A quick followup to my previous post about Russel Hoban's The Hungry Three series! A friend of mine who happens to be both a professor of poetry and also a poet herself pointed out that the opening of The Great Gumdrop Robbery also happens to be poetry. Quoth the poet: "Your analysis of the paragraph noting the repetition/patterns and fairytale conventions is spot on, but the meter is a significant factor as well, contributing to the paragraph's incantation-like quality." She suggested looking at the following stanzas of Edgar Allan Poe's "Raven" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" as "examples of comparable meter": Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I mu...
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