rpgs and poetic tradition...

[Kesher]

Okay, this is nowhere near as pretentious as that title makes it sound...

So, I've been reading a lot of mid-20th century poetry lately, and the gigantic book The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner and the following analogies began popping up in my head like brightly colored mushrooms:

Dave Arneson is our Homer
Gygax is Ovid, which maybe ain't fair, but he sure ain't Homer
Greg Stafford is, well, I can't decide, but someone.

(large interlude, eschewing any sort of chronology)

Ron Edwards is Ezra Pound (y'know, pre-Pisan imprisonment days)
Vincent is like a weird mixture of Blake and Whitman
Ben Lehman is Rimbaud
Jared Sorensen is Andre Breton, or maybe Tristan Tzara (okay, they're not primarily poets, but I've been reading the Surrealist Manifestoes as well as octaNe and c'mon, it fits...)
 

Aaron

[Lisa Padol]

Who's our James Joyce?

And who's our Dumas?

-Lisa

[Stefan / 1of3]

I usually considered the Forge the neoteric Alexandria. So someone here ought to be Kallimachos.

[Kesher]

OH YES, fuckin' Joyce... I skipped right over him 'cause I was thinkin' poets, but yeah...

I say the sum total of all D+D homebrews is the rpg equivalent of Finnegans Wake.  Yup.

And yeah man, Alexandria; either that or Babylon...

Aaron

[Ben Lehman]

Clinton is moving towards being our Robert Frost.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S.  I mean that as a compliment.  I realize that Frost gets bashed in some academic circles.  This is because some academic circles are full of pikers.

[Peter Nordstrand]

Greg Stafford is Snorri Sturlasson

And Ron isn't Ezra Pound, he is Hugh Hefner

Cheers,

/Peter

[talysman]

Greg Stafford is Snorri Sturlasson

no, he's obviously Edmund Spenser.

[droog]

Emily Care Boss is, of course, Emily Dickinson.

Paul Czege is Charles Bukowski.

[Emily Care]

Alas I did not wait for love
But then it came for me
It found me in the underpass
Where conflicts came to be....

Tony LB could be our Byron and Michael Miller our Keats.
(Though I think with less animosity between the two).

[Kesher]

Okay, Stafford is Snorri, absolutely!

So we have Byron and Keats; who's Shelley?

I agree Ben, Bobby Frost gets the shaft-- he's a bit out of fashion these days.  I can see some Hayden Carruth in Clinton, too...

For some reason I was thinking of Paul Czege as more akin to John Berryman, but Bukowski, yeah, I can see that.

Aaron

[Larry L.]

Kesher,

I'm gonna say our Joyce has not yet been.

[jerry]

And Ron isn't Ezra Pound, he is Hugh Hefner

"Thank heaven, for little games..."

Jerry

[Mark D. Eddy]

Dumas Pere, or Fils? Rein*Hagen for Pere, I'd say.

R. Sean Borgstrom is the Sibyl.

[Michael S. Miller]

Tony LB could be our Byron and Michael Miller our Keats.
(Though I think with less animosity between the two).

I'm not much of a poetry guy, but if I have to be one of the Romantics, I get to be Shelley. Why? Because if I kick off prematurely, my wife will totally devote herself to promoting my body of work.

As for Kat's equivalent of Frankenstein ... it's in development, I assure you.

[droog]

I'm kind of thinking right now that Tony might be Dorothy Parker.