Amphigory

Amphigory of December
by Girl With Weltschmerz

decades ago in
canons of white
discipline,
chromatic ascendance and
reppraisal nonplussed of
conflicting histories was the
December of the world.

Wow. Such depth. It's talking about the dark ages with its discipline of the unwashed mob, or the world wars. "December of the world" is such a poignant phrase; December refers to winter so winter of the world is some kind of dark era. The poem talks about canons, as in the canons of Switzerland, and chromatic ascendance, which is probably something profound in philosophy, a conception enforced by "conflicting histories". But before I get carried away with analysis, I should tell you the definition of amphigory.

amphigory: "a nonsensical piece of verse" Encarta Dictionary

In other words, an amphigory is a poem that looks like it's profound, but is actually nonsense, like the one at the beginning of this article. Want proof that this Amphigory of December is actually almost randomly generated? Well, here's how I wrote it.

1. While reading the preface to Reinhard Diestel's Graph Theory, I wrote down random words that caught my eye as the first world in each line (decades, canon, discipline, etc.).
2. I read each word and, ignoring the other words, wrote down the first word that came to my mind and left it blank if nothing came to mind.
3. Then, I added simple verbs ("is") and punctuation and propositions, such that the whole poem made some grammatical sense.
   

A while ago, I was looking to get some of my actual poetry published in some literary magazine. I read through several ezines and other magazines in libraries. What I found was that there were lots of poems that made minimal sense, quite like my Amphigory of December. It seems that people attach philosophical and literary profoundness to things they can't understand. Just like the Emperor attached beauty to the robe that he could not see. It's a kind of poetic weltschmerz.