Boustrophedon

Someone’s taking the etymology of “verse” a little too seriously. Kudos for at least gesturing towards the rhyme scheme, and turning “and” into “DNA” in a line about genes is clever. However, it behooves writers to know at least a little bit about the science behind reading. A simple way of explaining what happens, particularly with poetry, is that while the brain processes one line, the eye is already perusing the line below it. By writing every other line backwards, you’re making it so that the eye skips over what it can’t recognize and jumps to what it can. You end up, then, with only half the poem, which really isn’t helpful. Most people are going to stop trying. Those who are determined are going to try to read each line in order, but it’s going to take deliberate, focused attention to bend the brain into reading the backwards lines. The brain can only pay attention to so many things at once (same reason why texting while driving is so dangerous, or why you missed the gorilla in that intro psych video), which means that recognizing words that should be familiar is going to take up more energy than those delicate aspects of reading and understanding that make poetry enjoyable. Travers may be right that the pretentious among us may love it, but I can promise you that Wordsworth and Shakespeare, who championed the poetic aspects of everyday speech, and Milton, who eschewed the harsh jangle of forced rhyme schemes, all true masters of English verse, would never have stooped to a gimmick like this.