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Record W7160830929 · doi:10.1386/btwo_00118_1

Reading the poet backwards: The poems and songs of Robert Priest

2025· article· en· W7160830929 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Robert Priest

Bibliographic record

VenueBook 2 0 · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicThemes in Literature Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPoetryAbsurdityLyricsReading (process)AliasFocus (optics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Robert Priest is a Canadian poet, children’s author and singer–songwriter. He has written eighteen books of poetry, four children’s novels, four albums of children’s songs and has released six CDs of songs and poems. Under the alias ‘Dr Poetry’, he has also written and performed two seasons of poetry on CBC Radio’s spoken-word show Word Beat and is well known for his aphorisms and the No.1 Alannah Myles hit ‘Song Instead of a Kiss’ . The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature characterized Priest’s poetry as ‘full of flashes of insight. Imaginative in a strange way, he takes inordinate chances with logic, countering absurdity with absurdity, and expanding our sense of human emotional possibilities’. The following piece is a commentary on a selection of his poetry and song lyrics by Priest. It draws on several recorded conversations and e-mails with Mick Gowar and includes examples of Priest’s writing for both children and adults, although the main focus is on Priest’s poetry writing, songwriting and performing for children.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.317
Threshold uncertainty score0.630

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0090.009
Scholarly communication0.0050.002
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.224
Teacher spread0.215 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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