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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 OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.914
Threshold uncertainty score0.465

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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