Tuesday 19 June 2007

Tuesday Video: Kurt Schwitters



Primiti Too Taa from Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (Original Sonata) is an early example of sound poetry.

(via)

Tuesday 12 June 2007

Tuesday Video: Edward Gorey



A neat animation of The Tuning Fork by Edward Gorey, read by Dan Powell and produced by Sara Hasz.

Thursday 7 June 2007

Introduction to Poetry

INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


(via)

Tuesday 5 June 2007

Monday 4 June 2007

Why are limericks funny?


Limericks are a common poetic form, so common that many poets won't acknowledge them as poetry at all. Snobs.

The form of a limerick is a rhyming triplet divided by a rhyming couplet in the form a a b b a. The first second and third lines are three metrical feet and lines three and four are two metrical feet. A foot being three syllables, so 9, 9, 6, 6, and 9 syllables of which lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme and lines 2 and 3 rhyme.

Confused? Me too. Here's even more than you need to know about the construction of limericks.

Time for an example.

A certain young man, it was noted,
Went about in the heat thickly-coated;
He said, 'You may scoff,
But I shan't take it off;
Underneath I am horribly bloated.'

- Edward Gorey, The Listing Attic in Amphigorey

As with so many things, I can find no definitive origin for limericks. Nor can I find any real reason why they're almost always funny. Or trying to be funny.

Some sources suggest that they are indeed named for Limerick, Ireland, after what sounds like a cheap advertising slogan, "Come all the way up to Limerick?" Or by soldiers returning to same from France in the 1700s.

The bawdy nature of many limericks is blamed on sailors and bar patrons and people who like to rhyme "Nantucket".

The popularity of limericks as a classsroom exercise was begun by Edward Lear with the publication of A Book of Nonsense (1845). The form of his poems does not follow that of modern limericks with the final rhyme being one from the first two lines, often the place name.

There was an Old Person of Ewell,
Who chiefly subsisted on gruel;
But to make it more nice
He inserted some mice,
Which refreshed that Old Person of Ewell.
Limerick (poetry) at Wikipedia

Edward Lear Home Page

Tuesday 29 May 2007

Tuesday Video: Anne Sexton



This is a five minute clip from a documentary on Anne Sexton. Includes some readings by her and discussion of the use of her therapy tapes in the writing of Diane Middlebrook's Anne Sexton: A Biography.

Sunday 27 May 2007

Getting your poetry fix aurally.

The best way to read poetry is to not to. That is, get someone else to do it for you. Especially if you're just starting out reading poetry, it can help to get a sense of how it sounds when read by the author or an actor. Too many people read poetry and think they have to pause at the end of each line break. (Not true, you follow the punctuation as in any other writing.)

So, shall we all host tea-parties and invite poets? Well you could try that - but they might resent having to perform in exchange for their cream cake and Darjeeling. You could go to some readings at a cafe or pub, but I confess I don't do that after some horrible reading-related incidents at university. Far too scary and confronting. Especially if the poet comes up to you afterwards to ask you what you thought. (Is "Eep?" a suitable response? Probably not.)

The solution, of course, lies in recorded media. CDs, audio files, podcasts, tapes, records, 8-track. Whatever you're comfortable with.

A quick Google led me to these useful sites:

Cloudy Day Art - a roughly monthly, roughly half-hour podcast that includes several different poets reading their own work each episode.

Griffin Poetry Prize - a page of author readings in various video and audio formats. The poets are chosen from this Canadian prize's shortlists and winners.

Houghton Mifflin's Poetic Voice - a different poet from the Houghton Mifflin stable is featured in each episode which includes discussions as well as readings.

Poets.org has a long list of audio files that are stupidly embedded and can not be extracted from the webpage. But it's still a good collection and includes Dylan Thomas reading Do not go gentle into that good night — he never sounded like that in my head.


There are several tapes my daughter and I listen to while eating dinner — Sir John Mills and Hayley Mills reading A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six* and Spike Milligan reading from A Children's Treasury of Milligan. (It's the new edition that comes with the CD.) When they wear out (which won't take long at this rate) I think we'll move onto some Roald Dahl and Neil Gaiman. Dinner-time listening shouldn't be too heavy. It might affect the digestion.

*No longer available, but I did find a used copy for 35 GBP!

Tuesday 22 May 2007

Tuesday Video: Allen Ginsberg



Here's a performance from 1995 of Allen Ginsberg reading "The Ballad of the Skeletons" while Paul McCartney noodles along on his guitar.

Saturday 19 May 2007

Compare and Contrast: Wordsworth vs Wadsworth Longfellow



















William Wordsworth

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
NameWilliam Wordsworth (1770-1850)Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
NationalityEnglishAmerican
Poetic styleRomanticPopular, sentimental
Hair StyleSideburnsBeard
Reasons to ReadPoems are short, so easier to memorise.Poems are narratives, so easier to understand.
Famous PoemI wandered lonely as a cloudPaul Revere's Ride or The Wreck of the Hesperus
Quotable LinesThou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
OtherEngland's Poet Laureate 1843-1850
Good friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Member of the Fireside Poets. Very popular during his lifetime. Said to be first American with running water.
MoreComplete works at Bartleby.com
William Wordsworth at Wikipedia
Selected poems at PoetryFoundation.org
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at Wikipedia

Tuesday 15 May 2007

Tuesday Video: Billy Collins



Former US Poet Laureate (2001-2003) Billy Collins has worked with a number of artists to animate several of his poems. The results are delightful. Here is Walking Across the Atlantic at YouTube, but there are Quicktime videos for ten others at Billy Collins Action Poetry.

You can also download the Creative Commons licensed The Best Cigarette — 33 of Collins' poems as read by him. Burn it to CD and give it away to your friends.

Monday 14 May 2007

Sunday Poems at The Endicott Studio


Over at Endicott Redux, Terri Windling has been regularly posting Sunday Poems for quite a while. It's a great way to get a poetic fix to set you up for the week. Quite often they're by lesser-known poets too.

They do like their myths and fairy tales at The Endicott Studio — it's pretty much their raison d'ĂȘtre. Today's find, Slept by Jennifer Chang, is laden with Grimm-like imagery as is Hansel by Brent Hendricks, which featured a few weeks ago.




Image is "Hedgerow Nester" by Terri Windling.

Friday 11 May 2007

What is poetry?

According to the Macquarie Dictionary poetry is
the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts.

Which is nothing if not flowery.

Wikipedia says poetry
is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible meaning.

Which is nothing if not cold.

Your answer will lie, I think somewhere between these two definitions. Like any other art, any attempt to describe poetry is in the mind of the beholder. In other words, don't ask a poet to define her work.

Just as painting is more than pigment on canvas, poetry is more than words on paper. Certainly there are formal rules of poetry if you're reading sonnets or haiku, jintishi or villanelle. But there are equal numbers of poems without apparent form, or forms invented purely for that occasion.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)


Have you ever heard a kid learning to talk? Nonsense words, spoonerisms, madcap sentences, and attempts to recite the alphabet backwards? Any experimentation with language for the sheer joy of it; playing with sounds as well as meanings.

For me, that is poetry.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King's horses and all the King's men
said, "Oh, not scrambled eggs for dinner again!"

Tuesday 8 May 2007

Tuesday Video: Monty Python



An excerpt from Monty Python's Flying Circus.

It's only the third Tuesday video and already I'm cheating.

Monday 7 May 2007

The Hollow Men sounds like a Dr Who episode.*

Poetry classical poetry is often used in pop culture as a short-cut to indicate worldliness, intellect and a certain exclusivity. Poetry is seen as such a luxury that only someone with ample spare time and someone else to do the washing-up could possibly read, study and especially memorise it. Something for the upper classes to indulge in perhaps? All of which of course is rubbish, but you still see it in every tv show.

So, if you were wondering, it was T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men that was quoted in this week's episode of Doctor Who, The Lazarus Experiment. Which goes to show that if it's good enough for a Timelord, it's good enough for you.


*Honestly, I wrote that and then did the Google search... The Hollow Men (Dr. Who Series)

Thursday 3 May 2007

Zero and her Origin

Jeremy Bornstein's Zero and her Origin is a poem inspired by the cracking of the HD-DVD encryption key. (All you need to know for poetic purposes is that it's a sequence of 32 numbers and letters.)

Zero, the number said to be discovered
Nine times by ancient magicians, was
Found again by a mysterious order of
Nine modern alchemists, who built
One machine after another, until finally
One exploded with fascinating results.
(...)
Which just goes to show that poetry can be written about anything at all.

(via)

Tuesday 1 May 2007

Sunday 29 April 2007

Finding Poetry in the Dewey Decimal System


I'm not going to suggest that any non-poetry-reader start buying random poetry books to try and get a handle on the whole thing (but if you were, this would be a great place to start); that's why the Romans invented local libraries. (Collections of scrolls were sometimes kept at Roman spas, leading to that great discovery - reading in the bath.*)

And although it would be easier if Poetry had it's own section adjacent to Fiction in a corner with some cosy beanbags and perhaps a window for some natural light, it doesn't, so here's where to start looking on the shelves.

Poetry in general is found at 811 with English (and Australian and American) Poetry at 821. If you can read them, there's German Poetry at 831, French at 841, Italian at 851, Spanish at 861, Latin at 871, Classical Greek at 881 and all the other languages smooshed into the 890's. My local also has a section of Rhymes next to the Junior books, which is the place to go for Nursery Rhymes and poetry by Judith Viorst.

For advice on writing poetry you could look around 808 (or go back along the shelves to 152 'Self-help').

There is a good overview of the Dewey Decimal Classification system on Wikipedia. (There's an official page, but it's pretty inpenetrable to non-librarians.)

If you want to have a go at cataloging your own collection, this page has a listing of the 1000 top-level call number subdivisions.

In the unlikely event that your library uses some cataloguing system other than that invented by Melvil Dewey I'm afraid I can't help you, but that's why the ancient Greeks invented librarians.

*An expensive habit if carried out with library books.

Thursday 26 April 2007

Why read poetry?

So why read poetry at all?

In addition to the myriad reasons for reading anything for pleasure, poetry has one obvious trait in it's favour. It's short.*

You can get the same emotional punch — a sudden recognition of yourself or the world, a loud laugh, an insight into the human condition — in a fraction of the time it takes to trek across Middle-earth or discover Darcy's a pretty nice guy after all. If you don't like the poem, you've hardly wasted any time. If you did like it, you can read it again straight away. Poetry is good for your emotional health.

Poetry slows you down. I've never heard of anyone advocating the speed reading of poetry, although that technique can work well for non-fiction and even some fiction. You have to sit still and breathe (cup of tea optional) or you'll miss it. Poetry is good for your physical health.

Because of the positioning of the words on the page, less common words and creative grammar, you are forced to pay attention to their meaning. You might come across terminology, ideas and eventually you'll start to notice new beats and rhythms you haven't come across before. Poetry is good for your mental health.

See, it's a cure-all; you'll be more relaxed, centered and intelligent if you read poetry. How can you afford not to?


*I reserve the right to make gross assumptions. Most poems are shorter than most novels. Unless you decide to start with something epic.

Wednesday 25 April 2007

It's a what-now experience?

I promise to never ever link to any site which can be described like this:

A Unicorn uses poetry to describe 16 nature stations on a make believe trail that is designed to evoke a fantasy-mystical experience.


Google it if you must. Don't blame me for any scarring that occurs.

Tuesday 24 April 2007

Tuesday Video: Neil Gaiman



Neil Gaiman reading "Instructions" from his collection Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders.

The Plan is to blog a video each Tuesday of an author reading his or her own work. The Plan is to also get Neil Gaiman out of the way early on so we can discover other new (or old) poets that are currently hidden by the mighty short-story-lyric-script-poem-novel-comic-writing shadow of Gaiman.

So what do you think of "Instructions"? Do we really need a set of guidelines for fairy-tale lands? Don't we know all this intuitively? Personally, I think it could be funnier, but I think that of most things.

Saturday 21 April 2007

What does "euphonically" mean?


Euphony is the opposite of cacophony. It is the way things sound when they sound good. Like music. Or poetry.

There isn't enough euphony in the world, especially in the English language. P.F. Cates is an attempt to draw attention to it by way of entertaining poetry. But not in a scary way.

This is a euphonium, which can also be pleasing to the ear.

Image courtesy hmwhite.com