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