Tuesday Video: Kurt Schwitters

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

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Tuesday Video: Edward Gorey

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

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.


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Tuesday Video: Cookie Monster

Here are some Very Good Rhymes.

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 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.

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!