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.

Compare and Contrast: Wordsworth vs Wadsworth Longfellow

Name	William Wordsworth (1770-1850)	Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Nationality	English	American
Poetic style	Romantic	Popular, sentimental
Hair Style	Sideburns	Beard
Reasons to Read	Poems are short, so easier to memorise.	Poems are narratives, so easier to understand.
Famous Poem	I wandered lonely as a cloud	Paul Revere's Ride or The Wreck of the Hesperus
Quotable Lines	Thou 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.
Other	England'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.
More	Complete works at Bartleby.com William Wordsworth at Wikipedia	Selected poems at PoetryFoundation.org Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at Wikipedia

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.

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'être. 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.

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 Video: Monty Python

An excerpt from Monty Python's Flying Circus.

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

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)