I cannot stop listening to this mix. Mark Morrison was so creepy.
Two great songs in one hot place! Amazing! Bump yr weekend to it.
-TGR
Author Archives: Ryan
Prosody = Sexxxy
We English teachers aren’t supposed to care about such things anymore, but fug it: knowing something about the basics of poetic form will enrich your understanding of poetry. In other words, it will make poetry more pleasurable for you. It’s like taking a basic music appreciation class and then going back and listening to records you already dug. Scansion is like dancing: it is all about learning how to follow the beat.
With this fact in mind, some good English Dept. folks at the University of Virginia (which I believe is the school Mr. Jefferson founded after he got his degree at my alma mater, William & Mary) have launched a wonderful new website for poetry nerds to waste time on. It’s called “For Better of Verse” (yeah, I hope you like puns, too), and in addition to an excellent glossary of poetic terms (teachers take note), it has a very, very cool interactive prosody widget. Doesn’t that sound fun?! Trust me, it is, even if you don’t think you care or need to know about iambs.
Using various canonical lyrics as well as passages from longer works–and I mean really canonical: it’s heavy on people like Milton and the Romantics, with some Yeats thrown in–the site allows you to practice your ability to spot the accents (i.e. the metrical emphases) and other key formal features in lines of poetry. The site will even “grade” your efforts. Scansion is an imperfect technique, because it is often possible to place the accents in one line several different ways, and the whole deal might sound stuffy and academic at first, but trust me, this is like an addictive video game. Learning to scan “traditional” accentual poetry will in turn help you detect and savor the sonic features of “free verse”: once you can pick up the difference between, say, a trochee and an iamb, you will notice yourself paying more attention to things like internal rhyme, alliteration, and syllable counts, formal features which remain crucial to free verse, even though f.v. mostly dispenses with traditional meter. Scan away!
-TGR
Reco: The Wooden Spoon
Hey, there are other young cats out there doing the poem thing! Dan Pritchard, the Boston-based guy who writes The Wooden Spoon, seems like a sharp critic. He apparently also helped found The Critical Flame, a magazine I recently discovered and have continued reading. Good, digestible reviews all around, all for my peeps, the general readers. Enjoy.
-TGR
Poetry Doses
Here are two dispiriting facts that become downright weird when paired. 1.) Few Americans today read poetry. 2.) Each year more poetry books are published in the United States than in any previous year. I know, wha?
Still, you can find what you’ll like. In an essay for the Contemporary Poetry Review, Joan Houlihan reiterates a bit of common sense Kingsley Amis once offered apropos of Larkin’s writing: the first few lines of a poem will tell you if it’s any good (that is, whether or not you want to spend time reading more of it). This is the sort of thing we aren’t allowed to say in front of a class. It’s true, though.
Although I don’t agree with all of her particular judgments (she swats Charlie Smith!), Houlihan’s main argument is smoothly persuasive. She envisions a decent future for poetry, one in which what has happened to music over the past decade also happens to literary culture and is thus a huge, if non-traditional, boon for us scribblers.
As we move into the next decade, it seems very likely that a subset of all published poetry will, like music, become readily experienced or viewed for free, and that readers will “sample” poems and make any buying decisions based on these samples. Readers will become sophisticated enough in their own judgments, or tuned in enough to trusted recommenders wherever and however encountered, and soon the disappearance of reviews in mainstream periodicals won’t be missed. It may even turn out that the book of poems as physical object no longer holds us, cannot maintain its presence through the next ten years, cannot justify its 65 or more pages of poems all bound into one place—we might instead purchase only 5 or 10 poems at once, or a “mixed tape” of poems we love, or a subset of poems by a favorite poet. The packaging and distribution mechanisms are already in place; we, the readers, will only need to become proficient at making our own selections. Just be sure to read the first lines before you buy.
That said, I would still like to see more poetry reviews in The LA Times and my local alt paper and everywhere else. It can’t hurt for more media outlets to pay at least a few smart people to read books and make brief comments on them. Right, innit? Anybody hiring?
-TGR
A New Map of America?
What would the U.S. look like if the Senate weren’t designed so that large rural places with low populations have more power than compressed urban centers where, you know, lots of Americans actually live? What if all the states were about the same size in terms of residents? James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly has posted a cool “thought experiment” map (designed by Neil Freeman) on his blog, in which state borders have been redrawn the same way Congressional districts are–as population changes–without hugely altering the existing cultural / ethnic make-up (fragmented and complex as those are). I would live in Mojave and be a native of Allegheny (I think–the map is kinda small). You? I especially like the new provincial names.
The Poetics of Staten Island
What’s inside the cultural imagination of NYC’s most derided borough? What would a cultural history of it look like? At Slate.com, SI native Jonah Weiner (great New York name) undertakes a short-form investigation. Having only been exposed to Staten by the Wu-Tang clan and heard mostly awful things about it, I found this piece smart and wry. It’s a skeptical embrace of “the strangest bedfellow in the city’s ménage à cinq, regarded as a little red state full of orange people who seem to have crash-landed on our blue planet.”
-TGR
Orwell’s diaries
One usually doesn’t think of George Orwell as somebody with a Romantic inner life; this is mainly because of how we’re taught to read him in high school and college, as the cold-eyed, despondent observer of the mid-twentieth century’s horrors. And he is that. But he was also a human being (hence given to sentiments and wanderings and frustration and hunger, like the rest of us), one equipped with an artist’s tools for expressing his humanity, and we get a good look at all this in the new omnibus edition of his Diaries, which has just come out in England and which D.J. Taylor reviews in the latest Times Literary Supplement. Taylor considers these a major part of Orwell’s oeuvre and important matter for any new biographers, writing that they are
Handsomely produced, illustrated with Orwell’s own pencil sketches and footnoted with [Peter] Davison’s customary élan, this latest wave in the repackager’s tide invites two questions. Why did Orwell write diaries? And what do they tell us about him? . . .
Well, for starters,
there is [many] a sudden glimpse of all kinds of things not often associated with Orwell – frustrated yearnings, sequestered retreats, the deepest of romantic chasms.
Long live Eric Blair, in all his versions. Happy MLK Day!
-TGR
Keep Trippin’
It’s hard to pitch a baseball well. It’s even harder to throw a no-hitter in the Major Leagues while tripping balls on acid, which is what the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Dock Ellis did on June 12, 1970. Thanks to the Internets, you can get the animated story, narrated by the man himself. Even if you’ve already seen this (I think it might have gotten mentioned in fuggin’ Time), I’ll bet you need to see it again, not least because Ellis is a good storyteller. [Hat-tip to Dan Pecchenino for this.]
Spring training starts in a little over two months!
-TGR
The General Reader 