Category Archives: Pooms/Poetry

boy genius saves poetry!!

Posted on by under Authors, Pooms/Poetry

What have ya, then, when a drink-beast has also FINE POEMS IN IM?  Seriously, though, here is a link to the BBC’s neat-o Dylan Thomas site.  (With pictures!  He and Caitlin had great hair.)  Dude was a wanker iin his personal life, and a lot of his writing blows, but who isn’t a sucker for stuff like “The force that through the green fuse . . .”?  The bad swathes don’t erase the brilliant heartbreakers.

-TGR

PS: Know what’s fun?  Humming “JOYCE ON THE WEEEEK-END” to the tune of Neil Young’s “Out on the Weekend.”  Serious brain humor.

Prosody = Sexxxy

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Pooms/Poetry, Visual

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

Poetry Doses

Posted on by under Other Critics, Pooms/Poetry

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