Tag: Poetry

Read https://global.oup.com/academic/product/poetry-a-very-short-introduction-9780199229116?cc=au&lang=en&
  • Discusses what poetry is, and what it is for, with examples from both contemporary and ancient poets
  • Examines the contemporary debates surrounding the value and universality of poetry.
  • From distinguished modern poet and literary critic, Bernard O’Donoghue.
  • Part of the Very Short Introductions series – over nine million copies sold worldwide

Source: Poetry – A Very Short Introduction by Bernard O’Donoghue

Bernard O’Donoghue’s Poetry: A Very Short Introduction explores what it is that constitutes a poem and what are its purposes. He explores the various applications, the devices and their various contexts. In the end, he concludes with the following:

Having started with grand claims for poetry, by Shelley, Wallace Stevens, and others, on grounds of public utility, this brief consideration of what poetry is has encountered a series of recurrent features. Its primary effect seems to be to satisfy what the reader or hearer wants by surprising them in some way. It is never the statement of the obvious. It may be abnormal in language or in opinion or in organization. But it must not be abnormal for the sake of it; it must not be perverse, because its endeavour is to expose the truth in some sense that is not obvious. It works in the service of reality. It is in that sense that it is an enhancement of life as we end where we began.

Source: Poetry – A Very Short Introduction by Bernard O’Donoghue

Throughout, O’Donoghue ties together various points of view and perspectives, often contradictory. It had me thinking again about Stanley Fish’s essay ‘How to Recognise a Poem When You See One’, in which he argues that it is the act of reading and the associated attention which creates the poem:

In other words, acts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their source. It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities.

Source: ‘How to Recognise a Poem When You See One’ in Is There a Text in This Class? by Stanley Fish

In the end, O’Donoghue’s book provides an thought provoking introduction that asks as many questions. It felt like anytime that he made a statement of sorts that there was also a but that followed it. Whether it be Goethe’s world literature, discussion of rhythm and the domination of lyrical poems compared to say epics.

Bookmarked ‘The Waste Land’, a Century On – Quadrant Online (quadrant.org.au)

In The Waste Land, Eliot draws on an astonishing range of sources—classical, biblical, and from across several of the European literary traditions—and a variety of poetic modes of expression, to portray the decline and fall of Western civilisation.

Barry Spurr celebrates 100 years since the release of TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. He breaks down the poem and Eliot’s life, capturing how it has hard to believe in a Romantic representation of life after the horrors of the Great War.

In other pieces, Angelica Frey discusses the incorporation of the legend of the Fisher King in The Waste Land.

ᔥ “” in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” — more relevant than ever, a century later – ABC Religion & Ethics ()

Bookmarked Rebecca Solnit: How Donald Trump Wanted the End of History (Literary Hub)

A Hundred Days Into the New Era, Looking Back on the Old

Rebecca Solnit looks back on Donald Trump’s legacy and reflects on his effort to ‘end history’. I remember trying to make sense of Trump’s election win, thinking that it might be bad, but I never considered it would be this absurd. What I like about Solnit’s piece is that she is not naive enough to think that she can explain what happened simply. In some attempt to make sense of it all, Solnit instead turns to poetics:

Bookmarked Verse by Verse (sites.research.google)
Google’s experiment using AI to create poems in the style of past poets. This reminds me of Ian Guest’s debate about poetry versus coding. I imagine some would worry that this might be considered as ‘cheating’, however what interests me is the opportunity to easily create and then deconstruct the structures associated with the text.

Another example of AI generated text is Mark Riedl’s Generating Parody Lyrics.

via Clive Thompson

Listened Why Willem Dafoe, Iggy Pop and more are reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to us from theguardian.com

Slavery, ecocide, plague … the warnings of Coleridge’s poem resound down the ages. Now 40 actors, musicians and authors are performing in a daily mass-reading

The University of Plymouth spent three years putting together a shared reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Philip Hoare summarises why this poem is so important.

It is not despite but because of its narcotic wildness that The Rime became one of the most referenced works of poetry ever. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, to Fleetwood Mac, Iron Maiden and Public Image Ltd’s “Albatross” – a screech of post-punk angst sung by John Lydon – it is the one poem that almost everyone can quote. Lines including “All creatures great and small” and “Water, water, everywhere” have become part of the lexicon.

via Jason Kottke

Bookmarked The Consecrated Heretic, Down Under (Snakes and Ladders)

An explanation of these contradictions may come from the other end of the world. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has argued that France produces, from time to time, a peculiar kind of figure whom he calls the “consecrated heretic.” Voltaire is one example; Rousseau another; Sartre a third. The consecrated heretic is an artist or intellectual who plants his feet firmly in the riverbed and faces the social current upstream, refusing to be carried along by it. He mocks conventional wisdom; he scandalizes ordinary people by what he believes, what he says, how he acts. Of course, many people do this, but only a tiny handful are celebrated for it, are seen as indispensable threads in the social fabric. The passionate earnestness of these few is acknowledged; they are clearly dedicated in their own perverse way to the common good. Eventually the nation’s major institutions seek to bestow high honors on such heretics, who of course turn aside disdainfully, which makes them treasured all the more. Les Murray is the chief consecrated heretic of Australia.

Alan Jacobs discusses the work on the late Les Murray.
Liked Auden on No-Platforming Pound (The New York Review of Books)

In 1945, when Bennett Cerf of Random House was preparing to send to the printer An Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry, he omitted twelve early poems by Ezra Pound included in a 1927 anthology on which the new book had been based. In the years since those poems, Pound had become notorious for his fascist politics and florid anti-Semitism. W.H. Auden, one of Cerf’s authors at Random House, wrote Cerf some letters about Cerf’s action and its consequences that may still be clarifying today. “I think your very natural abhorrence of Pound’s conduct has led you to take the first step which, if not protested now, will be followed by others which would horrify you,” he wrote.

Bookmarked Learning To Code By Writing Code Poems by Murat Kemaldar (Smashing Magazine)

In all languages, there is probably a word for love. You kinda know what it means, but not really, because it is so subjective. But still, there is a word for it.

But in JavaScript, there is no “love,” until you say there is. It can be whatever you want it to be.

Murat Kemaldar discusses the connections between coding and poetry. He re-imagines the various rules and constructs in a more human form. This continues a conversation started between Darrell Branson, Tony Richards and Ian Guest on Episode 234 of the Ed Tech Team Podcast about whether everyone should learn poetry and coding. This is also something Royan Lee shares.