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Mike Snider's Formal Blog at the Sonnetarium
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Wednesday, October 26, 2005 |
Only a handful of poet-bloggers normally work in meter, and considerably more than a few have made it clear that they think meter not just irrelevant to contemporary practice, but a positive hindrance to making good poems.
They're wrong, and I've worked so hard at attempting to show them the error of their ways that I'm not surprised to be called an archformalist. That's wrong, too; still, it amazed even me to find myself defending free verse in the comments to Michael Blowhard's review of my little chap (had to get that link in again!).
And I shouldn't have been amazed. It's easy in poetry blogland to forget what I've written so many times that it's become just blah-blah-blah even to me: there are many, many educated, passionate, intelligent readers out there who feel insulted—not challenged but insulted—by contemporary poetry and poets, and there are too many poets who prove those readers right by caring about no audience but academics and other poets. Such an attitude on the part of poets was impossible when they actually had to drive at least some book and magazine sales in order to be published. As it happens, the great majority of verse written without that constraint has been free verse, so it's no surprise that many people mistakenly assume free verse is necessarily associated with that attitude.
I'm afraid the Web will make the situation even worse: it's too easy to find other people who share and reinforce one's attitudes, interests, and prejudices, and too easy to ignore everybody else. It's too easy to not be bothered to try to publish at all. Yikes.
Update 10/27/2005: Added the word "mistakenly" to the last sentence of the penulitmate paragraph above.
8:27:21 PM 
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Monday, October 24, 2005 |
I don't think I'm this good, but I'll certainly tell you when someone else does, particularly if that person is as witty and well-informed as are the Blowhards. I'm about 50/50 on the politics there, but it's always enlightening and entertaining when Michael Blowhard writes about architecture or novels or the publishing business, or when Friedrich writes one of his now-too-rare posts on the visual arts.
Now I've got to get fitted for some new hats.
8:00:05 PM
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Sunday, October 23, 2005 |
Software's delivered and that other business has come to nothing, so there are no public excuses left for not blogging. My brain, however, needs to have the poetry channels reinforced, and the evidence is that not only did I find that article via Slashdot but that I've been dreaming code, and not in nightmares.
So where have I turned? Slate, of course—where I found an article explaining that Miss Manners is to blame for Harriet Miers' troubles. That article links the Wikipedia article on the villanelle and a letter written by Virginia Woolf to Thomas Hardy to thank him for his novels and poetry, in particular the 1914 volume of poetry Satires of Circumstance, which included a sonnet about her father, Sir Leslie Stephen:
THE SCHRECKHORN
(With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)
(June 1897)
Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim;
Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams
Upon my nearing vision, less it seems
A looming Alp-height than a guise of him
Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,
Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,
Of semblance to his personality
In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.
At his last change, when Life's dull coils unwind,
Will he, in old love, hitherward escape,
And the eternal essence of his mind
Enter this silent adamantine shape,
And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows
When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?
That sonnet certainly colors the portrait of the father in To the Lighthouse, especially after Woolf says the poem (along with some other remembrances of Sir Stephen by Hardy) is "incomparably the truest and most imaginative portrait of him in existence, for which alone his children should be always grateful to you."
She wrote 10 days before her thirty-third birthday and her own first novel was yet to be published, and it would be nine years before she wrote "on or about December 10 1910 human nature changed," but surely it means something that Virginia Woolf, of all people, would end her letter calling Hardy's book of poetry "the most remarkable book to appear in my lifetime."
I'll very strenuously deny it's cat-vacuuming (though I admit I should have been working on the next Turco form or other things I've promised), but looking up the dates for Woolf's essay on the art exhibition led me to this article by Kathleen Goonan, one of my favorite SF writers. It's wonderful to find she shares so many of my interests, though I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people who write things I like think about things I like to think about.
BTW, you can find the complete text of Hardy's 1914 Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with
Miscellaneous Pieces at Project Gutenberg, hosted by ibiblio, the love-child of North Carolina poet and uber-geek Paul Jones. There's an interview with Paul Jones at Slashdot. His wife Sallie Green is the editor of Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance.
8:17:01 PM
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Tuesday, October 18, 2005 |
Many thanks to those who have enquired about my well-being: I have been obscenely busy and then even more anxious. I am still suspended, though less hopefully than yesterday. But I'm OK.
I've read little or no poetry, but I did finally start over and finish Azar Nafisi's astonishing Reading Lolita in Tehran, which led me to re-read—and read for the first time—much of Austen and James (Fitzgerald's Gatsby and all of Nabakov are yet to appear in Project Gutenberg). Pride and Prejudice, in pdf format, literally kept me awake till dawn last night.
There is a wonderful piece of conversation early on in that book:
[Mrs. Bennet]"When [Jane] was only fifteen, there was a man at my
brother Gardiner's in town so much in love with her that my sister-in-
law was sure he would make her an offer before we came away. But,
however, he did not. Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he
wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were."
"And so ended his affection," said Elizabeth impatiently. "There
has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder
who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!"
"I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love," said Darcy.
"Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is
strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away."
I'm off to the CaLifornia desert on business tomorrow. Back Saturday.
8:20:49 PM
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© Copyright 2008 Michael Snider.
Last update: 6/26/08; 9:27:33 PM.
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