Lyric Poetry and the Rockstar Poet of the Middle Ages

The form for today is lyric poetry, especially its origins. Like most poetry, originally it could be set to music and often was. The Greeks had lyric poetry, but until it met courtly love, the form didn’t really get going. Once it did, however, lyric poetry exploded on scene, and a few hundred years later brought us the power ballads and heartbreak country.

The pioneer in lyric poetry in the Middle Ages was rockstar poet William IX of Aquitaine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_IX,_Duke_of_Aquitaine#Poetic_career

William perhaps invented the form and idea of romantic poetry, so we have him and his successive troubadours to blame for our modern shallow, Hollywood version of love.

Granted, as a prolific womanizer he likely used his honeyed tongue (ooh double entendre :p) to get into the pants (under the skirts) of any woman that struck his fancy. However, he did leave quite the legacy to his granddaughter, Eleanor of Aquitaine, mother of Richard the Lion-Hearted and John, called Lackland. See William’s complete works: http://www.trobar.org/troubadours/coms_de_peiteu/

See? Poetry has been helping guys get laid for the last 900 years! :) As one of the first troubadours, hopefully it worked better for Willy than the wrong Steve (see yesterday’s blog). And if it didn’t, William was still one of the most powerful lords of his day. If his lyrics failed, he could always use the “Hey, did you know I own, like, most of what will someday be France?” to pick up girls in a bar.

Lyric poetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyric_poet#Middle_Ages has less to do with form and more to do with content. The Middle Ages saw the advent of the age of idyllic courtly love, and even today lyric poems have less to do with telling a story than exploring the poet’s mind, perceptions, and feelings, dealing deeply with the author’s own point of view and feelings. Love alone isn’t the only topic for a lyric poem. Grief, loss, war, nostalgia, peace, nature, and other large ideas can compose the content of this type of poem. Sonnets, Petrarchan and Shakespearean; rhymed or unrhymed; sung to music or read; even rap lyrics can be called lyric poetry, or poetry with a beat. It’s basically what most of us think of when we hear the word “poetry.”

New York Times Poetry, Sex-not-poetry, and the Sestina

I’ve started exploring the New York Times poetry and poets section.
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/poetry_and_poets/index.html
Some good, up-to-date stuff. There’s also an article on how to celebrate poetry month
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/11-ways-to-celebrate-national-poetry-month-with-the-new-york-times/, and Craigslist as poetry. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/nyregion/28poetry.html

Yeah, Craigslist. You read that right.

There’s book reviews, poet obits, and all that. Fun stuff.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xad1qa_wrong-steve-sex-not-poetry_shortfilms

Wrong Steve - Sex Not Poetry!
Uploaded by BadDateTV. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

Sucks to be this guy.

Okay, form. Today’s form is the rather typical sestina. It’s French in origin, a 39-line poem with specific end-line words, six of them, that recombine to form a pattern. All lines should be similar in length.

So the schematic looks like this:
123456
615243
364125
532614
451362
246531

A picture, or in this case the picture of a poem, is worth a thousand words.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20167

Six Words

by Lloyd Schwartz

yes

no

maybe

sometimes

always

never

Never?

Yes.

Always?

No.

Sometimes?

Maybe—

maybe

never

sometimes.

Yes—

no

always:

always

maybe.

No—

never

yes.

Sometimes,

sometimes

(always)

yes.

Maybe

never . . .

No,

no—

sometimes.

Never.

Always?

Maybe.

Yes—

yes no

maybe sometimes

always never.

And for fun, here is a sestina generator. http://dilute.net/sestinas/

Limericks and Stone Cold Steve Austin Reads Poetry

In honor of the milkers’ night out we had last night, here’s why April is the drunkest month. Enjoy!

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/april-is-the-drunkest-month/

And the form-of-the-day is the limerick, since all good drinking bouts usually result in dirty limericks. You know how it goes, five lines, abbbaa rhyme scheme, three stresses in lines1, 2, and 5, two stresses in lines 3 and 4, nine syllables in the long lines, six in the short ones. For more on limericks, try http://www.poetry-online.org/limericks.htm. And for those like me with their minds in the gutter, try http://www.dirtylimerick.com/.

On Poetry and Dada poems

Obviously I’ve been thinking about poetry a lot this month. I haven’t been this immersed in the form since college and I’ve found it, surprisingly, rather pleasant. I even find myself reaching for poetry anthologies at odd moments and reading Thomas Gray and William Blake instead of Theodore Roethke and Federico Garcia Lorca. So the immersion in all this poetry, along with analysis of form, has led to me to a crucial question:

Where has the poetry gone?

Poetry and literature used to be the stuff of life. Now, reading at all feels like an accomplishment, despite the fact that we live in the most word-prolific age in human history. Email, test messages, advertising, we’re reading all the time. No longer are words locked up in some musty monk guarded library word-hoard, but rather than embrace the words, we scoff at them.

In the course of my researching various forms for poetry month, I stumbled across the link between song and poetry over and over again. And I can’t help but muse on how music remains so popular, so piped into our heads 24/7, while poetry has faded in the hands of a select few. Taking that thought one step further and looking at the social aspects of music, everyone can quote a line or two from a song, making reference to it, and then share a bond with the other person who recognizes the song. Who intentionally quotes poetry? Where is the social aspect of poetry now? And I can’t help but think that’s the entire problem. Poetry went from being an active, interactive, social, communal affair, in recitals and concerts or readings, to drawing the eyes downward, down onto the page, isolating the words in the mind of the reader and slowly taking the reader away from society to focus on those verses, rather than keep them active among friends and peers. I’ve heard some Shakespeare scholars argue that reading the plays is actually quite tedious and not a very fun away to experience Shakespeare. And he’s the master of language! But, language is meant to be heard, not just observed frozen and stilted on the page. Somehow I feel much is the same with other kinds of poetry, the words are meant to be shared, not help alone in a private word-hoard.

So what is the solution? Poetry will probably never hold the same place in society as it once did, but how can we as individuals change poetic image for the modern day? Three things, in my non-poet opinion.

1) Poetry slams and readings. Get out there, share your work, listen to the work of others. Inspire each other, help each other. Have fun. Make poetry social again.

2) Give poetry a new image. Yeah, Keats and Donne and Shakespeare have their place but they wrote for audiences. They wrote to make money. So does Stephen King and Nora Roberts. Write what you like but write for the audience. Write about modern issues, not just romantic nature poems. We have enough of those. Write about the economy or a Democratic government. Poets are the voice. Use yours.

3) Read poetry. Write poetry. If you have an interest in poetry, work to make it a part of your life.

So, speaking of form, here’s one for today. Dada poetry dates back to World War I, bringing poetry and visual arts together as an anti-bourgeois, anti-war, and anarchistic movement. Dada poetry was performed at rallies, public gatherings, in literary journals, etc. It was a public form of expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo. /http://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/Dada

A Dada poem is made in three steps. First, cut words or blocks of words from magazines or other printed materials. Second, mix them together in a hat, bowl, or just scatter them across the floor. Third, randomly select the pieces and, in order of selection, lay them out on a page. Don’t change the order, but feel free to arrange line breaks and punctuation as you go. Sense is not the name of the game here and the results probably won’t make sense. The original intent of the Dada movement was to illustrate the chaos and meaninglessness of everyday life. For a cool Dada generator, go here: http://www.poemofquotes.com/tools/dada.php

Here’s a few more resources on Dada poetry. Enjoy!
http://www.madsci.org/~lynn/juju/surr/games/dada-poem.html
http://www.uic.edu/classes/ad/ad382/sites/Projects/P014/P014_context.html

Never Work a Shift in Rubber Knee Boots that Don’t Fit.

I think the title says it all.

Haven’t done forms for awhile, so today we have two Spanish forms, the Cancione (not to be confused with the canzone, or the calzone for that matter, completely different) and the Lira.

First of all, the cancione is based on the nonce form. What is this nonce form? you ask. Well, I’m glad you did. There’s an explanation of it at  http://www.writing.com/main/books/action/view/entry_id/373905, basically explaining that all forms were once nonce forms. How can that be? You ask. Well, I’m glad you did because its actually quite interesting. The nonce form is not free verse. To be a nonce poem, the poem must have structure, a distinctive rhyme scheme, meter, and form. Sound familiar? It should, most poem types we’ve covered this month have certain specific elements to them that mark them as one form or another. Except free verse, but that’s in a class all by itself. So, once upon a time, some guy kept going abab cdcd efef gg in iambic pentameter. It became recognized as a form and even got a name, the sonnet. So all forms begin as nonce forms, it’s just a matter of which ones get picked up and used and which don’t.

So the cancione as a nonce form isn’t popular yet, but it does have set rules for meter. To write a cancione, use seven and eleven syllable lines, or heptasyllable (7) and hendesyllable (11) lines. That’s it. I couldn’t fine much reference to the cancione on the web, but the cancion is mentioned on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canci%C3%B3n .

Now the lira. It’s a five-line form with special attention to syllable count and an ababb rhyme scheme. The syllable count and rhyme look like this:

xxxxxxa

xxxxxxxxxxb

xxxxxxa

xxxxxxb

xxxxxxxxxxb

For an example, try http://www.poems-and-quotes.com/nature/poems.php?id=1141330. This isn’t my poem and all credit goes to the Italian Stallion, as indicated.

The same site has a fun rhymer tool. Try it out at http://www.poems-and-quotes.com/rhymer.html.

So that’s it for Spanish poetry. We’re in the downward trend on poetry month. I’ve had a lot of fun, I don’t know about you. I’ve still got some stuff up my sleeve with poets reading poetry and poets who pioneered one form or another, especially love, with focus on courtly love, in poetry. But in the days we have left, if there’s anything you’d like to see more of, less of, or bring up for the first time, leave a comment and be sure to check back for a response. Later days.

Taco Tuesday

Working a double today so it's short and sweet again on the blogosphere. I was always interested in Ai while in college, but I never read much of her, mostly because the library didn't carry her work more than me not taking time for it. While cruising the New York Times poetry section, I stumbled on her obit page. Seems a little odd to include it since I've barely read her work and there's lots of other poets to cover. But I've always been drawn to the brutality in her work that manages to stay beautiful at the same time. Maybe this will finally get me to pick up a copy.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=80637

Even Poets Think Poetry Is Hard...

...but like most writers seem to find that they can't not do it.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21329

This is an interview with C.K. Williams on Poets.org.

Here's another link to a larger portion of the same interview. Enjoy!

http://bigthink.com/ckwilliams