Earl Gray

Earl Gray
"You can argue with me but, in the end, you'll have to face that fact that you're arguing with a squirrel." - Earl Gray

Monday, December 30, 2013

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IX

   "You're crying with a loaf of bread under your arm."  - old Yiddish saying.




Earl the Squirrel's Rule #81
      A buddy of mine was whining at length about writer's block.

     "Wait a minute," I interjected, "don't you keep a pocket notebook or file of bon mots you're thought up on your own or have adopted or adapted from your reading?"

     "Sure," he said.  "Doesn't everyone?"

     "And now you're complaining about a lack of motivating thoughts, right?"

     My friend is normally quick-witted and perceptive but, on this occasion, I needed to reiterate and rephrase my two questions eight times before he clued in and exclaimed:  "Ah, I see what you're saying.  I have a whole book of ideas!"

     Duh.

Tip #1:

     Most poets record their brilliancies for future use in this manner and then move on with their lives.  Consider another approach:  Before you run out of steam and leave it, make a complete poem, using that phrase and whatever other relevant ones you find in your Quips Booklet.  Overall quality isn't the issue yet.  It's okay if the rest of the piece is mere outline or filler.  Give it a separate file or page.

     How does this help?  There may be many times when you will have sufficient energy to edit a poem but not enough to finish and then edit an as-yet-incomplete work.  At worst, you will be giving posthumous anthologists more to work with.


Tip #2:

     Most literature courses concentrate on the interpretive.  Creative writing courses and seminars tend to overemphasis the importance of inspiration.  It seems that almost no one is teaching or learning the elements of the art form.  Apparently, these cart-before-the-horse individuals and institutions believe there is a dire shortage of bad poetry in the world.

     If you think WCW's "The Red Wheelbarrow" is free verse, that AnaCrusis is a Mexican Country and Western singer or that this poem:

Today,
Time has stopped.
A minute is still a minute.
An hour is still an hour.
And yet,
The past and the future
Hang in perfect balance.
All focused on the present.
A sweet flow of excitement
Warms me.
You are near.


    ...and this one:

Beyond this arid pit is life, lived
incognito. Dreams resist
our beckoning. Just coax the one
that's closest: I can see
my wife. A rose
corsage adorns her wrist; her iris
catches the voyeur sun.

I see her neckline, hem and slit
unfurl then gather like geese
in flight. At dusk we dance and turn
to tell the termagant wind
to end its fit. Two shadows
move at the speed of night
along the shadeless halls
of hell.


    ...are close in quality, let me suggest that the only inspiration you should seek is that which leads to assimilation of the basics of versification.  Understanding them can, itself, help you avoid dry spells.

     How so?  The curgination and enjambment in the latter poem might inspire variations on these themes among observant poets but, of course, only if they know what curginas and enjambments are.



Links:

  1. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part I


  2. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part II


  3. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part III


  4. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IV


  5. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part V


  6. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VI


  7. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VII


  8. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VIII


  9. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IX


  10. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part X


  11. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XI


  12. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XII




    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel


Saturday, December 28, 2013

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part X

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #18
      I don't know where people get the notion that poetry is all "Kumbaya", with everyone getting equal opportunities and time to speak.  Perhaps it comes from open mics, slams, offline workshops or university presses.  No matter.  In real life all speech and all art competes for attention, frequently from a paltry, dwindling audience.  What is more, the competition is often not fair, open or evident.  It is a competition but artistic merit may be only one of the factors in play.

      For example, we have the infamous "New Yorker poem", so named because of TNY's notorious practice of publishing bad poems by celebrity poets.  Such work might bump yours out of contention, only to lose out to something written by a bigger celebrity.  Ç'est la vie.

      (Personally, I can understand¹ this in an insecure publication that is trying to get established.  They may need that name on their masthead.  For an established magazine to do this strikes me as abdicating their primary responsibility as a filter;  it is elitist and, at the same time, pathetic.  But I digress...)

      "My poem was published in a prominent poetry magazine, beating out thousands of others for this honor.  I won the competition, right?" 

      Hardly.

      In fact, it wouldn't even be right to say that "the game is afoot".  The real struggle hasn't begun.  To be read, that poem and publication still have to be sold to an indifferent audience.  Even then, readers might be more interested in the interviews and articles than the verse.

     "Okay, so the publisher and I find a way to get the lion's share of poetry readers.  We even beat out the hit counts for Pixel and Stage poets.  Now I'm a winner, right?"




      You've won a preseason game.  The championship is a long way off.

      Unless we like being ignored, it's time to consider our goal and the opposition.

      Imagine two strangers on a bus, train or plane.  Bored with avoiding each other's gaze or discussing the weather, sports or politics, one of them might ask:

     "What do you think of the latest James Bond flick?"  Or last week's episode of "The Big Bang Theory"?²

      In the last half century you would not hear³:  "What did you think of the poem in yesterday's paper?"  Or of a poetry book like "Songs of a Sourdough" (as we might in 1907)?  Obviously, today's poetry is outside our society's mainstream.

      Even with Internet and social media, the conversation rarely, if ever, presumes that the listener will be familiar with any given contemporary poem.  Conversations about such verse, when they occur, almost invariably include a URL to bring the message recipient(s) up to speed.  There are no icons.  No common ground or points of reference.  Thus, there is nothing of preexisting mutual interest to discuss.

      As poets, our goal is for our words to be heard and remembered as part of the culture at large.

      The bad news is that our competition is not simply every other poet vying for our publisher's favor, or even every other piece in every other publication.  It is every poem, song, movie, novel, play, television or radio show, if not every pastime available to consumers today.  Until everyone understands this neither your poem nor anyone else's has any practical chance of success. 

      The good news is that, frankly, most of our competitors suck.



Footnotes

¹ - I don't necessarily agree with or condone it but I do understand it.

² - Perhaps we should take a tip from Shakespeare--he knew a thing or two about succeeding with poetry--and write scripts?  Or from Bernie Taupin and write song lyrics?

³ - Is it worth noting that, in addition to the "It's a Bundyful Life (Part 1)" ("Married with Children", Season 4, Episode 11, airing on December 17th, 1989), we saw nothing but rhyming couplets on "Bedtime Stories" ("How I Met Your Mother", Season 9, Episode 11, airing on November 25, 2013)?

     I think not.  



Links:

  1. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part I


  2. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part II


  3. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part III


  4. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IV


  5. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part V


  6. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VI


  7. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VII


  8. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VIII


  9. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IX


  10. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part X


  11. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XI


  12. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XII




    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel


Friday, December 27, 2013

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XI

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #20

    What is poetry?  More to the point, why do so many try to write it?

     Because it seems to form one gigantic paradox, this is the easiest of the twelve issues to get ass-backwards.

     Suppose you want to send a vital, private message to some friends.  You dictate it to a courier, who writes it down.  Fearing detection along the way, she burns the note but is successful in delivering the gist of your missive.  Your information saves the day. 

     Are you happy?

     If entirely so, you may be the hero of the hour, a dear friend and perhaps even a great writer but you aren't a poet and you never will be as long as you have to ask:

    "Why not?"

     Answer:  Because you didn't cringe when you read about the burning and subsequent paraphrasing of your words.  Because poetry is verbatim, its producers are sticklers about exact wording.  They might say something like:  "We are delighted that everything worked out well..." while thinking to themselves "...but we'd have been happier still had the message arrived intact."

     Poets are funny that way.

     Many students come to poetry in order to draw attention to themselves or their issues.  Verse appears to be the perfect vehicle since, not only can people receive the info, they might even memorize it for future reference.  Thus, poetry makes sense both theoretically and historically. 

     The problem is that it makes no sense in practice or at present.  First, as an art form poetry is better suited to the timeless rather than the timely.  Second, there is no audience for poetry;  one has to be earned each and every generation, not just by you but by poets in general.  That hasn't happened.

     Insofar as selecting poetry as the medium for your message is concerned, the only thing worse than your choice is your timing.




Links:

  1. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part I


  2. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part II


  3. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part III


  4. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IV


  5. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part V


  6. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VI


  7. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VII


  8. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VIII


  9. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IX


  10. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part X


  11. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XI


  12. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XII




    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel




 

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XII

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #17
     What things do the majority of new poets get exactly wrong?  I can think of at least twelve.  Let us consider them in ascending order of importance. 

     We begin by examining the nature and value of originality.  This may be the least significant of the twelve aspects of poetry we'll examine but, as anyone falling from great height can attest, gravity dramatically affects all of our lives despite being among the weakest forces in physics.

     There are three conceivable approaches to novelty:

 1.  NNUTS - The Nothing New Under The Sun school punts the issue.  These prosodists trace the influences of poets and poems, apparently hoping to prove that no one has had an original thought since cave dwellers moved into huts.  For example, Tony French and others have shown that so many lines of John Gillespie Magee's "High Flight" were lifted from other sources that it could be considered a cento.  That doesn't change the fact that it is one of the two best known and best loved poems of the 20th century.  The cliché collage is the most visible product of the NNUTS view.

    You want your words to survive their telling.  Given that recognition is the goal why should incorporating the familiar into the process be such a crime?

    In short, these people don't sweat originality or content at all.  The hypothesis is that if you write well you'll be different enough.  To NNUTS advocates, a poem is "a little machine for remembering itself", as Don Paterson said.  This makes them good critics, critiquers and teachers but, because they insist that aspiring poets should take time to learn the elements of the craft, NNUTS proponents do not exert much influence within the lazy majority.

    For what it's worth, their patron saint is Algernon Charles Swinburne.

2.  MIN - At the opposite end of the spectrum is the "Make It New" crowd, a group of anti-aesthetics who face the originality issue head on, even as they exaggerate its importance.  In essence, they argue that we should abandon what has succeeded for millennia in favor of what has failed for almost a century.  Some call themselves "experimentalists" but ignore the results of their own tests.  Others refer to themselves as "avant garde", presuming to know the tastes of future generations despite a zero percent record of success in the past.  (What failed artists don't consider themselves ahead of their time?)  The rest identify themselves using wide-ranging [usually content-driven] nomenclature:  "conceptualists", "ideationalists", other euphemisms for "Convenient Poetics", etc.  What unifies these commentators, aside from a complete disregard/disdain for broader audiences, is their attempt to repackage the prehistoric.  Modernism began, more or less, with T.S. Eliot's hetrometrical "Prufrock" (1915) and then "The Waste Land" (1922) and "The Hollow Men" (1925).  It has since deteriorated into the artless prose with linebreaks we see today.  As such, we have retraced in reverse the steps of ancient prosodists who went from grunts with pauses to the dawn of meter.  An entire industry has been built around performing cosmetic surgery on prose qua poetry, the original failed aesthetic.


     As an aside, let me say that it is difficult to find anything weighty or fascinating to say on a regular basis.  If you doubt this, try blogging for a year or so.  We have to regard Edgar Guest with at least grudging admiration;  he wrote and published verse every day for thirty years!  Granted, it was insipid dreck, but in being metrically sound it showed familiarity with at least one more aspect of the art form than most of today's MIN "poets" can demonstrate.

     By definition, a cliché is trite, something everyone understands because they've seen it many times before.  The polar opposite of the clichéd/trite is not the new but the incoherent (i.e. that which no one comprehends).  Thus, we have postmodernism.

     It is difficult to imagine a role for MIN types.  In practice, they dominate "theoretical" discussions among Content Regents who think WCW's "The Red Wheelbarrow" is free verse.

3.  Good Stories Well Told ("GoStWeTo") - Is it really too much to ask that poets have something interesting¹ to say and know the difference between trochees and iambs?



Footnotes

¹ - "Interesting" does not necessarily imply "profound".  It can mean, among many other possibilities, "informative", "funny", "entertaining" or "moving".  That I feel the need to explain the term speaks volumes.



Links:

  1. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part I


  2. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part II


  3. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part III


  4. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IV


  5. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part V


  6. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VI


  7. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VII


  8. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VIII


  9. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IX


  10. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part X


  11. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XI


  12. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XII





    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel


Thursday, December 26, 2013

Heroic Couplet - Part II

Doggerel:  Doggerel is a derogatory term for verse considered of little literary value.

Verse:

1a. A single metrical line in a poetic composition; one line of poetry.
1b. A division of a metrical composition, such as a stanza of a poem or hymn.
1c. A poem.

2. Metrical or rhymed composition as distinct from prose; poetry.



1.  Bad poetry is not an oxymoron.

    In our first post on this subject we made the point that "not all poetry is art" and that it's "just a mode of speech".  We have two, and only two, of these:  prose and poetry.  The example we used was the "enjoy this while we can" message of a cancer-stricken girl which just happened to come in an iambic pentameter rhyming couplet--one that many will find "heroic" in both senses of the word.

    For the sake of this argument, let us say that this is doggerel with no literary value whatsoever.  Does this make it prose?  No.  Nor is this an opinion.  Every dictionary ever written agrees that doggerel is [bad] verse and that verse is [at least a subset of] poetry.  No dictionary allows for the possibility that doggerel might be prose.  The girl's verse in the photomeme¹ is poetry, no more or less than William McGonagall's "Tay Bridge Disaster" or William Shakespeare's Sonnet LXXIII.  Again, fact.  Not opinion.  Any editor can confirm not only that godawful poetry exists but that it is as common as Siberian snow.  It can be found in the best collections and can be written by the best poets

    Get over it.

2.  "Poetry is a verdict, not a claim." - Leonard Cohen

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #11
    According to the memecdote¹, the girl presented these words as a simple entreaty.  Someone else noted the form.  Whether it is poetry as opposed to prose is determined by objective (e.g. form, rhythm, technique, etc.) and subjective (e.g. memorability, response, consensus, etc.) measurements.  Despite the fact that she intended her words as prose, no one will argue that the girl's heroic couplet is anything but poetry.

    Compare this to Barack Obama's two inaugural "poems":  Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day " and Richard Blanco's "One Today".  Present those without explanation or page formatting to anyone unfamiliar with the text.  See if they identify it as anything but prose--most likely as dull prose, at that.

3.  Definitions matter.

    The fact that, in 2006, John Barr didn't know the difference between verse and its subset, doggerel, doesn't mean that that distinction isn't real.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #86

      Isn't this why we have dictionaries?



Footnotes:

¹ - A photomeme is some catchy phrasing on a photo [or other graphic].  A memecdote is a photomeme with a backstory.  Both are common on Facebook and other social media.



Links:

1.  Heroic Couplet

2. Heroic Couplet - Part II


    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel




Monday, December 23, 2013

Negative Reviewing

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #85
    I was reading articles about negative reviewing of poetry books on Carmine Starnino's blog.  Along the way I was reminded of the one serious argument against unflattering reviews:

    Poetry is dead. 

    That being the case, who benefits?  Who is going to be warned off reading the tome?  It's like telling a claustrophobic person to avoid small spaces.

    If history is a guide, most poets won't produce a single great poem in their lives.  Precious few have authored more than a handful of such masterpieces and those may be stretched across different collections.  In the last few decades no poet or poem has achieved the most basic, practical success:  finding, satisfying, and surviving within a significant audience.

    Parenthetically, in the absence of a market, positive reviews are equally pointless.  Worse, blurbing our buddies' mediocrities undermines our own integrity and that of the entire process.  Nevertheless, many cling to the notion that such cheerleading is good for poetry in general.  More on this in Part II.

    Given that all contemporary poetry fails, it is selective overkill to review it individually.  As chagrined as I am by what is being published today, I avoid singling out examples because I don't have an adequate response to the inevitable question:

   "Why me?"



    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel


Saturday, December 21, 2013

You

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #43
    How would you like to be the most famous/successful poetry publisher in the world?

    Imagine if this required zero creative talent and a $0 investment.  What is more, because of population expansion and mass media, you could attract a larger following than any poetry source in the history of the world.  

    Difficult?  No.  In fact, it's child's play.  All you need is some time, energy and familiarity with a few basics.

     We begin with The First Rule of Marketing Poetry: 

Don't!

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #72
    The drivers in my home town never use their turn signals. 

   "Why not?" you ask? 

    Because they don't want to lose the element of surprise.

    Go to your favorite successful fiction publisher's website.  Take a look around.  What related word¹ will you rarely find anywhere in their descriptions?

    They will mention, among other offerings, "novels", novellas", "novelettes", "books", "magazines", "stories", "joke-books", "narratives", "paperbacks", "hardcovers", "pot-boilers", "cliffhangers", "mysteries", "who-done-its" or "romances".  Anything other than "prose". 

    Given that prose outsells poetry by thousands to one and that publishers assiduously avoid leading with the generic word "prose", why on earth would you want to describe what you are trying to sell as "poetry"?

    Seriously, if you are trying to promote William Shakespeare bill him as a playwright, not as a guy who writes five hour² long poems.  You don't want to scare off the customers.

Audience Awareness

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #15
    Most poets can be excused for having trouble with this since it involves awareness of something that doesn't exist.  At the very least, one must begin with awareness of that fact:  there is no audience.  Indeed, at this juncture, those unable to accept that poetry is dead [on the demand side] can stop reading.

    For what it's worth, non-poets usually grasp this concept instinctively.  They can intuit why magicians don't use the word "trick".  They understand why the subtitle says "audience" rather than "reader".  They appreciate how pedantic it was for me to add "[on the demand side]".  They'd rather have the still-operative 1945 Chicago White Sox Goat Curse cast upon them than allow anyone to defame their efforts with the word "poetry".  Lawsuits have been filed over less!

    As an aside, ponder the notion that no literary critic--not Marjorie Perloff, John Boddie or Peter John Ross--is as tough as the person with no interest in poetry.  Think of it:  we're comparing those who have devoted much of their lives to analyzing poetry texts to those who turn up their noses and growl:  "Get that shit out of my face."  Which of these is better situated to understand why people don't enjoy contemporary verse?

     Let me cut to the chase.  Here's the gig:  Find a story to tell.  It can be, in descending order of general success, funny, romantic or dramatic.  Let the audience decide whether it's prose or poetry and whether that's a plus or a minus.  Concentrate on the destination (the audience's pleasure), not the cargo (i.e. content) or vessel (i.e. prose versus poetry). 

     Believe it or not, your ability to recognize appealing material is the only significant challenge here.  To understand how easy the rest is, check out Hank Beukema's recital of the John Stewart song, "Mother Country":



     The material is barely adequate, if a little hokey.  We could imagine it working in the United States around, say, July 4th.  The performance is okay, too, although we might hope to hear more excitement when E.A. Stuart comes out.  The video production is abysmal, though.  This has to be brought up closer to the level of a television vignette or commercial message.  All of that said, this is what your competition looks like.  Hardly intimidating, is it?

     With a little networking, you can do much better than this.

The Practical Steps

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #19
     Find a good narrative.  If it happens to be a poem, so much the better.

     Find someone³ who can tell stories well.   

     Find someone³ who can point a camera and use a video editing program. 

     Put them together, perhaps with some background music³.

     Post your results on YouTube and wait for one of your videos to go viral.

     Repeat as necessary.



Footnotes:

¹ - A search for "prose" upon arrival at the Simon and Schuster website initially yields [authors' names Francine Prose and James Prosek along with] David Lehman's "Great American Prose Poems".  It seems that only poets are silly enough to warn off readers with the enervating words "prose" or "poetry".

² - No, really.  Some of Shakespeare's productions took five hours.  And we complain about commercials!

³ - Any fast food restaurant should have plenty of qualified musicians, poets, actors and film students on staff.



    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel


Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Heroic Couplet

     No, not all poetry is art.  It's just a mode of speech.

     This poem will not survive its time, as Shakespeare's have.  It will not be preserved by those who tread the boards.  It may be buried underneath the morning news.  It lives in randomly accessed memories.  It does not limn.  It does not need discussion.  It won't be heard in English class.  It means no more than what it says. 

     It's just a message someone leaves behind.




Links:

1.  Heroic Couplet

2.  Heroic Couplet - Part II


Saturday, December 14, 2013

Ten Traps for Reviewers

"His arguments are as thin as the soup made
from the shadow of a pigeon that starved to death."

 - Abraham Lincoln on the debating ability of Stephen A. Douglas.




Earl the Squirrel's Rule #83
     Suppose you are about to write a review of a contemporary poetry collection.  I won't ask why;  I'll just hope it's not because you know and either like or dislike the author personally.  Your first challenge is to understand that this is a conversation between readers, past and prospective.  The author's feelings or reactions play no role here.  Your other challenge is to demonstrate why anyone should Give A Shit ("GAS").   Bearing in mind that, good or bad, very few will read the underlying work anyway, your recommendation will need to "create its own raison d'être" (whatever that means). 

     Oh, and some deft humor shouldn't hurt the cause.

     Listed from the merely annoying to the intolerable, here are the ten most egregious and common strategic mistakes perpetrated by reviewers:

10. Scholarship

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #49
    Your job as a reviewer is not to argue about the collection's place in the canon;  it's at least a half century too early for that.  Unless you are trying to make the case that the author has never had an original thought in his or her life there is no need to chart the work's family tree, tracing influences through the ages.  Also, think poems, not poets.  Unless it is part of a series, you don't need to place this compendium in the context of the author's other works.  No one GAS.  Just show us if this book is any bloody good.

9. Namedropping

     There is never any need to spell out a dozen other poets who write as well or as badly as this one.  No one GAS.  Just show us if this book is any bloody good.

8. Critique

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #73
     The damned thing is published.  It's too late for constructive critique.  Talk about the flaws without wasting time trying to repair them.  You say it might help with the author's next book?  In light of all the deficiencies you noted in this one, why would anyone, including the author, care about their next one?  Seriously.  No one GAS.  Just show us if this book is any bloody good. 

7. Book Reporting

     A plot outline is not a review.  Even if I love murder mysteries I don't want to waste time reading a godawful one.  If the collection has an overall theme describe it briefly and move on to the task at hand.  Books about one topic aren't inherently better or worse than those on other subjects.  No one GAS.  Just show us if this book is any bloody good. 

6. Content Regency

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #53
     If you haven't studied the elements of the craft please consider doing so before you write reviews.  Don't try to impress us with how profound [your peculiar interpretation of] the message is.  Life is short.  If the collection needs your expertise as an interpreter just say it's cryptocrap and move on.  Otherwise, concentrate on telling us whether or not these magnificent thoughts are expressed in a memorable fashion.  Of course, this is just another way of saying:  "No one GAS.  Just show us if this book is any bloody good." 

5. Bios

     Unless you are being held hostage by corporate terrorists and are trying to pass along the message that this book is the usual Autobiography of a Nobody, do not tap out the quotidian minutiae of the author's misspent or underlived life.  Save that for the Nobel Committee.  We don't GAS about who made the last film, TV sitcom or pizza we enjoyed.  Why would we care about who wrote a poetry collection--especially one you might be warning us to avoid?  Seriously.  No one GAS.  Just show us if this book is any bloody good.

4. Pontificating

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #32
     A reviewer's job involves divining, not defining, the reader's preferences.  Ergo, a review is not a treatise on aesthetics.  Again, the only issue is what readers like, not what you think they should like.  Spare us your sermons about how your readers' lack of taste will bring about the end of civilization.  No one GAS.  Just show us if this book is any bloody good. 

3. Documentation

     Stop restating your overall evaluation and give us supporting examples.  Ideally, these will speak for themselves, obviating the need for your evaluation entirely.  Show, don't tell.  There is no need to get bogged down in polemics.  No one GAS.  Just show us if this book is any bloody good.

2. Lawyering


    You are not an attorney making a case against opposing counsel.  You are a friend of the court, advising on the merits of what is being presented.  Do not showcase the worst poem to argue that the tome is wretched, or the best poem to imply that it is the second coming of "Grasshopper".  You needn't ignore these outliers entirely but do concentrate on representative samples.  Lots of 'em.  In the meantime, stop trying to score intellectual Brownie points with the jurors.  No one GAS.  Just show us if this book is any bloody good.

1. Blurbing

    Others brush off blurbers like the gadflies they may be.  Not this squirrel.  I rate blurbers half a notch above plagiarists, but only when I'm in a generous mood.  Smarm is dishonest, cowardly, and cloying.  It is a betrayal of precious readership trust.  It is like antimatter to the reviewing process.  Sifting through such unadulterated spam is one reason why no one GAS.

    Just show us if this book is any bloody good.



    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel



Friday, December 13, 2013

Why Few Read Poetry - Part I

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #35

     As you know, songs on the radio dealt poetry a death blow in the early 1920s.  It stands to reason that if poetry is going to be revived it will have to reclaim some of that audience.  This will require an understanding of why people read poetry before 1922...and why they don't now.

     Before the 20th century poetry and music were both performed.  Indeed, because verse required neither an instrument nor the ability to play one, a person might have encountered more poetry recitals than songs.

     How can we measure their relative popularity, though?  There were no albums, CDs, DVDs or MP3s so we cannot compare the sales of songs versus verses during that time.  We do have a common yardstick, though:  poetry sold as well as novels, both outselling musical scores (i.e. unperformed songs) by more than 100 to 1.  Nowadays, poetry is sold as text to be read by or to the end user but rarely performed, before or after publication.  Lo and behold, poetry sales are now on par with the scores and scripts of songs and films.  Today, novels outsell poetry collections [and sheet music] by 4-digit factors.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #43
     The obvious and inescapable conclusion is that if we want people to read contemporary poetry we need to show good verse¹ being performed well².  This is true both generally and specifically.  That is, we need people to hear a lot of poetry but especially the poem(s) that we're trying to sell them.  Who buys an MP3 without hearing the song first?  Thus, the typical publisher's insistence on being the first to present a piece is not just questionable;  it is exactly wrong on every conceivable level.

     Put another way, when people bought a book of poetry in, say, 1893 they could at least imagine it being performed before a breathless audience, perhaps by the purchasers themselves.  Poetry was useful, if only to spark such dreams, even within the most timorous souls.  Practicality was never an issue;  a 90 year old woman in a wheelchair can fantasize about being a prima donna...but only if she has seen a ballet.   

     The math is simple:

     No performances = no dreams of performing = no sales



Footnotes:

¹ - As self-defining as it may be, in this context "good verse" refers to poetry that works on the page and stage.

² - By "performed well" we mean as a Shakespearean actor might present it, as opposed to three minutes of unmodulated screaming or what seems like hours of droning.



    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel


Thursday, December 12, 2013

Poetry: Dead or Alive

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #69
    In our last post, "Writing Song Lyrics", we discussed the technical differences between poetry and song stemming from the fact that poetry is spoken while songs are sung.  Today, let's discuss the practical differences stemming from the fact that poetry is dead while song is very much alive.

    The delusion that poetry is alive has become a central tenet of Convenient Poetics, if only because verse being dead is such a terrible inconvenience.  A large part of the problem is that poetry has been gone for so long that few can recall what it was like when poetry was part of our common culture.  If not our past, we can look at other, non-anglophone societies to glimpse what life would be like in such an environment. 

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #45
    That said, it is hard to find precedents or analogies.  The best I can do is point out how, in a matter of a few generations, spoken French lost its past perfect tense.  Today, only non-francophones are baffled by this.  How can you have a language in which one cannot say "I did that" as opposed to "I have done that"?  The difference is that, while French lost one of many tenses, except in the written word, anglophones lost one of only two entire modes of speech, except in song.

     Let me draw a picture of what it's like when and where poetry is alive within a society.  Can you imagine:

  1. ...expressing dismay because your favorite 2013 poetry release sold only 200,000 copies?


  2. ...making $5,838,560.00 in 2013 dollars from one poem, it not being the one for which you are best known?


  3. ...popular poets (e.g. Robert Frost) out-earning popular musicians (e.g. the Beatles)?


  4. ...random schoolchildren reciting a half-hour long poem? 


  5. ...being able to recite more contemporary poetry than contemporary song lyrics?


  6. ...poets filling not just concert halls but football stadiums to capacity?


  7. ...non-poets quoting contemporary verse in missives (e.g. letters or, more recently, text messages, emails or social media posts) and speeches?


  8. ...every significant newspaper, tabloid and magazine publishing poetry?


  9. ...prominent families in your area competing to see who could attract the most famous poet to their parties?


     Boggles the mind, doesn't it?  Nevertheless...

  1. Let's do some arithmetic, shall we?

         Since the advent of language, at least 1% of every human population has been comprised of poets, amateur or otherwise.  To hear the Death Deniers speak, you'd think the figure today were closer to 10%!  No matter.  Let's say only half a percent are dabblers in poetry--a number smaller than in any other culture or era in human history.  That's about 2,000,000 poets in North America alone. 

         Now, what percentage of novelists will buy a best-seller, even a terrible one, if only to see what the buzz is about?  60%?  80?  Again, let's take a ridiculously low estimate:  10%.  If that same percentage of poets were to buy the same popular tome, without so much as a single educational, overseas, personal¹ or pleasure² sale, a poetry volume would sell 200,000 copies.

         Bottom line?  No one buys poetry books, including poets.  This isn't just a "coal to Newcastle" problem, with poets hoping to sell rather than buy.  It's a question of deficiency breeding deficiency.  How many failures to find a readership do people need to examine before they discern what can be learned from the exercise?


  2. Robert Service is said to have made $500,000 from "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" back in the day when that wasn't chump change.


  3. Had Frost and the Beatles lived a century earlier the latter would have toiled in obscurity.  You can probably name many 19th century poets and poems.  How many popular musicians and songs from that century can you identify?


  4. Even today, in some cultures kids can recite long poems at will, some written in the last half century. 


  5. Before music came onto the air waves in the 1920s poetry travelled much better than music, with its groups and instruments.  Few people heard more than one new song a month, and that tune was not played repeatedly for days or weeks on end, as they are on hit parades today.  The average person knew many more contemporary poems than songs. 


  6. Pablo Neruda, among many others, attracted such crowds.  On one occasion, when he couldn't recite an old poem the audience did it for him.


  7. Not only is contemporary poetry absent from our interpersonal and broader public discourse but it is becoming progressively less common and regarded as more pretentious or geekish to quote classical poetry.  That is, not only is poetry dead but the collective memory and use of it is fading, despite the admirable efforts of more [English Literature and Creative Writing] teachers than ever.


  8. Even medical journals included poetry!


  9. Touring poets would encourage bidding wars between sponsors, pitting crosstown rivals against each other.


     I know what you're thinking.

    "No radio, television, Internet, texting, cell phones.  Of course poetry was popular.  It was the only game in town!  We could never recapture that exclusivity today."

     All true.  This is no small challenge.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #51
     The question becomes:  Other than the usual benefits of living in the real world, why should poetry's cheerleaders face the painful but obvious truth? 

     The answer remains:  Because it allows a person to engage in the three greatest debates in the history of communication arts:

1.  Why were radio songs able to kill English poetry so quickly, especially as compared to verse in other technologically advanced cultures/languages?

2.  Why did it not affect sales of novels?

3.  How can we revive poetry?

     Food for thought.



Footnotes:

¹ - personal sales involve guilting friends, relatives or attendees at a reading into purchasing a book

² - pleasure sales involve strangers buying a poetry collection because they hope to enjoy reading it, as one might a novel



    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel


Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Writing Song Lyrics

"Whatever is too stupid to say can be sung."

    - Joseph Addison (1672-1719)



Introductory Lyric Writing:

     Humankind's first musical instrument was undoubtedly the drum.  When Paul Simon went to South America to record "The Rhythm of the Saints" (released in 1990) he was astounded to see Brazilian kids being able to drum for hours, still maintaining a regularity that computerized equipment could barely surpass.   Today, with forms like rap, we seem to have come full circle:  words and drums, nothing else.  As they say in the music industry:  "The beat's the boss." 

Tip #1:  Have your beats fall on important words:  the nouns and verbs that tell the gist of your story.

     As a budding songwriter you want your tunes to be "singable".¹  You want people belting them out in the shower or humming them absent-mindedly as they play their computer games.  You want music directors, agents and producers to think of your pieces as earworms.  You want people to stop hitting their radio buttons when they come across your work.  Next to melody and beat, the most important aspect of your composition is the lyrics--not their meaning, mind you;  just the sounds of the words themselves.  In short, you want your music to be catchy and your words to be memorable. 

Leonard Cohen
And who will write love songs for you
when I am lord at last
and your body is a little highway shrine
that all my priests have passed?

    - "Priests" by Leonard Cohen, describing having one's songs played on car radios

     In this post you will find advice on how to write effective lyrics.  Don't sweat the nomenclature;  you just need to understand a few basic concepts.

     The two things that will make your words unforgettable are repetitions of sounds and rhythms.  You're already familiar with rhymes at the ends of lines.  In song, these don't have to be anywhere near exact, like "mask" and cask".  Virtually anything with the same vowel sounds will do.

Bob Dylan
Yes, how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?

      - "Blowin' in the wind" by Bob Dylan

     In addition to rhymes, it is a good idea to repeat other sounds within the lines, especially in words/syllables that will be underscored by beats.  These "reps" are called:

1.  alliteration if they come at the beginning of stressed syllables;  if elsewhere,

2.  assonance if they involve vowels;  or,

3.  consonance if they involve consonant sounds.

     Your chorus is, essentially, one huge mega-rep used to burrow into unsuspecting brains.  

     Clearly, singing takes more time than speaking.  This, itself, helps underline your words, just as over-enunciating them slowly would (e.g. "READ...MY...LIPS...").  A sonnet takes about 65 seconds to recite but Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII, performed by Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, can take more than twice that long (2:56 minutes, in this case):



Melisma:

    While we're talking about Pink Floyd, consider these two lines from "Comfortably Numb":

Pink Floyd's David Gilmour

I
have become comfortably numb

    How can one word--one syllable, even!--be an entire line?  By having the performer sustain it for more than one beat.  This adds drama, poignancy and, above all, time to the performance.  Note that this elongation almost always involves vowel sounds, and usually long ones:  "pay", "paw", "pea", "pie", "Poe", "Pooh", or "pew" as opposed to "pen", "pin", or "pun", with "pan" lying somewhere in between.  Remember this when you are writing the last--the rhyming--word of your line.  Singers love to milk these!

Accentual versus Accentual-Syllabic:

    Most lines or songs are syllabic:  one note per syllable.  Take, for example, that second line from "Comfortably Numb":

have become comfortably numb 
DUM  de DUM DUM de dede DUM

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #82
    The music and singing both have a set number of beats--four, in this case--per line without regard to the number of other syllables between them.  Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be much of a pattern going on.

     Nevertheless, this "accentual" approach is how most English poetry was fashioned a thousand years ago;  to this day, it is still very common in English lyrics.

     More recent practice has shown that, if we put the same number of other syllables between each beat, we increase the song's singability.  These form units called "feet" which are either 2 or 3 syllables long, each featuring a beat.  That gives us five different possibilities, depending on where the beat lands within the 2- or 3-syllable foot:

1. First of two:  Trochaic (DUM-de): 

"Tommy | can you | hear me?"

   - Sound Repetitions:  "hear me"
   - Source:  "Tommy" by "The Who"

2. Second of two:  Iambic (de-DUM): 

"And we | will run | the rid|ges of | our green | land, Ten|nessee."

   - Reps:  "run" - "ridges", "green land Tennessee"
   - Source:  "Run the Ridges" as sung by the Kingston Trio

3. First of three:  Dactylic  (DUM-de-de):

"Raindrops on | roses and | whiskers on | kittens"

   - Reps:  "Raindrops" - "roses",  "whiskers" - kittens
   - Source:  "My Favorite Things"² by Rodgers and Hammerstein

4. Second of three:  Amphibrachic  (de-DUM-de):

   "It's four in | the morning | the end of | December"

   - Reps:  "four" - "morning", "morning" - "end" - "December"
   - Source:  "Famous Blue Raincoat" by Leonard Cohen

5. Third of three:  Anapestic  (de-de-DUM):

"We crossed ov|er the bord|er the hour | before dawn."

   - Reps:  crossed, over, border, hour, before
   - Source:  "Roads to Moscow" by Al Stewart

     It would help if you were to learn the basics of scansion (roughly:  rhythmic writing) but, for now, let's simplify:

Tip #2:  Keep either one other syllable between each beat or two other syllables between each beat.

     Note that what is considered a stressed syllable in poetry is not the same as in song, where, again, "the beat's the boss."  For example, if you were speaking, this sentence would be pronounced thus:

"And we will run the rid|ges of our green | land, Ten|nessee."

     ...as opposed to the song where, because of the beat, every second syllable is accented:  "of" is promoted to a stress while "land" is demoted to an unaccented word.

"And we | will run | the rid|ges of | our green | land, Ten|nessee."

Sonic Tempo:

     Earlier we mentioned how some vowel sounds are slow (e.g. "pay", "pew") while others are fast (e.g. "pin", "pen").  The same is true of consonant sounds:  "sh" and "j" take much longer than "p" or "t".  For example, compared to "pit", the word "josh" takes forever and a day to say.  To avoid unbalancing your line, then, try to distribute both types of sounds/words evenly within your lines.³

Tip #3:

Do not crowd a bunch of slow sounds into one spot and faster ones elsewhere.


Tip #4:  Better to have one syllable too few than one too many.

     Cramming too many syllables into too few beats can lead to people mishearing your lyrics, as in this famous case of eleven jammed around three:

tell them a hookah-smoking caterpillar



Tip #5:  As in life, if you're going to mess up, do so earlier, not later.

     Here is an example of a great lyricist going wrong:



     Note that sqeezing three syllables before and between beats works okay near the beginning of the line:

And¹ when² you³ rise and listen¹ to² the³ song again

     ...but it fails miserably here, at the end of a line:

there are wings on the raven¹ on² the³ wind

     Much better would have been:

there are wings on the raven wind

In Conclusion:

     I understand that country folk may not be your genre of choice but, on the subject of singability, study the earlier efforts of the master:  John Prine.



     Note that we said your lyrics should be "memorable" or, ideally, "unforgettable".  We didn't mention "discernible" or "intelligible".  Remember the scene from "27 Dresses" where Jane and Kevin butcher the lyrics to Elton John's "Benny and the Jets"?  This reinforces the point that lyrics are about sound, not meaning.



     Songs are about what the audience hears, not what the singer says.



Footnotes
:

¹ - For what it's worth, there is a natural tendency among successful songwriters to write less singable, more complex tunes later on in their careers.

² - Technically, this lyric can be scanned as dactylic, amphibrachic or anapestic.

³ - Some of us geeks believe the same is true in metrical poetry, saying that "all verse is quantitative."  Should all lines of English language poetry take the same time to recite?  That debate rages on.



    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address;  the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel