… at Pruned.
And it took a while, but the future may finally be here.
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Author: Harry
Julie, in the comments a couple of posts down the page, said:
Harry,
I’ve gotten emails from people who’ve checked out the wiki and think it’s a neat idea, though none of them are playing. Yet? I hope so.
I think one reason that The Poetry Wiki didn’t take off in its previous incarnation is that, psychologically, it’s quite intimidating. It’s not quite like anything you’d normally do with poetry, and it’s hard to know how to approach it or where to start. Are you rewriting the poem drastically? Tweaking it? Trying to respect the original intention? Bouncing off it in some other way? Cutting? Adding?
Julie’s idea of posting one of Spenser’s poems as a starting point gets rid of one psychological block, because you don’t have to worry about how the original writer will react.
I might post a similarly unthreatening piece to play with later, although the best thing to do would just be to dive in and edit.
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Top ten animals I’d most like to see
It’s the season for lists. I’m not going to do a review of 2005 in music or films of poetry or anything. I’m going to do a list of ‘top ten animals that it would be really really cool to see’. One ground rule – they can’t be extinct, so no Dodo, no Great Auk, no moas, no phorusrhacoids, no baluchitherium, no pteranodons, no plesiosaurs, no seismosaurus or tyrannosaurus. Not even a giant prehistoric dragonfly. *sigh*
Still, even without a time machine there are some pretty great things to see.
Before I get onto the final list, here’s a list of ten that might have made it onto the list if I hadn’t already seen them. In no particular order:
Stellar’s Sea Eagle
Giraffe
Black and White Colobus Monkey
Giant Anteater
Amazon River Dolphin
Carmine Bee-eater
Skimmer
Hoatzin
African Elephant
Leopard
A post at we make money not art made me laugh.
Or, to be more accurate, back in the face of overwhelming public apathy except from Julie.
Since I’ve got the spare bandwidth and everything, I’ve started a new wiki to replace The Poetry Wiki. I’ve called it ‘The Poetry Wiki‘. Original, I know. It just makes more sense to have everything in the same place.
I’ve used the Mediawiki software – i.e. the same used for Wikipedia – both because I know lots of people are somewhat familiar with it, and because Wikipedia has a lot of helpful stuff about how to use the software. You could start with the Wikipedia Help Page, for example.
At the moment it’s a blank canvas, so get in at the beginning. Have a go. Tell your friends. Jump in and make suggestions about how the site should work. Try out the editing syntax. Post some poetry.
I recently read Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi, which is a book that uses mutation as a way of understanding the development of the body. It’s interesting but quite medical; I have a pretty high tolerance for stuff about chemical pathways, gene mutations, hormones and so on, but I still found all the polysyllabic chemical names tended to make my eyes glaze over.
Lots of interesting snippets along the way, though. For example, the chapter about growth mutations had to distinguish them from ‘normal’ variation, whether racial or environmental. Apparently, young Dutch men now have an *average* height of six foot – which makes them taller than famously genetically tall people like the Masai and the Dinka. Almost more strikingly, in Holland there is no longer any correlation between young people’s social class and their height. That is certainly not true in the UK, and I find it an incredibly impressive advertisment for Dutch social policy.