Geoffrey Chaucer has a blog. It looks like posts only come along every few motnhs, but this made me laugh. Via Ancrene Wiseass.
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Tag: poetry
I got this link from somewhere – Bookslut, maybe? – but anyway, it’s a letter to The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences.
An epileptic patient “complained of being driven to write poetry. For 5 years, he experienced words as ‘continuously rhyming in his head’ and felt the need to write them down and show his writings to others. He did not talk in rhyme, write excessively in nonrhyme, or read poetry. The patient had not had a preoccupation with poetry until age 53 when he had the subacute onset of behavioral changes with irritability and anger.”
The brain really is peculiar. The fact that someone with brain damage would experience words rhyming in his head is remarkable but, given the extensive brain area devoted to language recognition and formation, makes some sense. The need to write it down and show it to people is what strikes me as most interesting. It suggests that the brain isn’t just exhibiting some kind of linguistic tic, but that the stimulus is somehow acting on his whole concept of poetry, including the associated ideas that you write it down and show it people.
I’m convinced that Burns Night is Scotland’s practical joke on the world. If you were writing a list of three ways to spoil a perfectly good dinner party, it would be hard to beat:
1) serve haggis and swedes
2) recite incomprehensible poetry
3) have bagpipe music
No wonder people drink whisky with it – it’s the only thing strong enough to dull the pain.
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lipstick of noise
The Lipstick of Noise is a poetry mp3 blog. Doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed, annoyingly. via Said the Gramophone.
Peter Sirr compares three different translations of a poem by Eugenio Montale over at The Cat Flap.
Ever since I read Mutants, I’ve been mulling over the idea of writing a group of poems around the idea of mutants and mutation.
The human (and indeed animal) stories – poor old Charles Byrne, freak-shows, the Elephant Man, court dwarves, superheroes and so on – are interesting source material; the science is somewhat interesting and provides extra source material by its connection to natural selection, ontogeny, Chernobyl, teratogens; the general idea of mutation has all sorts of metaphorical possibilties; and the word is attention-grabbing.
One possibility would be a set of ‘mutant sonnets’. The baseline of an established form would allow the formal mutation of the poems to be made apparent. Alternatively, the language could be ‘mutated’ in other ways. And the theme doesn’t have to extend to formal/linguistic considerations at all.
Something to consider. Perhaps a trip to the Hunterian is in order.