Tag: poetry

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Culture

po-heritage

One of the things that seems odd to me about Ron Silliman’s legendary (post)Avant/SoQ dichotomy is that trying to claim ownership of a country’s cultural heritage, trying to shape a national canon, feels like an essentially conservative impulse. The idea of a national tradition of radical poetics seems self-contradictory, like the Maoist idea of continuous revolution. I don’t think there’s actually a logical contradiction, but there does seem to be some conceptual tension.

I was going to use this observation as the starting point for a whole post about America’s relationship with its cultural heritage, but on balance I think that’s an exercise best left to the reader.

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Culture Me Other

The Poetry Wiki, again

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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Culture Me Other

The Poetry Wiki, back by popular demand

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.

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Culture Other

Szirtes on the myopia of poets

George Szirtes has an interesting post up at the moment, which starts:

One of the reasons I became a poet rather than a novelist is, perhaps, because I have a far stronger sense of events – nature as event, phenomena as event, objects as event – than of people. To most poets I suspect other people are a kind of myopic blur.

Whether it’s true for all poets or just him, the post is worth reading. No permalinks, so if you’re reading this some time in the future, you need to track down the entry for 20.12.05 .

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Culture

Modern poetry – mapped!

The Poetry Archive has got one of those tag-clouds so people can find poems by theme. From which we learn that the most popular subject in modern poetry is death. Woohoo. Potentially more cheerfully, death is closely followed by childhood, animals and love. After that come poetry, language and war. And so on. You can see for yourself.

It looks like ‘nature’ would score very high if all the appropriate categories were lumped together.

Not the most statistically rigorous experiment of all time (selection bias, much?), but kind of interesting.

Categories
Culture

Poet of the Year…

… is Lady Sovereign, for a sequence of rhymes on the song 9 to 5 that goes bikini/Lamborghini/Tweenies/C-Beebies/seen me/Lambrini.