Malcovati and

Fry

I second the recommendation for Stephen Fry's book. It's informative and a fun read. I can't vouch for its content, though --- I'm neither an English major nor a poet.

Good resources for good poetry:

www.poets.org
www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do
www.coppercanyonpress.org/

It is not the words
but the feel
of snowflakes brushing the air

Turnabout, as they say, is fair play.

Oh, now there is an interesting discussion. Is doggerel not real poetry? How would you define real poetry?

And that may have been the most gracious and elegant* acceptance of a compliment I've ever seen.

* in the mathematical sense

Whah? *doubletakes* Didn't I just close that thread?

Making Light: where you get not one, but two discussions of the nature of art.

(That was one sentence? Dang.)

A couple other sites I had bookmarked: Humanities Web (poems under "Literature"), The Wondering Minstrels (a collection by someone at Rice University), and Poets' Corner.

*This one-syllable synonym for "speculation" brought to you courtesy of thesaurus.com

Other contributors
serendipitously
provided plethoras;
prosody swarms

--Dave

"Online Writing Contests. Enter Poetry Writing Contests. Write and compete for cash prizes!"

"Skip the Poetry Contest. Publish your poetry. Fast. Easy. Free.* No Obligation. Start now!"

"Poetry Publishers Found. Literary agency finds publishers for your poetry. Submit online."
(Does the domain name WLpoetsagency.com ring any bells?)

"Poetry: We Need Writers. Publish, be read, and get paid. Start writing poetry instantly!"

* HA!, I say, and again, HA!

Triolets' second lines refrain
From coming back until the end;
Though the first one can cause some pain
Triolets' second lines refrain
From coming back yet once again.
(The form's too fragile to offend.)
Triolets' second lines refrain
From coming back until the end.

the wishes we once made have long been marred
by those who find it easier to glower
and leave the hopeful only a sharp shard
our hearts confronting this must quail and cower
around us now the harsh winds rush and scour
allowing not a one simply to be
what we would want nobody would agree
that in the tempest only those afraid
of horrid consequence refuse to see
our efforts guarantee we'll make the grade

those choices never made turn out quite hard
the villains never great are just a shower
of foolish sorts against whom we must guard
and who should never be allowed much power
so that the worst will never come to flower
there are not many who would make the plea
against the ones who hold the golden key
to step aside and just end their charade
that is no reason for such prideful glee
our efforts guarantee we'll make the grade

prince you may watch as under the great tree
the many halt and brew their morning tea
waiting like all of us for the parade
each of us pays the standard entrance fee
since nothing in this life is truly free
our efforts guarantee we'll make the grade

I'd agree with you about the Turco, particularly as a handbook

Or a backpocketbook--mine's mass market size and thin enough to carry that way. After peeking at Amazon, I'm thinking I've got a first edition, which is 160 pages. I've had it for a long, long time, so that's possible--or maybe my memory is futzy.

Brave man. That was my question, but I was too chicken to post it -- and the original question was about "versifying." To supplement your advice I'd add Steve Kowitt's In The Palm of Your Hand Addinizio/Laux's The Poet's Handbook -- and then I'd brick up the door and hide under the bed.

I can think of many edge cases, from Catullus to Rabbie Burns, where there is no clear, bright line between the two.

Re. pronunciation, I presume you've seen the wonderful poem on the difficulties of the English language and its pronunciation for non-native speakers? Has to be read aloud for full effect and I find it difficult 'cos I always end up laughing. It starts (and you can use this to Google the rest if you want):

Dearest creature in creation,
Studying English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
It will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Pray console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it.

Some of the examples could be useful for non-standard rhymes...

If you're going to tell me that some versification is doggerel and some is True Poetry*, you have to give me a method of distinguishing them. Otherwise I'll think your highfalutin' statements are just a bunch of snobbish hot air.

And adding all the quips about "bravery" and "bricking doors up"† just makes you sound like one of those posters who assumes his ideas are too daring, too true, and too dangerous for the rest of the world to handle.

We have a bingo square for that.

-----
* cue angel trumpets
† against, one presumes, the barbarian hordes

Seems to me that "doggerel or poetry?" is the verbal equivalent of "craft or art?" My own view, as a person who writes almost nothing but doggerel, is that doggerel doesn't generally have a Truth in it. So your dragon sonnets are poetry--nay, Art--but your spamkilling placeholders are doggerel.

This means that "The Tay Bridge Disaster" is poetry, albeit execrable. Similarly, if I could find my mom's Ogden Nash compendium, I'm sure I could find some poetry in it too. It also means that some sonnets are doggerel.

I'm by no means convinced I'm right. I think I'm on the right track with the parallel to "craft or art," but then again, I have no idea where craft stops and art begins, even after having this discussion about needlework, quilting, and knitting more than once.

By the way, I've been trying to find a poem for some time now that I'm sure I saw in some big anthology collected as a textbook. It's a war poem from one of the two WWs, that ends, "And now we three in Euston waiting room." Any help?

As a bookbinder, I strive to be a craftsman. I avoid the term artist entirely when I describe myself and my work. If someone feels that what I do is art, I'll say thank you, but I'm not sure enough of myself to label it as such. I think that I, personally, will have lost a piece of myself if I ever do so.

As a versifier*, I try to write stuff that rhymes, scans, and still sounds unstrained and natural. I am usually motivated to write it by some inner itch to express something. (This does not include the spam-zapping, which is simply like arranging the food on a kid's plate to make a smiley face: having fun in whatever one does.) I am content for what I write to be considered either poetry or doggerel.

I am not content, though, to have someone come in and ask if I'm trying to write "real" poetry, or "just" doggerel, like a granny painstakingly admiring a three year old's finger painting. Particularly not if they then run away again.

-----
* avoiding the word "poet"

My favorite art involves a high level of technical skill--e.g. Bruce's example in the other thread of the first 20pp of Glasshouse. You can't do that by accident: Stross is a craftsman. And the whole of the book is art because it tells me things about how the world works and ought to work. (See also, inter alia: Brust, Steven; Bear, Elizabeth.)

But mostly I just go with the "I know it when I see it" test.

Frances Cornford:

Parting in Wartime

How long ago Hector took off his plume,
Not wanting that his little son should cry,
Then kissed his sad Andromache goodbye -
And now we three in Euston waiting-room.

Or is it another poem?

The latter position is more generous and inclusive than I would have expected. The former seems snobbish and mean-spirited (and dilutes the meaning of doggerel). Perhaps you could either clarify or acknowledge some middle ground between extremes.

As to your idea that "For real poetry, the best resource is simply to read the best", I agree that it is one way to improve your skills. I disagree that it is the best resource, since the books and sites that help the most contain both instruction and carefully selected examples.

It's also possible to distinguish between "poetry" and "verse" in much the same way, with "verse" as a less negative (connotatively speaking) term for the "less serious" end of the continuum. TexAnne, I find your "craft or art" distinction especially worth thinking about, here--you seem to be using the subject of the poem and (perhaps?) authorial intention to define it. Me, I tend to focus on the emotional impact of a poem, which is a lot more subjective and probably a less useful approach . . .

Also, while I haven't done more than play with it, VersePerfect is an impressive software application. And it's free!

Interesting. I don't think I regard verse as a subset of poetry, but I do perceive an overlap there. I'm going to have to think about it.

That is, unable to explain the fact that certain of Kipling's verses - and we all know the ones - have grafted themselves into the very fabric of the English language, Orwell was reduced to explaining that the words were poetic but the sentiment was rotten, and therefore the result is not poetry, but something else. This is the very apotheosis of the academic view of poetry, and academics have thanked Orwell for his great insight ever since.

Screw Orwell.

No, sorry, it is true. And it can't be conveyed. The best I can do to explain it is to say that he was not a modern man, with modern assumptions about cause and effect, truth, and the nature of the universe. (It's a divide that separates him from Plato and Socrates, even.) The world of the gods was real to him. I don't mean in terms of religious faith, nor in the sense that he thought Pallas Athena of the shining eyes occupied the same world as he did. If anything, he knew her to be more real than he was.

That worldview comes through in his writing in ways that I can't explain. It's like if you ever really "get" Aboriginal art, for even a moment, you can't necessarily explain what is different to someone who hasn't had that experience.

This is not to say that the Odyssey is not a wonderful work in translation - I prefer Lattimore - but it's not the original work.

Just had to say that. Carry on.

There's Dickinson's definition: "If I feel so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my read were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there another way?"

Well, if it's in double dactyls or limerick form, probably not.

As to craft, I rejoice in the potter who said wearily "If it leaks, it's Art."

As a lit student who's taken (wasted?) the time to learn a few languages, I admit I may be biased here, but I'd side with Homer-in-Greek crowd.

There are translations that are works of art in their own right, but you haven't read any poet until you've read his or her actual words, not someone else's.

I recently had occasion to read Orlando Furioso in translation, and it actually made me uncomfortable. At the end I felt like I hadn't read the thing so much as I'd skated over someone's especially detailed summary of it.

Also, Homer is beautiful in the original Greek. Here's a bit recorded online.

On a tangential note, I find it completely mind-boggling that there are devout Christians who don't read Koine Greek or Hebrew.

http://people.bu.edu/bobl/odyssey.ram

re poetry in the original... Don't speak greek, Homer is the reason I want to learn. I do, however, speak Russian, and used to speak French (I can still, pretty much, read the latter). Pushkin is completely different in the original.

There is a very good, translation of his, "I loved you" in Sound and Sense (referenced above). It's terribly non-literal, and catches much of the meaning. I have a friend, who is a native speaker of French/English/Russian. He doesn't like that translation, nor the one I did, in a similar attempt to catch the meat of it.

But that's because of the way Russian and Greek poetry seem to be related (rhymes in Russian are more complex than in English, becuase the stresses have to match, and the stress pattern is different. One can't write sonnets in Russian, iambic pentameter isn't doable). It also has to do, I think, with Sasha being a genius (he makes me feel a dunce, and he's the idiot child of the family, having taken a double major in mathematics, and Middle English at UCLA, graduating at 19. To amuse abi, he did an English final once by writing a shakespearean sonnet, complaining in the couplet that his "one-hundred forty syllables are gone", but I digress).

The language informs the sense. Russian, poetry, for example uses a lot of passive constructions to convey active sentiment. It doesn't translate well. Capture the passive forms, and the sense is lost. Move to the active form and some of the flavor is missing (that, I think, is the real reason Sasha doesn't like the translations I was talking about, actually. I think he can see the Russian forms in his head when he reads the passive structures in English, I digress, again).

As for doggerel... I don't think I can define it. Mostly because I don't know it when I see it... or that I see offered up as doggerel is merely clumsy work.

I tend to think of it is ill-formed, put together with poor craft. It's not the subject, or the intent, but rather the execution.

The work of someone whom Pope would call a poetaster the sort he railed against in his Sound and Sense.

(I would love to ask Fitzgerald why he had Hermes speaking in rhyme.)

Chris@68: That's almost enough to get me to find a RealMedia player.

I had a strong, almost staggering reaction to the Odyssey in Greek. It was just...diffferent than in English, different in a way that I could not explain. I read you a passage* in April that seemed to capture it.

But I guess not everyone hits that, or hits it on the same work. I wonder if you'll find it on something else?

-----
* From The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

I second the motion. Poetry threads are one of my favourite things on Making Light.

And watching abi be good and nice is another. Thank you, Bruce, for pointing out to me that she was doing it more subtly than usual.

(I have taken
the WCW poem
that pastiches
so well

and which
you were probably
saving
to parodize later.

Forgive me
it was so delicious
so simple
and so cool.)

Rats! I'd convert it for you, but I don't have anywhere to host the file.

For me, though, Rachel Kitzinger's reading of the Helen and Aphrodite passage captures a lot of what can't be translated in the Iliad. The jagged edges of the passage disappear in translation, and English renderings don't capture the way that the measured rhythm of dactylic hexameter actually makes the exclamatory bits more affective, not less. When I read Nietzsche on Homer "dancing in chains," this is the passage I think of.

At any rate, forgive me - I'd assumed you didn't read Greek. If you've read the Odyssey entire in Greek and don't think there was much of anything there that can't be captured by a translation, then you would know better than I.

You're also in good company - for a long time, the one of primary differences between "oral" and "literary" epic was considered to be composition at the level of the episode, not the word. (I use the past tense here because people aren't writing about epic in this way so much any more, not because everyone agrees these people were wrong.) Personally, though, I'll never get the distinction. Who could read a translation of the "Com on wanre nicht" passage in Beowulf beside the original without thinking that the Anglo-Saxon words mattered?

I think that when a poem is translated, something essential is lost, because a poem uses the sound of the language to inform, amplify, or contrast with the sense. A translator can't preserve that; they can, however, put something else in its place in the target language. That's essentially a new poem based on the original, not a translation as we'd think of it for prose...and even for prose, some of that substitution of the translator's own work for that of the original writer must take place.

One of the best examples of this that I can think of is Brian Hooker's translation of Edmund Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. The original is in French syllable-counted verse, rhymed in couplets if memory serves. French lacks strong stress, which is why lines with the same number of syllables, but no particular meter, don't seem lame in that language. It's also quite rich in rhyme.

English has fewer rhymes, but very strong stresses. So using the form that worked so well for Rostand would not serve; the play would be desperately awkward and sound terrible. Hooker, therefore, translated it into blanks (blank verse, that is: unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter). I think of this as "translating the form," because blanks are a form that works in English the way the syllabic verse worked in French.

In addition, blank verse comes trailing theatrical expectations for English speakers, due to its association with Shakespeare. I think Hooker made a brilliant choice, and his verse is also adept; as a teenager I found the "No thank you" speech worth memorizing (since lost it, of course).

Whether it's an accurate translation, and whether it captures Rostand's moods and beauty, is something that will have to be judged by someone who reads French, which is to say not me.

Chris, #67: I find it completely mind-boggling that there are devout Christians who don't read Koine Greek or Hebrew.

I don't. That worldview is perfectly summed up in the (probably apocryphal) statement, "If the English language was good enough for the prophet Isaiah and the apostle Paul, it's good enough for me." IOW, anything before the KJV doesn't count.

You've never seen me when there's a tight deadline looming.

Lee, I know you really don't like the version of Christianity you were raised with, but could you please take your scorn elsewhere? In my faith tradition, we DO believe that pre-KJV versions matter--that's why we send our clergy to seminary. Your childhood trauma was real, but you keep forgetting that not all churches are like that.

It's like trying to explain the cutting nature of Hamlet's usage of you/thou in the bedroom scene with his mother.

When I was studying haiku, I came to much the same decision you ascribe to translating Cyrano. The sense of the Japanese is what I want to catch, and I find it, usually, lost in the effort to make the syllabic counts match.

I'm always pleased to see people who can do it, but too many years of too many translations have made it not work that way for me.

And nothing good can come of someone trying to translate haiku into rhymed sets of counted syllables.

Are you sure you didn't mean:

Translation of some
poetry is like licking
rice paper, yum yum!

*flees for the second time today*

Some
Haikus can be whimsical
but silly they should not

For that, one that one uses limericks

There was a translator from Nippon
Had some rice paper to write on
One day it rained and
the lacquer was stained
with the verses he wasn't complete on

I think the limerick looks lousy with the "and" but the scansion wants the syllable.

Feh.

There was a translator from Nippon
Who had some rice paper to write on.
Then one day it rained,
And the lacquer was stained
with the verses he wasn't complete on.

It is, of course, exactly the same, but it doesn't look ugly.

I just wish I'd typed it that way, when I added that "and" (which was the last word I put in the thing).

Charlotte Brontö's Jane Eyrecheopteryx, who loved Mister Pterochester?

Meanwhile, Xopher, who's named Hatton
(and mortally fears to be sat on),
declared he'd abhor
who calls a chicken a 'saur,
and eagerly reached for the baton.

Our fearless leader, great Abi,
declared that my verse was quite shabby;
so I swiftly declared
it would be repaired.
But she telephoned for a cabbie.

Terry, #80: And sometimes you get fortunate. The amount of time I spent in the SCA gave me a handle on one particular scene in Branagh's Henry V: that bit after the battle, when Henry has just discovered the slaughter of the non-combatants in the baggage train, and just then the French herald comes riding up to sue for terms, and Henry yanks him off the horse and throws him down in the mud. Yes, it shows that he's furious... but if you don't know that heralds were effectively sacrosanct, the full impact of that gesture -- the realization of just how angry he had to be to do that -- is going to slide past you. I still remember my stunned "OMG he GRABBED the HERALD!" reaction...

Ah. The one place translation does let you down in Cyrano? The nefarious nobleman in charge of our boys during the seige had erased his Gascon accent -- at the moment he throws in his lot with the cadets for real, he rolls his Rs. I keep trying to figure out how you could do this in English -- I think they'd have to come from Texas. Georgia, maybe, but Texas for the braggadocio.

A: They're opposites: a poet versifies, a hedge fund manager de-versifies.

Filters adjusted.

(note: when I tried to comment using Firefox, I got a message saying NoScript was detecting a possible crossscripting exploit.)