Posts Tagged ‘poetry’
What is prosody? Prosody studies the music of language. Prosody studies sounds moving through time. Prosody is separate from semantics. It’s distinct from the meaning of the words that the sounds compose. Prosody isn’t the sound of language organized in lines, as is now sometimes supposed. The reason this definitional fallacy is important to […]
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“There is no work of art without a subject,” said Ortega — and with him here I do not demur. Subject matter isn’t the only component of art, nor is it the most complicated, but it is the most fundamental. It is the component toward which all others are geared. Subject is what the artist presents. It […]
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Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end? Wert thou my enemy, O thou my […]
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Poems, unique among all literature, were for many centuries specifically meant to be learned by heart. They were meant to be memorized and then recited aloud. This is called the oral tradition of poetry, which in essence means holding literature in the mind and heart to then recite it. Thus we find in the oral […]
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The Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) did not invent the Petrarchan sonnet, which is also known as the Italian sonnet. It was first used by Dante (1265-1321) and then later by many of Dante’s contemporaries. Petrarch’s excellence with the form, however, especially when celebrating his beloved Laura, made the Italian sonnet more widely known, so that even […]
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She works in a diner called the Desert Rose which sits along the northwestern edge of Colorado, near the Utah border. It’s a small and undistinguished affair, worn and weathered but always brightly lit and burning like a little beacon in that high American desert. Triangles of cherry pie sit bleeding in the pie case, […]
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At the bar where I work (and work), when after an interview the drunken reporter asked me “Are you a tit man or an ass man?” I replied: “High cheekbones” (improvising a little on my favorite poet, whose name is Karl Shapiro): Verlaine compares the buttocks and the breasts: Buttocks the holy throne of the indecencies. […]
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The cat eats the praying mantis By punching it to death, Pushing it with her paws, Playing soccer with it, Tossing it in the air, Carrying it around in her jaws And finally, when the insect Has no more motion or flutter, Chewing its green head off. — Karl Shapiro
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“No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner.” — Eudora Welty In 1947, at the University of Mississippi, William Faulkner — an extraordinarily inconsistent and difficult writer whose work is almost invariably frustrating, and yet a writer whom you cannot ever quite dismiss (the following […]
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He trudged into the desert, taking almost nothing with him but water and a ghost- ly old photo of a lady beside the ocean. That first night, he lay above a dry creek bed. Below, he heard vipers moving through the sand with a side-winding motion, and he did not sleep. He’d grown obsessed with […]
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“One of the tests of a good writer,” said the poet Karl Shapiro, “is editorial acumen, the ability to turn down your work. It’s the amateur who falls in love with his own written words and holds them sacrosanct.” I think that that’s essentially true. I think also that anyone can learn to write formulaic […]
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There is a general formula (of sorts) to storytelling, but to be better understood, that formula is best presented in terms of principles, and not concretes. By concretes, I’m referring to these interminable lists of specifics we so often see, which when it comes to the art of story merely tell us what to do […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011