Gee I go away for a weekend, & all hell breaks loose in Raynes Park &
petc.
At least I can 'get' what happened in RP...
I can understand Dave's anger, but am not sure he places his
'solutions' where I would necessarily. I don't care if everyone knows
exactly what an 'anacrusis' is, but I do want writers to value wit,
etc. So, I'm sorta with Martin here, but, No Joanna, iambic pentameter
doesn't have to be boring, but an awful lot of it seems to be these
days -- even that which is published, at least by the so called
neo-formalists in the US of A.
I would say that what a lot of these people need to do is READ some
poetry, which far too many of them don't seem to do...
Doug
On 12-Nov-05, at 10:18 AM, Joanna Boulter wrote:
>> I don't really know what you're saying here, David. Most novelists
>> can't write either, if you go by what is actually published and then
>> consider the probable enormous number of the unpublished, just as
>> with poetry. You don't really have to work so hard to write very bad
>> prose. Whether one has to know what an anacrusis is to write good
>> poetry, considering that as a term it applies to quantitative verse,
>> not really to the stressed verse of Germanic languages, is a moot
>> point. If "banality posing as poetry" killed the art, the art would
>> have died a long time ago. Consider the huge amounts of dull
>> sententious plodfests written in the 18th & 19th century in England
>> alone. One might even be grateful for the relative taciturnity of
>> more recent poetasters. Catalexis doesn't really Make much
>> diff'rence, does it, Dave? But the real question is why you spend
>> time listening to people, who rather like M.Jourdain (it was prose in
>> his case), don't realize they're producing boring old iambic
>> pentameters a lot of the time anyway.
>> Cheers
>> Martin
>
> But iambic pentameters don't *have to be boring, surely?
>
> best joanna
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
Each leaf a runnel the
roofs now skiffs in green
I’ve never done anything
but begin.
Lisa Robertson
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