And my kudos to Janet, for wrestling with the impossible and doing a
damn fine job.
kasper salonen wrote:
> I find that metre enhances good lines to make them great, at best, &
> dooms the bad to insufferability.
>
> KS
>
> On 16/01/2008, Janet Jackson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> I'm reading Stephen Fry's "The Ode Less Travelled", which is poetry writing
>> for, not dummies, but smart people who want to learn about prosody. If you
>> already know about prosody it's still a fun read and Fry's illustrative
>> examples (from Chaucer to MC Hammer!) are good. And I'm doing the exercises,
>> distasteful though some of them are (dactylic hexameter about cows!
>> Tetrameter about television!). Anyway today's exercise was to imagine
>> oneself as a Victorian poet and write a rhyming poem to commemorate the Tay
>> bridge disaster (girders collapse, train goes down in a howling storm) that
>> was the subject of a truly dreadful poem by William (William?) McGonagall. I
>> thought the results were interesting:
>>
>> Were they dozing in their seats?
>> Did they shiver at the gale?
>> Were children snuggled up on mothers laps
>> Not dreaming that the new bridge would collapse,
>> That Britain's hopes could fail,
>> Flung screaming down to die?
>>
>> Did anybody lie
>> For saving face or greed
>> Or were that seventy-five, in howling terror,
>> Done in by plain bad luck and human error?
>> An iron horse can't bleed.
>> A bridge, when sick, won't grumble
>>
>> Refuse to eat, or stumble
>> Or quail at sleet and thunder,
>> Or show us where her buttresses are missing
>> Until, with shrieking wheels and steampipes hissing
>> A heavy train goes under.
>> Were we dozing in our seats?
>>
>> Hardly my usual mode, is it?
>> (If this were more than an exercise I wouldn't be happy with it -- in
>> particular, the order of the ideas -- but I can't be bothered to do any more
>> with it.)
>>
>> I wouldn't say it's more difficult to write well in this manner than in
>> unrhymed or free verse. The challenges are different, that's all. But it is
>> a mode that really lends itself to writing badly!
>>
>> Janet
>> --
>> Janet Jackson
>> [log in to unmask]
>> www.proximity.webhop.net
>> www.myspace.com/poetjj
>>
>>
>
>
--
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/
The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
--Corey Ford
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