Bloggy Howl, I have a Blog!

A sometimes serious, sometimes fun collection of my writings, readings and online activities...

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Why I like - and dislike - Poetry

When I was in school, poetry was part of the English syllabus. Not the writing of it, but the reading. I hated it.

Teachers, pressed for time and in a hurry to finish the syllabus before the exams, forced us to learn the poems by rote, the more creative among them finding film songs that had the same meter and making us sing the poems to those tunes. It worked as a device to get us to remember the poems but did not instil in us any appreciation of the writing or of the poet.

Yet, some poems remained etched in my emotive memory, to surface decades later when I began reading audio pieces for my blog. Lord Ullin’s Daughter and Jabberwocky virtually caught me by the short and curlies... and forced me to read them the way I wanted to, not the way I’d been taught. The chills I knew were lurking in Lord Ullin’s Daughter surfaced.

Having always been interested in performing, I wondered why I wanted to perform certain poems and not others. Why, for instance, did I somehow feel that most modern rhyming poetry was not a patch on the "oldies", yet some modern free verse brought that same feeling of wonder and desire to perform that older, rhyming poetry did?

And then I discovered "Performing Literature" by Beverly Whitaker Long and Mary Frances Hopkins. I found it in a second-hand bookshop, heavily marked down from its original price, and I bought it because it was cheap and had the word "Performing" in its title. Little did I know what a treasure trove I had stumbled upon.

I found brilliant quotes on poetry, for example, Philip Wheelwright’s "As in nature new qualities may be engendered by the coming together of elements in new ways, so too in poetry new suggestions of meaning can be engendered by the juxtaposition of previously unjoined words and images."

I found explanations of meter and how my instinctive use of them in organic, rather than mechanical, modes brought out the meaning and emotions they carried. I discovered that the modern, free verse poems I instinctively liked were the ones that juxtaposed words and images in new ways, the way Wheelwright mentioned. They were also the ones that did use meter, but so subtly, that the reader was not even aware of the underlying meter in seemingly strangely broken lines.

I understood why a poet on a playwrights' forum was so enamoured of the "cadence" of my monologue, "The Matchmaker". And I understood Aristotle's use of the word "poetry" for dramatic text.

Isn't it wonderful to discover an intellectual explanation for an instinctive reaction?

Saturday, July 23, 2005

Podcast: Jodi Flesberg Lilly's "Free Falling"

Here's a piece by Jodi Flesberg Lilly, another of my online students. Jodi reads her own piece, "Free Falling".

Listen to Jodi Flesberg Lilly's "Free Falling"

Friday, July 22, 2005

Sorry.. Getting personal again

How long does a man wait when a woman says she needs space?
Space to put her life in order,
Perhaps to put it in enough disorder to offset an imposed order.

How long does a man wait, seeing her every day,
Every night not knowing if she has decided not to see him,
If she has deliberately blinkered that side of her vision?

How long will she make him write bad poetry
At the age of forty?

Sunday, July 17, 2005

What's Your Blogging Personality?

Here's mine:

Your Blogging Type Is the Private Performer
Your blog is your stage - with your visitors your adoring fans.
At least, that's how you write with your witty one liners.
And while you like attention, you value your privacy.
You're likely to have an anonymous blog - or turn off comments.

Friday, July 15, 2005

Podcast: "How Do You Love Me", read by Virginia Foley

Virginia - Ginnie to most of us - is doing an online voice development course run by me. Megan's a poet. Here's what happened when the three of us got together across the miles :-)

Listen to Megan Allen's "How Do you Love Me"

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

When Hairy Met Trimmy

I wanted a beard and moustache trimmer. So I asked my friend, who’s a whiz at all things electronic, to pick one up for me.

Well, he did.

I fell in love with the sleek lil piece with the curves in the right places and called her Trimmy. Then I noticed the comb and the trimmer guides and a lil ole manual that said I could also use Trimmy to trim my hair. What a bonus! I needn’t visit the barber any more. Yeah, I know they call ’em hairdressers now, but barber it was that came home once a month to give me the grandma-approved crew cut and barber he shall remain to the end of my days. I hate visiting the barber.

So I kept the piece to be charged, waiting eagerly for 3:00 p.m., Sunday, when I would be rid of the barber forever.

3:00 p.m., Sunday.

Newspapers spread in the approved fashion to catch the trimmings. Towel over my shoulders to keep the itchy stuff out of my clothes.

I begin.

In the manual-approved style, I begin with the back of my head, which I can’t see, and shove Trimmy up my tangled tresses.

It feels like Trimmy is trying to pull my hair up by the roots. I disentangle Trimmy and bring her before my de-spectacled eyes. Trimmy has indeed pulled my hair up by the roots. Fully three of them. I shove Trimmy in again. Into battle, my hearty!

Minutes pass. Staying with the manual-approved style, I have neatly trimmed the front, back and sides.

Trimmy’s battery dies.

I am left with a partial crew-cut on the back, sides and front of my head and a clump of hair on the top. So far I haven’t looked in a mirror. Who needs a mirror when I’m going to trim all my hair to a 6 mm length?

I look in the bathroom mirror.

I look like one of those Brazilian aborigines they show on National Geographic, except I’m less dignified.

Mother raises an eyebrow, which is the equivalent of us lesser mortals kicking our heels and doing the fandango, in protest. You see I have been deputed, by virtue of being the only somewhat-able-bodied human at hand, to drop her and her luggage to the railway station so she can visit one of her other progeny, my sister down South. Only, she does not wish to be seen in public with a Brazilian with a bad barber.

Creative genius I, I save the evening with a baseball cap. I drop Mother and luggage to the station, to find that the train has been delayed. Indefinitely.

Mother sits on someone else’s luggage and carefully eyes the ground to ensure that no rats get near her. I stay with Mother’s luggage, until the passing of half-an-hour dictates that I sit down too. Mother’s luggage being the soft kind, I am constrained to sit on someone else’s hard luggage – very accommodating, these railway guards, with their tin trunk luggage – right next to Mother.

When I do gather the courage to look into Mother’s face, I see only a kind of odd wonderment at her forty-year old progeny’s insistence on behaving like an adolescent.

An hour and a half later, Mother safely ensconced in her seat on the train, I return home to my freshly charged Trimmy.

I wonder if Mother will make good on her promise, thirty years ago, to have me committed to a mental institution, so that humanity may survive. Hair intact.