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Punctuation and prosody
Lately, in clearing out the office I’ve occupied for nearly 17 years (time flies), I ran across a file of articles I had gathered for a paper I thought I was going to write but somehow never did. And,...
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Punctuation with musical interlude
In his review article, “Knowing When to Stop: Investigating the Nature of Punctuation,” (Language and Communication 13(1), 1993, pp. 27-43), Paul Bruthiaux traces the role of the liturgy in the use of...
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Punctuation and prosody
The second arm of Dr. Chafe’s study was to give the same sets of unpunctuated texts to different groups of young and old subjects to read silently and repunctuate. The relation between reading and...
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Lines
Also amongst the things I discovered, cleaning out my office, a book called Web Type Expert by Tom Arah (Friedman/Fairfax, 2003). Because I didn’t finish reading this book back when I bought it, I...
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Punctuation is to rhetoric as the rest is to music
In his review article, “Knowing When to Stop: Investigating the Nature of Punctuation,” (Language and Communication 13(1), 1993, pp. 27-43), Paul Bruthiaux emphasizes the oral element of punctuation...
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Comic or just silly?
David Lehman on Kenneth Koch, in The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor Books, 1999): The comic element in Koch’s poetry allows it to act as a corrective—to ward off...
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Some quotes
Taken from the Preface and the introduction to Part 1 of An Introduction to Poetry, 9th ed., edited by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia (Longman 1997): Robert Frost, asked to define poetry, said “Poetry is...
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Poetry is to be heard, not comprehended?
An Introduction to Poetry, 9th ed., edited by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia (Longman 1997): According to . . . Gerard Manley Hopkins, poetry is “to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and...
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Capturing animals
This morning as I sat at the computer, I happened to look to the right, where the bookshelf is and I spotted Ted Hughes’s Poetry in the Making (Faber and Faber, 1967). The modest paperback, text of a...
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Word drunk
A century ago in Paris, the painter Degas lamented that his poems weren’t any good though his ideas were wonderful, and the poet Mallarmé responded, “But my dear Degas, poems are made of words, not...
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The emotional poet
More from Ted Hughes’s Poetry in the Making (Faber and Faber, 1967) Poetry is not made out of thoughts or casual fancies. It is made out of experiences which change our bodies, and spirits, whether...
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Another quotable quote
Ted Berrigan, as quoted by David Lehman: What I’m saying is that there are a lot of ways to write terrific poems but there’s only one way essentially to write poems that are no good. And that’s to be...
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Miscellany
Karyn Eisler blogs the story behind On the Wires, her video now up at qarrtsiluni. It was early. It was loud. It was the beginning of June and I’d just returned from a trip abroad. I’d spent a full...
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Why do we read poetry?
Big question and I don’t intend to answer it. Nobody probably can answer it definitively, certainly not in a blog post. But I have been musing on questions that have been arising in the class I’m...
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Who has the right?
In her 2004 Jefferson lecture, Helen Vendler raised a series of questions: The arts have the advantage, once presented, of making people curious not only about aesthetic matters, but also about...
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More miscellany
from The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (Holt, Rhinehart, 1963), letter dated June 8 1915: A thousand copies is a lot of any book of poetry to sell. Five hundred is more of an edition than...
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What shall I call this one? I know — how about miscellany?
Robert Wrigley discusses his poem “Earthquake Light” with Diana Lockward. The Poet on the Poem: My poems, generally at least, work toward sonic unity. As much as anything else, this is the way I...
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Poetry read aloud
An Introduction to Poetry, 9th ed., edited by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia (Longman 1997) In . . . open form poetry, sound and rhythm are positive forces. When speaking a poem in open form, you often...
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Frost on style
I used to say “Style is content,” which is to say how you say a thing is the thing you say. I guess that’s what makes me a poet. I still think that is true, though lately I’ve backed off on it a...
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The sharks are circling
I discovered a new (to me) site that I need to explore: The Sharkpack Poetry Review In practice, the PACK seeks to create a space for pithy, incisive reviews of contemporary poems and poetry of the...
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