Well, yeah. Christmas always gets a big publicity send up though. Merchants don’t expect big sales for poetry day. Not even the booksellers. Thanks for letting us know. 
I’m delighted to see this discussion thread. Like many of the others here, many of my first efforts at writing were poetry. While I’ve not done a lot of poetry lately, I still dabble. I have a piece that may be of interest to furries coming out soon: a free verse poem told from the point of view of a bomb-sniffing dog in Afghanistan.
I also find that my study of poetry has influenced my prose, especially Japanese poetic forms. The Japanese even have a hybrid form call haibun that combines haiku and prose. Fun stuff.
To Altivo: I love the though of reviving old forms such as Beowulfian alliterative verse. Have you explored kennings at all in experimenting with the form?
I haven’t deliberately tried to use kennings, no. The original Norse form doesn’t fit too well into English. There is an Anglo-Saxon version though, and that would work. Next time I do something alliterative, I’ll see about trying it.
I think the main problem with the kenning is that it works like a literary allusion. That’s all well and good if your audience knows the reference, but it confuses them if they aren’t familiar with the source. I suppose one could do the trick using popular television references or film perhaps, but I’m no good at that because I don’t keep up with the media. References to Shakespeare or Dickens would be more in my line of thinking, and unfortunately also more likely to be problematic.
I would have thought that kennings would give one a tool to imply a larger world outside the poem in very few words.
Analogous to how the seasonal words (kigo) in Japanese poetry make connections to the whole history of Japanese poetry. Or perhaps how in prose, Cordwainer Smith alludes to events in his stories that are never recounted in other stories, but the mention of the events gives texture to the work.
Just a thought I’ve had about kennings in my very limited research into the subject…
Oh yes, definitely so. But intense dependency on external allusion also can limit the audience. That was my point. It’s a delicate balance for sure.
You could write a short poem that contains multiple kennings. Understanding those kennings requires knowledge of, say four or five works of classic literature, or a similar number of biblical books. How many modern readers will be able to grasp your intent?
In the realm of the old bards, they could count on their listeners to know the context. Today, that is no longer much of a certainty. Choosing that context so that most readers will understand your meaning is very difficult.
For example, I might easily use kennings that refer to Greek myth and legend, or to the bible, or to Shakespeare. But American readers under age 30 (or even 40) who have the typical US education will find those utterly obscure. They might well understand instead kennings drawn from videogames, Japanese anime and manga, or popular television. But I cannot use those because I lack those popular culture referents myself.
Intricate allusions have a context, and the context needs to be shared by both the writer and the audience in order to operate effectively.
I don’t think it has to be an either/or.
Those that understand or at least intuit the cultural allusions may get a deeper meaning, but I would like to hope that even a reader who doesn’t get the allusions may still find resonances in the…hidden depths that such allusions give a work.
Or at least that’s my hope when I try to incorporate similar techniques in my own prose…
This is a little off topic, but has been stuck in my mind all weekend. I’m very familiar with the lines “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”
I don’t even recall where I heard the phrase before, but it had been recycling in my mind ever since watching an episode of Dexter with the first line in that phrase. I finally looked it up and traced it to “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Elliot. Is anyone else familiar with this poem? If so, what are your thoughts on it?
It has been a while since I read it last, and the poem has many controversial interpretations. I don’t know what Eliot himself may ever have said about it. To me it seems to describe the condition of the aged in western societies, when they are “put on the bench” and left waiting to die. But it also says to me that this happens only because we submit ourselves to it as we grow older. I decline to do that to myself, thanks.
Today, in the United States, National Poetry Month has begun. Here are a couple links for you.
This past Saturday I was browsing through the books at a local thrift store and came across “The Spoken Word Revolution Redux” edited by Mark Eleveld, with a CD narrated by poet Marc Smith and Kevin Coval. It’s about performance poetry and slam poetry. I’ve never actually been to a slam, what a shame!
Does anyone know if there has ever been a poetry performance at a furcon?
Good question. I can only answer that I don’t know. But it shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange one.
By the way, huge congrats to everyone here! PT has found it fit to make an entire poetry board for us! It feels like a time for celebration! Poets unite!
April is National Poetry Month, and I have begun a series of posts to my DreamWidth journal about cowboy poetry. I previously featured modern poems with animal themes on my DW journal and I intend to continue in that fashion, posting cowboy poems which will mostly feature animals. What is cowboy poetry, you may ask? I will include some writings by authors who explain and explore the nature of cowboy poetry, such as Robert McDowell, in his introduction to the book Cowboy Poetry Matters, From Abilene to the Mainstream, Contemporary Cowboy Writing
You may begin here http://shining-river.dreamwidth.org/19085.html and feel free to read previous entries in my journal which featured animal themed poetry.
There are about 50 poems by modern poets posted there, along with my essay Finding Animals (Finding the Animals in Modern Academic Poetry) http://shining-river.dreamwidth.org/13848.html
"Poetry is the stone I carve,
shackles are the things that once blinded.
Taken are the truths I knew,
saddness is the weight my heart carries.
Light is the open portal to my soul,
fur is the color of rust.
Eyes are the blue that holds my life,
like oceans of the world too far and deep.
Blood is the streaks that smear my cheeks,
and the scars I remember of the pain I carry.
White is the color of my chest that feels with grief,
my tail curls to the glimmer of freedom and forest to vast to find me,
so my soul finds Nirvana in the comfort of the forest."
written by: Vil SumWolf