Quote:
Originally Posted by neilmarr
Hello there, Kenny and Tom: We have a lot of reading in common it seems. The Edge can be a little accademic at times and heavy on medicine, but it's worth subscribing to, and its videos are often quite fascinating. Here you go: http://www.edge.org/ Cheers. Neil |
Thanks, Neil. I'll be checking it out in a few minutes!
Currently Reading
I'm currently reading around twenty books, but I'm steadily whittling that number down. One of the books I'm reading
very slowly (but carefully) is
The Ode Less Traveled: Unlocking the Poet Within by the legendary Stephen Fry. I know it isn't the author's intention, but he has pretty well convinced me that I don't have what it takes to be even a
bad poet, much less an accomplished one. Perhaps the moment that opened my eyes more than any other was when he produced a poem he wrote especially to illustrate many of the things that go wrong in the works of countless modern poet wannabes. Entitled
"Post coitum omne animal triste", it contains "All the clichés, ... pointless lineation, meaningless punctuation and presentation, fatuous creations of new verbs 'cigaretted and drinked', 'worlded', 'nuded', 'afterloved', a posy Latin title—" and he assures us that "every pathology is presented." He goes on to add, "My 'poem' is also pretentious."
The problem is that really enjoyed reading the 'poem'.
Here it is, in it's entirety:
Quote:
Post coitum omne animal triste
i see you
!
you come
closer
improvident
with your coming
then—
..............stretched to scratch
—is it a trick of the light?—
i see you
worlded with pain
but of
necessity not
weeping
..............cigaretted and drinked
loaded against yourself
you seem so yes bold
irreducible
but nuded and afterloved
you are not so strong
are you
?
after all
|
Fry says, "The above is precisely the kind of worthless arse-dribble I am forced to read whenever I agree to judge a poetry competition. It took me under a minute and a half to write and while I dare say
you can see what utter wank it is, there are many who would accept it as poetry."
The book, despite crushing all my hopes and dreams of glory, is wonderful. Fry is a very entertaining writer who doesn't shy away from the technical details and terms of the art.