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diff --git a/archetypes/reading.md b/archetypes/reading.md index fd9679b..09401ec 100644 --- a/archetypes/reading.md +++ b/archetypes/reading.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ --- title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}" date: {{ .Date }} -draft: false +draft: true daily_read: true summary: "SUMMARY TEXT" --- diff --git a/config.toml b/config.toml index 2051845..1229cc5 100644 --- a/config.toml +++ b/config.toml @@ -96,3 +96,5 @@ pygmentsUseClasses = true [markup.tableOfContents] ordered = true + startLevel = 2 + endLevel = 4 diff --git a/content/reading/books/the-poem-lyric-sign-meter.md b/content/reading/books/the-poem-lyric-sign-meter.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8636411 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/reading/books/the-poem-lyric-sign-meter.md @@ -0,0 +1,116 @@ +--- +title: "The Poem - Lyric, Sign, Meter by Don Paterson" +date: 2023-10-09T11:56:52+01:00 +toc: true +draft: false +daily_read: false +type: "reading/books" +summary: "A book about poetry." +--- + +I heard about this on the Frank Skinner Poetry podcast - he had read it. +I am determined to record my notes on the book here. + +These will be rudimentary, childish, half-baked and of no use to anyone - probably not even me. + +As the *Preface* makes clear, the book is basically three long essays. +Part 1 is "accessible to lay readers". +Part 2 is domain theory. +Part 3, on metre, is technical and only of interest to "specialists and students". +Despite that warning, if I get there, I will probably at least try to read Part 3. + +## Part 1: Lyric: The Sound of the Poem + +### Poetry and Music + +#### Poetry is probably a mnemonic system for preliterate cultures + +Obvious example: + +> Where did you get those tasty strawberries you had the other day, Tommy? + +> *I got them by the river* +> *The bit of the river shaped like my quiver.* + +> *There by the pit* +> *Where we do our shit* +> *A nice field of berries* +> *Go there and pick.* + +I said it would be childish. + +Includes stories, histories and geneoligies. The first form of external storage for the brain, perhaps. + +Art's memorability. + +*Mnemosyne*: the muse of memory. + +#### Poet and reader agree to an imaginative contract + +The deal is that the poet and the reader bring an abundance of imaginative energy to bear on the poem. + +This can bring into reality a dimension that is denied to other forms of speech and writing. + +#### The raw material of music occurs without humans + +A wind whistling though the grill on a door to the laundry room in the stairwell of a brutalist East European tower block. + +A drop of forest rainwater off the tree canopy, plonking into a hollow log. + +A great deal of sense can be made of a conversation through a wall. + +> *This makes sense. Our [cats]({{< ref "/blog/cats/cat_kills" >}}) don't understand what we're saying but they take get the idea mostly from tone.* + +*Song* is a distinctly human business. +When whales and birds make song - which can be beautiful - it is about territory or sex. + +#### Poetry introduces music into language + +Word can be called into another person's presence and have their meanings yoked together by the repetition and arrangement of sounds. +Going back to the idea of the memory device, this gives the words a better chance of "hooking" on a single reading. + +### Memory + +#### Poetry seeks to transcend the human limitations of memory + +The reading and intonation of a poem can be emphasised to enhance the memorability. +Go listen to [Tennyson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson) reading one of his, or [T.S Eliot on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqvhMeZ2PlY). +They practically sing it. + +#### When you remember a poem, you own the whole thing + +This is not the case with a story or a novel, where you might be able to recall the story, but you certainly can't recall the whole thing from memory. +You can with a poem. +They say memorising a poem is a good thing, which is probably related to this. + +The poem is a little machine for remembering itself. + +Is memorising a poem a good thing, though? Or is it a *bad* thing? + +#### Mnemonic devices: brevity, patterned and original speech + +I've highlighted and underlines these in the book so they must be really important. +This is why, because you can come up with a nice bulleted list: + +- *brevity* of speech is the poem's most basic formal strategy +- *originality* of speech is its most basic literary virtue +- *patterned* speech its most basic identifying feature + +And these all arise naturally from the composition process. +This is intriguing, and I want to get there, but there are several hundred pages of dense reading and note-taking to go before I do. + +#### Poetic speech is made under two conditions: urgency and shortness of time + +The former is *inspriation*, the latter is *form*. +The result is the cultural convention, *the poem*. +That kind of makes sense. + +Needing to jump start the imagination part of this in writing workshops, through the use of trivial games such as word-association or other pump-priming techniques, is unnecessary. +If the imagination needs to be jump-started in this way, perhaps it's better left dormant. +(He has a point here, but I've been in the camp that's needed a jump start, so I don't want to be too hard on myself). + +This is a nice line that I am going to quote verbatim from page 13 (yes, I am only that many pages in): + +> *Language behaves in a curiously material-like way and, placed under the dual pressures of emotional urgency and temporal restraint, it will reveal its crystalline structure and intimate grain; whether written or spoken, it becomes rhythmic, lyrical and original.* + +[To be continued...] diff --git a/layouts/reading/books/single.html b/layouts/reading/books/single.html index 5363190..98b7d92 100644 --- a/layouts/reading/books/single.html +++ b/layouts/reading/books/single.html @@ -2,14 +2,19 @@ <style type="text/css" media="screen"> li { - margin-bottom: 1.2em; + margin-bottom: 0; } </style> -<h2 class="title">{{ .Title }}</h2> +<h1 class="title">{{ .Title }}</h1> +{{ if .Params.toc }} + <aside> + {{.TableOfContents }} + </aside> +{{ end }} {{ .Content }} -- {{ .Date.Format "2 Jan 2006" }} +- Started: {{ .Date.Format "2 Jan 2006" }} {{ end }} |