Changing poems

I've been reading the poems that the Writer's Almanac sends through daily since some time in 2009, and recently have increasingly found that the quality of them has become less poetic and less vital.  When I first started getting them, I used to keep them in a folder each day, for 'future reference.'  Well, yes, enough said about that.  And then I kept them in Evernote, but only if they appealed to me.  At least in Evernote there was more of a likelihood that I'd see them more than once.

Increasingly, they haven't appealed. I think firstly that the choices of poems now seem to lean more and more to the easy. Occasionally there's one with a bit of bite, but far too many of them are surface, descriptive, and fail to have something that says, Have at you!  Occasionally there's one from a poet whose name you recognise, and often those poems have more punch, but they're few and far between.

Furthermore the poems are often slack in construction (even though many of them have been published); there's little rhythm, little sense of internal rhyme, often little shape. I don't expect poems to rhyme, but I do expect them to have something for the ear to hear and enjoy.  I don't think they have to have a particular metre, but it does help if they've got rhythm.  Many of the recent ones have lacked this.  Shape is a matter of taste, perhaps, but it seems as though many of these poets have never read anything that came in stanzas or verses or thought that the way the poem was architectured made a point as well.

So yesterday I decided to unsubscribe from the Writer's Almanac (sorry, Garrison Keillor), and try something different. In fact, I wound up getting a daily tweet from Verse Daily, a site that looks a bit more amateurish than Writer's Almanac, but, if their poems are anything to go by, may have something better in their store.  I've been chewing over today's offering Self Portrait: Swimming in Monkeys, by Michael Teig on and off all morning. It's an odd poem, one that I presume is trying to pin down what goes to make up a personality by using all sorts of seemingly random metaphors. Some of them click (with me) some don't...so far. But the thing is I've enjoyed coming back to it and trying to get my teeth into it.  This hasn't happened much lately with the WA offerings.

I also signed up to get daily emails from The Poetry Foundation, a very professional-looking site that's long-established, and has a huge archive of poems. Their offerings have also been more mind-catching.  Today's piece, Flounder, by Natasha Tretheway, is a more conventionally laid-out poem, four lines to a verse, and is the 'conversation' between an old Negro lady and her grandchild/great-niece (?) about fishing - but much more, of course. It's an easy poem to pick up, and yet it has hidden depths, and a wonderful last verse. I like poems where the last lines suddenly switch things around, or take you off into a corner you didn't expect.  This one certainly does.

I've also just finished a review this morning of a book I began back in August: Poems of Devotion.  The review will probably go online at some point.  The editor of the book is Luke Hankins, and he's done a wonderful job of bringing together poems that have a religious element in common, but are devotional in the sense of Hallmark cards or little pretty gift books kind of devotional. These poems are tough, gritty, bite you in the neck kind of poems - although there are also ones that lift you out of the earth and into the air. It's taken me a long time to do the reviewing because the poems needed reading and re-reading. And there's a lengthy introduction to the book as well. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys good poetry.  It's a feast, though, watch out, there's quite a bit of pepper and curry and chilli in it.

Musicians, poets, scientists and atheists

I wrote about Evernote in my last post.  And I'm going to mention it here again: it's a great place to go looking for something to connect up with an idea or phrase that you're using in a post, a phrase such as the following: affordable Behringer mixers at Musician's Friend.

To many readers that will read a bit like a statement in a foreign language, or a dense poem. By the way, talking of poems, I'm reading an anthology called Poems of Devotion at the moment.  It's edited by the poet, Luke Hankins, who's served as Associate Editor of Asheville Poetry Review since 2006.  It's a collection of wonderful poems by modern poets, some more accessible than others, but all worth reading.  The focus in the book is on devotion to God, but there are some poems that have snuck under the radar a little too. 

But that's a side path. Back to the original phrase.  I did a search on a couple of the words in it: Behringer produced no results, mixers only a couple of not very interesting ones. Musicians - without the apostrophe - produced plenty, and the first was one from a book I read recently called God's Undertaker, by the scientist, John Lennox.  It's a book in which he tries to bring some sanity to the science/atheist vs Christian/creationist debate.  The following quote has only a small amount to do with musicians, but it's worth reading all the same.

"...the fact that there are scientists who appear to be at war with God is not quite the same thing as science itself being at war with God. For example, some musicians are militant atheists. But does that mean music itself is at war with God? Hardly. The point here may be expressed as follows: Statements by scientists are not necessarily statements of science. Nor, we might add, are such statements necessarily true; although the prestige of science is such that they are often taken to be so. For example, the assertions by [Peter] Atkins and Dawkins, with which we began, fall into that category. They are not statements of science but rather expressions of personal belief, indeed, of faith – fundamentally no different from (though noticeably less tolerant than) much expression of the kind of faith Dawkins expressly wishes to eradicate. Of course, the fact that Dawkins’ and Atkins’ cited pronouncements are statements of faith does not of itself mean that those statements are false; but it does mean that they must not be treated as if they were authoritative science. What needs to be investigated is the category into which they fit, and, most important of all, whether or not they are true."

This kind of straightforward thinking does wonder for the brain, especially if it's been assailed by Dawkins-type thinking.