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.

Some typically biased thoughts on drummers

Did you know that the seat a drummer sits on is called a 'throne?'  Nope?  Join the club.  I only discovered this today when I got the somewhat enigmatic message: buy drum throne. I'd always assumed the thing the drummer puts his bum on was a seat, as you'd expect.  But no, it's called a throne, and perhaps this is why many drummers have such a high opinion of themselves.

I've met - and worked with - some great drummers in my time; I've also met some whose ambition seemed to be to obliterate the rest of humanity.  When I went to church at the Assembly of God, from the mid-70s to the late 80s, there was one brilliant drummer there who was so attuned to what other people were playing that they could vary the tempo to a hair's breadth and he would be with them.  He never dominated the proceedings, forcing the other musicians to follow his beat. 

But there are drummers who, having spent their entire musical training period in a basement with soundproof walls, have never learned that music doesn't revolve around what the drummer does.  They can be enjoyable to play with, when the music requires absolute momentum and strictness of tempo, but when it requires quiet, warmth, rubato, they're just dynamite.  It seems some drummers don't know the meaning of subtlety, or of variation in tempo.  This just becomes frustrating for other musicians, who begin to feel hemmed in.  Even though music seems to be a thing that's regulated to a cut and dried strict rhythm, every musician (expect maybe some of the aforesaid drummers) knows there are shifts and gains in music. This is particularly evident when you accompany a singer: to hold a singer to a strict rhythm throughout would be to destroy the essence of what they're singing.

Some drummers can't be told these things, unfortunately.  Giving a solid beat is what they have come to believe drumming is all about. Ask them to do anything else, and they sit on their throne and sulk, acting as if their integrity had been somehow demeaned.  Or else they just ignore you, and continue to do what they did for so many hours in the basement: hammer it out and forget that the rest of the world exists.

Here's a video of four drummers playing rhythmically but subtly - these guys know how to intermingle with each other.  They're playing a piece called 4by4, by NZ composer, John Psathas. Watch out for the moment, quite a long way through, when one of the drummers casually scratches his ear, tosses his drumstick in the air, and then carries on as if this complex piece was all in a day's work.

Internet phrases

Day after day on the Internet you see phrases and lines from sentences that strike you as having some nice poetic turn about them.   See these examples from Twitter, which I worked at turning into a poem yesterday.  This sort of approach to poetry is sometimes called 'found' poetry - sometimes it's called a 'mess' because it doesn't always come off.  However, I think the Pantoum works, though it doesn't make obvious sense.  Of course, poetry doesn't always make obvious sense, and sometimes it's left up to the reader to find things in it that even the poet (or in this case, the collage-maker) may not have seen. 


Here's an example of a phrase that struck me as having a bit of rhythm about it: cheap plus size homecoming dresses, (though if you read it often enough it starts to lose all sense!)  It has a nice rhythm: bom!, bom bom, dum dada dum dum.  Not an easy rhythm to use over the long haul, but here's a possible approach:

Cheap plus size homecoming dresses,
Big, fulsome bosomy dresses,
Wide-stretching wallpaper dresses, 
Eye-catching full-flowing dresses. 

Cleary and Harding

Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding are a couple of dancers who've worked in the Riverdance stage shows.  Recently they've begun to perform 'hand-dancing' on You Tube videos.  The example above is one of their more intentionally  'po-faced' versions - in the America's Got Talent video, they actually smile a lot and move around the stage briefly.  I'm not sure what they're doing on AGT, unless they were a guest act.

You can see the Riverdance origins in the kind of constant, unstoppable rhythm that pervades these videos.  It's fun to watch two or three and then they become a bit much.   Try some others another day!

Cleary and Harding have their own website, under their 'trade' name of Up and Over It.  There are a variety of other videos on there, showing off different aspects of their dance style.

I’ve been learning a poem over the last week or so called Curiosity, by Alistair Reid. I found it some time ago when I had a book of his out of the library. Previously I’d learnt another of his poems, Growing, Flying, Happening, and thought it was great. Curiosity also appealed to me, but as I tackled some of the lines today I found it quite odd rhythmically.

Here are the lines in question:

Face it. Curiosity
will not cause him to die --
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill,
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.

The succession of doubling ups of the letter, l, is okay, and the rhythm paces along quite comfortably until we get to the line with the word, idyll, in it.

Now, I’ve always pronounced this idyll to rhyme with riddle (as in Chesterton’s line: Hey diddle diddle will rank as an idyll, if I pronounce it chaste,’) and as far as I can tell that’s the general British pronunciation of it. (The Americans apparently rhyme it with the word, idle, but they’re prone to peculiar pronunciations.)

If no less an authority than Chesterton says the word is idyll, rhyming with riddle, then that’s good enough for me. But try saying that sort of idyll in the middle of this poem. It works in its own line, but it clashes oddly with all the hills, and wills and hells, and kills. I thought at first Reid might have had an odd notion to pronounce it i-dill, but it’s unlikely, since it throws the rhythm right out.

But pronouncing it idyll (rhyming with middle) is a riddle, because it gets no importance, and usually you’d think that idyll, because of its curious sound and comparative rarity, would get some room to breathe. Not in this poem.

Perhaps there’s a way to make it work. I haven’t quite found it yet.

Steve Reich

The other evening coming home from work I was listening to a Steve Reich piece, one of those duets of his where two pianists are playing exactly the same phrase over and over, and then one gets out of synch slightly, and changes the sound of the rhythm, and then gradually they get further apart and slowly come together again. At first I just wanted to switch it off – there’s nothing more annoying than sheer repetition, but the subtle differences gradually got to me, and appealed. And really that’s all there is to this music: it’s like listening to something extremely mechanical that can’t quite stay in sync with itself, such as a large machine. There’s an odd fascination with it, and an irritation. I don’t know that you could call it music, as such, except in the broadest Charles-Ives sense.
At the moment, as I write this, there's something similar on the Concert Program. I don't know what it is, though it must end soon, because the requests section is due to start. It's more orchestral, but still has that awe-ful repetition going on, only here there's a bit more variety because there are more instruments. I'm not sure that I'd want to build my reputation on music that consists of tiny repeated phrases. I've just remembered that I've heard the Clapping Music recently too: that must be exceptionally difficult to do. Two musicians doing nothing but clapping, first in sync and then gradually out of sync. But in the end how is that particularly different from the piece I heard the other night? Or the thing that's on at the moment - which still hasn't come to an end?
Wait, it has come to an end, and it was Reich. But the announcer unhelpfully hasn't told us what it was exactly.