Versecraft

Topics discussed in this episode include: - Sleerickets - Poetry Says -Fly poet Ernest Hilbert -Versecraft for softies podcast Poetry Unbound -Baumeister Dave Klug -You can now email me! -Even better, you can now send me money ! -The one and only Alicia Stallings -Also great poets Joshua Mehigan and Shane McCrae -Buy Alicia's book here! -It's another sonnet, doggone it! -Loosey goosey ia...

PSA: Listen to Alice's delightful podcast Poetry Says Outline: Intro: The Case For Accentual-Syllabic Verse Nine Benefits of Meter 1. Compositional Mindfulness 2. Musicality 3. Memorability 4. Structural Integrity 5. Prosodic Expressivity 6. Prosodic Literacy 7. Allusiveness (with discussion of Post-Colonialism) 8. Stylistic Elevation 9. Advocacy of Order The Benefits of Alliteration and Rhym...

Outline:  Introduction: The Burden of Proof Part 1: The Case For Poetry in Prose 1. The Argument From Freedom 2. The Argument From Accessibility 3. The Argument From Spontaneity 4. The Argument From Natural Speech 5. The Argument From Organic Form 6. The Argument From Modernity  Support the show VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE. BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE . VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE . Please subscrib...

Mea culpa: When referring to the practice of poets, I should've used they/them pronouns rather than he/him. I was caught up in thinking of the poet as myself!  Topics mentioned in this episode include: -The "Psychedelic Renaissance" -The kind of trip depends upon the mind that trips.  -How to have a good time your first time -Don't be Pentheus -The difference between a cliche a...

Topics mentioned in this episode include: -My thanks to Mr. John!  -Matthew from Sleerickets -Mark Jarman (now I just need a Luke!) -Anglo-Saxon verse revisited -Hemistichs, caesuras, accentual alliteration -Richard Wilbur's "Junk"  -The metrical decay of mid-century poets -Formalism as emotional discipline -Mark Jarman's "Questions For Ecclesiastes" and "Zeno&ap...

Mea culpa: When I said "anagram," I meant to say acronym!  Topics mentioned in this episode include: -Fabulous crafter of verse A.E. Stallings -Her upcoming Hudson Review piece "Frieze Frame" and recent Selected Poems "This Afterlife" -New deats on Keats -The controversh of Hopkins' verse -The life and times of Gerard -Toward a definition of "Inscape" -...

Topics mentioned in this episode include: -The antitheses of Emily Dickinson -White = Infinity in 19th century American Lit. -Fascicles! -The Modernist, Feminist, and Queer claims on Emily -Magnificent and trending writer Virginia Woolf -A secular Memento Mori -Ballad Stanzas and Common Meter -The Amazing Grace phenomenon -Why Ballad Stanzas sound so ballad-y -Slant rhyme revisited -Matthew's...

Topics discussed in this episode include:  -Schedule change! -My trip to England -Romanticism -The charm of Keats -The tragedy of Keats -The tragedy of Pergolesi -Italian sonnet redux -The creative opportunity that is rhyme -Why this sonnet is weird -The riddle of Keats's morbidity -Ode To A Nightingale -The Notorious B.I.G. -Ode On Melancholy -Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement -The poet...

Mea culpa regarding the scansion of line 29: I should've mentioned that you could also very reasonably interpret this as an acephalous iambic line. My bad. I like the trochees better though!  Topics discussed in this episode include:  -Dante's Purgatorio  -"The God of This World To His Prophet"  -Swedish skalds Hakan Sandell and Tomas Transtromer  -Dante's tropical vacay ...

Mea culpa: I forgot to mention that the last line of the poem can also be read in the following sense: desire to LIVE and not merely to EXIST ("be" alone). In this reading, it is the body which allows the soul to actually "live."  Topics discussed in this episode include:  -Matthew's podcast, "Sleerickets"  -The Dantesque pairing of this and the following episode...

Mea culpa: at around 6:40 I say "5 lines" when I meant to say "5 feet." Topics discussed in this episode include:  -My upcoming sojourn to fair Albion  -The master of Persian poetry gives me a light slap on the wrist  -The Harlem Renaissance!  -Form is important, but it should follow function  -Form as intellectual and creative scaffolding  -English on the outside, Italian on t...

Topics discussed in this episode include:  -The "Plain Style"  -Epigrams -"Stoner" by John Williams  -Stanzaic asymmetricity  -Wacky rhyme schemes as evidence of revision  -Stanzaic palindromes  -The triplet as the couplet of couplets  -Ladies (feminine endings) last  -The curious case of iambic tetrameter  -A gloss of glose  -Plato, the worst third-wheel ever, returns  -Earthy...

Topics discussed in this episode include:   -The joy of comparing like-minded poems  -The Platonic dilemma of romantic love  -Heroic couplets  -The Problem of Universals  -Plato 101  -The contemptus mundi of Platonism  -The Renaissance vogue for Platonism  -Petrarch and the legacy of the Western love lyric  -Poetic structure as the mirror of thought structure  -Marriage is inherently anti-Platonic...

Topics discussed in this episode include: -My thanks for (past and future) rating and reviewing!  -Art vs. Craft  -The spectrum of creativity  -Craft as all making, not rote production  -The Romantic fallacy of art without craft  -The case to abolish "art."  -Utilitarian vs. Rhetorical craft  -Horace's "Dulce Et Utile"  -The secret third thing that Horatio had not dreamt o...

Topics discussed in this episode include:  -My life story -Poetic "throat-clearing"  -Curtal sonnets  -Why sonnets are the supreme lyric form  -English vs. Italian sonnets  -I'm basically Aristotle  -The inscrutability of life and the nihilist's overreaction  -The tragic mistake behind global warming and the meat industry  -What does autochthonic mean??  -Sartre can eat my shor...

Topics discussed in this episode include: -The excellent poetry podcast Sleerickets, by MBS  -The four kinds of written poetry  -Toward a definition of "free verse"  -Loose patterns and motley patterns  -The debate over Robert Hayden  -Hayden puts the verse in universal  -How poetry can (and can't) change the world  -The structure of a bullfight, of a poem  -The Garden of Earthly De...

Topics mentioned in this episode include:  -My new page on the OPA website!  -My delusions of TikTok stardom  -The deliciously old school quality of Pinkerton's mind  -Melville and Aquinas!  -Stanzaic structures, stanzaic rhythm  -Why iambic pentameter reigns supreme  -Poetry: A marriage of sound and sense  -Pride-induced dysmorphia  -Pride as the supreme evil  -Should I just include Milton o...

 Topics mentioned in this episode:  -The Ohio Poetry Association -Milton: Anapests or nah? -Revisions of elisions  -Bach deserves some rubato now and then  -Thomas Hardy: Poet, novelist, romantic, modernist, man of mystery.  -Shout out to those weird inbetweeners Robinson and Frost  -What "hap" happens to mean  -The Dante Rossetti of sonnets  -Lear, Job, and other sad, god-smacked men  -...

Topics discussed in this episode include:  -A sheepish apology  -The excellence of Eratosphere  -Rhythm vs. Meter, and respective variations  -Metrical stress vs. speech stress  -The charm and well-adjustedness of Janet Lewis  -Organized religion vs. natural spirituality  -Biblical ambience = anaphora and parallelism  -Amphibrachs!  -Versecraft feat. Migos and Lizzo  -Spondees and Pyrrhics!  -And...

Note: I apologize for the shuffling of papers in the audio. Clearly I need a stapler.  Mea culpa: "In a dark time" is a pyrrhic-spondee motion, not an anapest-trochee one.  Topics discussed in this episode include:  -The multifarious talent of Wallace Stevens -Stevens' theory of a "Supreme Fiction" -The incoherence of this theory -From subjectivism to objectivism -Stevens&...

Subjects touched on in this episode include:  -Mid-century poet syndrome  -Rhythmic vs. metrical variation  -The poem as caesura salad  -The Mind-Body problem, or, putting Descartes before the horse  -Chaos and Cosmos  -Is Hell artificial or organic?  -Guilty sin vs. sinful guilt  -More distinctions re: Romanticism  -Insatiable desire and spiritual hollowness  -A great Shakespeare quote from a jus...

Subjects discussed in this episode include:    -Aspects of devotional and Metaphysical poetry -Memento Mori and its more fun twin, Carpe Diem  -Tell the truth, but tell it in true rhymes.  -The passing of time really blows.  -Death may be the mother of beauty, but sin is the mother of death.  -You may be star dust, but you're still dust.  -A surprisingly harmless debate about pronouns.  -Ther...

Mea culpa: The first line ("In a dark time, the eye begins to see) actually scans as: pyrrhic, spondee, iamb, iamb, iamb.  Topics discussed in this episode include:   -How to pronounce (or not) this dude's name -Romanticism -Romanticism's problem child, Confessional poetry -Mysticism via mental illness -Meter and rhyme zaniness -Two new kinds of feet! -Paradoxes thrust one into figu...

"A Song For Rising" by Edgar Bowers  Published September 19th, 2022  Some of the topics covered in this episode include:  -What verse is  -What this thing that we call meter is  -Poetry is like crack  -Why make time to rhyme?  -Edgar Bowers, perfect man of arts and letters  -I know I am, but what are you?  -Pantheism!  -Psych, no pantheism.  -Confronting existence between the voids of bi...