Ken Stange

Oliver Wendall Holmes (Literary Clerihew) (2015-02-01)

Oliver Wendall Holmes’
never wrote huge tomes
cuz Sherlock took very little time
to solve almost any ol’ crime.

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Ernest Hemingway (Literary Clerihew) (2015-02-03)

Ernest Hemingway
said no f’ing way
he’d prefer sunning on a beach in Rio de Janeiro
to boldly climbing Mount Kilimanjaro

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F. Scott Fitzgerald (Literary Clerihew) (2015-02-05)

F. Scott Fitzgerald
fancied himself the herald
of that twenties rage
we call ‘The Jazz Age’.

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T. S. Elliot (Literary Clerihew) (2015-02-07) 

T. S. Elliot
was no idiot,
though not nearly as profound
as some of his poems try to sound.

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Good Enough (2015-02-09)

Watched the film Whiplash the other night, and it raises some interesting questions about motivating would-be artists. The story is about the interaction of a verbally abusive music teacher and one of his extremely promising students. The teacher justifies his abuse as necessary to push anyone with the potential to be great on to actually achieve greatness.  The sadistic extent of the teacher’s abusiveness makes that assumption morally repugnant, but at one point in the film this teacher says something that does ring true. He says that to tell a student who fails to push himself that he did “good enough” is one of the worst things a teacher can say.

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Encouraging Creativity? (2015-02-11)

I believe that a necessary but not sufficient component of creativity, or any significant accomplishment, is motivation. This brings me back to thinking about Whiplash.  If you have a student who is creative, how do you encourage and nurture him or her? 

I can’t pretend to know. The data is conflicting. Many creative people seem to be driven to increased effort by rejection. An “I’ll show you!” attitude motivates them. And there is solid research showing that many talented young people have lost interest in their talents if too often extrinsically rewarded by praise. And then, on the other hand, there is the fact that many an accomplished individual recalls receiving encouragement from a mentor when they were about to give up in despair.  

For much of my life I have been obsessed with understanding the nature of creativity, and I’ve even written a trilogy of books on it. But I still wouldn’t presume to suggest a reliable way to encourage it.

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To Teach Or Not To Teach, That Is The Question (2015-02-13)

I once thought I’d choose teaching English to high school students for my day job. It was during my teenage years that I first came to deeply appreciate poetry, but most of my English teachers didn’t contribute to that. So I thought it would be profoundly rewarding to inspire appreciation of poetry in kids at that impressionable age.

It didn’t work out, largely because I was a lousy ‘education student’ who revolted against the same regimentation I’d had to endure in high school. I couldn’t see myself enforcing rules I found too absurd to adhere to myself. So when I was told to cut my hair before going to a particular class to ‘practice teach’, I decided teaching high school English wasn’t for me.

It turned out to be a good decision. The teaching I envisioned myself doing would be an all-consuming vocation and would leave little time for what I’d come to believe was my real calling,

And I wonder if, like teaching creative writing, teaching appreciation of poetry may be an impossible goal. One can give students the tools to appreciate poetry, but only they can choose to use them.

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The Real Teachers (2015-02-15)

Our Real Teachers
.

“These teachers were invisible
discreet as sex and seasons’ change
they only spoke in happenings
their only lecture was our pain.
.

We all grew along their blackboards
until like angels we fell down
far smarter than we realized
they made our silence into sound.
.

They used our stretching bodies’ ache
and the high arching of our bones
to make their hard lessons
come home come home come home.”

(From my book: Bourgeois Pleasures)

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A Clathic Inspiration (2015-02-17)

Prof of Profs

For Allison Hogge, in memory of Brian Wilkie

I was a math major—fond of all things rational.

It was the first day of my first poetry class.

The prof, with the air of a priest at Latin mass,

told us that we could “make great poetry personal,”

could own it, since poetry we memorize sings

inside us always. By way of illustration

he began reciting Shelley with real passion,

but stopped at “Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”—

because, with that last plosive, his top denture

popped from his mouth and bounced off an empty chair.

He blinked, then offered, as postscript to his lecture,   

a promise so splendid it made me give up math:

“More thingth like that will happen in thith clath.”

(Poem by Geoffrey Brock published in Poetry)

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Bad Writing As Poetry? (2015-02-19)

It’s interesting that because a poet can legitimately deviate from the conventions of prose to increase the effectiveness of the poem, some scribblers think the converse is true.

(Image credit: Earl Grey)

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The Boredom Criterion (2015-02-21)

I’m sure the majority of people would say the reason they don’t read poetry is because it’s boring. Good poetry, of course, is the opposite of boring, but it often requires some effort on the part of the reader to appreciate it. (Most good art does.)

But my point here is that, yet again, scribblers don’t understand that the converse doesn’t have to be true. They seem to think that by writing something ‘difficult’ to understand, they must have created a poem.

 (Image credit: Earl Grey)

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Sound And Sense (2015-02-23)

I have a book somewhere that was used as a textbook on poetry in one of my university classes, and it is aptly named:  Sound and Sense. These are the two key components in real poetry. The competent poet has to be very concerned about how a poem sounds. A poem is like a piece of music in that its sense is partially, and often crucially, dependent on how it sounds.

For example, consider the prosodic (musical) structure of the limerick. (It consists of five lines in roughly anapestic meter rhyming AABBA. (The first, second and fifth lines have 3 metrical feet, while the third and fourth only have two.) Any poem conforming to this structure sounds humorous.

I’ve sometimes asked my students to try to write a convincingly sombre limerick. So far, none of them have succeeded.

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
   But don’t try serious
   It will seem spurious
Such stern ones will still sound comical.

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The Poet Or The Reader Versus The Poem (2015-02-25)

So much misunderstanding about poetry is based on egotism. Good poets aren’t writing poems about themselves, and good readers aren’t reading poems as personal messages to them. A poem is created by the interaction of poet and reader, which creates something entirely new. To think otherwise is like expecting water to be like either hydrogen or oxygen.

 (Image credit: Earl Grey)

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Poem As Image (2015-02-27)

An extreme example of utilizing a poem’s appearance is what is usually called ‘concrete poetry’. Here the poem often is intended as an actual representation of what it is about. This criterion is so narrow that inevitably most of these are way too simplistic to be of serious interest. They’re almost always merely cute—or clever at best.

                      (Credit: Iron Monkey Interactive)

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