random bits

[cellio]

Overheard from a Diablo game: "...as long as you resurrect faster than they heal..." Um, yeah. :-)

I didn't know about the Netflix prize until siderea posted about it. Nifty! Improve their predictions by 10%; win a million bucks. It'll be interesting if the psychologist ends up beating the mathematicians.

I recently attended a religious service that had a lot of poetry in it. Or, at least, I assume it was poetry, but it made me wonder: surely modern (meterless, structureless) poetry is more than just doing things with white space, right? I mean, I understand a sonnet or a sestina at some level; I see the challenges that faced the author and can appreciate the artistry worked within those constraints. I have, thus far, been unable to develop such an appreciation for the choice of where to put a line break, except in the small subset of cases where that creates a change in meaning or creates an accrostic or some such. It feels, to me, sort of like composing music without concerning oneself with key, mode, or time signature. Obviously I'm missing something.

I was asked a few days ago to read a short torah portion this Shabbat. I wondered how long it would take me to learn (it's about 12 lines in the scroll). Answer, for first-order learning: 35 minutes. That was surprising. Of course, it will require daily reinforcement to keep it, but that's fine.

Note to self: I was talking with someone recently about what I look for in candiates for the laurel (the SCA's highest award for arts and sciences), and remembered that I had written about this a while back. Yup, still believe all that, almost six years later.

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that, in meterless, unrhymed poetry, you're supposed to be putting all the work into the words, the way they sound and the images they evoke. There may still be a cadence or shape to how the syllables are strung together, but not as rigidly.

In principle, a good sonnet writer is doing all of that as well - but (so the theory goes) the structure leads you into either the trap of using clever meter and rhyme as a mask for lazy wordsmithing, or the trap of butchering a beautiful turn of phrase to shoehorn it into structure.

As an unrepentant sonneteer myself, the expression of this to which I've been most sympathetic is the argument that, as learning exercises, you should start without rhyme and meter, and only start working with form once you've developed a foundation that doesn't include lazy habits.

[cellio]

Were I trying to learn to write poetry I might try a dual approach -- "free verse" to work on my wordsmithing and specific forms to keep me from thinking that's all there is to it. Giving people a blank canvas is great for freeing them from worries (about meter, etc), but there can be such a thing as too much freedom for the beginner. Maybe the answer is to start with forms that have very few rules, like haiku? (I am not saying that good haiku is easy, mind, but I'm talking about reaching competency, not being a star.)