Tag Archives: Tennyson

POETS Day! Hendecasyllabics

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Happy 250. I don’t guess many need POETS Day encouragement, but Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s the Semiquincentennial. How blessed are we as a nation that this falls on a weekend?

They pledged their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor.

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Thomas Campion (1567-1620) tried to squish English poetry into Hellenic meter. He wasn’t alone. Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney eyed the same goal. The latter two gave it up for iambic pentameter. Campion beat onward in a doomed campaign.

Classical rhythms don’t work in English. Listen to a romance language speaker. They inherited cadence from the Romans, and they from the Greeks. Syllable to syllable, they’re even. For all the stereotypes about spicy Spaniards and hot Latin lovers, their pitch and speed may vary from sentence to sentence and god knows there are arms in motion, but the actual speech is flat, practically monotone. They have their accentual moments, but those are not the rule. They stretch syllables. There are drawn out and compact vowels, but not much happening on the Y axis. English is bouncy.

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POETS Day! GK Chesterton Was a Merry Old Soul

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Photo by Adam Jones – Interior of Old King Cole Bar – St. Regis Hotel – Midtown – Manhattan – New York City – USA

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Andrew J. Offutt was a science fiction and fantasy writer, respected in his field, very prolific, and who served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1976 – 1978. He also wrote more than four hundred erotic novels under the names Farrah Fawkes, Opal Andrews, Turk Winter, and fourteen pseudonyms.

Some years ago I read, “My Dad the Pornographer,” an article his son, Chris Offutt, wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 2015. It’s behind a paywall now but the gist of the article is that the author’s dad died and left him a house full of binders filled pre-written sex acts. Apparently, Andrew Offutt would jot down any mechanics that came to him and when he needed to move a plot along (I know, but…) he’d reach for a readymade lewdness.

If I remember correctly, Chris wrote that his dad crossed out the ones he used with magic marker so they wouldn’t make a second appearance. Can’t have Farrah plagiarizing Turk. In some cases, there were sections of paper gone where naughty bits were literally cut out to be pasted into a working manuscript.

Andrew turned his down-low side hustle into an assembly line. If a scene occurred to him, he wrote it and found a use for it later. I think that’s brilliant and wish I’d been doing the same with POETS Day opening commentary so when I’m done with the main part about the week’s poet or poem I could reach for a binder filled with the joys of skipping away from the office or worksite for mid-afternoon weekend-style tomfoolery and presto, done. But I haven’t and I’m pressed for time.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, get out of work and all that.

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