Category — Elsewhere

First, your app sucks. It’s hard to find anything. Requests for connections don’t appear at all. And now you’ve broken the web site on the iPad also, since no matter how trivial an action I perform, the entire screen fills with an invitation to download the app. Used to be, that if I dismissed the invitation, things would continue as normal on the web site. Now it loses what I was trying to do. Which it also does when I accept the suggestion. If it’s not fixed, I’m leaving.

If what one means is that there is always difficult work to do in preparation for doing great work in some field and, sometimes, even more difficulty in the production of some particular great work in that field, I’m on board.

But in a fine essay at The London Review of Books , “Is Wagner bad for us?,” Nicholas Spice says this near the end:

I know that’s meant as a compliment to poetry, but I’m glad for that “much” immediately before “great music,’ and I’d be very glad for a similar qualifier applied to “poetry.”

In a 2002 letter to Lynx (unfortunately I can’t link to Lynx, only to specific instances of its pieces), Khizra Aslam describes the form she devised and provides a link to her own ghazanelle in Lynx. It’s the third poem as you scroll down the page.

Last night at band practice our bass player surprised me with a nifty setting to Tuesday’s triolet. I think we’re going to add it to the repertoire.

And I’ve added a link to Jingle Monster‘s very nifty Times in Rhymes, rhyming couplet commentary on the (mostly Australian) news of the day.

Via a Google news Alert on “poetry,” I found a most interesting review of Andrew Hudgins Shut Up You’re Fine: Poems for Very Very Bad Children. The review’s title is “Bad Poetry Is More Fun,” and it begins “I’m not usually a poetry reader” (but who is, these days?) and does a pretty fair job of introducing the book — even if I didn’t already know Hudgins’ work, I’d probably order it. But this passage particularly caught my eye:

Life, death, family, sexuality — all the big themes are touched upon, just not in a very enlightened way. I’m pretty sure the term “doggerel” was invented for poems like these but don’t let that stop you– there’s plenty here to enjoy if your taste in poetry isn’t too refined. At least it rhymes, usually.

In possibly related news, the same alert let me know that for the first time in 25 years, the Urdd Eisteddfod poetry chair of Wales was left empty. As a judge said, “None of the poems satisfactorily combine clear ideation with masterful technique.”

That link above to Shut Up You’re Fine includes an opportunity to “Look Inside”; for an unrhymed, unrefined, and definitely adult-themed poem from Hudgins, look here.

I stole that title of from the Blowhards and I’m not sorry — go read this post about the forgotten author of Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis. Michael Blowhard asks

Hey, some other questions that the Patrick Dennis thing may leave us wondering about:

Why don’t we value light entertainment more than we do?
Why don’t we value pleasure more than we do?
If it’s OK to think of Boucher, Fragonard, Fred Astaire, and Cary Grant as immortals, why not delightful writers too?

There may be more important questions concerning writing as an art market — but I can’t think of any.