Current Series!

Saturday, November 25, 2017

Poetry : Major Methods 2B of 3, Blank Verse

Blank Verse:  Old Masters and New


Remember, we’re examining the poems using MMO:  Means, Methods, Opportunity (Aristotle’s Kairos).  This time we won’t have three different forms to analyze.  Blank Verse only has one form.

On tap we have the Old Masters, Shakespeare and Cowper, and the New Masters, Frost and Stevens.

Flip to the link below to read the blog:

http://writersinkservi.com/2017/11/25/poetry-major-met…-blank-verse-mmo/

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Dream a Deadly Dream

A new book by my friend Remi Black, the second in her Enclave series.

Dream a Deadly Dream

Assassination.  A fugitive comtesse.  A lethal sleep-spell.  Wyre and wraiths.  Wizardry against sorcery.  And regicide.

In Dream a Deadly Dream, a sorcerous plot to kill the king weaves together past and present, dream and reality, to create a nightmare that can kill.

For three years Cherai, the comtesse Muirée, has hidden from the conspirators who assassinated her father.  Now, in the weeping season, a sorcerer has woven a lethal sleep-snare to entrap her.  Although she doesn’t know it, she holds the key to the conspirators’ chance to seize the throne of Vaermonde, a chance thwarted when they killed her father too quickly.  The poisoned nightmares sent by the sorcerer will compel Cherai to turn herself over to her father’s murderers.

Only a chance-met wizard can free her from the sorcerous sleep-spell.

The exiled wizard Alstera wandered into Vaermonde, seeking an opportunity to rid herself of the bindings on her power.  When she encounters Cherai, she realizes the nightmares are caused by a sorcerer.  Breaking a simple sleep-spell without any expectation of extrinsic reward should remove one of the bindings.  Selfishly, she attaches herself to Cherai.

Yet the sleep-spell is not a simple one:  it is a powerful sleep-snare, designed to kill once the conspirators have the document that Cherai’s father hid.  Alstera must use forbidden blood-magic—another crime against wizardry—to slip her powers through the binding sigils tattooed on her wrists.

After capture and escape from the king’s regiment and the betrayal by a friend who is spying secretly for an old enemy of Cherai’s father, the two women flee cross-country, heading for the Muirée estate.  There they hope to find the reason for the assassination and the identity of the conspirators who plan to kill the king.  Yet the poisoned nightmares intensify.  The sorcerer sends a wraith and a wyre to capture Cherai.  And betrayal closes the net.

Will the poisoned nightmares kill Cherai?  Can Alstera free her from that sorcerous web before the conspirators kill the king?  Threats come from both enemies and friends, from steely blades and magickal spells.  Will Cherai be caught by the conspirators?  With her powers bound, protected only by blood-magic, can Alstera defeat the sorcerer?  Or will he kill Cherai with his sleep-snare?

Dream a Deadly Dream, a novel of 119,000 words, is the second book in the Enclave series.  Enclave 1: Weave a Wizardry Web explores Alstera’s crimes, for which she was bound and banished.  While Dream is a continuation of Alstera’s story in Web, both novels are complete and without cliff-
hangers. 

Intimidate the Intimidators

Blank Verse

Poets who want to appear “intellectual” (cue the snobbish accent) will use Blank Verse.

See, I’m already limiting my readers who are turning off because I’m using the jargon of educational poetry.

“**”

Okay, first, let me talk about “professors” and “educators” of higher content learning.  (I am using “**” here so you will know I am being sarcastic about these terms.  These people aren’t teachers.  Sorry, back to my point.)

These people run the Advanced Placement level courses in high school and many of the higher level college & university courses (for several years, as an adjunct professor, I had to bow to their strictures).  Some of these “people”—not all of them—act as if the knowledge they have is arcane, open to only the privileged few.  They want to keep their content secret.  They present the information in dribs and drabs wrapped around by multiple distractors, so that only a special few will understand it.

Grrr.  These “people” make me mad.  They made me mad when I was part of them;  they still make me mad.

For example, Math “people” hate John Harold Saxon Jr. :: Saxon biography on Wiki  For years they decried his methods.  Now that he’s dead, they’re stealing his methods.  Oh, I thought those methods were worthless.  Guess not!

Poetry

I want you to understand and enjoy poetry as more than mindless words set to music.  From January of this year to now, I have attempted to present various ideas about poetry in a challenging but not a complicated manner.  I’ve truly enjoyed several of these blogs:


My point:  Well, it’s simple.

Don’t be intimidated.

Actually, don’t let anything intimidate you.  If you’re struggling, ask for help.  If certain “people” (there’s those “**” again) won’t help, they are not worthy;  move to someone else.  If you’re not struggling, well, have fun!

And with these lessons, I won’t keep it simple, but I will tell you what you need to know.

Okay, here we go.

Blank Verse

Don’t panic.

Part One:  Blank Verse is called “blank” because it doesn’t rhyme.

See, regular poetry rhymes at the end of the line (it’s called “end rhyme”.  That’s not hard.)  Blank Verse doesn’t.

Part Two: Blank Verse has a regular beat.

What?

Regular poetry follows a regular beat:  Remember “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Sugar is sweet / And so are you.”  Hear the rocking-chair beat?

Now, I could go all “English teacher” on you and talk about pyrrhic meter or iambs and trochees or anapest and dactylic . . . but I won’t.  I will say that most people will tell you that “Blank Verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter.”  There, that’s out of the way.

All we need to know—unless we’re studying to be English teachers ~ and I worked for years with people who don’t know this and didn’t care to learn it—is that Blank Verse will usually and predominantly have 10 syllables per line.

This is how we distinguish Blank Verse from Free Verse :: Free Verse will NOT have a certain number of syllables on each line.

Caveat:  Shakespeare liked to mess with his syllables to prevent that rocking-chair beat of “Roses are red”.  I don’t blame him.  He was writing some serious stuff, there.  You have to avoid a rocking chair when you’re writing philosophy.

So, Blank Verse is different from Pure Verse because it doesn’t rhyme AND it is different from Free Verse because it will have 10 syllables per line.

Blank Verse in Practice

Now, old-timey poets working in English (they come after Shakespeare, not the decrepit ones before him, ya know) liked to use Blank Verse to give their poetry an “intellectual snobbery”.  And they wound up all their words to sound “intellectual”, too.

Here’s an example:  “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant.

If you can make it through the first 72 lines, good for you.  You don’t have to.  Basically, drop over to this link and count the syllables per line on the first ten or so lines, and you’ll see that the majority of lines run about 10 syllables per :: poetry of intimidation

You can take my word for it, if you want to.  With students, we count the syllables out for a bit to prove the point.  Invariably, one will go on looking for more or less syllables than 10 to prove me wrong and wind up proving me right.

Here’s how WCBryant is intellectual:  He says “Thanatopsis” so only a few will know what he’s talking about.  Thanatos is the Greek god of Death;  he’s the one you didn’t want touching you.  (Hades ruled the Land of the Dead;  he wasn’t Death.)  “Opsis” means “looking/seeing”.  So the poem is about looking at death.

The whole first 72 lines basically say

  1. everybody is afraid of death,
  2. we don’t need to be afraid of death,
  3. our bodies are simply manure for plants and everything that comes after us,
  4. everybody is going to wind up the same way:  dead, and
  5. Dead will look just like Life, with people of all ages and professions and economics.
It’s the last stanza that’s important, and I used to have my students memorize it:  "So live that when thy summons ..."  Well, it's this:  Live your life in such a way that you are not afraid to die.  Cuz you’re going to, okay?  Okay.

Bryant takes 81 lines to say all of that ~ 5 bullet points and a sentence.  This classic of American literature is the reason high school students hate poetry.  It’s the reason adults look back at high school English classes and say, “I don’t understand poetry.”

Well, geez, slaving through things like WCB’s “Thanatopsis”, none of us understand anything.

I Got Your Back

Not all Blank Verse is like WCBryant, thank God.

Here’s one by Robert Frost, “For Once then, Something” about looking into a deep well, trying to see beyond literally and figuratively, and being mocked for doing so but still trying: Frost and a well

And one really recent, political and accusatory, by Terrence Hayes: His title uses "assassins".

And from Seamus Heaney, “Storm on an Island,” which speaks to all of us about the elementals of life that dwarf us and give us fear but which we still bow our heads and walk into.  This link provides annotations which provide an interpretation:  No intimidation

Sources

If you go looking for modern blank verse, avoid Poetry Foundation.  They have misidentified pure blank verse, and you’ll find a lot of poems that don’t fit.  PF is usually very good, but they let us down here.

And I stumbled upon a review of a book that I would like to put in my ToBeRead stack, which never seems to go down: a book examining our topic, past and present

Next blog, some Old and New Masters of the Blank Verse form.  Shakespeare, of course.  Who else?  Well, join us on the 25th and be surprised.

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Discover M.A. Lee

Try this: click!

New covers mean looking at how people can find books. M.A. Lee surveys a major e-retailer's listings for her books and list some Indie Writer difficulties.