A puritan at play
The Secret Life of Poems: A Poetry Primer
by Tom Paulin
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will. Besides, unlike Sense and Sensibility, Paradise Lost hasn’t been on television. With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with. Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: “The poem’s sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.” They would greet this with the kind of sheepish silence one reserves for those who ask whether you have been washed in the blood of the Lamb.
Tom Paulin’s new book is the latest in a series of bluffer’s guides to poetry which have recently fallen from the press, one of them, I must confess, by myself. Paulin has a passion for language and a marvellously sensitive ear for its textures and cadences. In fact, he reads so closely, slowing a poem down to a sort of surreal slow-motion, that it becomes in his hands a strange cacophony of plosive, guttural and sibilant noises. He is wondrously nimble at tracking a pattern of sound through a text, though the process rapidly become repetitive and over-technical: “There are three ih sounds in the next stanza, two in the next stanza, along with two i sounds. Then in the last stanza there are a total of nine ih sounds and three i sounds …”
Tags: irish, poems
hey, the local bar celebrates today so I celebrate today.
padding your resume, or just lying? maybe a little of column A, and a little of column B…
Sorry narrow-minded snobs who have no respect for earlier generations of Irish Americans. Don’t like it, stay home on St. Patrick’s Day.
Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, because St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland. So lets remember him, and drive these snakes out of business.Tomorrow, everybody fill up your gas tank, buy some rolls of nickels and pennies at the bank, buy a little silver and gold if possible, and buy a nice basket or two because pretty soon, a wallet’s just not going to cut it.A quick collapse is far better than a slow decay. Let’s see what we can do.
WTF? Is it immoral for women to store unused embryos when they reach menopause, or before?
Here you generally read about how stupidly religious America is… when England decides to reschedule St. Patty’s because of holy week… no comment whatsoever.Fuck that… St. Patty’s is going on as scheduled in the US. Easter is for the kids.
Here is one for you…Mexican St. Patrick’s Dayhttp://ptlia.com/Forms/Main/Default.aspx?L=en-us&P=Editorials6Historically correct.
Americans aren’t telling the pubs across the Big Pond to invest in a little something we like to call refrigeration, so please let us delude ourselves into enjoying what we think is the holiday with weak green-dyed beer and the odd parade or two. kthxbai
That makes no sense. Why are possible lives worth more than real ones? They should be equal but I guess it is much easier to imagine innocent people getting killed then looking at the real ones and realising they are mostly dicks anyway.Ireland FAILS.