Year: 2012

Free online course on modern and contemporary American poetry

Sue Watling Open Education, Raising Poetic Awareness , ,

Open educational resources and course take advantage of the internet to offer free learning opportunities. One of the leading platforms is the US based Coursera at https://www.coursera.org and I’ve been looking at its Modern and Comtemporary American Poetry or MoPo as it calls itself. The course has just completed a ten week teaching schedule but the content will remain online for the rest of the academic year and is well worth visiting.

Coursera Modern American Poetry course

Starting with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman the syllabus traces the development of poetic modernism including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein before moving onto Anti Modernism, Formalism, the Beat Poets of the 1940’s and 50’s and onto the New York School and Language Poetry before finishing with Conceptualism. Materials include links to all the relevant texts and videos of round table discussions between the tutor Al Filreis and his students at the University of Pennsylvania. There are communication forums, recordings of live webcasts and an interesting peer review assessment technique. This is a brilliant introduction to 150 years of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and its free. What’s not to like!

Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition

Sue Watling Poetry competitions ,

The 27th annual Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition is now open for entries. Entrants are invited to submit a collection of 20-24 pages of poems for the chance to win a cash prize and publication by Smith/Doorstop Books. Judged by Simon Armitage, closing date is 29 November (post) or midnight 1 December (online). A £1 surcharge is applied to online entries. I’m guessing this is for printing expenses.

Entering competitions is good practice. It can be motivating to have a structure and a deadline to work to. The downside is submission often comes at a cost. There’s not much money in poetry so to some extent its understandable why charging for entry is seen as an income generator, but the £25 being charged by Poetry Business seems more of a deterrent than incentive. The explanation is as follows:

Our two expert readers and judge all need paying appropriately for what is many hours of intensive reading. In addition, the competition needs to be promoted, there are substantial administration costs, £2,000 prize money and a winners’ reading – all of which is paid for by the entry fees. (The winning collections are printed and publicised out of our usual budget.) The competition makes up an extremely important part of our income though, and allows us to continue with our less lucrative activities (such as publishing poetry!).

Fair enough but  £25 is a lot of money and risks reaffirming poetry’s reputation as exclusive rather than being for everyone.

If you have 20-24 poems plus a spare £25, the competition details are here http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/competition-menu/competition

Poetry Book Society; free membership and free competition for students

Sue Watling Poetry competitions , ,

The Poetry Book Society*  is offering free membership to students in UK higher education. Members have access to an online version of the Bulletin, the PBS quarterly review as well as 25% discount on books. The Society is currently inviting entries to its first Student Poetry Competition.  The closing date is 5th December 2012 and will be judged by George Szirtes winner of the 2004 T S Eliot prize  for his collection Reel.  All that’s needed is to select student from the online membership form and attach a digital photo of a current student card.

*The Poetry Book Society was founded in 1953 by T S Eliot and friends to ‘propagate the art of poetry’ by bringing the best new poetry to readers.

the power of love versus poetry

Sue Watling Defining Poetry, Poets Past and Present , , ,

Valerie Eliot 1926 – 2012

T S and Valerie Eliot

When Valerie Fletcher married T S Eliot the poetry stopped. He was 68. She was 31. They appear to have been happy but there was no more poetry. The Waste Land,  The Four Quartets  and with the rest of Eliot’’s modernist output were all written earlier. Biographical details on the life of T S Eliot are scattered across the internet and make it tempting to connect the poetry and psyche. Maybe we can only write our best when we are in difficult relationships or situations and shows how poetry requires tapping into the deeper layers; the universal experiences of grief and angst. Or do we simply get old. And what about love?

 What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

 The Waste Land. I The Burial of the Dead

 

Poetry for Remembrance

Sue Watling Defining Poetry, War Poetry , , , ,

Poppies photographed by Sue Watling

D-Day veteran Dennis B Wilson, nearly 70 years after writing poems on the front line, has published  Elegy of a Common Soldier, a book of WW2 poetry.   The website http://dennisbwilson.com contains Mr Wilson’s Plea for ‘Real’ Poetry where he describes modern poetry as ‘incomprehensible to all but a few’.

‘It seems to me to be completely pointless, and a waste of time, to write something that no one else can understand.  A poet is only completely successful if he has awakened in the mind of the reader an echo of his or her own emotional experiences, who may not themselves have been able to put their feelings into words.  I believe that modern poetry shares with modern art the operation of the ‘Emperor’s clothes syndrome,’ whereby many of its adherents do not really understand it but are unwilling to admit their ignorance in case they are thought to be stupid or uninformed.’

Poetry may be one of the most contextual of arts.  While the universality of thoughts, feelings and emotions provide common threads from Catallus to the current day, social influence changes. It helps to read poetry with a sense of the environment it was written in. Challenged by early 20th century modernism, poetic style has been freed from traditional restraints, and for many this is a deterrent to engaging with poetry. For Wilson, modern poetry is not poetry.

‘ It seems to me that to write a passage of prose and then divide it into broken lines at the whim of the writer, (which I assume to be the process involved), presents no difficulty.’

Instead, he calls for a return to metrics.

‘The true poet… has to write his thoughts in words of the correct number of syllables, with the accent in the right places, in a recognizable metric form and, (usually), with words that rhyme where needed’.

Defining poetry is not easy. Like most modern art forms, high degrees of subjectivity can be involved in naming and labelling words as poems. On days like today, 11 November, Armistice Day, the context is paramount.  Poetry for Remembrance provides one of the finest definitions of all.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

From For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon