[Patricia A. Marsh]

Maybe the Iron Chef <u>was</u>, as you say, "...HUGE in America." Wouldn't know about that. No cable TV here. Rooftop antenna just fine when ya live on the third-highest hilltop in the County.

(Ps-ss-st! Sh-h. Don't let on that I told you so, Janet, but most rural West Virginia coalfield citizens live in a Third-World country. And rumour has it that "...very high camp." means the highest hill is reserved for the Company boss's house.)

Yeah! You guessed it: I need some sleep. 'night!

Originally posted by Janet Kenny:
Patricia,
It was HUGE in America. Actually there's serious information and very polished cooking but it's presentation is very high camp.

If you care about food it's definitely worth watching. If you want a funny show ditto.
Janet

PS: And watch this movie
Tampopo

Last link failed.

[This message has been edited by Patricia A. Marsh (edited April 18, 2005).]

[grasshopper]

Janet,
I feel your statement that a non-Japanese can't write a haiku needs more justification. I became interested in haiku and other oriental short forms and joined some dedicated lists where both Japanese and non-Japanese authors post.
I confess that I have read hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands and thousands, of utterly boring, drab haiku, senryu, cinquains etc, and very few that I considered successful. I once complained that most of the ku seemed to have been written by born-again florists. The problem is that many people are drawn to these forms because they look easy--they don't appreciate the extreme difficulty of writing a good one.
I mentioned elsewhere that I thought the 'spontaneity' of a haiku was often overlooked. It is not like the reflective Western Romantic tradition of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'. With haiku, I feel the poem should feel like an immediate response to the experience--it is a celebration of the now-ness of experience. That 'spontaneity' takes enormous craft and many years to master, I suspect. If a cinquain is regarded as a Western form of the haiku, I think it requires that quality of the oriental form.

I don't usually post my own poems in General threads, but hope you will forgive me posting this one, firstly because it is a rhyming cinquain, and secondly, to lighten the mood.....

The Etcetera Cinquain
"We do not accept rhyming poetry, greeting-card verse, poems about vampires, etc." (From the submission details of Pebble Lake Review.)

Mid night:
again the thirst.
My love, I am accursed--
I will repent, recant, but first
one bite.


Regards, Maz

[Janet Kenny]

Ah Patricia. I watched the "Iron Chef" and "Tampopo" on Australian public television
Australian TV notice
G'nite,
Janet

Edited back to say I think it's OK to say Adelaide Crapsey agreed with me though it would be better to say I agreed with her

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited April 18, 2005).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Tim,

Intriguing link. I was thinking, as a particularly cruel challenge, to challenge folk to write sestinas using the next set of random words generated as masking by the next email spam I received. Of course, the moment I thought of it, I received a spam letter, where the "Engrish" is almost as surreal as the random text. Here's the random text:

scantier! denizen, nouns kneeling diffusers. Slovenia! infants, slows Kronecker reopened. prophecy! logged, downstream sewed implore. tiling! artichoke, braided vagrant tutors. blueberry! gagged, fiction Boers inscribed. droops! rises, truant unlike million.

That's enough for five different cruel sestinas.

Here is the sexy "Engrish" that came with it. I've added line breaks to make it more poetic, a "found poem":

"welcome to my prison! Orientals"

Gnash of a metal grate,
groans turning into cry.

My small prison.

It is the only place,
where pretty babes
shout from pain,
but I'm not
going to stop
playing my games.

Only here
I spank their cakes,
but they continue to blow
my purple headed monster,

only here
I can do everything
I want

till one of their holes
will not be filled
with fountain of goo.

Do you want to see,
how I do it?

Cum here.

[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited April 18, 2005).]

[Janet Kenny]

Love your vampire poem Maz!! I don't deny that good poems may spring up anywhere.

I can't justify my crazy theories more than I have done already and far be it from me to spoil anyone's pleasure. I think my singing days may have some effect on my sense of language and form. I became morbidly aware of musical translations that obliged the singer to emote on "the".
I love the idea of spontaneous poems which trap images and ideas.

I just think they need not be corseted in a self conscious jelly mould. I love your "born-again florists". I bet there's some phony decadent stuff in Japanese.

I have recently read some of your FV poems with immense admiration but lacked the time to say so. I am in awe.

I write naturally in trad form. I just do. If I had to count everything I'd give up. I used to write more free poems and feel that once this time of tension is over I'll write some more.
Janet
.....
Kevin,
You're unstoppable
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited April 18, 2005).]

[albert geiser]

In Western culture in the 19th Century verse writing peaked as a popular way to pass the time, not just for poets or aspiring poets, but for people in their day to day lives, and it was used with versalitity. People even wrote verse because it was easier for them than to compose whole paragraphs of prose. In cultures where people often sing the metrics and the rhyme in poetry come easily. And that was the case throughout Western culture until the 20th Century took hold. Poetry writing as a common practice continued to flourish in pockets of culture where singing also flourished, such as many parts of the American South.

Those days are long gone. Metrics hold an association in the mind with a bygone time that many people feel should be restored. But the reality is that free verse began in the same Victorian era, in the middle of the 19th Century because versalitity in poetry flourished then.

Free verse parallels in use, influence, and necessity, free indirect discourse in fiction. Free verse should more accurately be called free indirect verse because what's free is the discourse in the poem. Leaves of Grass has the equivalent role in poetry to Madame Bovary in fiction. This is not going to be undone. Free verse does not require the poetic equivalent of stream of consciousness or poetic dadaism or anything highly experimental.

The fact that everyone who writes at all right now has to live with is that the literary arts are shrinking in influence and use in Western culture, without any sign of a reversal.

Metricists who are serious about aspiring to write very good poetry, that's when metrics become formalism, are competing for a shrinking pool of crumbs left from the poetic pie with the poets who are continuing to take the greater risks with free indirect verse. I think the competition gets strange when Western metricists and Western free verse poets are competing over haiku.

There's probably nothing stranger going on in Western poetry than metricists and free verse poets competing over the definition of haiku; which has no discourse, no narrative, no rhyme, no mythology, no meter, no cadence; in Western terms.



[This message has been edited by albert geiser (edited April 18, 2005).]

[Henry Quince]

Janet, I have no Japanese, but I believe the essence of haiku and senryu resides in their images, which can — though doubtless less well — be rendered in languages other than Japanese.

I thought you had allowed yourself to become persuaded of that during Lee Gurga’s stint in Lariat, and indeed I recall that you wrote a couple of English Haiku yourself, one of which Lee was going to publish. It will be interesting to see whether you participate again when he returns this year, and whether you raise your objections to the form with him!

Henry

[Janet Kenny]

Henry,
I thought it over and decided that I have always treasured those same elements in all of my poetry and that the restrictions of the posture did not add anything to that particular search in English poetry.

I won't raise those objections with Mr Gurga again because I am sure he finds fulfilment and depth in his own approach to Haiku. It is his personal search and of course I respect that. His knowledge is something to respect. The same is true of my dear friend Wiley Clements.

I have come to doubt that it is much use for non--Japanese poets unless they so lack an ability to identify with experience they need a zen whack on the head--in which case I wonder why they want to write in the first place.
Janet

PS: Henry,
I've just noticed the exclamation mark at the end. Is that a letter from "Outraged of Penge"?


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited April 18, 2005).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Originally posted by albert geiser:
The fact that everyone who writes at all right now has to live with is that the literary arts are shrinking in influence and use in Western culture, without any sign of a reversal.

Had a nice reply all composed, then had my Wacom tablet fall onto the "close" key of my new wireless keyboard. I think this is the 21st century equivalent of tipping over the inkwell, and while less messy, more catastrophic for loss of text.

Ah well, not a new thing with the internet. What is new is that the internet has caused a blossoming of epistolary writing not seen since the English Regency, except we're not characters in Jane Austen novels. This is open to everyone, and everyone is writing and, among other things, posting their poetry. After all, where else do you think all those second-rate haikus and cinquains are coming from?

I think it's also nonsense that the literary arts are shrinking. Television has made theatre run 24/7 in people's living rooms, and everything on tv was written by someone, including the "reality" shows. I have shelves around me collapsing with the weight of books, some of which I've even written, and I just turned in a couple critical essays based on television shows I watch--one of them last night, in fact, that had a plot twist which I'll likely have to address in a second draft of one of the essays. Ah well.

Folk no longer gather round the piano in the saloon for an old-fashioned sing-along. Now the bars have kareoke nights. Exactly how is that different, aside from less employment for piano players?

Novels are a popular artform of the past two hundred years. Read Jane Austen's rant in Northanger Abbey about the status of novelists (as opposed to poets) at the time and look at the popularity of such books now. Poetry? Throw a rock and you'll hit it, even today.



[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited April 18, 2005).]

[albert geiser]

Kevin-

If you want to throw a rock to reach poetry, the rock has to go through a visual medium. Literature isn't going away, but it's subordinate now to the visual medium. That doesn't mean the arts are worse off, just that literature is.

Karaoke isn't complete without a video screen and words at the bottom of the screen.

Most people in the West today would not reply to the question, "What did you do last night?" with "I wrote poetry." Even if one did write poetry last night, you just know it's better to only tell certain confidants, and otherwise everyone else one knows will give you weird looks. It's especially not wise to talk about having written poetry last night in the workplace. Whereas, it would have been a common reply in the mid 19th Century to say. "I wrote poetry last night."

Try talking about cinquains to some gossipy coworker in a nearby cubicle. The same people who were calling French fries American fries are the ones who make the audience for American Idol. It's a risk to talk about poetry in public, let alone make it publicly known that one writes poetry.

It's true that the epistolary form has been flourishing lately, without many people knowing that's what they're doing. But links are becoming a necessity with this epistolary era. and the links connect the new letter writing to the visual medium. E mail is frequently as incomplete without a visual link as karaoke is without a video.



[This message has been edited by albert geiser (edited April 18, 2005).]