Category: Writing

I sometimes think that a poet is really a frustrated engineer. Or is it, an engineer is a frustrated poet?

Researching what kind of metadata one could capture about a poem, I’ve found that there are a goodly number of rules and restrictions when it comes to poetry. More than I’m aware of from my limited education in the form.

Thankfully there are sites such as this one, virtualLit an online, free, and interactive poetry tutorial that covers the elements in poetry, using three poems as examples of each: “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop; “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell; and “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke.

What I’m discovering in my researches is that one uses one set of elements to find a poem, but a different set to understand it, both mechanically and sensuously. For instance, wanting to find poems that use the concept of birds as freedom would use the element of metaphor; but once found, then other elements, such as the poem’s poetic form could not only help the reader appreciate the art of the poem, but better understand the craft of poetry.

It is through better knowledge of the craft that we discover new ideas, such as a poetic form that’s based purely on visuals, called concrete poetry, where I found a link to this site that features extraordinary visual haiku.

Born too late in a strange land,
lost with love of a people
you can never claim.
Living a time you can never know.
Touching flyleaf of book
as hand of friend.
Surrounded by plain walls that can’t
keep you safe, from sepia
faces with delicate tints.
You walk streets you resent
because your prints are misplaced.
You drink of waters faint
as fog and myth.
You don’t see me because
I’m too real. I’m messy and chaotic,
and speak words you can hear.
I walk in light, no stones lie on me.
Smell of sweat and soap,
not flowers decayed.
I am less real to you than images
in print and paint.
In your mind, less real than
beauties in a field scattered about;
like painted bluebirds on fragile teacup.
Your life ended when
Atom’s fire blossomed,
Your time started when the ashes
had cleared.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

Taking a break from ‘what is good radio’, I wanted to point out what I consider to be good journalism.

Dave Winer is on a tear against the professional news organizations because of an appearance of Jon Stewart on Crossfire. I listened to a recording of this (managing not to hotlink directly to the MP3 file), and I enjoyed many of the quips between the participants, and found Stewart to be both funny and clever at times; but I also found him to be disingenuous and rather cheap.

(Transcript here.)

Stewart kept iterating that they, the Crossfire folk, are “…hurting America’–they in this case meaning, we presume, journalists. No, they aren’t. Americans are hurting America. We’re hurting America because no matter what we hear, no matter how factual the reporting, we’ll believe what we want to believe or what suits us to believe. Americans would rather listen to hyperbole and rhetoric than to fact. Not just Americans – the same can be said of the average citizen of most countries.

“You are hurting us.” “You are hurting us.”

Sounds like Arnold before he learned to act. Oh, wait a sec….

When Dave Winer uses the Stewart appearance as a segue into an exposition that reporters should be paying more heed to their customers, as iterated in this Bloggercon question (in which he insults most of the people who do him the courtesy of responding), I damn near choked on my coffee. If anything, reporters should be listening to their ‘customers’ less.

On any given day I can find at least one example of excellent journalism. It’s sophisticated and chi-chi clever to sneer at the professional news organizations, but if you keep your eyes, and your mind, open, you’ll find that many of these organizations do as good a job as their ‘customers’ allow. And in some cases, a better job than their ‘customers’ deserve.

Take this piece I found in the Houston Press (via a post made today in Fodor’s Travel Blog). No, its not about Iraq, or the Presidential race, or the contaminated flu shots. It’s about osso bucco.

A food critic questioned the osso bucco he was served at a local restaurant and was told, “If you don’t like it, there’s the door. Pay your bill and go. And don’t come back”, by the restaurant’s owner. He was also challenged about his knowledge of osso bucco.

This should be enough to earn a completely negative review; yet the food critic actually followed on the chef’s challenge and researched osso bucco, educating both his reading audience and himself on what to look for (what the restaurant served was not it). And even after being thrown out of the restaurant, he made a qualified recommendation of it because of the freshness of the fish served. Most importantly, he never took himself completely seriously, as you can see in the humor of his writing, particularly with the description of the busboy and his fake accent:

If you get the spiky-haired young waiter who reads the specials off the blackboard with a phony Italian accent, resist the temptation to ask where he’s from. (He was born in Galveston and reared in nearby Santa Fe.) If you play along, he’ll do this goofy Italian accent all night long for your entertainment.

Not to point fingers, but if Robb Walsh was a weblogger, he would have blasted the restaurant, daily, for three weeks; accused them of a conspiracy; nicknamed the whole thing ‘osso buccogate’; suggested that this action in Houston just demonstrates Bush’s Texan disregard for the voters; posted the restaurant’s phone number for people to call and harrass the spiky haired busboy; and then got all of his readers to Google Bomb the place with the words, “This Restaurant Sucks!”

Of course, this was only about food, but if I continued my morning reading of all the publications I check out from throughout the world, I’ll probably find decent reporting in many, and about more significant stories. As for the bias, it’s up to me to spot it where it exists–that’s cuz I is smart, and I rede good.

But if there is bias in a publication, it’s because the customers put it there. Fox got where it was by listening to its customers. What we need is less customer intervention, not more.

Hmmm. I wonder if all of this would sound better as a podcast? Should I start it with the NY Loose song, “Hide?” Is that copyright free?