I wrote a song. And instead of performing it for a few friends, or maybe a small congregation, I first performed it on a big stage, with thousands of people watching – and singing along. How am I feeling about it? Good. The Sunday afternoon reprise went better, partly because I knew folks were going …
It’s been over a week since my last post, in part because I have been wrestling with an unruly piece that isn’t just a poem but also a song lyric. Yeah, the not-at-all lyric writer is composing a song. I suppose it makes sense, given my musical propensities, to begin understanding the poetics through music. I …
Oh dear readers, it has come to this: the section on metre where Stephen Fry leads us coyly into writing limericks. He disguises it, of course, by teaching us about amphibrachic trimeter and catalectic amphibrachic dimeter, which are the external and internal lines of a limerick – all very academic, you see. But the end …
I’ve been spending the last few mornings discovering the monsters that live in the Poetic Sea, down in Ternary Bay… I mean, what else am I to think, when rhythms, meters, and devices are given names like ‘anapaest‘, ‘dactyl‘, ‘molossus‘, and ‘tribrach‘? It’s not been a bad journey to this part of the Poetic Sea, …
I’ve been slowly working some exercises on various poetic metres, finding over and over that my verse sounds strained and my rhymes are forced. At times I’ve leaned too far into alliteration and have needed an avalanche of Advil to get through it. I have been frankly embarrassed by the poetry I’ve been writing, even …
I’ve been released from the heroic formality of iambic pentameter – Fry has moved us on to other rhythms, rhythms that – as he points out – feel easier to speak between breaths. In the exercises over the past couple of days, I’ve written a lot of dreck, but occasionally have had moments of meaning …
Here I am, six days into this new spiritual practice of finding and celebrating my poetic and lyric voice. And I’m neck deep in these lessons Stephen Fry keeps hurling at us. First he has us writing in iambic pentameter, which is fine but is also the earworm of poetic metres and I wind up speaking …
As I sat down to write this morning, I discovered a funny thing – a stricter poetic form actually helped me organize and work with my thoughts. I’m not sure I like today’s poem – a commentary on yesterday’s school shooting – but I think I wrote better than I would have had this been a …
Gentle readers! How I have missed you! And how glad I was for the break – it would have been unwieldy to write while moving to my temporary digs on Nantucket, where I am doing a two month sabbatical ministry. But now I am settled, a service and several meetings under my belt, and I …
On Ash Wednesday, I will begin a new practice, of writing poems, prayers, meditations, and other short pieces for spiritual and liturgical use, inspired in part by Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Traveled, Erik Walker Wikstrom’s Simply Pray, and the liturgical calendar. I make absolutely no promises that any of it will be good – I …