Should we remain sanguine in the face of pop stars, politicians, actors etc, etc, inveigling their way on to the poetry stage? Well, if we believe that poetry is everywhere then it stands to reason that everyone is poetry.
Still… Jarvis Cocker, a poet?
Andrew Motion on the promotional trail for his latest novel, Silver – Return to Treasure Island, will read at the North Devon Arts Centre. Don’t know if he’ll be reading any poetry though.
Technological advances mean that all aspects of life can be digitalised but is poetry published on the internet simply that or is it something that deserves its on niche?
This article attempts to shed some light on the questions.
We are always on the lookout for new ways in which that most protean of art forms, poetry, can be presented. And here’s something of a landmark that harnesses the power of a computer interfacing the internet to deliver the poetic goods.
There are no words printed on the pages of this book, Between Page and Screen, which contains a series of letters between two lovers. Instead, each page has a geometric shape and a web address leading to the book’s website. To access the text, readers visit the website and hold up each page to their webcam. The website detects the geometric shapes then displays the poetry in text animations.
The video below shows the book in action.
I realise this might not be the usual Tears in the Fence poetry fare but I suspect Mark Grist, the teacher involved in this rap battle, DOES read the type of poetry you might find in Tears. It tickles me that the teacher beat the student at his own game and with a lot more style and word play too! I’m familiar with the process of trying to engage young people with poetry in schools. It helps sometimes (depending on the school and the students) if you can approach it using something – like rap – that means something to them. I imagine Blizzard got a lesson in poetry and the manipulation of words that wouldn’t have sunk in quite the same way in the classroom!
Bet you didn’t see this one coming. It certainly made me go, “eh?” I can’t lie, I want to hear it!
Apparently, Michael Jackson recorded a bunch of show tunes inspired by the poetry of Robert Burns.
Yes, you read that right. The late King of Pop took on The Ploughman Poet. And…Crivens! Isn’t the resemblance between them uncanny? Or is that just me?
Wonder what Burns would have made of Michael Jackson’s Thriller? Now it’s got me thinking: remember the spoken word bit of Thriller intoned by Vincent Price (verses below)? I wonder what it would sound like in Burns’ Scottish accent?
Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize your neighborhood
And those whoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpse’s shell
The foulest stench’s in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
for no mere mortal can resist
the evil of the thriller
Yes, you read that right! It’s in the Scotland on Sunday so it must be true. And on the 250th anniversary of his birth too.
Here at Tears in the Fence online, we are agog and all ‘WTF?’
Apparently, it’s the brainchild of whisky firm Auchentoshan who likes to do things differently.
And all things literary too, according to the New York Times.
It seems British TV series export, Downton Abbey, is going down a storm across the pond. That in itself is not unusual. Strictly Come Dancing, Doctor Who and Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch (whose a Cumberbitch then? Check it out. They are ALL over the internet!) and Martin Freeman have all proved that point. The difference here is that publishers have realised that the viewers of Downton Abbey are book readers too. Stephen Morrison, the editor in chief and associate publisher of Penguin Books even shamelessly admits “We’re just riding that ‘Downton Abbey’ wave.”
It makes me feel somewhat caught on the backfoot (only joking!). I’m a huge reader but I’ve never watched Downton Abbey so don’t quite appreciate what all the fuss is about. And now it looks like poetry publishers are getting in on the act. Sadly, it seems poetry doesn’t have the power to bask in the Downton Abbey luminosity as much as prose.
Go figure!
“Is poetry dead? Or, in the age of the internet, does it offer us what nothing else can?” is the perennial question that leads this five page article in the Washington Post by Lauren Wilcox. We blogged about the preview of it last week.
It’s great to see so much space given to consideration of the question on the Washington Post’s website but can anyone across the pond in America tell us if it was given as much space in the physical magazine? We hope so although we fear that might not be the case.
Tears in the Fence 