the iambic blog @innerlea.com...

Innerlea: traditional poetics and prosody a blog with audio database Writings, often in iambic verse About traditional old poetry And rhythm, meter, prosody and such In Shakespeare, Chaucer, Eliot and Frost, And Wallace Stevens; maybe a look at lyrics Occasionally poems by my poor hand, And on other affairs at innerlea— As well as a writer's utility page. *

PoetryFoundation.org The Writer's Almanac

A Little Essay on Google (01-12-10) Texts Without Context By Michiko Kakutani    from the New York Times Published: March 17, 2010

A technical note:
This site has been designed to demonstrate the value in the integrated rendering of text, recording and commentary, via HTML, in the study of poetry. The design takes special efforts in displaying text, indexes, notes, and lectures, in the most convenient and [space] efficient manor so as to encourage regular use. This, though, places the design at odds with the use of browser tags, as their use generally assumes a fixed-size, single, window. So if you're using tabs and want to view these pages as they were designed to be viewed then you will most likely want to disable tabs in the browser. And closing as many navigational bars at the top of the window as is possible is also very useful. And if there's some parameter that forces the browser to always open windows to fit the whole screen, this too should be disabled.

Using inline frames to hold longish text allows the sound controller to remain available to the user. However some browsers have real issues in dealing with sound controllers, inline frames, and the resizing and positioning of windows. These considerations have led to two different page formats for displaying longer poems that need scrolling: flat and frame. The first, the flat format, is the more universally renderable. The second is more elegant for its use of an inline frame for presenting the text, and keeping the sound controller available to the user as the recording progresses.
Both pages require that Apple's Quicktime module be installed (most users have it).

If there's any technical problems let me know, maybe I can suggest something.

The Launching Blog (late-Spring, 2010)

The second Pale Fire Blog (Mid-Spring, 2010)

Pale Fire. As if I needed more creative thoughts, direction, scope of vision, one more project; more memorizing, writing and recording, when there's so much to do just trying to get this strange site to work right, and get filled all the many notes, semantic holes — into the gin joint wanders Pale Fire. Pale Fire is a capturer and seducer; something that makes the many thoughts I have about the role of poetry these days; its use and relevance, its proper place, its power to entertain; — fully concrete. — August of 2010

Today it's May the 9th, a long time since August, and a lot of things have been done.
Firstly and finally, I memorized the thing, about three or four weeks ago. It takes about an hour. It may be getting shorter. I recite it when I take my almost daily walks. Fortunately in these day's of the ubiquitous cell-phone walking around talking loudly to yourself goes virtually unnoticed.
I've also found some Pale Fire resources on the web, some of which I've taken the time to rearrange more to my own liking.
And I've made some new friends. The members of the Vladimir Nabokov Forum (a link to the archive search function). It's a place where people go to hurl nuts at one another like cartoon squirrels.

I came across Pale Fire while reading the Wikipedia article on Heroic Couplets. I was basically trying to find a way to bring Chaucer, and his Canterbury Tales closer to modern audiences. One way would be to lightly sketch [trace] a history of good pieces written in Heroic Couplet form. ( Heroic Couplet article at Wikipedia)
A few of these noteworthy examples are:

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Chaucer's simple style, when heard, presents to many modern listener, largely unexposure to spoken verse, a new sound, a new aesthetic experience, of artful, lyrical, storytelling. Chaucer provides a model, a fundamental set of examples for how sentences can be laid out over a five foot line. It provides models for [basic poetic] description, humor, irony, and storytelling; in almost endless supply. It thus provides the language arts teacher with the opportunity to entertain, and to model various vocal modes, acting, public speaking. Things that some may prefer not doing.
Nevertheless, practiced recitations among language arts educators may emerge as an important part of their professional skills and a goal of normal language arts development and of advanced literacy.

The chief educational value of recitation is that it engages the emotions and imagination and possesses the potential to be enjoyed. (One can always hope.) The value of memorizing significant amounts of verse rises with the number of complex sentence forms that are to be encountered. These when memorized, become potential models for the reciter's own creative rhetorical endeavors.
The strangeness of sentence structure often found in verse, is the result of the constraints of rhythm and rhyme. Once internalized, and returned-to often, such odd syntactic structures provide a cache of sense and sound, practical prosody, rhetoric and wit.
Similar considerations may apply to the autonomous composing of metaphors as a worthy rhetorical objective.

Heroic couplets, through their use of rhyme, more clearly demarcate line endings of the sometimes elusive five-foot line. Familiarizing the ear to this form ought to act as a powerful aid to the ear in recognizing the iambic pentametric rhythm, and some of its variations, and consequentially, blank verse; Shakespeare's sphere. [So] a close familiarity with heroic couplets is likely useful in understanding verse in general.

Chaucer provides something else that modern poetry generally eschew, narration. Story telling is a useful goal in verse as it is apt to be found popularly engaging. People love stories, there just haven't been that many good stories set in verse in a long time. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Frost's Hired Hand.

A Simple Paradigm for Teaching Recitation

I know a little about programming and hypertextual practice and designs (and even have a few unique opinions there too, but alas...), and one might hope that within all these new digital cognitive apparatuses might lie a power to present more remote, more difficult, educational matter in a more accessible, easier-to-learn, way. Something like Chaucer might illustrate such mind-expanding potentialities.

Probably none of this makes any sense to anybody, my clumsy prose, and so I'll offer a sample:



And so I was looking up the Heroic Couplet form at Wikipedia:

And thus was I led to Pale Fire.
It was really more than I wanted.
A large modern specimen, variation, of Chaucer's old form;
and in a narrative fashion to boot.

And that's part of the problem: that I went into the issue too much
already-wanting a useful, effective, discovery.

At any rate, as already noted I think, I memorized the thing
and here's a sample of that effort:


And so comrade reader, if you're reading this and haven't read Pale Fire...
you might want to check out: entries at Wikipedia: Vladimir Nabokov    Pale Fire (1962)

My reading depicts a Shade who's gone berserk in his bath.
This reading depends upon certain points.
That Shade's metaphors are looser or wider in Canto 4.
That his choice of subject matter, his shaving habits, is bizarre.
That there are disjointed lines and thoughts in Canto 4.
That the words, the use of plosives, and the staccato like rhythm that comes from a list of often monosyllabic, comma-demarcated, nouns, in and around Shade's rage support a robust even wild vocal rendering.
The dramatic structure of the poem itself as a whole: that the reader ought to expect some kind of memorable climax to such a long and, I think, enjoyable poem. And Shade's madscene supplies that dramatic pop.

Spring '10 Blog (April 12th '10)

Spring arrives, with its poetic allusions,
I need the system search function just to
plow through the ever growing rank confusions
of my hard drive, in order to retrieve
my own Spring poems, of robins and magnolias...

(a little schmaltzy perhaps...)

To my Magnolia  (April '09) How easy it is to write of my magnolia ensconced before my porch and unkept house the solitary thing that tries to keep up some semblance of appearances. Winter lingered on through chilly nights... [Click here, or on title, to see and hear complete poem]

It dredges up some other references
to magnolias, three sad spring poems of
Robert Lowell. Alexandrines open
To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage

and also from his Home After Three Months Away
and also from his Man And Wife
My verse, thank God, is hardly so depressing:
perhaps it would be better if it bore
a little more poetical despair.

An Exotic Robin (An Odd Bird)  (April '09) [frame version] Among the rows of pleasant bungalows where I take my almost daily walks there's one distinguished by an odd bird, a robin, marked by two long tail feathers of pure white, and on each wing also, toward their outer edges, another plume of long white. And when he flies, and spreads his wings and tail they form a nested pair of pointed V's, like some small sleek new military jet. [Click here, or on title, to see and hear complete poem]

---

Musing much lately upon how the material I've been mastering might be used, organized, and somehow staged. It might most plausibly be done by trying to sell the idea of a series of lectures two or three a weeks over perhaps a two or three week period. These lectures would feature live performances mostly exploring the use of iambic pentameter and especially the heroic couplet as demonstraded in Chaucer, Nabokov, and Shakespeare, and to a lesser extent, Frost, Stevens, Browning, Eliot, and Yeats, maybe Tennyson and Keats. The aim would generally be to perform and have comprehended some sections from the Canterbury Tales, perhaps all of Nabokov's Pale Fire,
Romeo's: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
Juliet's: My only love sprung from my only hate!
Friar Laurence's: The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night
On Iambic Pentameter

Sophisticated, set in early winter, is Hart Crane's famous Proem to Brooklyn Bridge. A background graphic shows the awesome structure, now scheduled, I hear, for sad destruction, when its inviolate curve foresake our eyes, forever. Gone. Too unbelievable! My notes include a useful paraphrase of a poem that's often found obtuse.

pre-turkeyday fall '09 Blog (november 19th '09) Prose, and no pictures either. Returning to Pale Fire, big time. Just finished the first filled-out interpretation. Should have something available by turkeyday. The CD packets, include both Pale Fire and Canterbury? Intro's, texts, notes. Might as well try to assemble something like that.

even later fall '09 Blog (november 13th '09) Prose, and no pictures either. Taking a break from Pale Fire. Had hoped to have some CD packets produced by turkeyday. Something provisional at least. Should print out the current notes just to see where things stand. Otherwise trying to complete recordings et al for the General Prologue of Canterbury. Why I'm not sure. Just to do some recording? Because I don't care much for the current models I'm listening-to? A sense of closure. What really needs doing is the promotion, which is coming along after a fashion, which is to say, slow. Written a link[request]letter that's turned into a history of the project, and maybe even biography. This may turn out all right. I'm going to need several summaries or characterizations of my work before this promotion phase is done. See the Amway salesman at his rounds, selling verse, making mighty progress: The unusually warm November wind  gently tousles the patch of hair that's left  above his forehead as it might some sparse  brown graveside mourners huddling together.

The fall '09 Blog (begun: October 15 '09,) Something I should have said some time ago, a page of Halloween and Autumn poems, (together with recorded recitations), occurs on the site on page 9 of A Little Garden of Recorded Verse. Of course the poems and their recordings are enchanting, but what's most noteworthy here is something called Medea's Incantation by Arthur Golding. It's from his translation of Ovid's epic Metamorphoses. This piece served as a model for a speech in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, that's well known, in which old Prospero predicts the day when he will toss his magic books away. That speech begins then with this borrowed phrase: “Ye Elves of Hills, Brooks, Standing Lakes and Groves” A fuller exploration of these texts is also available at: Westron Wynde. Golding's depiction of Medea's quest and conjurations is, I think, great fun, the perfect piece for a young female witch, some budding wiccam, brash enthusiast, to learn to say upon a hollow's eve to hear what kinds of magic words achieve.

The fall '09 Blog (begun: September 10 '09,) My absorption into Pale Fire has stalled progress on almost everything else. I stop to record parts of it, and write down commentary. Specifically it has stalled the promotion of the Canterbury section of the website. I've made some progress in trimming back the wonderful multi-windowing features I've designed into the site using Javascript. I've had to concede that on a majority of implementations of Javascript browser routines do not support very well the kinds of innovations I seek to provide the viewer. So I've had to concede and simplify, and move away from the practical eloquence of modularism. There will be more on this, fttb you might like to read a brief, somewhat old, hypertextual essay on the subject, Notes on Multi-Windowing Html. [some idle thoughts on writing] latest on Chaucer

To help you understand, and that full quick,
some part of what this site is all about,
(as if by good ensample, so to speche)
may I suggest that you should listen to
Chaucer's portrait of the Pauvre Persoun,
(which is Middle English for poor parson,)
taken from the Canterbury Tales
written by Geoff Chaucer long ago;
performed in Middle English by yours truly,
G. S. Lipon, noted reciteur.
Toward Canterbury is a set of recordings
of selections from the Canterbury Tales,
performed in Middle English,
accompanied by text and brief analyses,
hoping to entertain as well as to instruct,
When completed, which should be soon,
it will consists of seven excerpts
comprising 40 minutes.
Enough has been accomplished to merit your attention,
or so I think.

The summer '09 Blog (begun: august 2nd '09,) [review] early august '09 What have I been up to? uhh, I seem to move in so many directions at the same time. I've written some poems to go with everything else. And I think they're good. There's about fourteen of them, which I'm trying to shop a round. We'll see how that goes. No real money, but recognition, publicity, promotion, of the other stuff, Chaucer, a collection of readings, writings and notes about the Canterbury Tales. Starting to complete memorization of the complete introduction, have recently learned the Monk, the frere, the franklin, the wyf of bath, persoun; am working on the millere; the marchant, the clerk; but I listen to all the remaining portraits regularly now, along with thte ending. It the continuing practice, preoccupation, discipline. And then there's the writing! beside the lyric verse. I've produced, or am producing, three audio projects, concerned with using digital resources to more fully explore poetry, especially traditional, i.e. metric verse. These latest projects focus on Chaucer, and Iambic Pentameter in general. They're an evolving set of annotated and recorded lectures with dramatic readings, from Chaucer, Golding, Shakespeare, Thayer, and Mandelbaum, and some others. They are called, Toward Canterbury, an audio introduction to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Westron Wynde, a study of early verse,   translations of Ovid's portrait of Medea from his the Metamorphoses,   as well as study of fouteeners. On Iambic Pentameter, an historical survey with recordings This last one's only now getting started; but it makes use of pieces already recorded and marked-up, and so is capable of some amount of quick development. The other projects need a filling in of notes, definitions, analysis, especially with regards to prosody and performance, for each piece in each collection and for each collection overall. And this writing is the thing that most occupies me. Some of this, the definitions of Middle English wordes, other factual elucidations of limited value perhaps, but needed for a complete comprehension of the text, can be simple, almost mindless. Others take longer. Sometimes some thoughts come out that are a pleasure to set down. But others, especially some of the longer introductory essays tend to get lost, and need extensive editing and revising, which truth to say, I'm not that practiced-at. Although in lyric verse writing I am, but their there almost is no boundary between writing and revision, there revision is always ongoing. But here things need to be studied, hacked a part, the parts saved, things pasted together, lengthened, or shorted, and eventually concluded. But I'm getting better at it... It's just that I'll rotate through these tasks so quickly, (including recordings mind you) that I almost lack comprehension of whats been done over the last few weeks and months; and years.

[using other verse writing to promote site] early june '09 Admittedly this hasn't gone that well, (so far,) and certainly not well attended-to, either by writer or by audience, but all of that may be about to change. I think the weakness of this blog to date is the result of lack of clarity about the enterprise and its promotion, and now, at last, I think that this is changing, I've got a set of surer goals in mind. I'm writing verse now, real lyrical verse, and my opinion is it's rather good, and worthy of being published and reviewed by the literary press. And thereto, there will be no postings of such works either here, or in this vicinity (except perhaps for about billie jean.) And so to save the precious virginity, of these hopefully attractive works I'm going to reset this site and blog, so all such stuff will linger here no longer, Hopefully my works will come to light upon some worthy literary site, or magazine. Should I get published, you'll hear about it here, is all I say, of that you can be sure. I'll try to leverage each against the other, my published verse and my quixotic site, (which seeks to promote Chaucer and recital) and hopefully advance forward from there.

[notes for an audio introduction to Chaucer ] early june '09 But more to the point, and assuming that this is your first visit, I'll bring myself around again, once more, and try to define my goals and aspirations, and thus the purpose of this site and blog. This site, these words, make up an enterprise, implausible, outwardly quixotic, to reinvigorate our language study (through modern digital technology ) by encouraging the recitation of set pieces, practiced oration, poetry; as part of ordinary language study.

[ poetry, emotion, education ] early june '09 The art of recital and interpretation as tool of interest, conjurer of emotion; as well as subject worthy to be studied; is likely undervalued; singular efforts not noted or rewarded; the art & science of recital, not regularly studied; and this is quite unlikely to change soon, (unless efforts like this should gain some traction,) and this is certainly unfortunate, and what it is I try to rectify. For poetry and recitation bring something special to our language study, distinct from the dry study   of form and grammar; (however necessary they may be;) for spoken verse is able to convey emotion; and emotions are what guide our thoughts, and plans and attitudes, including attitudes toward education. To the extent recital stirs emotions and is enjoyed it should be returned-to frequently; to gain attention, mold it; change the mood; useful things to know when one is seeking to organize an hour.

on Westron Wynde.
This project was first intended to be
a kind of pre-introduction to Chaucer,
and the sound of Middle English,
and of the great vowel shift;
and especially of the pronunciation
of the first-person, subjective, pronoun, I;
that's pronounced, ee.
It's easily confused with the pronoun he.

And so I thought to try reciting the early 16th century song, Westron Wynde, in my best Middle English, (accompanied by a simple, single note rendering on guitar, of an early melody that was set to it.) just to elucidate this pronominal problem.

But then I noticed Westron Wynde was cast in fourteen-ers. I had been doing some reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and remembered that there was an Elizabethan translation into fourteeners of the ancient masterpiece by Arthur Golding; that it is known that Shakespeare was acquainted-with, since a particular passage, Medea's Incantation, (that begins her efforts to restore to youth her father-in-law, old Aeson,) had been adapted by Shakespeare as the very famous Prospero's Farewell to Magic in the play, The Tempest. It begins:
And so I began trolling around there.
Eventually I ended up with something that's more like a study of fourteeners,
and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Shakespeare, and Thayer's Casey at the Bat, …
rather than an introduction to Middle English,
and the great vowel shift,

And so says something in its own right,
and yet will serve us as a stepping-stone,
of sorts, on our way to Bailey's Tabard Inne.

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