Versecraft
Exploring the art of poetry through the craft of some of the world's best but most underrated poems.
Episodes
-"L'Envoi" by Herman Melville
-"Fragment of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century" by Melville
-"Clarel" by Melville
-"Moby-Dick" by Melville
-"The Maldive Shark" by Melville
-"The Confidence Man" by Melville
-"Timoleon" by Melville
-Gnostics, Cathars, and Bogomils
-Dualisms, Persian, French, and Indian
-White Symbolism: Lightning and the Whale
-Ahab's inverted Zoroastrianism-cum-Gnosticism
-The Ophites and Leviathan
-"G...
Mea culpa: Sorry for the confusion-- of course I DID end up giving a recap of my adventures.
-Travel details mentioned: the Haar, Alfred Janniot, the Musee Branly, the museums in Nancy, Spinoza's homes
-Friends mentioned: Cameron Clark, David Klug, Niall Campbell, Gerry Cambridge, Victoria Moul
-The Movement and the New Lines anthology
-"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold
-Thomistic aesthetics
-The construct...
Read this essay (and see the poems) on Substack!
Poems discussed:
"The Rhodora" by Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In the Desert" by Herman Melville (my Melville essay)
"Lucifer in Starlight" by George Meredith
"Cold-Blooded Creatures" by Elinor Wylie
"The Animals" by Edwin Muir
"Sunt Leones" by Stevie Smith (Fayne's essay)
"Beyond the Demonic Element" by Harvey Shapiro
"Nothing in Heaven Functions as it Ought" by X.J. Kennedy
Read this essay at The Sonneteer!
Sonnet types discussed:
The Sicilian: ABAB ABAB, CDC DCD
The Italian: ABBA ABBA, CDC DCD
The English: ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG
The French: ABAB, CDCD, EEF, GGF
The Spenserian: ABAB, BCBC, CDCD, EE
The Miltonic: Italian, with enjambment, delayed volta, and non-courtly/erotic content
The Meredithian: ABBA, CDDC, EFFE, GHHG
The Pushkin: aBaB, ccDD, eFFe, GG
The Hilbertian: ABC ABC, DEF DEF, GG
The Terza Rima: ...
-What is meter?
-10 Reasons to write in meter
-Kinds of meter (Accentual, Syllabic, Parellelist, Quantitative, Accentual-Syllabic)
-Kinds of feet (Iamb, Trochee, Anapest, Amphibrach, Dactyl)
-“Junk” by Richard Wilbur
-“Considering the Snail” by Thom Gunn
-KJV Psalm 23
-Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare
-“The Tyger” by William Blake
-“The Destruction of Sennacherib” by...
Topics discussed:
-Disco Demolition Night
-Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death"
-See Matthew's great episode on the above
-Alice's essay, "On Fear"
-My essay, "The Iron Lyre"
-The Sleerickets episode "This Was Poetry"
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You can l...
-Read the poems on my Substack!
-If there is a “West,” all Semites and Aryans are part of it
-Arab Classicism and the House of Wisdom
-Al Ma’arri
-Afzaladdin
-Moses Ibn Ezra
-Sehnsucht
-Ibn Iyad
-Manjik
-Dick Davis
-Samuel Johnson’s “Rasselas”
-Proto-Imagism
-My long road to appreciating haiku
-Zen in the Art of Archery
-Matsuo Basho
-Ethan McGuire
-Kireji, Kigo, Jisei
-Minamoto no Shitago
-Howard Nemerov
-Derek Wa...
Read this essay (and view the poems) on Substack!
Topics discussed include:
Bright Soft Things (Crashaw Essay)
The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse trans. Christopher Childers
Asclepiades 6
Zonas 9
Argentarius 26
Martial 5.73, 1.73, 3.65
"Prayer" by George Herbert
"Cold Turkey" by Joshua Mehigan
"Upon the Body of Our Blessed Lord, Naked and Bloody" by Richard Crashaw
"To Our Lord, Upon the W...
Read this episode on Substack!
Mea culpa: Yes, in the heat of the moment, I mispronounced mise en scene. A la guillotine!
Topics discussed include:
-Some po-biz kvetching
-The telos of Versecraft
-The "ghost" of pentameter
-The Stevensian cosmovision and the metaphysics of metaphor
-The axis mundi
-Nicholas of Cusa and coincidentia oppositorum
-The Moirai
-Contronyms
-"An Ordinary Childhood" by ...
Read this episode on Substack and subscribe!
Topics discussed include:
-Plato's "Ion"
-The Muses and Schizophrenia
-Poets must be weirdos
-The normies are the willing slaves of the mad
-Lewis's trilemma
-The American Confessionals and the French Decadents
-The Wild 18th century
-Go read William Cowper's "The Task!"
-Samuel Johnson, Richard Savage, William Collins, Christopher Smart, William Blake, Friederich Holderlin, The Mar...
Read this episode (and the poem) on Substack!
Topics discussed include:
-Going to Oaxaca!
-"Poetry and Music" and "Rhyme's Reason" by John Hollander
-Jacques Lacan and the "mirror phase"
-The nightmare of the self vs. the nightmare of the unconscious
-The survival of Romanticism
VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.
BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.
VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.
Please subs...
Read the poems: "The Early Purges" and "Limbo."
Topics mentioned:
-Poetry careerism in the 21st century
-The perennial appeal of the Gentleman Farmer Poet
-The value of exposure to death
-Rural vs. Urban morality
-"The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" by Robert Frost
-Piscine Christianity
-"At the Fishhouses" by Elizabeth Bishop
Read this essay and support the show on Substack!
Topics discussed in this episode include:
R.S. Thomas's poems:
-Revision
-Alexander Fayne's essay on R.S. Thomas
-Pascal's "Night of Fire"
-Apophatic theology
-John Scotus Erigena, Philo, Pseudo-Dionysius, Weil, etc.
-Keats's "Ode On A Grecian Urn"
-Milton's "On His Blindness"
VISIT MY WEBSITE ...
Read this episode in essay form here!
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-The Cambridge Three: Dick Davis, Robert Wells, Clive Wilmer
-The Stanford Poets: Thom Gunn, Edgar Bowers, Yvor Winters, etc.
-Virgil's Georgics
-The Idylls of Theocritus
-Wells poems discussed: "A Caution," "Deus Loci," "The Unnamed Pool," "The Bathing Place," "The Last of Summer."
Read the poem here.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Transcending the smallness of one's time
-The Voorslag Affair
-Campbell against the world, i.e. punching Steve Spender in the face
-Ambivalent stanzas
-The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot
-"Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens
-"Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
-"The Whiteness of the Whale" by Herman Melville
-A Nietzschean response to apocalypse
Read the episode on Substack here
Poems discussed in this episode:
"Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee" by Emily Bronte
"Cargoes" by John Masefield
"From Stone to Steel" by E.J. Pratt
"The Hill" by Rupert Brooke
"When the Ecstatic Body Grips" by E.R. Dodds
"For My Daughter" by Weldon Kees
"Poetry and Religion" by Les Murray
"Soul" by Alan Shapiro
"Where the River Meets the Sound" by Suzanne Doyle
"Clear Water" by Catherine Tufariello
-Read the poem... by pre-ordering Forester’s new collection here!
-My annus mirabilis
-Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
-Renovating the sonnet-house
-Mycorrhizal intelligence
-Is the pathos fallacious?
-A thinking cheese for the thinking man
-The ents at the entmoot
-My recent episode on Sleerickets with Alice
-Cosmic double-consciousness
-Dark circle...
Read the transcript of this episode here!
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-The meaning and history of New Formalism
-“Can Poetry Matter?” by Dana Gioia
-The Big Read and Poetry Out Loud
-“The Catholic Writer Today” by Dana Gioia
-“Poetry as Enchantment” by Dana Gioia
-The Noir hero
-Christopher Marlowe and Charles Ma...
Topics discussed in this episode:
-My conversation with David and Matthew on Age of Muses
-My new post at Literary Matters
-My French translation episode on Heredia
-My Spanish translation episode on Lope
-Metaphrase and paraphrase
-Germany's view of Goethe
-Magister Christopher Childers
-From Sturm und Drang to Spit on that Thang (sorry)
-Weimar (semi)Classicism
-How to write a sex poem
-Acc...
Topics discussed in this episode include:
Read the polished transcript of this episode on Substack!
My lecture on The Grand Style in English
My poem, "Spelunker," in New Verse Review
Poetry’s psychological effect and moral charge
The burden of genius
Poetry vs. Philosophy
Maimonides and Augustine
The decadence of the academy
"Poetry as Enchantment" by Dana Gi...
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