Versecraft
Exploring the art of poetry through the craft of some of the world's best but most underrated poems.
Episodes
Poems/Prose Lyrics featured:
"The Eagles" by Jones Very
"The Oracles" by A.E. Housman
"An Equation" by Hyam Plutzik
"Plato and the Serpent" by Catherine Davis
"Crow's Theology" by Ted Hughes
"Changeling" by Rhina Espaillat
"Hardy" by Robert Mezey
"The Master of Metaphor" by Carl Dennis
"Lust" by J.D. McClatchy
Topics discussed in this episode:
-Email me your questions!!
-Cameron's substack, "Minor Tiresias"
-My poem, "At Woodlawn" in Merion West
-My poem, "Aztec Support" in Light
-My episode on Learning the Secrets of English Verse
-"Missing Measures" and "All the Fun's In How You Say A Thing" by Timothy Steele
-De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum
-"Notes On Metre" by Otto Jespersen
-Th...
Send me your AMA questions for Versecraft 100!
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Greatest Generation poets
-"Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry" by Howard Nemerov
-"De Anima" by Aristotle
-On loose iambics
-The ghost of Sapphics
-A transexual volta
-Life engenders the great romance of death
-"Spring and Fall" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
-Th...
Text of poem:
Bird Watcher
It returns to the same nest. The watcher lies
beneath spring brushwood to await its coming–
at watch so long he dreams himself becoming
less than himself and more, the landscape’s eyes.
Though far beyond his eyes, beyond the range
of field-glasses, he knows it breaks no bonds:
its instinct to his knowledge corresponds,
riding the current of the season’s change.
What is th...
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Go buy Learning the Secrets of English Verse!
-My episode, The Idea Of A Poetry Conservatory
-Poetry as skill
-The Fitzgerald system of scansion
-Parallelism, Syllabics, Loose Iambics, Stress-counting, rhyme-driving, sprung rhythm, oh my!
-"All the Fun's In How You Say A Thing" by Timothy Steele
-Sonnets don't cure polio, but they're pretty gr...
Topics discussed include:
-Your host has an identity crisis
-RIP POETRY SAYS!
-Listen to Alice on Milton and with me.
-Matthew, Alice, and I argue about The Iron Lyre
-THE ERN MALLEY HOAX
-The New York School and the Generation of '68
-Read the entire text of The Darkening Ecliptic here.
-A Primer of English Versification
-Dickinson and ...
Topics discussed:
-Alice tackles Milton on Poetry Says
-The long and short of a long fellow
-Longfellow's Dante
-The Monster of Literature
-Romance languages and hendecasyllabics
-Faithful to which fidelity?
-Translational hijinks ensue
-Mosaic rhymes!
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Note: My use of the phrase "men without chests" and Matthew's were completely coincidental!
Text of poem:
Lachrimae Antiquae Novae
Crucified Lord, so naked to the world,
you live unseen within that nakedness,
consigned by proxy to the judas-kiss
of our devotion, bowed beneath the gold,
with re-enactments, penances foretold:
scentings of love across a wilderness
of retrospection, wild and object...
Text of poem:
Nor strange it is, to us who walk in bonds
Of flesh and time, if virtue's self awhile
Gleam dull like sunless ice; whilst graceful guile—
Blood-flecked like hematite or diamonds
With a red inward spark—to reconcile
Beauty and evil seems and corresponds
So well with good that the mind joys to have
Full wider jet and scope nor swings and sleeps
Forever in one cradle wearily:
Like those vas...
Read the text of the poem here
Topics discussed in this episode include:
The Iron Lyre: Poetry, Heavy Metal, and the New Sublime
Alice and Elijah vs. The Abyss on SLEERICKETS
"The Rhythms of English Poetry" by Derek Attridge
My Gerard Manley Hopkins episode
Speech stress vs....
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Jewelcraft, Housecraft, Guitarcraft
-The utilities of form
-David Gilmour
-The mysticism of scientific discovery
-Technology: What is it good for?
-Cosmic double-consciousness
-Does a cosmic perspective lead to enlightenment or nihilism?
-The functional aesthetics of Nature
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VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.
Please subscribe, rate, and review! T...
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Why poetry?
-Poetry vs. Music
-David vs. Versecraft
-My "What Is Art?" episode
-The Case For Meter and Rhyme Part I
-The Case For Meter and Rhyme Part II
-The Case Against Versecraft by Matt Wall
-"Cain" by Lord Byron
-"Empedocles On Etna" by Matthew Arnold
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Topics discussed in this episode include:
-New Critical Rococo
-The Changing Light at Sandover
-The Ingram Merrill Foundation
-Shape poems
-"Pindarick Odes"
-"Intimations of Immortality" by William Wordsworth
-"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold
-"Santa Baby" by Eartha Kitt
-What do Christmas trees and dying men...
The original 10 Poems I Like
"New Advances in Quitting Poetry" on SLEERICKETS
"This is not Exactly What I Mean" on the SLEERICKETS Secret Show
My Dante essay at Voegelin View!
Poems discussed in this episode:
"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" by W.B. Yeats
"Miriam Tazewell" by John Crowe Ransom
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Sentimentality
-National character
-Philip Larkin, novelist: "Jill," and "A Girl in Winter"
-"The Movement" movement
-The Oxford Book of 20th Century English Verse
-"Church-Going" by Philip Larkin
-The blindness of historical consciousness
-Temporal and generational erosion
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Listen to my talk on Melville here
-Listen to my poetry reading with Dan Brown here
-Outsider poetry
-The Education of Henry Adams
-Metrical hijinks
-The inherent negations of blindness
-"Durer: Insbrook, 1495" by Ern Malley
-"Lycidas" by John Milton
-Forging a new sensibility in identitarian poetry
Text of poem:
The Education of the Blind Poet; Or, Ars ...
Soundtrack to this episode
Text of poem:
The Last Act
‘Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,
Now leaves him.
It is too often only close to death,
or utter failure, when the mind is held
to truth, we see the outlines of the gods,
those whom we loved but never realized.
Above us in a void burnt-out and cold,
at unfamiliar heights their forms return
like ghosts to move across the final night,
remote and unappeased in our...
Read the Classical Outlook poetry issue here!
To receive a link to the Critical Path Symposium, follow the email link at the bottom right of this page
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Philip Walsh and Rachel Hadas!
-Classical Reception Studies
-"44 Pastorals" by Rachel Hadas
-Prosimetra/Haibun
-"Prose of Departure" by James Merrill
...
Als Zarathustra dreissig Jahr alt war, verliess er seine Heimat und den See seiner Heimat und ging in das Gebirge. Hier genoss er seines Geistes und seiner Einsamkeit und wurde dessen zehn Jahr nicht müde. Endlich aber verwandelte sich sein Herz,—und eines Morgens stand er mit der Morgenröthe auf, trat vor die Sonne hin und sprach zu ihr also: „Du grosses Gestirn! Was wäre dein Glück, wenn du nicht Die hättest, welchen du leuchtest...
Mea culpa: "The Neural Lyre" was published in 1983, not 1994. Don't know why I said that!
Read today's poem here
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-William Paley's watchmaker analogy
-Problems with teleological arguments
-Brandon Carter's Anthropic Principle
-Multiverse/many worlds theory
-John Archibald Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle
-"It from bit&...
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