Versecraft

Note: At the 19:27 mark, a word cuts out. That word is "specious!" 

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Make symposia happen!

-Hey mom, I'm on Sleerickets !

-Also on Sleerickets here ! 

-The Inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers

-Aspects of Metaphysical Poetry

-The 20th century Donne revival 

-T.S. Eliot's essay The Metaphysical Poets 

-The Dissociation of Sensibility 

-Intellect as decoration

-The life and times of Johnny

-Donne's treatise on suicide, Biathanatos 

-Hybrid sonnet redux

-Metrically, Donne likes it rough

-There are such things as stupid questions

-Casuistry! 

-Pascal's Provincial Letters 

-Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation 

-Another Jesuit poet? 

-Consequentialism

-Eliot's Objective Correlative

-Apophasis

-Hypallage returns!

-"Chug your own blood til you forget what I've done"

-To forget is to be merciless

-Not a saint, but our favorite sinner

Text of poem:

Holy Sonnet IX

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree

Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,

If lecherous goats, if serpents envious

Cannot be damn'd, alas, why should I be?

Why should intent or reason, born in me,

Make sins, else equal, in me more heinous?

And mercy being easy, and glorious

To God, in his stern wrath why threatens he?

But who am I, that dare dispute with thee,

O God? Oh, of thine only worthy blood

And my tears, make a heavenly Lethean flood,

And drown in it my sins' black memory.

That thou remember them, some claim as debt;

I think it mercy, if thou wilt forget.

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

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Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

PSA: No Versecraft next week! Sorry :(  Also, the audio is a little crackly in the beginning, but smooths out after a few minutes.  

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-Why the 1920's be like that

-The Modernist rogues gallery

-Flapper Poet Girl Gang

-The Neo-Romantics

-Contribute to the Make Versecraft A Legitimate Side Hustle Fund

-Hag Pesach Sameach, y'all

-Who knew 1899-1988 was such a tongue twister?

-Jesus Louises! (Bogan and Gluck)

-Crackpot critical savant Harold Bloom

-Cool contempo skalds Annie Finch and Shane McCrae

-Romantic-Metaphysical-Symbolist melange

-Rules are meant to be broken, apparently

-A case for Sam Spade

-"The Clouds" by Aristophanes

-Insert "Second Coming" reference here

-Classic heart vs. mind situash. 

-I'm not philosophically vain, I'm metaphysically conceited! 

-Young millennial nostalgic fav Fantasia 2000 

-The Myth of Phaethon

-I like my air medium rare

-Sympathy for the hapless mind

-The mind takes credit for the heart's work

-A devotional poem? 

-The big homie John "Spank Me Daddy" Donne

-The smaller homie Francis Thompson

-Pros and cons of Romanticism

-Modernism = Wacky Romanticism

-Post-Modernism = Wacky_R0mant1c1sm.jpg

-Aeschylus is never wrong

Text of poem:

Send Forth the High Falcon

Send forth the high falcon flying after the mind   

Till it come toppling down from its cold cloud:   

The beak of the falcon to pierce it till it fall

Where the simple heart is bowed.

O in wild innocence it rides

The rare ungovernable element,

But once it sways to terror and descent,

The marches of the wind are its abyss,

No wind staying it upward of the breast—

Let mind be proud for this,

And ignorant from what fabulous cause it dropt,

Or with how learned a gesture the unschooled heart   

Shall lull both terror and innocence to rest.

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Ernest Hilbert! 

-Robinson revisited 

-Sorry Matthew, it looks like I actually have the more controversial podcast. 

-You can listen to the Comedy Central Roast of Versecraft here. 

-The paradox of relativism

-How (evaluative) Lit Crit works 

-Ernest's Heavy Metal poem 

-Buy Ernest's new book here 

-The Hilbertian sonnet

-A New Formalist style 

-The horror of logistics

-Late Summertime Blues

-The Myth of Icarus

-The Poetics of Grammar

-The blessing and curse of the forbidden fruit

-The last rites of "Last Rites"

-Make lasting memories, then let them go. 

Text of poem:

Last Rites

I’ve known beauty almost impossible                                    

to believe, nearly always lost amid                                         

all the usual distractions. Deadlines loom.                 

Taxes come due. Birthdays pass. Debts double.                     

But once a bright and late summer sun filled             

the air, angling astonishingly through a room                        

filled with music, some old heart-aching song,                      

and there was my son, not yet two years, coming      

across the floor toward me with arms outspread,                   

his face big with a smile, and he was so strong                      

and new, unworried blue eyes, becoming                               

ever giddier, unbalanced, lunging ahead,                               

hoping to fly in that warm light with his father,                     

to hug me as if for very life, and I wished I could                  

stay there always lifting him, laughing, and such                  

light linger as if we’re still together,                           

and I will tell you it hurt it was so good,                                

and I know I’ve had that. I had that much. 

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Quotable comebacks

-My listeners down under! 

-Everyone should know about Ern Malley 

-A hearty thanks to my very first patrons! 

-You too can nourish the fiscal integrity of the show here. 

-Candidate for American poetry GOAT, Edwin Arlington Robinson. 

-Adventurer, soldier, and fairy god-fan Kermit Roosevelt.

-The Tom Bradys of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

-Killer Robinson poems Aunt Imogen, Rembrandt to Rembrandt, and Lancelot.

-The Troubadour effect

-Red vines, but not the sweet kind

-There's always a woman.

-A dead woman. 

-A wailing demon-lover.

-Heeeeeerrree's Milton! (Take a shot)

-The suicidal tendencies of a pantheistic God 

-Paul Valery's "Sketch of A Serpent." 

-"This creation thing is really killing me"-- God

-"This Jesus thing is really killing me" -- God

-Inferno XIII 

-Dante's "Contra Passo"

-Inferno III 

-The Golem

-Luke has the gall

-The Galenic theory of humors

-Orpheus and Eurydice in reverse

-But is it an evil poem?

Text of the poem here.

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Sleerickets

-Poetry Says

-Fly poet Ernest Hilbert

-Versecraft for softies podcast Poetry Unbound

-Baumeister Dave Klug

-You can now email me!

-Even better, you can now send me money!

-The one and only Alicia Stallings

-Also great poets Joshua Mehigan and Shane McCrae

-Buy Alicia's book here!

-It's another sonnet, doggone it!

-Loosey goosey iambic lines

-Ave, Tertius Paeon

-Do I get Postmodernist windbag points for saying liminality?

-Get hype for hypallage!!

-Etymological trans-linguistic puns, boy

-The Four-fold method strikes back

-The unity of opposites

-Let's get diluvian

-Elizabeth Bishop's poem The Fish

-Robert Lowell's poem The Quaker Graveyard In Nantucket

-The best pun you've heard all week

-The Moirae make marionettes of us all

Text of poem:

Fishing

The two of them stood in the middle water,

The current slipping away, quick and cold,

The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,

Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.

Maybe he regretted he had brought her—

She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told—

Perhaps a year ago, but now too old.

Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:

To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails

And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.

And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales

Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,

Life and death weighed in the shining scales,

The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

PSA: Listen to Alice's delightful podcast Poetry Says

Outline:

Intro: The Case For Accentual-Syllabic Verse

Nine Benefits of Meter

1. Compositional Mindfulness

2. Musicality

3. Memorability

4. Structural Integrity

5. Prosodic Expressivity

6. Prosodic Literacy

7. Allusiveness (with discussion of Post-Colonialism)

8. Stylistic Elevation

9. Advocacy of Order

The Benefits of Alliteration and Rhyme 

1. All the above!

2. Sonic-semantic linkage

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Outline: 

Introduction: The Burden of Proof

Part 1: The Case For Poetry in Prose

1. The Argument From Freedom

2. The Argument From Accessibility

3. The Argument From Spontaneity

4. The Argument From Natural Speech

5. The Argument From Organic Form

6. The Argument From Modernity 

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Mea culpa: When referring to the practice of poets, I should've used they/them pronouns rather than he/him. I was caught up in thinking of the poet as myself! 

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-The "Psychedelic Renaissance"

-The kind of trip depends upon the mind that trips. 

-How to have a good time your first time

-Don't be Pentheus

-The difference between a cliche and an earth-shattering truth

-My version of Plato's cave

-Chasing the dragon of enlightenment

-DMT vs. everything else

-Getting Rocky Mountain High

-The toke ain't no joke

-The curious case of tripping sober

-It's an English sonnet, mate. 

-Heads are gonna roll

-Word painting revisited

-Metrical problem children

-The Mayfly Method

-Magpie appreciation

-From psychedelia to anagogy

-A time to live, a time to die

Text of poem:

DMT

 For D.K. 

Warm in life’s late morning we ascended 

and sought out a ground to meet the Holy Face. 

High on our own summit, we commended

all our spirits’ hopes to some synthetic grace. 

All began to melt except the mind— 

yet limitless and crass geometry

held nothing that the ego could not find

far better in the magpies on the tree. 

Sober forms and true reality

the revelation: tree, and friend, and bird

more wondrous than mindless infinity. 

No angels spoke but they— yet them we heard:

“It’s fitting setting souls should seek their night—

For you, young suns, to lend the world your light.”

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-My thanks to Mr. John! 

-Matthew from Sleerickets

-Mark Jarman (now I just need a Luke!)

-Anglo-Saxon verse revisited

-Hemistichs, caesuras, accentual alliteration

-Richard Wilbur's "Junk" 

-The metrical decay of mid-century poets

-Formalism as emotional discipline

-Mark Jarman's "Questions For Ecclesiastes" and "Zeno's Eternity"

-Mark's review of Wilbur's Moliere in the Hudson Review

-John Donne's "Holy Sonnets"

-Flannery O'Connor

-Phonetic slant rhyme

-How caesuras can make lines feel funky without being funky

-Donne's Holy Sonnet VII

-The many ends of the world

-The Sermon On the Mount

-The cosmology of Lurianic Kabbalah and Tikkun Olam

-Felix Culpa

-Sexual innuendo

-To live in sin is to see the world through hell-colored glasses

-Tragic enlightenment through sin

-An unsettling double-meaning

-The meaning of an "unholy" sonnet

-Charles Baudelaire

-William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell"

Text of poem:

Unholy Sonnet 16 

We drove to the world’s end and there betrayed 

the ones we promised not to. While we drove 

We talked about the afterlife and love, 

slowing to an impatient crawl, delayed 

by roadwork, in an idling parade 

we couldn’t see the head or tail of. 

We inched past miles of asphalt, reeking stuff, 

stroked by a rake of fire as it was laid. 

And we agreed the analogues for hell 

came to us everywhere we looked in life. 

But not for heaven. For it we couldn’t find 

a metaphor or likeness. Not until 

we had betrayed our loved ones, at the end, 

did we have something to compare it with.  

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Mea culpa: When I said "anagram," I meant to say acronym! 

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-Fabulous crafter of verse A.E. Stallings

-Her upcoming Hudson Review piece "Frieze Frame" and recent Selected Poems "This Afterlife"

-New deats on Keats

-The controversh of Hopkins' verse

-The life and times of Gerard

-Toward a definition of "Inscape"

-Anagogy and Four-Fold Interpretation

-Christ as the code of the universe software

-Duns Scotus returns!

-Haecceity vs. Quiddity

-Haecceity as the root of love

-Anglo-Saxon verse and "sprung rhythm"

-Cynghanedd!!

-Metrical counterpoint

-Ave, Secundus Paeon

-Kings, fishes, dragons, flies, fire

-The Ichthys

-The union of sense and sensibility

-We, the lovable characters in Christ's masquerade.

Text of poem:

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)