Versecraft

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

 -My new page on the OPA website! 
-My delusions of TikTok stardom 
-The deliciously old school quality of Pinkerton's mind 
-Melville and Aquinas! 
-Stanzaic structures, stanzaic rhythm 
-Why iambic pentameter reigns supreme 
-Poetry: A marriage of sound and sense 
-Pride-induced dysmorphia 
-Pride as the supreme evil 
-Should I just include Milton on every episode? Yes. 
-The irony of transcendent ambition 
-Satan doesn't have time for your iambic line 
-Satan or Jesus: Who wore flesh better? 
-Ambiguity and multivalence 
-A definition of puns 
-Why puns are lit 
-Penitence, repentance, penance 
-The anatomy of despair, ala Kierkegaard 
-You are, in fact, your own worst enemy. 
-Bilingual pun!! Milton would be proud. 

Text of poem: 

Error Pursued 

Satan in Eden “was constrain’d
into a beast.” 
All of the proud, like him, are pained, 
and you not least, 
to wear the flesh of which we all are made. 

It was a means for him and Christ. 
Shrewder than we, 
each knew for what he sacrificed. 
Carnality 
destroys when not accepted and allayed. 

It is the gift of punishment
that you refuse. 
You say you sin without consent 
and thus excuse 
self-pity and self-hate—and your despair. 

For self is faithless to its end. 
Not wife or child 
will fail as badly, nor has friend 
as soon beguiled. 
It is your way, and you are most aware. 

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:

 -The Ohio Poetry Association
-Milton: Anapests or nah?
-Revisions of elisions 
-Bach deserves some rubato now and then 
-Thomas Hardy: Poet, novelist, romantic, modernist, man of mystery. 
-Shout out to those weird inbetweeners Robinson and Frost 
-What "hap" happens to mean 
-The Dante Rossetti of sonnets 
-Lear, Job, and other sad, god-smacked men 
-What exactly is in this ecstasy? 
-The awkward moment when you realize that both the horrific theological scenarios you talk about accurately describe the Christian god. 
-Cool it with the spondees! 
-A bad god is better than no god 
-Where mete and meter meet. 
-Cretics and Amphibrachs? Somebody stop me! 
-Hardy has some assumptions to answer for 
-The real difference between believers and atheists 
-The fractal dance of chaos and order in the universe 
-The universe desires order via us. 
-Two kinds of "dice" are twice as nice 
-Two kinds of "doom" threaten and loom 
-Scansion to bacchic excess 
-Bill Coyle! 
-As usual, the Greeks did it first 

Text of poem: 

Hap 

If but some vengeful god would call to me 
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, 
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, 
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!” 

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, 
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; 
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I 
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. 

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, 
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? 
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, 
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . 
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown 
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. 

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:

 -A sheepish apology
 -The excellence of Eratosphere
 -Rhythm vs. Meter, and respective variations
 -Metrical stress vs. speech stress
 -The charm and well-adjustedness of Janet Lewis
 -Organized religion vs. natural spirituality
 -Biblical ambience = anaphora and parallelism
 -Amphibrachs!
 -Versecraft feat. Migos and Lizzo
 -Spondees and Pyrrhics!
 -And Dactyls! Collect 'em all.
 -The symbology of the daisy, no Gatsby required.
 -The Legend of the Headless Iamb
 -Hemistichs!
 -Bodily decay is comforting, guys. No no hear me out... 
-Accurate diction, or noble fiction?
 -Automatic, supersonic, Miltonic anapests...
 -God as The Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth
 -We are built for this world, not the next.
 -I agree, says Carl Dennis
 -The Earth is our bed, and we must lie in it.

Text of poem:

Country Burial 
After the words of the magnificence and doom, 
after the vision of the splendor and the fear, 
they go out slowly into the flowery meadow, 
carrying the casket and lay it on the earth 
by the grave’s edge. The daisies bend and straighten 
under the trailing skirts, and serious faces 
look with faint relief, and briefly smile. 
Into this earth the flesh and wood shall melt 
and under these familiar common flowers 
flow through the earth they both have understood 
by sight and touch and daily sustenance. 
And this is comforting: 
For heaven is a blinding radiance where 
leaves are no longer green, nor water wet, 
milk white, soot black, nor winter weather cold, 
and the eyeless vision of the Almighty Face 
brings numbness to the untranslatable heart. 

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 (/ /)

Note: I apologize for the shuffling of papers in the audio. Clearly I need a stapler. 

Mea culpa: "In a dark time" is a pyrrhic-spondee motion, not an anapest-trochee one. 

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-The multifarious talent of Wallace Stevens
-Stevens' theory of a "Supreme Fiction"
-The incoherence of this theory
-From subjectivism to objectivism
-Stevens's poem, "The Snow Man"
-Clutch your pearls, this is free verse! 
-Accentual vs. Accentual-Syllabic meter 
-How to write with the "ghost of meter." 
-Anglo-Saxon verse is no slouch 
-It's cold outside = nihilism? 
-The fallacy most pathetic 
-Maybe things DO exist independent of my mind. Huh. 
-Less fantasizing, more listening. 
-A part apart from parts cannot be whole. Take that, mysticism. 
-Anaphora, the catnip of free verse poets and Roman rhetoricians alike. 
-It's God! It's ghosts! It's people! It's... just leaves. 
-Destruction of the self vs. destruction of self-centeredness 
-The particulars of this particular particular, and the course, of course. 

Text of the poem: 

The Course of a Particular
 
Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind, 
Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less. 
It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow. 

The leaves cry . . . One holds off and merely hears the cry. 
It is a busy cry, concerning someone else. 
And though one says that one is part of everything, 

There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved; 
And being part is an exertion that declines: 
One feels the life of that which gives life as it is. 

The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention, 
Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry. 
It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves, 

In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more 
Than they are in the final finding of the ear, 
in the thing Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all. 

Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe, rate, or review, and tell your friends about the show! 

Art by David Anthony Klug 

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 (/ /)

Subjects touched on in this episode include:

 -Mid-century poet syndrome
 -Rhythmic vs. metrical variation
 -The poem as caesura salad
 -The Mind-Body problem, or, putting Descartes before the horse
 -Chaos and Cosmos
 -Is Hell artificial or organic?
 -Guilty sin vs. sinful guilt
 -More distinctions re: Romanticism
 -Insatiable desire and spiritual hollowness
 -A great Shakespeare quote from a just-ok Shakespeare play
 -Civilization as the macro-ubermensch
 -A short botanical digression
 -Finding existential hope in the way fruit works

 Text of the poem: 

Organic Bloom

The brain constructs its system to enclose
The steady paradox of thought and sense;
Momentously its tissued meaning grows
To solve and integrate experience.
But life escapes closed reason. We explain
Our chaos into cosmos, cell by cell, 
Only to learn of some insidious pain
Beyond the limits of our charted hell,
A guilt not mentioned in our prayers, a sin
Conceived against the self. So, vast and vaster
The plasmic circles of gray discipline
Spread outward to include each new disaster. 
Enormous floats the brain's organic bloom
Till, bursting like a fruit, it scatters doom. 

Thank you so much for listening. Please rate, review, subscribe, or recommend to a friend! 

Art by David Anthony Klug 

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 (/ /)

Subjects discussed in this episode include: 
 

-Aspects of devotional and Metaphysical poetry

-Memento Mori and its more fun twin, Carpe Diem 

-Tell the truth, but tell it in true rhymes. 

-The passing of time really blows. 

-Death may be the mother of beauty, but sin is the mother of death. 

-You may be star dust, but you're still dust. 

-A surprisingly harmless debate about pronouns. 

-There are no blasphemous hoodlums in this poem, unfortunately. 

-What's the difference between you and a time-keeping device? There isn't one. 

-Glass is just fancy sand. 

-Facing your mortality: not just a 17th century Christian activity. 

Text of the poem: 

Church Monuments 

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,

Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes

May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;

To which the blast of death's incessant motion,

Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,

Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust

My body to this school, that it may learn

To spell his elements, and find his birth

Written in dusty heraldry and lines;

Which dissolution sure doth best discern,

Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.

These laugh at jet, and marble put for signs,

To sever the good fellowship of dust,

And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,

When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat

To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?

Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem

And true descent: that when thou shalt grow fat,

And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know,

That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust

That measures all our time; which also shall

Be crumbled into dust. Mark, here below,

How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,

That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.

If you liked this episode, please rate, review, subscribe, or tell a friend about it! Thanks for listening. 

Art by David Anthony Klug 

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: The first line ("In a dark time, the eye begins to see) actually scans as: pyrrhic, spondee, iamb, iamb, iamb. 

Topics discussed in this episode include:
 
-How to pronounce (or not) this dude's name
-Romanticism
-Romanticism's problem child, Confessional poetry
-Mysticism via mental illness
-Meter and rhyme zaniness
-Two new kinds of feet!
-Paradoxes thrust one into figurative interpretations
-Darkness and Light
-Dante cameo! 
-Biblical allusions
-The tasteful use of personification
-Imitative instances of awesome alliteration
-Neurotypical normativity and Foucault
-Psychedelic psychosis
-Ego, Ego death, dissociation
-Existential crisis via identity crisis
-Pantheism returns! 
-...or does it? 

Text of poem: 

In A Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see, 
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; 
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree. 
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
 My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave, 
Or winding path? The edge is what I have. 

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, 
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. 
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, 
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? 
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
 And one is One, free in the tearing wind. 

Art by David Anthony Klug 

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 (/ /)

"A Song For Rising" by Edgar Bowers
 Published September 19th, 2022

 Some of the topics covered in this episode include:
 -What verse is
 -What this thing that we call meter is
 -Poetry is like crack
 -Why make time to rhyme? 
-Edgar Bowers, perfect man of arts and letters
 -I know I am, but what are you?
 -Pantheism!
 -Psych, no pantheism.
 -Confronting existence between the voids of birth and death
 -Waking up is a weird thing that happens

 The text of today's poem: 

A Song For Rising

My life is mine to have well or to lose.
I struggle to conceive, not who I am, 
but, in the constant end that I must choose, 
the being that permits me to its sum. 

Even by that attempt I must profane
the certain no pretense of mine can change, 
from which each hopeful lie departs in vain. 
I am the brief departure lies derange. 

So here I am at last, and you are there, 
the same as you have always been,
the true, the final and the necessary care. 
All that I am and hope to be is you. 

But why you are or why I am or why 
I think to ask I will no longer guess.
The manifest dilemma that was I
 confronted you between its nothingness.

 Please rate, review, and subscribe, or recommend the show to a friend! 

Art by David Anthony Klug 

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 (/ /)