r/TrueLit • u/pregnantchihuahua3 ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow • 3d ago
Weekly General Discussion Thread
Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.
Weekly Updates: N/A
8
u/Plastic-Persimmon433 3d ago
Is anyone else not a fan of present tense in fiction? I try to fight it but I just can't help feeling that it's a bit hacky every time I read it. Obviously I've enjoyed some books like Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, but most of the time it's kind of grating to read. It's especially annoying because a lot of newer American short fiction tends to operate in this mode. I'd like to see if I can get my mind changed though so please recommend your favorite stories or novels written in present tense.
5
u/littlebirdsinsideme 2d ago
No, I think present tense can be really effective. In general I'm always interested in what all the different combinations of tense and person can do that the others can't, so I don't dismiss or dislike any of them. But when someone uses present tense with minimal thought about whether it's right for the story or how to use it effectively I can see how it can be grating. Like they're using it to try to force that sense of immediacy and as a result it feels fake or something?
Favorite novel written in present tense, maybe Agota Kristof's Book of Lies.
1
u/Plastic-Persimmon433 2d ago
That's fair, and I think similar to what you're saying I feel that it is a mode that is deceptively difficult and can easily go wrong, at least for me. But I'll definitely check out Book of Lies.
3
u/merurunrun 2d ago
I just finished reading Darlingtonia, a kind of Mr. Robot/Enemy of the State-ish modern technothriller, that was almost all third-person present tense. It was a bit jarring at first (like you, I'm not normally a fan), but it worked well enough that it didn't bother me after a chapter or two. Fitting with some themes of the story, it felt less like the events of the book were being described, and more like the characters were being surveilled or even "programmed" by the narration in real-time.
1
6
u/-pomette 3d ago edited 2d ago
Trying to decide which books to acquire next as I rebuild my book collection to reflect my current literary penchant. I’m thinking around two (maybe three) books for now. Problem is, I want all of these and can’t possibly decide. Any thoughts?
- The Passion According to G.H by Clarice Lispector
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
I’ve only read Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector (absolutely incredible) and would really love to read more of her work this year. So maybe…definitely! one Lispector book?
Edit: Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights are now part of my collection. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, it really helped finalize my decision!
6
u/lispectorgadget 2d ago
I think all these are great! I would definitely prioritize Middlemarch; it's essential.
6
u/Brilliant_Fail1 2d ago
I'd say they're all wonderful books in totally different ways (except the Goldfinch, very much the odd one out in terms of quality or importance to my mind). Lispector is a major part of the experimental tradition, but the other three are major works full stop and I'd say you simply have to read all three of Bronte, Morrison and Eliot. Whatever order you get those in, get all three. Eliot is effortful intellectually, Morrison emotionally, but Wuthering Heights is a straight up blast, albeit with occasional touches of Victorian/Gothic turgidity...
4
u/SMAAAASHBros 2d ago
Middlemarch has been declared the greatest novel of all time on multiple occasions, and for good reason imo. One of my favorites.
6
u/TrueCrimeLitStan 2d ago edited 2d ago
Been a while since I last plugged r/Nabokov
It's definitely transformed I think to be a better place in terms of discussion, light scholarship, and avoiding the cliches that dominate every conversation about him
In light of Halloween, spooky recommendations are always enjoyable.
Medea by Euripides
Is my suggestion. It goes right for it
4
u/Soup_65 Books! 2d ago
A few less standard spooky ventures:
pierre - Melville, Nightwood - Djuna Barnes, Titus Andronicus - Shakespeare, Alexandra - Lycophron
3
5
u/dismal_windfall 1d ago
I wanted to get some other’s thoughts. What are the chances that Anne Rice gets reassessed? Other genre writers have received acclaimed years after they were active but it hasn’t really happened to Rice. She tried writing epic literary novels like Cry to Heaven and Feast of All Saints, but both were mixed at the time and no one really talks about them anymore.
5
u/Fearless_Industry825 22h ago edited 22h ago
I removed the last of the giant sunflower plants last week. There were a handful of very small sunflowers left, so I cut those and collected the last flowers for a small bouquet. Now I can look at them while I sit at the dining room table and write this. Summer can be a cruel season, but I am left with this token of flowers in October.
We’ve had some peak autumn days over the past few weeks. Crystalline blue sky, the leaves changing color, cool days and cold nights. Even the stars look brighter on crisp cold, dry nights. This is one of the best times of the year in the Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest. I muddle through the hot, humid days of summer in anticipation of days like this.
3
u/CabbageSandwhich 2d ago
Got to go to the Vollman and Devyn Defoe reading on Saturday and it was really amazing. Defoe's reading got me to pick up a copy of her book Burnside and I look forward to reading it. Vollman read a couple of passages from A Table For Fortune and it made waiting for my local bookstore to receive my order all the more challenging. They had copies for sale there but I like giving the store I can walk too as much of my book money as possible.
The Q&A afterwards kind of blew me away. Vollman is so thoughtful and well spoken and in a room full of people who brought their stacks of Vollman books to have signed I think Defoe was great also. Vollman clearly cares so much about people and wants things to be better. It sounded like the event was recorded so if it makes it's way out there it's definitely worth checking out.
I got to see Michael Lentz talk last month and aside from these two occasions I don't think I've been to an author event since Brian Jacques came to town in elementary school. It made me miss college and being in a room with people who are genuinely discussing ideas with curiosity.
1
u/d-r-i-g 2d ago
What sections did he read? I’m about halfway through it.
1
u/CabbageSandwhich 2d ago
I believe the first part was from book 1 or 2, Matthew is finding out about Abu Grhaib and Dave/Elliotts knowledge of it at the dinner table
and then I'm pretty sure a section from Book 4 Matthew has run away and isn't talking to his parents. He's hiding at his Aunt's house who tells him she won't lie to his parents. He runs away and hops on a freight train and we get some of his thoughts and description of riding the rails up the Feather River Canyon. Which Vollman discussed afterwards is a route he has rode more than once.
7
u/lispectorgadget 2d ago
My partner and I went to Montreal for a few days. It felt incredibly surreal to be in a country with public programs, a social safety net. We met up with a friend who was living off of publicly funded grants and part-time contracts as an artist, and living in a beautiful, modern apartment. She referenced a program for trauma patients that the government funded, and as we were walking away, my partner and I laughed--could you imagine, lololol.
When we got back to NYC, I felt this hum of desperation I didn't feel in Montreal. Advertisements were boiling, shrill. This guy with a swollen, bare, elephantine foot walked delicately throughout the subway car, asking for money, apologizing for the smell. We got a medical bill that only feels survivable because of insurance, because of the social safety net of us two, because we have the time and knowledge to fight medical bureaucracy--and it's still breathtaking.
Anyway, loved Montreal; we were joking but not really joking about moving there. Also started The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy, and for the first 100 pages I was like, this is lowkey, kind of, just Haruki Murakami, but I got past that and now it really rips.
Also read You Don't Need a Smartphone by August Lamm. Is anyone doing the dumbphone thing? Intrigued by it after this.
3
u/fragmad 2d ago
I want to use a dumb phone but my job requires Slack, and I use my phone for music, taking photographs, and Ordinance Survey maps while running, etc. But I throughly understand the appeal as I go through phases of being revolted at my own doomscrolling and then other phases of enjoying the quality time I spend with my leftist science fiction bro Discord.
2
u/Soup_65 Books! 2d ago
my lil bro works for a canadian company so he goes up there sometimes and he fucking loves montreal. He's straight up said he'd try to move there if it wasn't so cold in the winter. But yeah it'd be nice if things were good here. I've actually been on a "go to all those random medical checkups i've been putting off now that my new health insurance kicked in" spree lately myself, so I feel spiritutally if not physically or financially. city's a fucking pressure festival
I can't do the dumbphone thing because a sorta-job I sorta have requires that I be able to get alerts pretty quickly (it's also like it never actually happens so this isn't in an overwhelming way it just is easier). But my mom's never had a smartphone and refuses to ever get one. I think it's very cool.
2
u/ToHideWritingPrompts 17h ago
we had the same experience when we went up to montreal a few years ago. it's a cliche, but that joie de vivre man. at least when we were there (of course as tourists, so rose colored glasses and all) everyone just felt so oriented around a totally different perspective of what serves what and all. And that was coming from new england which is already once removed from east coast life
1
u/lispectorgadget 1m ago
I know right? it was kind of crazy. On the one hand--tourism, yeah--on the other hand??? I have known a few people who are artists who have gotten grants from the Montreal government to work on their craft, and like?? can you imagine that happening in the US lolol
7
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 2d ago edited 1d ago
So: Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It seemed from the outset everyone was pretty excited about this Prize in comparison to the Bob Dylan fiasco, which was the last time I paid close attention to the Nobel Prize. That and I have a vague recollection of them not awarding someone a year or two ago, but it could have been another prize. (They actually blend together.) Then I see Emily Wilson compare her to Rupi Kaur, the poster child for Instagram poetry, also Canadian. Probably comes from the fact Wilson is a scholar of that dimension and Anne Carson mainly subordinates classicalism toward poetry I assume? I'm not all that familiar with her work honestly. I've enjoyed a handful of poems but not too much familiarity. And, of course, a modern poet getting any wider recognition comes with the usual song and dance about how much contemporary poetry is worthless and just prose snapped up like sticks and so forth. If you need any further evidence most of American culture is always trying to put the genie back in the bottle, look no further than that nonsense. Some people's idea of good poetry today is like X.J. Kennedy. Then again that might be giving the attitude too much credit. Like, they would know about Kennedy. Although if I have to hear another facile question about "does this line scan or not?" I think I'll die. Actually spontaneously combust, so if you see smoke--you know why.
8
u/littlebirdsinsideme 2d ago
compare her to Rupi Kaur
Yeah I think that's fucking crazy, must be the result of some inter-classicist beef
4
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 2d ago
The Nation review I read has that kind of tone--though Anne Carson is a poet and Wilson is a straightforward example of the classics scholar. At best it feels a little like a scholar wagging a finger at a poet who doesn't have much interest in scholarship, at worst you could even accuse Wilson of a truly fundamental misunderstanding of poetry. Although I feel charitable toward Wilson because she seems aware of the issue that scholarship doesn't really survive in a poem.
7
u/bananaberry518 2d ago
I don’t know anything about Carson really, but I do think Wilson is a bit of a hater sometimes lol.
3
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 2d ago
She definitely can be--the review has a line about Anne Carson fan merch. And I can't begrudge a scholar their hate, somehow I feel all of them earned it in some fashion. It's as per usual the way things go.
5
u/Roshers 2d ago
Emily Wilson compared Anne Carson to Rupi Kaur? That is brutal. I’ve never read Carson, but woof.
4
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 2d ago
Indeed, the "Be Canadian, be zany" line traces back to a review Wilson did for The Nation only a couple years ago on Wrong Norma. Wilson actually associates Carson to a brief genealogy of Canadian poets that began with Margaret Atwood--whose poetry is like Robert Bly's with brief, unmetered lines on contemporary experiences and their connection to deeply felt myth. Rupi Kaur is according to Wilson at least the logical conclusion of it all.
The review feels rather astute for a classicist commenting on our contemporary moment honestly. Although very limited as well admittedly.
5
u/linquendil let your indulgence set me free 2d ago
Maybe I’m academic-brained, but I think that review in The Nation is not so unreasonable when read in its fullness. Insightful observations about Carson’s method, perfectly valid critiques (the Greek typography stuff is really inexcusable, IMO), and overall a sense of affection in spite of Wilson’s scholarly and artistic frustrations. Maybe there are some cheap shots, but I’m not sure they’re delivered with any real venom.
3
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 2d ago edited 2d ago
Well, if there's no venom to the insult, it has enough bite force to give everyone pause. I mean, comparisons to Rupi Kaur no matter how you slice it are pretty damning, genealogically or otherwise. Nevertheless I don't condemn Wilson for feeling so strongly. After all, a lot of her public statements on really anything that touches on classical work has been critical. But that comes on the heels of some pretty strong reception to her own work. And there's always going to be a need to differentiate that work from other cultural sea changes. Anne Carson getting a Nobel Prize. The Odyssey film adaptation having been a modest success. Although I actually sympathize with Wilson: most of these works are not all that compelling. I suppose there are people who would have been concerned with untranslated Greek on a page. I'm sure that person exists somewhere.
What I personally have a problem with is the lack of care Wilson displays in her comments about poetry generally. I don't care about Anne Carson all that much but I find some of the ideas pressed in that review typical of a scholarly approach. It's not that shocking.
2
u/linquendil let your indulgence set me free 2d ago
I’m curious about your second paragraph. What ideas do you object to?
3
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 2d ago
I don't know if it's ideas specifically but rather a handful of stray comments I've glanced at here and there. Nothing suggests its programmatic. But they begin with constant references to metrical poetry and so forth. Part of it is understandable given the nature of responsible scholarship but also I find it does impair judgement of what contemporary poetry is. Versification and prosody simply aren't serious issues in contemporary poetry. And some of Wilson's reactions to Anne Carson are in that lane I would argue. More simply put, Wilson is a great scholar, but that doesn't translate to an understanding of contemporary poetry. In fact, it might even be a detriment to it frankly.
I imagine that's also the root of her frustration that everyone calls her a great modernizer and iconoclast of Homer as opposed to someone fundamentally more accurate, attuned to scholarship. (Ultimately that's for the scholars to argue, not those outside the discipline.) But again I would say that's kind of a problem when assessing anything contemporaneous poetically speaking. It's a disjunction of discursivity, if anything.
5
u/pregnantchihuahua3 ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow 2d ago
While I really did not like Autobiography, comparing her to Kaur is genuinely insane… I’ve read a number of her shorter poems since her win. Still not a fan of those, but they are poetry. Kaur just writes drivel.
4
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 2d ago edited 2d ago
In all fairness, I don't necessarily think Wilson went out to deliberately insult Carson, but it is incredible to be like: "The creative legacy of Anne Carson is ultimately realized in Rupi Kaur." Just incredible stuff. Part of striking out the difference probably comes down to a different idea of how to translate a poem from ancient sources. Wilson's already controversial in that regard, but Carson's taking of translating as part of the poetic remand itself does force some uncomfortable questions. Especially if your whole thing is scholarly appreciation of that kind of those very old texts.
3
u/plenipotency 2d ago
I just read that Emily Wilson review of Wrong Norma and thought it was a great review. Saying it compares Carson to Rupi Kaur is clickbait of the highest order. Atwood and Kaur are brought up as fellow Canadian authors of accessible poetry with young followers, and then Wilson writes “And yet Carson is a very different kind of writer from either Kaur or Atwood, or indeed anybody.” Wilson isn’t even really hard on Rupi Kaur here.
3
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 1d ago
Okay and do you think there might be something to the line of "Anne Carson fan merch"? Or is that another innocuous compliment when she then says, "I'd buy that hoodie for sure"? I actually found the review astute and even learned the foibles of untranslated Greek on the page. Because I don't think it's "clickbait" to take what Wilson says and understand it as an appeal, but why even mention Atwood or Rupi Kaur at all? Especially when it opens with a very straightforward caricature of Anne Carson's work: "Be Canadian. Be zany. Be moody," etc. Wilson invites the comparison and that's fine. She doesn't have to write about the foibles of Rupi Kaur because that's commonly acknowledged. It's a rhetorical appeal to what Rupi Kaur means as a synecdoche. Maybe it's harsh but it's honest. Otherwise it seems a little irresponsible to me to introduce other names for such a innocuous purpose when everyone knows what Rupi Kaur represents. And anyways: all writers are different from each other basically. It's pointing out the obvious.
1
u/Physical_Milk_4600 1d ago
“All writers are different “: of course! But a major distinction of Carson’s work is to juxtapose very different writers, eg Proust and Euripides. Wilson’s essay is about that mode of being surprisingly “wrong” so the piece starts with a demo of what that can be like. I feel people are commenting without reading the whole essay…
2
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think you're missing a subtler point here despite having read the review--Wilson ends on a mixed metaphor of sorts about the fox and the hedgehog in her closing paragraph. Wilson here through Archilochus aligns Carson at first with the fox who knows many things. Indeed, from Euripides to Proust, but then somewhat awkwardly adds there is something akin to the hedgehog as it curls into itself. It's the focal point of the entire review. The title guarantees our focus on it because frankly the motif of fox and hedgehog don't appear all that frequently throughout the review anyways. Wilson quite explicitly argues that Carson's curling into herself into her works as the one big thing she knows. This might also explain what Wilson argues is Carson's lack of universal empathy someone like Montague was said to possess. (She also adds an anecdote about how to prepare herself for a reading, Anne Carson will repeat to herself, "I am Anne Carson.") If anything, it is not surprising the on-the-fly genealogy Wilson sets up starts with Atwood and ends with Rupi Kaur. You could go further and begin to examine the political dimension to those kinds of remarks.
Like I have said, it's an astute review of a poet's work. Largely critical, nevertheless. Any poet would be lucky to have that kind of attention. I'm sympathetic to Wilson's assessment, but I'm not going to pretend there isn't anything harsh about a comparison to Atwood and Rupi Kaur. What that might mean for the work in question. That'd be irresponsible, frankly speaking.
2
u/Soup_65 Books! 2d ago
I've got little familiarity with her as well, though I am going to read Autobiography of Red (half because /u/pregnantchihuahua3 hates it so much that I'm curious). I have read some of her sappho and not exactly a fan (I think it plays into creating a myth of who Sappho was that arguably pays no attention to the real person).
I love when people care about scansion because I literally can't hear it. Like I'm tone deaf or something. Ironically tones in Chinese make some sense to me. Maybe it's the actual emphasis conveying specific meaning part rather than the enjambment of a sonic structure that is either so necessary it's hard to avoid (ie iambs in english which I refuse to believe is anything but just how english works), or the fact that at the same time when tone can carry sense but not specific meaning (ie. how you inflect an english word can imply different ephases or meaning but doesn't literally change the word according to an established vocabulary like how that is the case in chinese).
I don't know yo. You know by now I'm obsessed with noises, all into poems now, and am a massive hater. So I don't think you find me gone in a puff of smoke, me and the vitriol have too much fun together.
2
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 2d ago
I tried reading Autobiography of Red and did not finish it. Not from anything really standing out, but from apathy. I kind of slid her poetry amongst people like Louise Glück and Mary Oliver, except maybe she had a robust intellectual background. And the shorter poems have been fine enough. Her translations are probably the most interesting aspect to her body of work going forward, though it isn't like Men in Aida or anything, much more like a collage. Whether or not the historical person of Sappho is a concern--who cares? We're talking about poetry, Sappho's dead.
Well, again a text doesn't have tones. All of the aspiration toward a condition of music Pound was trying to attain was frankly impossible. I suspect he knew that because none of the people who argue for versification have actually squarely confronted what music actually is. Nothing of actual music really makes it inside a poem. All that versifiers have are a series of jingles and mnemonic devices. They couldn't even appreciate noise. If anything, neo-formalism was a true nadir of American culture. Final evidence of poetry fully becoming marginalized.
5
u/foxinanattic 2d ago
> Nothing of actual music really makes it inside a poem
well, rhythm does, doesn't it? and in some sense rhythm is the most basic element of music. (I'll be honest, I'm coming at this from a point of view where I think poetry with strong rhythms is better than free verse)
2
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 2d ago
In music, rhythm is pitch. That is not something a poet or really any writer has access to. Rhythm also doesn't just mean beats in a linear fashion. Nor does the fact that speech having rhythms (defined as loosely as possible) constitute anything truly meaningful for a poet because that constitutes speech and not writing. It's about keeping everything in time, which a poet is never really worried about. And anyways: it is next to possible to actually account for that. The reader will enforce their own rhythm on these things. They used to think John Keats couldn't rhyme but then later learned he had an accent. They used to call him a poet of the Cockney school. And all the specific rhythms with which we read Keats today are entirely our own anyways. Calling that music is not accurate. Almost feels like an insult. Paradise Lost famous for its blank verse is as much a suggestion as Milton needed as anything actually concrete to a poem.
If anything, a focus on the meagerness of the sound and sight available to a writer is ultimately a distraction from the actual raw materials of a writer, which is conceptual. There are many, many forgettable poems Gautier wrote about trees and lakes. Wilde's poetry also takes a similar cue. And in the last analysis I don't think that's especially fair to a poet. Again Pound's famous description made it clear there was only an aspiration to music which hasn't been borne out.
3
u/foxinanattic 2d ago
> Rhythm also doesn't just mean beats in a linear fashion
I'm not quite sure how to interpret this. In Indian music, rhythm is pretty much exactly defined by a cycle of repeating beats (of a percussion instrument like the tabla, or claps).
> Nor does the fact that speech having rhythms (defined as loosely as possible) constitute anything truly meaningful for a poet because that constitutes speech and not writing
I see poetry as primarily oral, closely tied to song, so for me it is closer to speech and music than writing, and rhythm is a very important aspect of it. If you think of poetry as primarily a written form, then it makes sense to me that rhythm would be much less important to you.
1
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 2d ago
Again, every rhythm is also pitch, which is what makes Indian music sound the way it does to the human ear. And how everything is kept in time is a vitally important feature to that. Time signatures are immanent rather than linearly realized aspect to a musical work. It is there from the start and defines the sound further. These resources are not available to the poet in any capacity, whether or not we are talking about oral works or prose specifically.
And I don't underscore orality because a very great majority of poets do not behave with any special emphasis on speech patterns, which is not unavailable in prose. In fact, it is possible to set prose to music as much as anything else. Librettos these days are often written in prose as well. I simply don't see the connection poetry would have to music. Hell, the fact we can coherently talk about prose-poetry at all suggests the connection is not about some essential connection but rather a generic reorientation along the way to a poetic remand of musicality.
3
u/foxinanattic 1d ago
For most of history, poetry was an oral art form, and in many cultures it was sung, so closely associated with music. For me the idea that orality can be separated from poetry is very hard to accept, but that is probably just because of the literary culture I grew up with, where poetry still has a strongly oral and musical association. My feeling is that the very idea of prose poetry and even free verse can only make sense in a literary culture where poetry has been separated from orality. I'm not entirely sure, but I believe free verse in European literature really became popular after poetry was primarily being received as a written and not an oral art form. In oral poetry-dominant cultures, on the other hand, traditional metric poetry is still predominant.
1
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 1d ago
Indeed, perhaps poetry can have those expected associations with music for other cultures and the poetic remand would after all contend with that history. It would still be called poetry. Perhaps that's what makes this conversation incommensurable to a degree. But I would still underscore the lack of necessity for that connection. And that soon, if it hasn't already happened, there are many poets in every culture who have realized something similar to one degree or another. (And I would imagine that it has already happened to such an extent.) Free verse and prose-poetry can be found in any culture, there's nothing essentially Western about unmusical poetry. A demand for music is concordant to a demand for silence as well.
2
u/foxinanattic 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, we have free verse in South Asia as well. However because a large part of the audience for poetry is through musical renditions, it's still not as popular. To me, as a reader, prose poetry reads more as a somewhat poetic form of prose than what i (intuitively) recognise as poetry
Do you think that unmusical poetry is perhaps more "pure" than musical poetry, because it doesn't have the relation/constraint of another art form?
edit: I thought of something related that might be interesting. In Urdu literature, there is a genre called "Afsancha" which literally means (very) short story. From the name, it would be natural to think that this is the equivalent of flash fiction in English - which is true of some examples, yet others seem more like prose poetry. Though there's a decent amount of free verse in Urdu, I don't think there's much prose poetry, at least using that name. Which might be because orality/musicality is still so strongly associated with poetry, that "prose poems" cannot be conceived of as a genre, and have to be thought of as "very short stories" instead.
and of course, I agree, that there's nothing Western about non-musical poetry. I just used Western Europe as an example because it was one of the first societies to achieve widespread literacy at a level where poetry could succeed as a primarily written genre. I wouldn't be surprised if there were examples of free verse from China dating much before European ones, because they had a highly literate population much earlier.
→ More replies (0)1
u/foxinanattic 2d ago edited 2d ago
I usually enjoy metric poetry, but I can't help but feel there's something artificial about iambic pentameter in English verse. Because with the way feet are paired you can end up with a foot like /from the/ with "from" being the "stressed" syllable just because it's a little bit stronger than "the". Some Renaissance verse in iambic pentameter actually scans better to me by reading the lines as having four stresses, like in old English alliterative verse or even a sort of weird form of Italian hendecasyllables.
2
u/NicePaint2863 12h ago
Present tense sometimes makes a novel feel like it's live-tweeting itself. But when it works, there's something terrifying about the lack of hindsight. Even the narrator doesn't know what any of this means yet. So, definitely for me its a mixed format, amazing when done well, terrible when done even mediocrely
11
u/foxinanattic 2d ago edited 2d ago
I find it very sad how communal singing is dying away as an activity. In the UK it seems like it has more or less died out, outside folk singing hobby groups, the odd choir and possibly football chants. I grew up in a family where we sing all the time, individually or as a group, so for me it's a foundational part of my appreciation of music.
unrelated, but I've started finding it extremely irritating how every year when the Nobel prize is announced, lots of people immediately start talking about how Murakami is a bad writer. I understand why people think he doesn't deserve the prize, (personally I think it's a mostly meaningless award and it's pointless to talk about "deserving" it), he's definitely not one of the best writers of our time. But I think his short stories are actually very good, much better than his novels in fact, and I hate when people act like anyone who enjoys his work must have bad taste or not know anything about literature!