One of the great things about this “As The Pizza Cooks” kind of writing is that it saves me from having to figure out titles. I hate figuring out titles for things. I remember in grade school they used to have these reading comprehension tests where you’d read a paragraph and then were asked to select the best title for it. I always got those wrong and never understood why. It’s also the among the most common criticisms I get with my poems in a poetry workshop.
Seriously, I can take a poem to a workshop, ask for input and I can almost guarantee that I’ll get two comments: This should be a longer poem and you need a better title.
I’m a bit traumatized about this so to avoid having that come up again on my blog, I just started using numbers as titles. Now, I do at least let you know if I’m talking about music or nothing (these pizza posts are about nothing, but you keep pressing the like button on them so here we are).
I didn’t sit down to talk about poem titles. Actually I’m a bit worried I might have a bit of a sinus infection, but what’s really on my mind is reading poetry out loud. You see, in those poetry workshops I attend, we read each other’s poem and then it’s open for comments about the poem. We do send a written version of the poem before the workshop so we can read it ahead of time and hopefully come up with something useful to say about it. The general idea is to say something that you liked, something you didn’t, something that you didn’t understand and offer an editing suggestion or two (all of which the writer is allowed to ignore completely).
But … I hate to admit the number of times I’ve read a poem, made detailed notes and thought I had something useful and helpful to say only to have the poet read their poem and my brain go, “Oh, that’s what you mean.” Then I drop everything I’d written beforehand about the poem and have to make up comments on the spot.
There is just something about hearing a poem vs. reading it that can often change my view of a poem — especially when it’s the writer of the poem who is reading aloud. I often find myself saying that I prefer to hear poems rather than read them. Poems are meant to be heard.
Currently I’m not in a regular poetry workshop group. Sadly there just aren’t that many in my area and I haven’t found a group that meets online, but I have found a number of places online that do regular readings of poetry. Some of these also do a bit of commentary on the poems while one has a Q&A session. Mostly these are podcasts which I can listen too while I’m in the workshop, but I did find one doing live readings with the real poets reading their own works.
Here’s a couple I like:
https://www.inflectionism.com/ The Infectionist Review is an online poetry journal that’s publish a couple of my favorite poets. They do a monthly poetry reading with a Q&A session.
Two Podcasts:
https://www.slowdownshow.org/ The Slow Down does a daily reading of a poem with commentary. They also have a daily mailing list with the poem of the day. I prefer the podcast.
https://onbeing.org/series/poetry-unbound/ Poetry Unbound is a weekly show by Padraig O Tuama, a great contemporary poet. There’s a lot to Padraig, and this is just his comments on poems he reads.
I used to listen to a woodworking podcast and a maker podcast but both ended their shows so now I’m picking up poetry and one theological one: https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/podcast/ The Bible for Normal People. I don’t write much about my theology on this blog, but I do have beliefs, interests and opinions. Peter Enns, who started this podcast is a contemporary theologian and professor of Bible studies at St. Davids University. I like the fresh and uncomplicated interpretations he gives and the depth which his podcast goes. The podcasts are also long enough for me to get a fair amount of work done in my shop.
Well, that’s all I have time for as the timer just went off.
And maybe this will be a new feature, but here’s this week’s pizza:
The curst is Diane Henders recipe that she posted for me in a comment a few weeks ago. Worked great — well I guess it could be rounder or squarer or something. The toppings are spinach, pepperoni, olives, mushrooms and red onion. Yum.
Andrew's View of the Week 