Only a few days left - until this Friday - to book a place on the 'Appreciation of Poetry' course I'll be teaching for Adult Education at NUI, Galway, which starts next Tuesday, 3 October at 7pm. Contact Berna Morgan on 091-494055 to book your spot. Full details on page 6 of the NUI Galway Short Courses booklet here.
Poems by a variety of Irish and international writers, including Louis MacNiece, William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Paula Meehan and many others will be explored in a lively, informal atmosphere. Some of the themes addressed include: how poetry is made; the sonnet; the villanelle and forms of rhyme; poetry in free verse; language and vision in ekphrasis; image, nature and description in the haiku; poetry of common things and the antipoetic and spoken word. Let's put the adventure back in reading poetry; lets find the music and fun in prosody! Here's the inimitable Kim Addonizo doing just that:
Prosody Pathetique
Trochees tear your heart to tatters.
Lovers leave you broken, battered.
Fuck you, fuck off: spondees. So what.
Get high. Drop dead. Who cares. Life sucks.
Dactyls are you getting boozed in your underwear,
thinking of someone who used to be there.
These are iambs: Dolor. Despair.
And going on and on about your pain,
and sleeping pills, and dark and heavy rain.
Now for the anapests: in the end, you’re alone.
In the bag, in the dark; in a terrible rut.
With a smirk, in a wink, the wolves tear you apart.
Lovers leave you broken, battered.
Fuck you, fuck off: spondees. So what.
Get high. Drop dead. Who cares. Life sucks.
Dactyls are you getting boozed in your underwear,
thinking of someone who used to be there.
These are iambs: Dolor. Despair.
And going on and on about your pain,
and sleeping pills, and dark and heavy rain.
Now for the anapests: in the end, you’re alone.
In the bag, in the dark; in a terrible rut.
With a smirk, in a wink, the wolves tear you apart.
Kim Addonizio
