Today’s WORK via Reader N.—thanks!
WORK
Yeats said that he wrote in form because if he didn’t he wouldn’t know when to stop. Like Samuel Beckett I prefer the word ‘shape’ to ‘form.’ At Trinity [College Dublin] during a course on Aristotle’s Poetics our Greek professor W. B. Stanford told us to come back the following week with our own definition of poetry. Mine was: ‘If prose is a river, then poetry’s a fountain.’ I still feel that’s pretty good because it suggests that ‘form’ (or ‘shape’) is releasing rather than constraining. The fountain is shapely and at the same time free-flowing.
—Michael Longley
—from “A Jovial Hullabaloo”
—found in One Wide Expanse (The Poet’s Chair: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry)
WORD(S)
tintamarre /tin-tə-MAR/. noun. Generally, an uproar, a din, a hubbub…a clamor. Also a community parade filled with noise and noisemakers. From French tintamarre, from Middle French tinter (to ring), from Latin tinitare (to ring frequently), which is a frequentative/repetitive form of tinnire (to ring).
“He learn’d and profited much by that hurly-burly or tintimarre.” (Michel de Montaigne, translated by John Florio)
“I was president of the August 15 Committee in Edmunston the year they decided to hold the Acadian Tintamarre parade. I spent half my time arguing you do the Tintamarre on foot, not in cars.” (Frances Daigle)
“I did guess, by such a tintamarre, and cough, and sneeze, and groan, among de spirit one other night here, dat there might be treasure and bullion hereabout.” (Sir Walter Scott)
“A tintamarre of voices and a jingle of glasses accompanied the violins and tambours de Basque as the company stood up and sang the song, winding up with a grand burst at the chorus…” (William Kirby)
WEB
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Readers B., C. and K. all shared a link to “The Really Big One”, about the possible future Cascadia earthquake that could destroy Seattle. Further reading from both ends of the spectrum of reactions: “Earthquake experts on ‘The Really Big One’: Here’s what will actually happen in Seattle” and “The Five Scariest Takeaways From the New Yorker Article About the Earthquake That Will ‘Devastate’ Seattle”
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The Great Britain Air Letter, 1941–2011 A Miscellany to Celebrate 70 Years
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Little girl hands in the world’s scariest poem to ‘Creativity Corner’
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Today in 1951, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is published by Little, Brown and Co. Even now it sells more than 250,000 copies annually (more than 65 million so far). Dismissed by many as a dated book for adolescents, I enjoyed re-reading Catcher in the Rye just a few years ago…which may just mean I’m a dated adolescent. A few years ago, it was revealed in the documentary Salinger that five new Salinger books would be published starting this year.
WATCH/WITNESS
Word as Image (by Ji Lee) — “Challenge: Create an image out of a word, using only the letters in the word itself. Rule: use only the graphic elements of the letters without adding outside parts.”
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Reader G. writes in: “For my money, James Tate was one of our best short story writers even if everyone insists on calling them ‘prose poems.’”
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Reader W. wonders: “What happened to the Cormac McCarthy contest?” — Stay tuned. Real soon now…
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