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Unread 03-26-2021, 07:03 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
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Default Rattlecast with Wendy Videlock

Another former Eratospherean was interviewed on Rattle recently:
Wendy Videlock | Rattlecast #84 (March 16)

I admire her ability to use logic and patterns as a trellis for something more characteristic of life's organic chaos. This is not my gift.

I also enjoy that the version of the poem that she recites doesn't always match the written version onscreen. Tim Green mentions that, too. I find that I engage with a different level of interest when there's a mismatch between what I'm seeing and what I'm hearing.

A few highlights:
  • Talking about "breaking out of the rut of a rhythm" by playing with it: "Meter is meant to be broken. We call those substitutions. [...] To set a pattern is to break a pattern so that something else can happen," so that it "bypasses the intellect."
  • Humor (some examples of playfulness and surprise in Wendy's work, and then a discussion.) Also more later on the bad rap that light verse gets, when it can actually have some very dark and crafty undercurrents, but I didn't note the timestamp at the time and can't find it again to link to it. See humor link below.
  • Discussion of Wendy's visual artwork and the interaction of doodles of words and drawings in her physical journal with her poetry and visual artwork
  • Falling in love with poetry. Influences, including nursery rhymes, fairy tales, dreamtime, early Yeats: "We have this moment with poetry, trying to revisit that magic, and when it happens, we're invigorated and want to do it more, reading and writing it." Consolation and exhilaration. Living favorites: A.E. (Alicia) Stallings and Rhina P. Espaillat: "They know how to work with both silence and sound."
  • Form and meter in humor. "With funny poems, if they sound like it's a cliché, just like with a joke, you kinda know it right away. So I try not to be funny in the beginning. [...] It's sort of the opposite of 'Tell a joke in your speech and it will lighten the room and everyone will like you right away.' With poetry, you must be a serious poet first, and then they let their guard down...." Discussion of Wendy Cope's light verse. "Light verse is a big tent, but it has a bad reputation." Appreciation of LIGHT and Lighten Up Online, X.J. Kennedy.
  • Tim Green said on light verse in serious magazines (since Wendy has published several light pieces in venues like POETRY): "It's such a strange thing to me, and it always is. Meter and rhyme are what regular people like. And having humor, and poetry that doesn't take itself too seriously, is what people like. And yet we publish all this really heavy stuff, about like philosophy and death and rape, and all these terrible things that happen. [...] Why are we so serious as poets? [...] I beg for more humor. [...] We did a Humor issue and it was really hard to fill. And a lot of pieces submitted for the non-themed part of the issue were funnier than the Humor submissions." I thought Wendy's thoughts on that were interesting, too.
  • I remember when she workshopped "The Various Ways 'Oh My' Can Be Said" here. Fun!
  • A discussion of recurring images, symbols, and words in our work. Wendy feels that they are positive, mythically, and that they can inform our work, in spite of the fact that we are a "symbol illiterate" world and tend to regard these as clichés to be avoided rather than embraced. She thinks that advertising has messed with our understanding of how symbols work on a broader cultural level. (This is my own paraphrase and may not do justice to what Wendy actually said.) "It's like music. It bypasses the intellect...You don't know where these things come from, sometimes, and you get some sort of reptilian brain thing going on."

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 03-26-2021 at 08:27 PM.
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