Currently Browsing: Tiel Aisha Ansari
3 Aug 2012
How personal should writing be?
Well, clearly there’s no one answer. There’s a question of genre: in a memoir or autobiography, we expect everything to have some bearing on the subject. As readers, we (or at least, I) turn to such books to get inside the author/narrator’s head. When world events crop up, we want to hear how they influenced that person’s life or world-view more than how they influenced history in... read more
25 Jul 2012
Attracting student projects
I seem to be attracting a lot of them. There was this one. This was a couple of years ago, and I didn’t find out about it until afterwards. The person never contacted me directly, but followed my blog for a while and made some interesting observations. Last fall a music student at Chapman University asked if he could use “Sestina, Inspired by Rumi” as the basis for a musical composition,... read more
5 Jul 2012
Triumphs and milestones
Greatest triumph? Short answer: Getting my first book published. Hardly worth a whole post. I view my growth as a writer in terms of milestones. Each one is substantial, compared to the one before, but it’s hard to say which is the “greatest.” So here’s a quick chronological list: Deciding I was serious about poetry Getting my first publication, in an online journal (long since... read more
12 Jun 2012
Alliteration and Repetition
Friends And Foes Inform Me I’m Flourescent Merriam-Webster defines alliteration as follows: “the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables”. The Prosody Guide offers a slightly different definition: “identity of the first sounds preceding the vowels in the syllables carrying the primary stresses of two words”. According to the Prosody definition,... read more
7 Jun 2012
Difficulties? What difficulties? Also some remarks about formal poetry
I haven’t really run into any difficulties as a writer. Yet. There’s plenty of time. Which is not to say I’ve realized all my writing goals: far from it. But I feel like I’m making steady progress toward the important ones, so it’s really just a matter of continuing to apply myself. That doesn’t count as a difficulty. And of course, there are time management issues, but... read more
25 May 2012
Fear of Hypocrisy
What I most fear as a writer is hypocrisy. This may sound funny coming from someone who’s nattered on about how poetry doesn’t need to be personal, defends the right of poets to write fiction, etc. etc. But just as there’s a difference between fiction and lying, there’s a difference between fact and integrity. Just because a poem is about “true” facts doesn’t mean... read more
2 May 2012
It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing
Back to the idea of rhythm. How does one create such? Traditional methods include rhyme, meter, and alliteration. (Alliteration isn’t used much in English verse any more, which is kind of a shame.) Repetition of key words, phrases, or lines is also common in many older verse forms. Creating rhythm in free verse is more challenging, and unfortunately is sometimes ignored: this results in the kind... read more
17 Apr 2012
Scansion or Meter
This will be the first of a series of three or four irregularly spaced posts about technical issues in formal poetry. Somewhere in here I’ll likely write a post about why I write formal poetry, and why every poet should at least be able to. There’s a good deal of technical information about scansion and meter at various online locations, including my favorites, Vole Central and the Prosody Guide.... read more
