stephen fry

British actor/aesthete Stephen Fry is a favorite personality in our household. He's also written some books, including The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, which my husband picked up recently and I've been gradually working through.

In The Ode Less Travelled, Fry introduces the reader to poetry from a technical angle. I'm a quarter of the way through, and he has yet to discuss deriving meaning from poetry; as he says, "I certainly do not attempt in this book to pick up where [your] poor teachers left off and instruct you in poetry appreciation." Instead, Fry dissects meter, rhyme, and classic poetic forms and guides readers through exercises to try it for themselves. He believes all people are poetic by nature but don't have the tools to make anything of it; this book is the toolbox he offers.

Fry doesn't touch free verse at all; in fact, in his foreword, he quotes W. H. Auden, as I will now:
"The poet who writes 'free' verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive but more often the result is squalor—dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor."

In my own (albeit dubious and sporadic) poetic efforts, I have preferred the structure offered by formal verse. Free verse feels a bit like being thrown into the middle of a foreign country sans tour guide, phrase book, or proper shoes. I'm at a loss as to where to go, what to do. When I'm working within the structure of a sonnet, however, there's just enough confinement to make me feel safe.**

As of page 75, Fry has given me an overview of meter to beat the pants off the high school English class version: the various feet, the various -ameters, enjambment and caesura, the various substitutions and adding/lopping of "weak" syllables to add emphasis to the "strong." Along the way, he offers dozens of illustration from classic verse (from Shakespeare's to modern times), examples he's made up for illustrative purposes (for which he makes no apologies), and exercises he insists readers attempt.

His authorial voice is engaging and, often, amusing. How often did your English teacher interrupt class to shout, "NO, DAMN YOU, NO! A THOUSAND TIMES NO! THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE VERSE IS NOT THE SENSE BUT THE METRE"? Or comment on William Blake's verse, "My dear, the scansion!" Fry doesn't pretend to be a great scholar or a great poet; he's the appreciator of poetry we could all be if we spent the time and thought.

So far, none of my exercises have yielded anything unembarrassing enough to share here, but I'm planning to continue through the book and, I hope, someday have some more verse I wouldn't be ashamed to put my name on.

The Ode Less Travelled isn't a poet's bible, but it is full of valuable information for those of us who know little but are willing to learn. It ought to be required for all writers who wants to write a rhyming picture book. It won't help them write a better story, but with any luck it will prevent their readers from wrinkling their noses and exclaiming, "My dear, the scansion!"

**Thinking of formal verse always reminds me of this dialogue from A Wrinkle in Time:

(Mrs. Whatsit) [The sonnet] is a very strict form of poetry, is it not? There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That's a very strict rhythm or meter, yes? And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it?

(Mrs. Whatsit) Yes. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

Isn't that lovely?

Kelly at Big A little a has this week's Poetry Friday round-up. Be sure to check it out!

I've mentioned before what a great extemporaneous speaker Stephen Fry is. This morning I enjoyed his latest "podgram," entitled "Wallpaper."

After some initial meandering, Fry settles in, with his usual eloquence and beautiful, sonorous voice, to discuss Oscar Wilde and his critical involvement in the aesthetic movement.

Fry summarizes aestheticism as viewing the world not in terms of good versus evil, but rather beautiful versus ugly. Nature with its sunsets, its snowy peaks, its fantastic flora and fauna, is beautiful; all ugliness in the world is due to the interference of humankind. But if we view ourselves as only able to mar Nature's perfection, unable to create anything beautiful of our own, hopelessness sets in. What is to stop us, to loosely quote Fry, from crapping in our own nests? That is why, when Oscar Wilde said Americans were so violent because our wallpaper was ugly, he was not simply making a flippant remark.

Recently I was involved in a discussion with other writers about why we write. This was my basic argument: that in writing, as in any other pursuit, you have to believe you have something to offer, some improvement to make (no matter how infintessimal), or you might as well give up—on life, on everything. I believe writing is one way humankind can make the world more beautiful. Writing might also be moral or utilitarian, but in the case of novels, at least, I'm with the aesthetes: I believe their main purpose is to be enjoyed. And I believe the act of writing itself is a way of seeking the truth, making sense of the world from all its clamor—to quote Wildes's "Hélas!":

Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God...

And though scholars disagree on the precise meaning of the final lines of aesthetic forerunner John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," I'll twist them to my own aesthetic ends by concluding thusly:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"—that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

Catch this week's Poetry Friday round-up at The Well-Read Child!

Happy Equinox! How I love that word, equinox, so magical and mysterious-sounding. And come springtime, I love what it means even more. More daylight than nighttime! Crocuses and daffodils! T-shirts and open windows! I’d definitely put the vernal equinox in Room Lovely.

What is Room Lovely? First you need to know about Room 101. In Orwell’s 1984, Room 101 was the dreaded chamber where dissidents would be tortured with whatever they feared most. For example, if Indiana Jones went into Room 101, he would most assuredly scream, “Why did it have to be snakes?”

Anyway, the British, wonderfully odd ducks that they are, have a TV program called Room 101, in which various British personalities discuss things they hate with funny man host Paul Merton. If Merton agrees with the guest, with a pull of a lever, those things (or a physical representation of them) go down the chute into Room 101.

And that’s it. That’s all there is to it. This is why you’ve got to love the BBC.

Recently, I watched the episode of Room 101 in which Stephen Fry was the guest (currently available on YouTube). You’d probably know Stephen Fry as the actor who played Jeeves in TV’s Jeeves and Wooster, the narrator of the British Harry Potter audiobooks, or—the way I know him—the host of the offbeat BBC comedy/talk/quiz/intellectual show QI. Fry is a remarkable extemporaneous speaker. Everything he says sounds incredibly intelligent—generally because it is. Oh, all right, and because he’s got a British accent.

Anyway, Stephen Fry’s the one who suggested that instead of focusing on the negative, sending things you hate to Room 101, we ought to send things we love to a place called Room Lovely—and that Room 101 itself ought to be sent to Room 101.

Earlier in the show, he also remarked on critics. I believe late night TV film critics were the specific target of his ire, but he talked about professional critics more generally:

I just have this feeling that these people are going to go, when they’re dead, and St. Peter’s going to say, “What did you do with your life?”

You know, I think it’s just a terrible waste of a life.

Now, as the person who develops my library’s picture book collection based almost exclusively on journal reviews, I do rely heavily on such criticism. And I want to read scathingly honest reviews. I hate ordering books based on gently positive reviews, to find them blah on multiple levels (in own admittedly critical eyes). In our media-buried world, we need critics. There’s just too much material out there to wade through to the junk to the good stuff all by ourselves.

And we need to be critical consumers on our own, too. Even a garbage disposal won’t eat everything you feed it. (Ever drop a spoon in there? It’s not pretty.) It revolts me to think of the blank-stared, slack-jawed couch potato who passively ingests all media that comes his or her way. Do take in books, movies, music, TV, but don’t just gulp them down. Taste them. If you find them pleasing, savor them. If you don’t, spit them out. And think about why. Think about how they might have been better and how they make you see the world differently, if only for a few minutes. Discuss them. Think about them in the shower or when you’re lying awake in the middle of the night.

But best of all, be an active producer, creating your own content, whether it's a book or a painting or a garden or a wooly hat or a delcious meal. You still need to be critical. Developing a critical eye is essential to writing. You need to be able to recognize what is successful and what is not in the books you read, apply what you’ve learned in your own writing, and critically approach what you’ve written. You won’t always be able to recognize just what you’re doing right or wrong, but you can’t be completely hopeless at it, either, or you’ll never improve.

Believe it or not, this is all a lead-up to the revelation that I don’t generally like writing book reviews and have no desire to advance my career in librarianship through professional reviewing. I do read critically, view critically, listen critically, but when it comes down to it, I don’t usually feel like taking the time to write down my thoughts for a public forum like this. It takes a very special piece of work to do that, and even then I have to be in the right mood. It really takes a lot of thought and time and energy to write good reviews. And that’s thought and time and energy that, most days, I’d much rather put toward creating my own work than critiquing others’.

I’m not about to put the critics in Room 101. We need them. But I’m with Stephen Fry in wanting to put my own arms, legs, and soul to work, doing things, rather than spending my precious time remarking on what other people are doing with their own precious time.