Random Ideas: Ecphrasis and Blogging
Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 10:03 pm
Some thoughts on how to improve at composition.
Ecphrasis. While most of us probably do want to make verses of at least a little artistic merit, purely technical work is good practice. It occured to me a few days ago that ecphrasis - a verse description of some random thing, often a work of visual art originally - kills two birds with one stone. First, you'll learn a lot of vocabulary related to the subject and, second, metrical practice never hurts. If you can make it funny or interesting, all the better, but if the Muses don't always smile on the work, well, you don't applaud the soprano for clearing her throat or singing scales.
In the Renaissance, when classical Latin once again became the model for good Latin, people produced ecphrastic poems on scientific instruments, not usually thought a fit subject for poetic effusion. Mesomedes' poems on sundials aren't very interesting to me, but his ecphrasis on a sponge managed to be obliquely erotic. So the genre isn't without hope.
Defending the honor of a cartoon plastic pig has used up my nous for today, so I'm not about to suggest a subject right now. If we decide to do a few of these we should vary the meter so we don't find ourselves capable of producing words that scan only as dactyls or only as iambs.
Blogging. Everyone's doing it. Why not dedicate yourself to producing at least one blog post a week, however, dull, but only in Greek or Latin? Heap abuse on commenters who don't reply in the same language. For Hellenes, I know that both LiveJournal and Blogger.com accept Unicode. LJ is known to accept SPIonic.
If anyone else is interested in this, post here. Perhaps we can cobble together a LJ community (does Blogger have those?) for Textkit members.
(I realize this last idea is a little hare-brained, and most likely of the two to flop horribly. I thought I'd share it anyway, if only for amusement.)
Ecphrasis. While most of us probably do want to make verses of at least a little artistic merit, purely technical work is good practice. It occured to me a few days ago that ecphrasis - a verse description of some random thing, often a work of visual art originally - kills two birds with one stone. First, you'll learn a lot of vocabulary related to the subject and, second, metrical practice never hurts. If you can make it funny or interesting, all the better, but if the Muses don't always smile on the work, well, you don't applaud the soprano for clearing her throat or singing scales.
In the Renaissance, when classical Latin once again became the model for good Latin, people produced ecphrastic poems on scientific instruments, not usually thought a fit subject for poetic effusion. Mesomedes' poems on sundials aren't very interesting to me, but his ecphrasis on a sponge managed to be obliquely erotic. So the genre isn't without hope.
Defending the honor of a cartoon plastic pig has used up my nous for today, so I'm not about to suggest a subject right now. If we decide to do a few of these we should vary the meter so we don't find ourselves capable of producing words that scan only as dactyls or only as iambs.
Blogging. Everyone's doing it. Why not dedicate yourself to producing at least one blog post a week, however, dull, but only in Greek or Latin? Heap abuse on commenters who don't reply in the same language. For Hellenes, I know that both LiveJournal and Blogger.com accept Unicode. LJ is known to accept SPIonic.
If anyone else is interested in this, post here. Perhaps we can cobble together a LJ community (does Blogger have those?) for Textkit members.
(I realize this last idea is a little hare-brained, and most likely of the two to flop horribly. I thought I'd share it anyway, if only for amusement.)