Arts Today in Stranger Suggests
posted by on February 6 at 10:45 AM
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rhyme
(Poetry) Two years ago at Hugo House, a petulant lady asked Sherman Alexie a question about poetry and he tore the lady apart. Kicked her head in. It was awesome. The guy knows a lot about poetry. Tonight, he’s the star of “a roundtable discussion and reading of formal poetry”—you know, poetry that rhymes, the only kind that’s fun to hear aloud. Also on the panel are Chelsea Rathburn, Richard Wakefield, and Eric McHenry. No telling whose head Alexie will kick in this time. Therein lies the suspense. (Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. 7 pm, free.) CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
Some poetry that doesn't rhyme is great to hear aloud: recordings of Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" live is amazing.
Of course, I'm out of range of Sherman's kicking, so I'm fearless.
"are" not "is" sez the english p'fesser
I can live without Ginsberg, but James Joyce reading bits of "Finnegan's Wake" aloud is pretty spectacular. As prose it's several orders of magnitude more poetic than most poetry. But yes, most free verse is pretty tough to stomach, especially as it's usually read in that "deeply concerned NPR lady" voice.
Sherman Alexie's funniest moment recently was his letter to the editor of Harper's a while back, making fun of the dustup between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus over who was the more "excluded" :
"Does Ben Marcus, educated at NYU and Brown, employed by Columbia, and published by Anchor, Vintage, and Harper’s, truly believe that he is an excluded experimentalist? Does he honestly believe that Jonathan Franzen, educated at Swarthmore, once employed by Harvard, and published by FSG and Harper’s, is somehow more elitist? Or is Franzen the populist? Or is a populist elitist? Is there really much difference between Marcus and Franzen? This East Coast - East Coast Literary Rap War reminds me of the Far Side cartoon in which a lone penguin, suffering in a crowd of millions of exactly similar penguins, rises and shouts, “I just have to be me!”
Sherman Alexie
Seattle, Wash. "
His rants are better than his verse. Alexie is not much of a poet, IMO. More short stories chopped up into lines of varying lengths ...
he rants better than he writes...and he's not that good of a ranter...
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