Sunday, September 20, 2009

Iambic Pentameter is Sexy!

I'm exploring iambic pentameter at the moment with Stephen Fry, and I'm having a wonderful time doing it! Who'd have thought an arcane thing could be so much fun.

Well, I'm sure there are lots of people out there like me who love the ins and outs of poetic things who love thinking about things like iambic pentameter. We'd love talking about them too, but other people tend to go cross-eyed and walk away when we start chatting about it.

Anyway, the upshot of this post is to tell everyone out there that Stephen Fry, the famous English funny chap who has starred in things such as the BBC comedy series Blackadder, is a poet! He has struggled with poetry for love and amusement for many years, and has written a book about it that I have just discovered - 'The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within'. I'm only part way through, and I have already re-written and vastly improved one of my own poems, based on what I have learned.

Go to this website and you can read a review - I read another review that I found on Google, but it was boring and said less than kind things about my new poetic hero, so I haven't put a link in this post. I haven't finished reading the book yet because, as is usual, real life gets in the way of my poetry, and also, with Fry's book there are exercises to do, and that takes up time, especially if you're like me and you want to use what you have learned to improve other poem's you've written before you travel on in the book.