What about a video library?

A few years ago, I wrote brief reviews of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre series on my Livejournal, as well as a few episodes of Jim Henson’s Storyteller. I’m now trying to determine the format in which I want to get that content moved over here to the Resources page, as well as thinking about how much I’d like to finish reviewing Storyteller once I have access to my DVDs again. I also have the Greek myths series the Henson Company did around the same time, so I will add those to the docket as well.

At the same time, I do have a few of the Disney fairy tale movies, and I believe a copy of Ever After. I might have a version or two of The Snow Queen. I’ve seen Princess Tutu, I need to get caught up on Once Upon a Time, and I gave the first few episodes of Grimm a try back when they first aired. I’m pondering how many of those I’m inclined to review if I still have copies, and how well I remember them to discuss them if I don’t have copies for reviewing.

While I think on those things, though, I’m also curious as to what’s in your video libraries of folklore, mythology, and fairy tales? In addition to the above, I’ve got a solid education in the movies for which Ray Harryhausen did his marvelous creatures, including the various iterations of Sinbad and Hercules, and the first version of Clash of the Titans. When I was in school, we watched a few educational series that staged retellings of folk and fairy tales. I caught a version of Beauty and the Beast from the 1980s starring Rebecca de Mornay that I remember was part of a series of limited release movies, but I never managed to catch any of the others. I think the Sleeping Beauty starred Tawnee Welch, but it might have been Rumpelstiltskin. I’ve heard of a marvelous movie called The Polar Bear King, but not yet managed to get my hands on it to watch it. Oh, and I did see the Bridget Fonda version of The Snow Queen, which is another review I need to put on the Resources page in some version.

Another Tumblr Post, Note for a Future Post, and Body Fail

I’ve put up another audio recording on my Tumblr, and realized I need to talk about my video folklore library at some point. So this is a note to do that in the near future, when my head is less fuzzy with migraine.

Speaking Up and Going Places

I just want to point out that there’s a new page at my website! Habitations links to other places on the web where I have an active presence, which right now is primarily Livejournal and Tumblr. Livejournal is my more quotidian version of weblogging, and Tumblr is a bit of an experiment. I am forced to admit, I’m not entirely certain I parse it, but it allows me to upload mp3 files, among other things, and that means I can share some recorded readings I’ve done which, for one reason or another, did not end up accompanying the text of works when they were published. The inaugural mp3 I’ve chosen is for “Warning Signs,” which was published in Jabberwocky in June of 2012.

I welcome suggestions for other poems people would like to hear me read for my Tumblr, though I note that the poems suggested must be mine, I won’t redo recordings I have already done, and the text of any poem I do read needs to be available online. For ideas, take a look at my Works page; if a poem is linked, but there’s no audio available when the link opens, it should be good to go.

Fear of the Beat

This is an article I wrote for the HWA newsletter back in early 2009. I don’t believe it appears anywhere else online. My question is, does it hold true for you?

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Fear begins with a heartbeat. Not a quickened heartbeat, nor a failing one. Just the steady, relentless sound of something inescapable: life being measured out, one step, one beat, closer to the grave. The pattern-making machine of the brain picks up that rhythm, and it becomes both the soundtrack of comfort, and the soundtrack of anxiety. Life is here, and death is coming.

Effective writing of any type depends on rhythm for impact, but this is particularly true of poetry. Forms of poetry are identified by their rhythm. Meter is the basic measurement, and one way to dictate meter is through repetition. Endrhymes and alliteration are repetitions of sound. You can also repeat entire words and phrases. In horror poetry, such repetition emphasizes the terror of the mundane, turns around the innocuous image to show the darkness behind. It takes the heartbeat, and makes it the worst thing you’ve ever heard.

Pick a word, a common word. You don’t need blood or gore or tentacles. Choose water or watermelon. Choose both and put them together, eating watermelon with your cousin down at the swimming hole in the summer. There’s nobody else around, and the air is hot and still. The water is still. There’s the buzz of insects, and the sound of your cousin chewing watermelon beside you. You take turns spitting out seeds into the water, little ripples before the seeds settle, floating on the surface. You get closer and closer to the center with practice. Then you spit a seed that sinks, little bubbles rising up around it, little ripples that get bigger. There’s nothing to make the water move, but it’s moving, and you think you see something else moving under the surface. Under the buzz of the insects, under your cousin’s noisy, panicked breath, you hear your heartbeat. The water ripples in time.

Maybe you’ve already stated what’s under the water. Maybe you haven’t. It’s not important. What’s important is the water, and the watermelon, the tension that builds each time you use the words. You can show your work. You just can’t let your reader escape it.

The heartbeat, you see, has to be their own. You set its pace by your words, your repetition. It does the rest. Do your part right, and the heartbeat might even do the rest until the heart stops, the fear you wrote part of the reader’s nightmare landscape. This is how nursery rhymes work, why memorizing poetry is held to be easier than memorizing prose. The rhythm gets under your skin, into your head. Use that to your advantage.

What’s in your folklore and fairy tale library?

Most my library is currently in storage across the country, but I want to start making use of the Resources area of my site, so I will be starting with a present my sister got me this past holiday season, Marina Warner’s Six Myths of Our Time. That got me thinking about what’s in my library of folklore analysis and fairy tale scholarship, and it made me wonder what might be in the libraries of those I’m hoping to converse with via this blog and my Resources page.

I can’t make an exhaustive list at this time, of course, but I will say there is a good deal more Marina Warner, as well as a chunk of Jack Zipes. In fact, I do have Zipes’ Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion and The Irresistible Fairy Tale both on my Kindle to follow up the Warner. In addition, I plan to look at retellings, original fairy tales, and collections, and I’ve got some of those on my Kindle as well. I’ve got Coyote Still Going, A Wolf at the Door, Black Swan, White Raven, Fairy Tales Reimagined, The Prose Edda, Teutonic Myth and Legend, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Celtic Fairy Tales, Once Upon a Curse, The Collected Fairy Tale Books of Andrew Lang, Russian Fairy Tales, Norse Mythology, The Complete Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Slavic Mythology, Norse Gods, Goddesses, Giants, Dwarves, Elves, & More, The Frog Princess, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Vassilissa the Beautiful, Folklore, and The Poetic Edda. Those are just the ones that seem fairly obviously to hold folkloric and fairy tale content from the titles, too. I’m pretty certain I’ll find more as I go a-reading.

As should be evident, I love reading this stuff, which is doubtless why it comes out in my writing so much. I love reading the analysis and criticism as well as the tales themselves, even when I disagree with it. I’ve been lucky enough to benefit from a few kind souls who’ve downsized their own libraries and given away things they had in duplicate or had converted to digital or were just done with. That’s how I managed to get the Maria Tatar Norton Critical Edition of The Classic Fairy Tales, and a few other gems the titles of which I cannot remember. I have Elizabeth Wanning Harries’ Twice Upon a Time, but have yet to read it. I have read, but don’t have, From the Beast to the Blonde. I have most of the volumes of the Windling/Datlow fairy tale anthologies and several of the novels in the same series. Oh, and I do have Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells on my Kindle.

What’s in your fairy tale library? What critics and scholars do you recommend or, conversely, recommend against?

Is poetry your native language?

When you were a child, did you learn nursery rhymes?  Did you chant skip-rope rhythms in the schoolyard?  Do you sing along to music on the radio because you just feel the emotion pouring out of the lyrics?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you already speak poetry.

The truth is, most native English speakers, at least, learn to speak poetry when we learn to speak, and again when we learn to read.  Poetry is full of rhythm and rhyme, which are great for the memory.  In fact, these are techniques that remain in use while we are taught how to read and write prose, along with other poetic devices like meter and repetition.  Really, it’s only when we get to the point where we need to be taught prose as something different from formal poetry, and where we are taught formal poetry as its own thing, that we are taught poetry is somehow this specialized form of language that we need to learn how to read and write and understand, and we are taught–usually not directly, but it’s strongly implied–that most of us will never truly understand it, because that’s something that can’t be taught, and only a special few of us possess the innate ability.

We believe this, because we are taught that we can believe our teachers, and they don’t mean to lie to us.  They don’t mean to create this cognitive dissonance, where we are taught to believe we don’t know how to speak poetry even as we chant in the schoolyard and sing along to the radio.  And it’s true that poetry can be very complex, that it can be language distilled and layered.  It can be advanced, and require some training and skill to pick apart.  Then again, that’s true of every form of language.  That doesn’t stop us from reading and writing those other forms, so why let it stop us from reading and writing poetry?  Why let it stop us from claiming poetry as our own?

Is there another factor I’m missing, perhaps?