Friday, April 1, 2016

Happy Poetry Month!

    No fooling, I sit here on the last weekday of Spring Break watching not the deer in the driveway, but the rain pouring down. I will post two April-themed poetic things today.

     The first is my reading in Middle English of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Of the dozen or so recording I have on Soundcloud, this one is by far the one that gets the most play. Perhaps people want to see who would ever try this. I must say that knowing German helps with Middle English.

https://soundcloud.com/arthur-turfa-1/prologue-canterbury-tales-in

   And "April is the cruelest month", as TS Eliot reminds us in The Waste Land:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rpFBSO65P4

     In the popular mind, poets do not hold regular jobs or have normal lives. They exist on air and live for art's sake. But Chaucer was a knight, a diplomat at times, and a figure at court. Eliot was a banker and then a publisher. I will speak more on this theme in future posts.

     Poetry month.....every month for some of us!





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