Weekly Geeks: Genre Allergies

Given the prompt by Weekly Geeks this week to discuss my genre dislikes and allergies (or, more positively, my genre loves and recommendation), I decided this was a post in need of a list. Because if there is one genre I really love, it’s a good list.

Three Genres I Dislike/Am Allergic To:
1. Boy-fantasy (see: A Game of Thrones and possibly Eragon, if you asked my co-blogger Kate)
2. Stream-of-consciousness anything (which I guess means the Beats are out as a whole)
3. Poetry (unless it’s Tennyson or “Jabberwocky”)

Classics Challenge: Possession by A.S. Byatt

I’ve decided to try something new with the Classics Challenge this week! As per the schedule, the next two weeks are allotted to A.S. Byatt’s Book Prize-winning Possession. Since Possession is a book so rooted in pure bookishness, academic literary criticism, and intertextuality, I thought it would be nice to take a closer look at specific quotes from the book rather than me coming up with particular questions.

I’ve chosen two quotes from Possession that each bring out a particular issue of reading in general and I hope you will join me in sharing your thoughts about these quotes and issues! As an added bonus, those of you who don’t have time or inclination to join in reading the whole book can still participate by engaging with these quotes.

Quote I:
“I will read the most trivial things — once commenced — only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending — sweet or sour — and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?” (176)

Quote II:
“Then I was angry with her, for we do not talk of meanings in this pedantic nineteenth-century way, on the Black Nights, we simply tell and hear and believe…. I do not believe all these explanations. They diminish.” (354-55)
Related Question: Do you agree that reading too much into a text “diminishes” it? Or do you think does the opposite (i.e. adds valuable layers of meaning)?

Rereadings: Tennyson

I am, to put it lightly, not a poetry fan. It is a medium I simply have been chronically unable to get interested in or enjoy even a little. The only time I can remember enjoying poetry was in an English class about Victorian medievalism I took my first year of college. In said class, we read Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and, for the first time in my life, I responded positively to a poem. It was all very Meet Me in Saint Louis: “Tirra lirra!” sang Sir Lancelot, “Zing, zing, zing” went my heartstrings.

Weekly Geeks: Poetry Month

Now I’m not one for poetry but maybe I should learn more about this literary form. For this week’s theme, I encourage participants to to help celebrate National Poetry Month…

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog might remember my post on poetry from last fall. For those of you who don’t, let me sum this up: I am not usually a fan. Despite having edited an amateur literary collection that was mostly poetry, I usually cannot sit and read poetry for any extended period of time.

But even though I’m not a huge poetry reader, I do read it occasionally. So, for this week’s post, I’ll post one of my favorite poems, and as you guys to leave your favorites in the comments!

Literary Transgression: Poetry

I loathe poetry.

Well, maybe that’s unfair. I do like some poetry: Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, John Donne, Edna St. Vincent Millay, selected Rilke and Blake, and a smattering of Yeats, Shelley and Coleridge. I enjoyed what I read of Edmund Spenser very much, and I even got on board with a few of Anne Bradstreet’s poems.

What I don’t like is how poetry seems to be the official chosen form of the teenage writer, most of whom  seem to labour under a few poetical misconceptions. Namely, that 1) because poetry is short, it’s easy to write; 2) if it rhymes, that’s better; 3) the best poetry is autobiographical; and 4) metaphors must be made explicitly clear to the reader, because the reader is not as smart as the writer.