Homework Jan. 11: Techie-wreckie Jottings

[Neville Briggs]

David, I heard that Shelley wrote that, Ozymadias in one evening when he and a friend had a sort of informal friendly workshop to write a sonnet. Amazing what can come out of workshopping.
Apparently 19th Century Englishmen thought that a name sounded exotic if it had a Z in it somewhere , e.g. Tarzan

[David Campbell]

Now Ozzie, it has lots of rhyme,
and heaps of metre, unless I’m
mistaken, plus it’s surely got
a really most intriguing plot
in desert country, bleak and bare,
a message that we all can share.
The grammar’s good, the spelling’s great,
but bush verse? Hmmm…how would it rate?
To make it Aussie, real true blue,
you’d have to add a kangaroo!

David

[Neville Briggs]

You could just make it like this;

Ozymandias, 1915.

An ANZAC digger from the southern land
said " Mate, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
stand here in Egypt. Near them on the sand..
........etc

Voila! a bush poetry sonnet on
Ozymandias aka Pharoah Ramses.

[Maureen K Clifford]

Good thinking Neville It's one of my favourite ph-oems one of the few I actually did learn at school. Nice reading of it on this clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSi6aHDniR4

[Neville Briggs]

I had a listen to that clip Maureen. There is also one where Vincent Price recites the poem, I like Vincent Price's rendition and his clip contains photos of Ramses broken statue and Ramses mummified body which give a good idea of the basis of the sonnet, although I think that Shelley's poem is a wider philosophical comment than Egyptology.

[David Campbell]

Like the suggestion about 19th century Englishmen, Neville! Maybe that's why my reaction to a lot of their poetry was...zzzzzzz.

It's possible that quite a few of us learnt Ozymandias at school, Maureen...it was nice and short! Plus, the idea of those mysterious stone legs and the head lying in the desert sand and what might have shattered the statue was fascinating, even if the deeper philosophical undertones probably escaped us. In terms of sparking the imagination, my boyhood mind ranked it alongside Coleridge's Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner...much more interesting than Daffodils!

Cheers
David

[Shelley Hansen]

... and not just boys, David! My cute blond curly-girly head loved the "mayhem and adventure" poems too - much more exciting than daffodils and "blithe spirits"! Do you remember The Inchcape Rock? I used to love imagining Sir Ralph the Rover sinking to his well-deserved doom under the righteously indignant eye of the "Holy Abbott of Aberbrothok"!!

So - at the risk of opening another can of worms - with your tinkering of Ozymandias, are you and Neville suggesting that an Australian-themed sonnet might be admissible in a traditional bush poetry competition???

Oh, by the way, Neville - it came to me - somewhere in the dim sleepless hours of early morning! And you were right - just one line in the end. So I've posted my (hopefully) final revision of The Poitry Competition in Members' Poetry.

Cheers, Shelley.

[David Campbell]

I'd forgotten about The Inchcape Rock, Shelley...thank you for the reminder. Well worth checking out again! We could do with more nautical poems here. Maybe that could be a future homework exercise, Maureen...writing a salt-encrusted sea-shanty. After all, we are girt by the stuff.

A sonnet should be perfectly acceptable in a bush poetry competition, although length might work against it in a comp with a high (say 80+) line-limit because it'd be up against some poems with longer, more complex narratives. But Ozymandias is a terrific example of a poem that suggests so much with relatively few words. Brevity can be very powerful because there's no time for the reader's mind to wander.

And congratulations on finding a solution for The Poitry Competition!

Cheers
David

[Maureen K Clifford]

Good thought David and taken on board

[Shelley Hansen]

Great idea for homework, David! I always did like "Hornblower" better than "Heidi" !! ("Man the poop deck, Mr Bracegirdle!!")

You are right about the power of the sonnet - I've always thought of it as a "poetry power snack"!! So much can be said in those 14 lines, and it's so rewarding to compare and experiment with the Shakespearean and Petrarchan versions of the sonnet. Talking about bush poetry, I suppose one could always adapt and use a suite of sonnets to achieve a longer result. Themes that come to mind could be "Australia Through Its Seasons" or maybe "Songbirds of the Forest". Could be a good idea for a Henry Kendall competition.

Cheers, Shelley