Ash Talks Books

Yesterday, it was Milad-un-Nabi or Prophet Muhammed's birthday. Today, I picked up 'Rumi - The Book of Love' - 'Poems of Ecstacy and Longing' with Translations and Commentary by Coleman Barks from a forgotten corner of my bookshelf and started reading it. I bought this from a Chennai bookstore in 2014 when I was actually looking for the poet Rilke's work. Jelaluddin Rumi is a Sufi mystic and poet who belonged to the time 1207-1273. Sufis call Rumi the 'Qutb' of love or the 'pole' of love, the other two 'poles' being Gilani, the pole of power, and Ibn Arabi, the pole of knowledge. Rumi's poems talk of surrender. Coleman Barks goes on to say that his poems appeal as much to 12-year olds as to older people. He says a creative writing teacher on the prime-time show Judging Amy, suggests that his students read 'The Great Gatsby' and 'The Essential Rumi' to learn how to write. Donna Karan reads Rumi on a fashion...

Chapter 2 is ‘Reading for Form -1 -Formalism and Early Structuralism, 1914- 1960’ The Russians developed the so-called formal method, so they were called formalists. The Russian linguist, Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) moved to New York City before the Second World War, and in the late 1950s and 1960s, his works began to be translated into English. Formalists were concerned with the form of literature. Jakobson in 1921 coined the term ‘literariness’ – or that which makes a literary text different from other texts. The secret of ‘literariness’, they concluded, was ‘defamiliarization’. Defamiliarization in poetry A number of literary devices are used. For example, forms of repetition, rhyme, a regular meter, stanzas, metaphors, symbols. The last two may be used in non-poetic language, too. Defamiliarization in novels An example: Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker of 1980 “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld p...

I bought on Kindle 'A Treatise on Poetry for Beginners' by Dr. A.V.Koshy. I've written poems without having done literature or studying poetry. I just love words and how they flow. So I have no idea how to write poems, but that doesn't stop me from reading, writing, and appreciating poems. The title of the book indicates it is for beginners, and I consider myself one, so here I'm the right target audience. This slim volume reproduced a series of Facebook posts by the author on poetry, complete with timestamps. I learned that those who have a sound grasp of punctuation, spelling, and grammar, also known as the nuts and bolts, or the mechanics of writing in any language, are better equipped to write poetry. There's hope for me, yet! Rhyme is an ornament of poetry. Types of rhyme include internal rhyme, slant rhyme, eye rhyme, and ear rhyme. Rhyme Schemes cover ab ab, etc. Parallelism is a technique used in poetry. Incidentally( this is my 2 cent...