Mi Contra Fa

The Purpose of Poetry

I ran across an article in my local online newspaper today about Gayle Danley, an award-winning slam poet.  I've read, just a little bit, about slam poetry, since it's currently our most vibrant oral poetic expression.  It's been around long enough (Danley says the 1980s) that academics have come sniffing around its clubs, eager to dissect and analyze it, compare and contrast it to what has gone before.

I did a Google search and turned up Danley's TED-Ed talk.  Between that, and the local news article where she instructs middle school students to write, "You can't do that to me!" and then find a memory, and a poem, to match, I get a strong impression of an emotionally vivid and immediate form, deeply personal, with its truths laid out raw and stripped.

It's compelling. 

I caught a glimpse of this last year, when I was preparing for the Oldcastle Memorial Poetry Smackdown.  I was having difficulty writing two poems - a satire and a courtly love poem - because I didn't believe what I was writing.  I was engineering words - making them match meter and rhyme while having some meaning.  It was craft, but it wasn't art.

I have frequently thought of myself as a craftsman or wordsmith.  I'm really not a fan of the "muse" concept, particularly as it's used to excuse giving up on writing.  "Oh, I can't. My muse isn't speaking to me."  I have experienced inspiration - but I've also written to spec. Apply butt to chair and fingers to keyboard. Write!

But when I asked myself, "If I can't believe in what I'm writing, what can I believe in?" I got my answers, and got my poems out.  And they were better and more honest poems.

Not all SCA-appropriate poetry needs to be intensely personal lyric.  It would be terribly inappropriate in a ballad, with its frequently remote and unaffected narrator, or in an epic of great deeds.  And some of the period forms purposefully sought a highly artificial and stylized manner, and it would be wrong to project modern ideas of "real!" poetry into that.

But...

 

Wulf, my Wulf!  Your seldom-comings made my mind troubled, not missing meals.

Elias Carel, you're such a phony!

With small barefooted steps I go, through the cold and through the snow...

 

Vivid imagery expressing deeply felt emotions has its place as well.

 

Better to give or to receive?

A classic Christmas conundrum, cut for copious collages:

A Closer Look at Mineral Balls

Going over my Pinterest board, I started taking note of some features of various crystal balls in slings.  More behind the cut... (Apologies to anyone still following this on LJ. I long ago forgot how to make an lj-cut on Typepad.)

Mineral Balls Mark 1 and Mark 2

Spheres of minerals (usually quartz but I've seen others) set in gold, silver or copper-alloy slings are not uncommon finds in the graves of high-ranking Merovingian and Kentish women.  They're often paired with pierced silver spoons.  I've collected a bunch of pictures of them over on a Pinterest board, and I decided to try and make one. I bought a 1.25" diameter quartz sphere at Pennsic, and finally got around to slinging it up.

Very early efforts were just loops of wire, like this guy here.  The copper and brass craft wire I was using was having none of it - I couldn't get it secure enough that I didn't think the wire would just slip to the side and eject the ball at the first excuse.  So my next step, rather than "go buy thicker wire," was to twist two wires together and make the sling from that.

Cut for enormous pictures...

Flat gold threads!

I don't even remember what I was Googling for that brought me to The Warp Factor, (EDIT: the spelling of 'Snartemo,' I think) but I followed a link in that post to Gina-B's silkwork blog and discovered a magic keyword: goldwork!  There is a needle art out there that uses gold threads.  And while they seem to mostly use variously coiled threads, there is one kind called "broad plate" that is just a narrow strip of metal.  No. 6 broad plate is 2mm wide, and No. 11 is 1mm wide. Just what I want.

Armed with this knowledge, I've been able to locate Berlin Embroidery, a shop on this side of the Atlantic that carries No. 11 broad plate.  Hurrah!  The modest cost of a yard of this stuff ($7.50US for 2% gold, $4.50US for 0.5% gold) is well worth not having to Exacto-knife strips of aluminium to an even 1mm.

Pentathalon Update

Somewhere along the line, I got convinced that there was a Pentathalon at 12th Night.  I think I was just confused, but I have a lot of projects going on right now...

• Kentish crystal ball in sling.  I used twisted wire for the sling, which isn't a good historical pick (although it is pretty!).  After reviewing my Pinterest board for these things, I may see if I can do any chasing on the aluminium band I bought to make something more appropriate.
• Snartemo II band - moving along well.  Working in wool is sort of awful - so sticky!  Undoing errors is hard.  I think I wove one or two iterations of the design with a 1-turn offset error, which I've corrected. Accidentally narrowed the heck out of the band on Sunday. :/
• Brocaded band - got the burgundy silk yesterday!  Not going to warp it up until the wool is done. Wish the silk was a touch more purple, but it is what it is.
• Artifact belt - My strap end is on its way, and I won an auction for a really cruddy belt buckle.  If it's too pitted and corroded to use, I have one on order from Raymond's Quiet Press, too. I've done a little reading on bronze artifact cleaning and restoration.
• Beaded necklace - have gone through my Faversham grave catalogue, making color copies of the reconstructed necklaces, and have tried a few stringings with the beads I have on-hand. Not happy yet.  Bought some amethyst beads on Fire Mountain Gem's Cyber Monday sale, woo hoo!  Also, real silver hooks for the brocaded band, like the Cologne princess's.
• Doing a little poking into the boxes found in the Faversham graves, and what wood (beech) and hardware (nails, L-shaped brackets, lock plate, handles) would be needed to make one.
• Linen robe - the linen thread came. No other forward progress on this one.
• Lay of Guthrun - hoping to do a recording of this this week for my online class. May be with harp instead of lyre.
• Thor's Wedding - Urg, still needs so much work and a few more readings of the source material.