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Muti-lation at the end of the line

In Broken Hierarchies: Precursor to a Variorum? I noticed major revisions to a poem in Geoffrey Hill’s Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, which I argued amounted to a totally altered poem following a new and different philosophical development. Because the revisions in BH are widespread and significant, I suggested that critics writing on Hill are now and […]

22.05.2014 – 11:28 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry, Readings | Tagged enjambment, Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns, poetry | Comments (8)

Omit Needless Fossil Poetry

Chasing down a famous quotation today, I came across a volume in the College of Dentistry Library of the University of California, San Francisco, generously made available by Google Books. The publication is the 1896 yearly digest of Items of Interest, by The Dental Independent, which describes itself as “a monthly record of dental literature”. […]

04.05.2014 – 15:04 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Linguistics | Tagged Etymology, Noah Webster, philology, poetry, R. W. Emerson, Richard Chenevix Trench, Strunk and White, style | Comments (0)

Sandwich Police make Burrito Bust

In my first-year poetry class, when introducing the idea of poetic ambiguity (rich ambiguity), I like to begin with a few examples of every-day ambiguity, in the form of so-called “crash blossoms“, those newspaper headlines that can go in two often amusing directions (e.g.: “Friends help murder victim’s family“). This morning my #CapeCod Twitter stack […]

17.04.2014 – 09:08 | By D-AW | Posted in Linguistics, Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics, Teaching Poetry | Tagged ambiguity, poetry | Comments (3)

Poetry and Happenstance at Cambridge

Notes and thoughts from “Poetry and Happenstance”, a day-long symposium at Cambridge University, which took place last Friday, 4th April. There were eight papers in all: Anne Stillman – “What appears to be yours” In the opening talk, Stillman expressed some unease about what was really meant by the symposium’s key title word, happenstance. This […]

07.04.2014 – 07:35 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology, Poetry | Tagged contingency, found poetry, Geoffrey Hill, Hopkins, neologism, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (0)

“Does steak love lettuce?” Most human-like computer poems (and vice versa).

I have happened upon Botpoet, a site that runs “Bot or Not”, a sort of Turing test using poems. It’s mildly entertaining to guess whether a poem was written by a human or a computer program, but I find most of the cases pretty obviously one or the other. What’s more fun is the “Leaderboard“, […]

06.03.2014 – 10:20 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, General, Poetry | Tagged contingency, digital humanities, Gertrude Stein, poetry, Samuel Beckett | Comments (0)

Two Poetry Conferences in April

I’m currently getting material together for two conference papers in April. The first is for “Poetry and Happenstance” at Cambridge on April 4, which is a theme that fits nicely with the topics I’ve been pursuing over the last few years. The title I’ve given the organizers is “The way it is: authority, arbitrariness, and […]

25.02.2014 – 12:56 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged contingency, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry, Seamus Heaney | Comments (2)

How different is poetic diction?

In “Measured Words” I made an assertion that “some words aren’t very common in speech but show up fairly frequently in poetry, and vice versa.” This is intuitive, but I’m going to demonstrate it anyway, to make good my other assertion that “seeing what you already know or think you know displayed in an unfamiliar […]

23.02.2014 – 10:42 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged corpora, digital humanities, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (9)

Joseph Brodsky, Social Parasite

Joseph Brodsky died eighteen years ago today. Seamus Heaney, in his elegy for Brodsky, referred to it as “Yeats’s anniversary, | (Double-crossed and death-marched date | January twenty-eight)”. This year also marks the fiftieth anniversary of Brodsky’s show-trial on charges of “social parasitism.” In observance of these milestones, below are some key passages from the […]

28.01.2014 – 09:36 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics | Tagged Joseph Brodsky, poetry, Seamus Heaney | Comments (0)

Wood, a poem

Here is “Wood”, a kind of poem:

25.11.2013 – 17:52 | By D-AW | Posted in Linguistics, Poetry, Readings, Teaching Poetry | Tagged found poetry, poetry | Comments (2)

O hell-kite! All? – Antedating verse coinages

In case you thought any of the top eleven most common words invented in verse were actually invented in verse, it’s worth following up with an illustration of the inherent contingency in any lexicographical record. As everyone knows, the OED is in the midst of its first complete revision. My list of poetic neologisms was […]

13.11.2013 – 10:04 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Poetry | Tagged corpora, digital humanities, Etymology, lexicography, neologism, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry, Shakespeare | Comments (1)

Hanover, Hannover

In early December I’ll be in Germany, presenting a poster and short talk at “(Digital) Humanities Revisited – Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Age”. The whole trip is generously funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, which among its various activities supporting research in academia and beyond, puts on a series of conferences at the Herrenhausen […]

25.10.2013 – 13:04 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Linguistics, Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged corpora, digital humanities, lexicography, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (0)

Dies Caniculares

Lines against lines in summer: Though I in Prochyta with greater ease Could live, than in a street of palaces. What scene so desert or so full of fright, As towering houses, tumbling in the night, And Rome on fire beheld by its own blazing light? But worse than all the clattering tiles, and […]

18.07.2013 – 10:52 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology, Poetry, Readings | Tagged lexicography, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry, Ted Hughes, W. H. Auden | Comments (1)

Emily Dickinson was a Dinosaur

In a graduate student’s paper this morning I came across a description of Emily Dickinson’s handwriting by T. W. Higginson, who in 1891 remembered receiving a letter, almost thirty years earlier, postmarked Amherst, MA. The letter was the now famous one that begins “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” […]

25.06.2013 – 16:33 | By D-AW | Posted in General, Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics, Uncategorized | Tagged Emily Dickinson, poetry | Comments (0)

Poetic Antagonyms

The verb “cleave” has two contradictory senses in English: it means both “to separate” and “to join together” (and so figures its own self-separated, self-joined meanings). Out this week is a journal article in which I discuss “cleave” and other self-antithetical words (I call them “antagonyms”) when they occur in English poetry, as well as […]

13.05.2013 – 14:07 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Poetry, Readings | Tagged Emily Dickinson, Geoffrey Hill, lexicography, poetry, Seamus Heaney | Comments (10)

Robert Greene’s Vision

Written at the instant of his death Containing a penitent passion for the folly of his pen Sero sed serio To the gentlemen readers, health. Gentlemen, in a vision before my death I foresee that I am like to sustain the shame of many follies of my youth when I am shrouded in my winding-sheet. […]

30.04.2013 – 09:12 | By D-AW | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged poetry | Comments (0)

Sorts of Hierarchies

I was intrigued when I read that Geoffrey Hill’s forthcoming collected poetical works would be called Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 (OUP: 2013). I recognized it as the title of a poem in Without Title (itself a title that suggests the breaking of a certain kind of hierarchy), but I hadn’t thought of that poem or the […]

08.03.2013 – 16:39 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Poetry, Readings | Tagged corpora, digital humanities, Geoffrey Hill, poetry, Seamus Heaney | Comments (6)

Poetry and the Dictionary Conference – Oxford 2013

The CFP for this summer’s conference in Oxford has been posted. I expect to be there discussing some aspect of the OED and poetry. This symposium will be held at St Peter’s College, Oxford, on 15 June, 2013, with a view to opening up and exploring connections between poetry and the dictionary. Proposals for papers […]

13.02.2013 – 09:27 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Poetry | Tagged OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (0)

Three OED Poems

Recent posts on found poetry reminded me of several OED entries I bookmarked out over the years because they gave me more than the usual pleasures of etymology, definition, and commonplace-book-like selection of previous uses. So I decided to work up a couple of these into poems. Other than acts of lineation, punctuation, elision, and […]

01.02.2013 – 09:19 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (3)

The most and least poetic alphabetical ranges in the OED

In my presentation at DH2012 I made a couple of comments on Giles Goodland’s paper ‘OED Online’s Single-Quotations Entries: an Analysis‘, mostly about the sampling method that Goodland employs, and which everyone else has employed so far when trying to say something about the OED that isn’t facilitated by whatever the current online functionality happens […]

26.07.2012 – 12:27 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged n-grams, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (0)

Discovery: the most poetic word in the English language

Now that I’ve tagged more than half of the evidence quotations in OED2 for genre [see here and here for a discussion of this process], it’s time to start having a poke around in the data. A question that occurred to me last night was: ‘is there anything interesting about the relative density of poetic vs. […]

25.07.2012 – 15:01 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (0)

Electronic OED, Poetry and Intertextuality :: DH2012 Presentation Slides

Here are the slides for my presentation today at Digital Humanities 2012 in Hamburg: PDF: Electronic OED, Poetry and Intertextuality [de-linked*] At the moment this is for reference or information only, and is presented here without the necessary context and discussion in my conference paper (to be posted at a later date). An abstract with […]

19.07.2012 – 06:00 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Poetry | Tagged Allusion, digital humanities, Etymology, Intertextuality, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (0)

Poetry & Contingency