Aldon Nielsen, "Tray"
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, Tyrone Williams, hosted by Al Filreis, convened in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House, before a live audience, to discuss Aldon’s poem “Tray.” There are 29 sections in the poem; the group discussed the first 6. In the book titled Tray, published by Make Now Press in 2017, the title poem takes up the first 37 pages; the sections we discussed run to page 14. Usually, of course, we play an audio recording of the poem from we’re about to discuss as archived in PennSound, but on this day, because we had the honor of Aldon’s presence we asked him to perform those sections.
November 29, 2023
molossus
by David Shook
From the moment that an explanation is offered, there’s no longer any danger for the reader. — Alain Robbe-Grillet, to Mario Bellatin, for molossus 1
Definition(s):
a) In prosody, a molossus is a metrical foot of three long syllables. English language prosody, mapped in stressed and unstressed syllables, is not very accommodating. Attempted examples include Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break,” which properly scanned makes three separate feet, the end of the second line of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ “The Caged Skylark,” (“Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells—“), which seems a stretch but works if scanned as four feet and its final word does not take on extra stress, and “wild-goose chase,” which works in isolation but seldom in context, as in Thomas Hardy’s “Erotophuseos.”