Books

Other Men's Flowers

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/01/featuresreviews.guardianreview5
- What accounted for its success? My guess is that it made poetry respectable for manly men - Wavell's section on war is called "Good Fighting" but his section on love a tongue-tied "Love and All That" - in an age when reciteable poetry still had a popular appeal.

Sonnet 18
- David Tennant recites Sonnet 18
  - This is a competent but very subdued reading.
- Hip-Hop & Shakespeare? Akala at TEDxAldeburgh
  - It's a good idea to rap the sonnet but a bad reading, the guy clearly hasn't thought about what the lines actually mean and how they should be inflected to sound like natural speech. He's rapping too fast.
"If" by Rudyard Kipling
- If, Rudyard Kipling's poem, recitated by Sir Michael Caine
  - He really messes up a lot...he totally messes up the most famous line in the poem, "If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run", he says "forty seconds" instead.
The New Colossus
- Obama Outlines Immigration Reform (full video)
  - Obama doesn't give a good reading. It sounds stiff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme_scheme
- Q: Why does rap not use as many rhyme schemes as poetry does?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_verse
- Blank verse is poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century", and Paul Fussell has estimated that "about three quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse"