Good Scansion (Public Post)
A recreation of the keynote I delivered at my 40th Birthday PowerPoint Party. A series of infodumps about poetic meter, in which I sing, play guitar, and embarrass myself a little. Please enjoy!
Consider backing if you would like more shenanigans like this.
Comments (9)
Thank you so much for this. I can't tell you how much I needed a good LOL today. (I've posted to Mastadon. May your mastery be shared far & wide.)
It's odd you mention iamb isn't an iamb, as I was always taught iambs, trochee and spondee are all self-demonstrative. (And that also part of the reason Bardologists get so weird about iambic pentameter is that an iamb is self-reflective of the same rhythm of a heartbeat so surely Shakespeare MUST be tapping into the inherent spirit of the human soul, ignore that he actually uses less iambs the longer he writes...) But regardless, I'm so happy to finally see this piece! As a person who detested doing scansion but has a weird connection to it anyway, this makes me understand how it can actually be kind of fun.
Just asking because I want to know if I'm imagining things: The Watership Down section in the Nebula version was animated and this one isn't, right? Or am I completely making that up?
oh, you are correct! that tripped YouTube's contentID so aggressively it blocked even the private version of the video, so I made an alternate edit. this version is just uploaded straight to Patreon but I used the the most recent export so it's the redone version. I'll see if I can swap them out at some point!
This has got to be one of my favorite videos ever. I had to mention scansion to our English language teacher at work because of this video, and now we're reading poetry and I love it, and I only regret that I do not know more about this. Thank you for bringing it back!
Every time I hear a particularly well-written verse I think to myself "...now that's some gooood scansion." 🥰
Thank you, I was just thinking that I'd love to watch it again and mourning its demise from Nebula!
I write pseudo-yearly poems for my wife for various occasions and keep track of all the meters I've used because I too am a little obsessive about scansion and I like trying out different meters. So far I've written in: Iambic tetrameter, iambic pentameter, Trochaic tetrameter, trochaic octameter, Amphibrachic dimeter (twice), amphibrachic tetrameter (twice), Anapestic tetrameter, A multi-verse limerick, and Tertius paeon tetrameter I missed this video the first time around, but it was very fun so I'm glad I caught the rerun!
By the way, I think this talk (when you first posted it) pushed me over the line to actually reading Watership Down. I read it aloud to my daughter and we both really liked it a lot. So thank you for that nudge.