Arontius of Bygelswade

.....On Saturday I had the priviledge to judge an entry in the Kingdom Arts and Sciences Championship. It was a Merovingian / Latin poem from the Sixth Century. I was fascinated with the subject and enjoyed the presentation immensely! One would think that it would be difficult to fill up an hour's worth of time talking about a poem of eight or so lines, but I was scratching my head and wondering where the time went when Mistress Gwen walked by with the five minute card in her hand. :-)

.....I am no Latin expert by any means, mainly a smattering of self-taught 'college' Latin so that I could translate a few things for myself. When I was e-mailed the documentation I went ahead and pulled out my old Latin dictionary and grammer, and even pulled out TBT's reference information to brush up on it. I knew that I faced someone of some depth of intensity as the documentation was FANTASTIC. Thorough and broad-ranged. I knew that I was going to have a tough time keeping myself from going 'DUH' at any given point. :-)

.....But I kept to the areas of which I could speak and not be a complete idiot and left those areas dealing with Latin composition and pronunciation to the other two judges, who have had more Latin than I and who also pulled out their old Latin grammers to brush up on it. :-)

.....But I found very little on which to comment, other to say how utterly impressed I was with the entry. I made a couple of suggestions for things I might have tried or done differently, but they were suggestions only, from the point of view of a poet. The presenter struck me as more of a scholar with a love of the construction of language, as versus someone who likes to write poetry. I wish that I would have had the opportunity to ask the presenter that question so as to hear the results. I was curious to see if my supposition was accurate.

.....Sir Richard geeked out a little on this and poetry in general. We both were really intrigued about the part that passion plays in the formation of poetry. We both have noticed that it takes a little bit of real emotion (or a little insanity) to create poetry of real depth. We talked of authors such as Byron and Frost and thought how people like Byron could tap into their insanity to produce poetic beauty. The mark of a truly good poet would be the ability to write a poem on a subject of which they knew nothing or had any emotional connection and make this poem one that would evoke emotion in others. The bottom line question being what would it take for someone living a mundane and relatively sane life to tap into a muse that would produce passion enough to write poetry of depth and substance.

.....We have both noticed that if we don't have an emotional investment in a particular subject whatever poetry we produce is rather boring or uninspiring.

.....So we left the conversation with an unresolved question. But we did decide that we needed to collaborate on poetry again. I agreed that I'd start. No sonnetry this time. We're going to write Anglo-Saxon heroic couplets. The hard part being that we have to brush up on our Middle English to that we can write it in the Middle English, paying attention to spelling and meaning so as to fit in a Middle English context. Should be an interesting exercise. :-)

.....Argh, already 8:30! Time to go to bed. 4AM will be here way too fast!!!! :-)

.....Aaron / Arontius.