Stratofanatic's Emporium

Although technically this book is a sequel to Bolivar’s The Lay of Old Hex , I read this having only encountered A Wheel of Ravens before. From the two books, though, you can clearly tell that Bolivar has a unique style. Unlike Wheel , which is written in the Old English alliterative meter, this book primarily appears in ballad form. This creates a smooth reading experience with strong intimations of 18 th - and 19 th -century British folklore. Like Wheel, though, the poems in Ballad for the Witching Hour share several interconnected stories and characters that Bolivar likes to use in common. Most of this collection’s poems are “Jack” tales (although not all these “Jacks” appear to be the same Jack). There’s also a dream-world, lots of cool mythological references, shared characters such as Scarlet Balladress, and so on. Overall, I’d recommend reading Ballad for the Witching Hour in one sitting, like I did, because then you can better see how Bolivar’s poems all play off one anot...

Of all the new alliterative poems I’ve recently seen, Lancelot Schaubert’s “ Dear Tolkien Estate ” is one of the more delightful. To give this one some context, if you’re a regular reader of Tales After Tolkien , you might have already heard of a little-known fantasy author by the name of J.R.R. Tolkien. Well, back in May 2013, the executor of Tolkien’s estate (his son Christopher) posthumously published one of his father’s longest original works in strict Old English meter, The Fall of Arthur . If you’ve not read it before, it’s a remarkable achievement, but alas … as holds true for most of Lancelot Schaubert Tolkien’s major projects, he never completed it. Only four cantos plus portions of a fifth are finished. Nevertheless, in 1934, he shared a draft of The Fall of Arthur with his trusted friend and colleague, the medievalist R. W. Chambers (1874-1942), who praised the poem highly. Yet this encouragement was apparently insufficient to entice Tolkien towards completion, and despite...

Having already discussed Poul Anderson, the Modern Revival’s most noteworthy early pulp poet, it only makes sense to now turn our sights on the Inklings, the two best-known “university” poets. And because most readers interested in such matters already know about Tolkien, let’s take the opportunity to give equal time to his friend and fellow Inkling, C. S. Lewis. Now, full disclosure: I’ve published a lot about Lewis’s alliterative verse, so there’s quite a few paths this blog post could take. Issues of national identity and English nationalism, for instance, or Lewis’s infamous disdain for modernist poetics. Or we might mention his preference for formalist poetry, his Christian apologetics, or the religious aspects of his fantasy. The man. The myth. The legend. But if people “know” one thing about Lewis’s poetry, they know that it’s … well … not very good. Now, that’s not my view, mind you, but even fans and scholars of Lewis tend to accept this assessment as the default conse...

Entry #2 is up in the blog series .... see the original here . Or check out my posting below.

Over that the Tales After Tolkien Society, I've started a new blog series for them: "The New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf." It's explicitly dedicated to chatting about poets and poems in the Modern Alliterative Revival, and it's going to be a fun, accessible-to-lay-readers little series, if I can say so myself.  My first entry can be found here: " Introduction to a Blog Series ." However, I'll also be posting entries on my own blog, hoping for just a few more readers. Enjoy!

Well, in line with my review of another modern alliterative poet, Lancelot Schaubert , I picked up Dothead (2016) by Amit Majmudar. As a way of supporting his work, I've posted reviews on Goodreads and Amazon ... and now here! ----------------------------------- I bought this book almost at random, having seen one of Majmudar’s published poems elsewhere, and for anyone who enjoys a very musical formalist poet, Majmudar will not disappoint. There’s not a ton of esoteric allusions in Dothead , but there’s a fair bit of literary history, so if you’ve got a bit of background on canonical 20 th -century authors, particularly the modernists, Dothead will provide some extra oomph. For instance, in his “James Bond Suite,” I thought I saw direct ties to Hemingway (“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”) and Yeats (“Easter 1916”) tied very cleverly into standard James Bond tropes. Likewise, Majmudar seems particularly enamored of the First World War and Wilfred Owen, two of my own pe...

Well, that was a nail-biter!  So, yeah, sure .... I may have known I was going present at MLA today for nine months, but that didn't stop me from only starting my conference paper yesterday afternoon. Luckily, I knew exactly what I wanted to say. The subject is an easy one for me: serving in departmental leadership despite precarious employment. And like most of my conference papers nowadays, it is a (self-professed) hilarious one. A chuckle-riot of a story about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer somehow doesn't interfere with me carefully laying out many issues faced by a contingent academic serving in a leadership role. I've uploaded it to academic.edu , and although I now wish that I'd called it "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Contingent Academic," it's officially called, " Above and Beyond: Joining Departmental Leadership while Contingent ." Also, the weird thing about doing a hilarious presentation on Zoom is that there's no real-time audience feedb...