Stuff You Should Know - How Poetry Works

Episode Date: May 2, 2017

Poetry is a broad and expansive art form. From dramatic verse to haiku, rhyming poetry and spoken word, there are many hats a poet can wear. Join Josh and Chuck today as they break down the history of poetry, a dive into what's so great about it. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Emily Dickinson Bryant and Jerry Longfellow Rowland.

Me, like I said, I'm just Josh Clark. I'm not a poet. And if I am, I don't know it. Oh, why don't you come over and help me straighten out my Longfellow? Oh, yeah. The great Ronnie Dangerfield. What is it?

And back to school. Yeah, but I think we should start off by saying that, you know, Jerry likes to deliver confidence builders right before we hit record. Yeah, she goes. She said, hey, something I've noticed when you guys record too, if there's one that you think stinks, record that one first.

Yeah, this one recording first. I like this one though. I do too. Jerry apparently is not down with poetry though. Geez. She's like, it's stupid. She's base. I hate poetry.

I like regular sentences. She's a fan of prose. Yeah. What this episode did for me was reminded me that I like poetry. Yeah. Yeah, I remember now as an English major, really getting into it for a little while.

I'll bet you had to read a lot of poetry for that. I did and some of it I didn't like at all, but a lot of it I really, really liked. And I just realized I don't read a lot of poetry anymore and I really kind of dug it. There's plenty of good poetry out there for sure. I've never been wanting to be like, oh, I'm going to sit here and read poetry all day.

Well, it does carry a certain like thing. Although I have smoked pipe before, some of my long sleeve shirts have suede patches on the elbows. Sure. I'm just a poser, because I don't sit around reading poetry, but I do appreciate a good poem.

Well, I think that's my deal is like a really good poem just impresses me to no end. Sure. Yeah, oh man. Try writing a poem yourself. I did once. How'd it go? I post college wrote a poem that I liked so much,

I sent it to the New Yorker. Oh, you liked it that much, huh? Yeah. I liked it enough to, you know, realize rejection. Did it turn out that Ziggy had already done the same poem? No. You know the reference? No.

Oh, there's a Seinfeld where Elaine sent in a comic to the New Yorker, but it turns out she had ripped off a Ziggy. I don't remember that. It's a good one. Anyway, I have a copy of this somewhere, a hard copy only, I think, in some box. You didn't bring it today?

Well, no. I mean, it's got to be my attic, but I need to get it in, because I remember thinking like it's pretty good. Well, yeah, I mean, if he sent it to the New Yorker, I would guess you thought very highly of it. But I was also 23 and, you know, probably thought, you know, I wrote my first poem,

I'm gonna send it to the New Yorker. Yeah, so it was your first. First and only. First you're like, this is going to the New Yorker. First shot. Yeah. That's funny. That's like akin to like just writing your first script

and being like, I should get this in Scorsese's hands. I might as well prepare my Oscar speech. Anyway, I did get a rejection letter, but it was nice to, you know, get that even. Yeah, you should have it framed next to your poem. Yeah. I'd like to see this poem or hear it. It was sort of longish,

and it was about a kid jumping in a pile of leaves in the fall. That's nice. But as you'll, we will see it had, you know, symbolism and metaphor, you know, I didn't, you know, I never said leaves or pile of leaves or anything like that, you know, it was all like very, I thought skillfully sort of crafted.

Yeah. Like you just put me on my head. Like I thought that the poem was about jumping into leaves and the leaves are a metaphor for something else, but it's about doing something else that's a metaphor for jumping in a pile of leaves. No, it was about a kid jumping in a pile of leaves. I just never explicitly said that.

I see. You know, he like became a locomotive, like a steam train and it was sort of fancy. Oh, I gotcha. That kind of thing. Oh, but that was good. Yeah, I thought it was pretty good. I think everyone wants to hear this poem now.

You're gonna have to post it. Well, if I dig it up, I will definitely read it in a very special step you should know. Okay. It's a deal. Called how to get our listeners to jump into a ravine. Right.

So one of the things Chuck, that when I was researching this, I went, I looked all over for, you know, learning to appreciate poetry or, you know, what it takes just for some advice because it's always been a tough nut to crack for me, which I think makes me like just about everybody. And I came across this essay on poets.org

and it's called how to read a poem. And it is, that's exactly what it's about. It's written in prose form, thankfully, so you can understand it like right off the bat. And the author made this point. He said that readers make three false assumptions when addressing an unfamiliar poem, right? The first is that they assume they should understand

the poem right out of the gate, first time they read it. Yes. And that if they don't, there's something wrong with them. Or probably less frequently, there's something wrong with the poem. Right. Poem doesn't work. I don't get it.

The second is that they, that there's in any given poem, there's a code. And if you can crack the code, you get the whole poem. Right. The poem's only about one certain thing and it's all encoded in one way. Yeah. And that's that.

Like you just crack it, bam, you're done. Poem's been read. Right. And then the third one is assuming that the poem can mean anything the reader wanted to mean. That's not true. The poem means what the author intended it to mean. Well, yeah.

It's open to interpretation, certainly. Yeah. But the poem still, from what I'm gathering here, there's no poet who ever wrote something and it was like, I have no idea what that means. Yeah, but I have heard poets and songwriters say, like, you know, I meant it to be this way, but it's whatever you take it.

Sure. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of meaning imbued in not just poetry, but any kind of writing, any kind of art, by the viewer, by the listener, by whoever, right? But the point is a poem is so meticulously crafted that you can bet every word, literally every syllable

in every single line was handpicked and almost sculpted. And it all comes together to point out that the best way to approach poetry is as a typewritten object of art. Yeah, agreed. And that once you come at it like that and that it's gonna be hard, it's gonna give you trouble, but the more trouble it gives you, the more rewarding it's gonna be when you understand it.

If you come at a poem like that and you're not gonna get it the first time out, that you're supposed to spend some time and effort on it, you can start to appreciate poems. Yeah. That's what I got from this in prose. I wonder if one of your issues with poetry is has something to do with how concise poetry is

and you as a writer, like why you haven't written a 2000 page novel is surprising to me still. Yeah. Infinite jest, the sequel. Like I always imagine your book would be like in Wonder Boys, that scene where he gets to sit down and he types out like, I can't remember the first three digits,

but you think, oh, it's 300 words. And then he types like a four at the end. It's like 3000 pages long. Right. Yeah, and Katie Holmes is like, yeah, once you started getting into the different lineages of the horses that were, you stop making choices. Such a good movie.

It is. Yeah, what do you think? Do you think that's accurate? What? Like why you might... Oh, that it's too concise? No, I can appreciate things that are different. I think for me, I ran into the same thing

that the author of How to Read a Poem kind of called out, which is, you expect to get it the first time. And if you don't, you just get kind of frustrated and you give up. Right. I'm a quitter. I'm a quitter reader.

That's not true. No, I take it back then. Should we talk about history? Yeah. Well, one thing I thought was kind of really neat is that poetry predates literacy. Yeah. By hundreds of years.

If not thousands. Yeah, true. I think when, kind of every site that I looked at talking about the history of poetry all pointed to Epic of Gilgamesh. Such a good story. And just the kind of the earliest poetry period were these epic poems.

And a lot of people think that one reason they turned to poetry was so they could memorize stories. Right, yeah, because if you were a storyteller in your group, you were in a story and that was your role. Yeah. And you needed to remember actual facts, events, that kind of thing. So it was a way to help record and memorize history in a way.

Right. Which is kind of a revealing thing about poetry because a lot of people think of poetry as written or typed. When really poetry is actually usually intended to be read aloud. Yeah. And once you start reading poems aloud, then I think you'll be like, oh, I see.

I hate my voice. I don't go to poetry readings, but there is a dude. In fact, I'm gonna read one of his poems later. There's a modern poet named Derek Brown. You know Derek? No. I thought you might have met him somehow. He tours, he's a touring poet.

Cool. And opens up a lot of times for music bands and like comedians. He opened for Eugene Merman. Okay. So I met him once and got to know him a little bit and he's just great. That's pretty cool.

Like his poems are awesome. Well, yeah, I'm sure. If you're a touring poet, you're not gonna suck. But he's trying to sort of, and you know, all kinds of, it's not like he's the only person out there writing poetry, but you know, you see articles about poetry being dead every now and then and it's just not the case.

Yeah, the article either says poetry is dead or poetry is alive and well, but everybody calls it rap. And then somebody else writes another. Yeah. And there's this huge ongoing debate over whether rap qualifies as poetry. And it's just. All written by like middle-aged white men.

Pretty much. Yeah. Oh goodness. So speaking of epics, the Greeks and the Romans, historically between what 1200 BC and AD 455 was when they were really cranking stuff out. And everyone always points to the two biggies. Homer wrote the Iliad, or I'm sorry, Iliad,

not the Iliad, and Odyssey. He didn't write the Iliad? I don't think the official title is the Iliad. Is that the Iliad? It's just Iliad. Iliad and Odyssey. I was surprised that Heesiad was called out. Yeah.

Instead of like Virgil. I would have guessed Virgil would have been name checked sooner than Heesiad. Right, as number two behind Homer. Yeah. Homer's number one for sure. Ancient Greek epic poets. Yeah, I think so.

But Heesiad, come on. I don't know, works and days, not bad. Yeah. As far as epic poems go. Sure. Which I'm not into. I struggled with both Iliad and Odyssey. Oh, you read them both?

Well, yeah, in English class. I mean, I can't absolutely look back and say I read them both all the way through for class. I might have been a little lazy about it. But we studied them in great detail. Yeah. I read enough of, I guess, the Odyssey that I started to confuse it with the...

With Odyssey. Harry Hamlin. What? Class of the Titans? Class of the Titans, yeah. Or L.A. Law. They just kind of run together. He started to confuse it with making love,

his 80s movie. I never saw that one. Yeah, it was a movie about like a gay man that was married and had like a secret affair. And Harry Hamlin was him? Well, no, I think the husband was Michael Antkeen. Remember that guy? No.

And I think he had the affair with Harry Hamlin because who wouldn't? Well, yeah. You know? I mean, that guy. Speaking of, I want to say something and this has nothing to do with anything. He just reminded me with 80s movie.

I've been watching a lot of Rift Tracks lately. Yeah. They kill it. I want to specifically recommend, if you have an Amazon Prime membership, it's streaming on Prime. A lot of Rift Tracks is. Nightmare at noon, I think is what it's called.

So had you not watched a lot of Rift Tracks? I'd seen a few, but I just kind of caught the bug and I've been like crying, laughing at some parts. Or like I'm just wiping my eyes. Like I don't, listen to me, man. I don't laugh like that. And it's making me laugh like that. Yeah.

Kevin and John, listen to stuff you should know supposedly. Yeah, I've heard that. Or at least they were nice enough to say that to my face. I don't know, either that or they're just super nice guys. I didn't want to make me feel bad. I could kind of see that. They're like, can I listen to stuff that knows? So moving on to medieval times.

Things started to get a little more, well not creative, but they started to expand the poetic horizons a bit with the language they use and the subject matter they wrote about. Chaucer in particularly started doing something really unusual is writing in the common everyday language, which kind of didn't happen a lot before him. No, it'd been Latin up till then.

Yeah. And he's like talking about, you know, common people. Yeah. In the common language. Yeah, well common for then, but Chaucer's tough. Oh man, impenetrable. Yeah, for me. It's like, what's this guy talking about?

Yeah. You need a good teacher for that stuff. Like a really good English teacher that can walk you through that stuff. Yeah, supposedly Canterbury tales are really interesting and like there's a lot of wit and humor to them, but yeah, it's just really difficult language. Yeah, I had somebody who knows it.

I had a good teacher in college and I had an idea to make Canterbury tales into a modern movie, but on a Greyhound bus and I thought that was great. I thought all my ideas were good when I was like 21. Yeah. It's not a bad idea. It's all right. It's no Sharknado.

You need royalties for that one. So moving on to the Renaissance period, things got even more creative. And this is when we saw New Forms of Meter, a young man named William Shakespeare, Thomas Marlowe. They started the verse drama movement. Right. So initially you've got poetry as just oral history,

basically. And then the Greeks come along and then the Romans and codify it and make formal structures out of it. And then everybody starts to undo those and it's getting further and further away from the Greeks and the Romans until we hit the Enlightenment period from about the mid 17th century till almost the 18th century,

almost the 19th century, I should say. And they went back and basically venerated the Greek and Roman traditions, which seems weird to me. But somebody was struck and said, these guys knew what they were doing. Yeah, I'm kind of surprised too, I would have thought the Enlightenment would have taken things in an even further.

Yeah. Like away from that, but I guess not. I guess not. I think the Romantics did though, 17, yeah, 1790 till about 1830. And that's when they kind of poo pooed in poo poo, but they strayed a bit from what the Enlightenment was doing. Well, Rebelled for sure.

It seems like there were like periods of strict structure and then rebellion away from that over the decades and centuries in the history of poetry, which is literally what we're talking about right now. And probably a cultural movement as well. I'm sure it was kind of all tied together, right? Sure. Certainly with the Transcendentalist movement

in the United States. And I used to be all about those cats. Yeah. Love them. And then I started really learning about Thoreau and I was kind of like, he was a bit of a weirdo. You know, like in real life, he's an odd dude. Yeah.

Yeah. And not like in all great ways, you know? Like he'd just go off and like poop in the corner at a party. He'd just go off and live deliberately like a weirdo. Okay, poop in the corner at a party. All right. But they did, you know, the Transcendentalists and the Romantics did focus a lot on create nature

and stuff like that. Yeah, certainly Thoreau. For sure. Was all about it. I liked, let me, I'm just saying, I liked Emerson more than Thoreau as I got older. Okay. I used to think Thoreau was great.

Sure. And then I came to like Emerson more. Well Thoreau, that's a young man's game. Sure, I was wondering how many people are just like, what are these guys talking about? Welcome to our new subscribers. Victorian period, 1832 to 1901. And this is further breaking away from the establishment.

And this is when you get like the great granddaddy of them all, Mr. Whitman. Yeah, he's like structure, meter, rhythm. You can take it and shove it. I say nuts to that. And things kind of like, that was it from kind of then on. Like you had your traditionalist still, and even today you still do, but that's when basically

all the rules were out the window and you could do whatever you wanted and call it poetry. Thanks to Walt Whitman. Leaves of grass, baby. I think that was the original title. Yeah. Comma baby. It was, yeah.

Couple of whys on the end. Should we move into the 20th century too? Well, you kind of have to because it's not like poetry just ended with Whitman. The 20th century definitely saw its share of movements. Apparently in the very early 20th century, there was a modernist movement that sought to go even further away from the norms.

And they even rebelled against poor Walt Whitman, who may or may not have still been alive to see this. But they said, you know what? We're sick of your flowery language and your fancy calligraphy and all that. We are going to make short, concise, interesting poems. And that was the modernist movement. This is where it really started to get interesting for me.

The modernists? Yeah, I was way into E.E. Cummings and Yates and Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Plath. What about Robert Frost? Yeah. He was good. Sure. I mean, listen to me.

He was good. He was all right. No, he was amazing. He was an adequate. W.H. Alden. Which one was the one who made pithy rhyming short rhymes? Like, this is so sad. I got my poetry from King of the Hill.

But there was this one King of the Hill where Peggy Hill is reciting a poem. She said, the cow is of the bovine oak. One end gives moo, the other milk. Who was that? It wasn't Ezra Pound, was it? Ezra Pound wouldn't have written something like that. It sounds like something Oscar Wilde would have done.

No. It was a Texan, I believe, because they were observing the guy's house. Oh, OK. No idea. Definitely wasn't Oscar Wilde then. Anyway, that's when I really got into poetry. It was way more accessible to me.

And I could read E.E. Cummings and sort of get it. I think part of it also, though, Chuck, is your experience was a lot closer in resemblance to the experience of people in the early 20th century than it was to a Puritan writing in New England in the 17th century about how much I love God and my neighbors. Like, your experience is different. So of course, you can identify with it.

So of course, the poetry that's created from that experience is going to speak to you or at least be more accessible to you. I think that's why a lot of people get turned off from poetry, too. Here's another reason. It's because you're indoctrinated into this history of poetry, and it should go backwards. It should go counter chronologically.

You should be inculcated in poetry roughly in at least the same century within the last 50, 60 years. And then once you start to get that, you can take on older and older stuff. But it's like, not only do you have to get the poem, you have to get the poem and also understand like a completely different social outlook

from somebody who lived a couple hundred years ago. It's like, what are they even talking about? Well, I was about to give advice to English teachers, but then I realized we just did the same thing. Like, if you start your class with, all right, let's talk about the Epic of Gilgamesh. That's how you can lose a student, but we just did the same thing.

Jerry, can you publish this thing backwards? Surely there's a way. Well, I have to admit to my dead poet society had a pretty big impact on me, too. Never saw it. Shut up. Never saw it. You're kidding.

I've never seen it just so I could save this moment. Have you really? Yeah, I've never seen it. Let's start a movie podcast where we each just are like. No. Yeah. It's called You've Never Seen That? So I was inculcated into the work of Robin Williams

in the wrong way and much that. More commending. No, no. Patch Adams. Once I saw Patch Adams, I was like, I can't see any more Robin Williams movies. You should see dead poets. I'm sure I should.

It was really good. I think I've got another 10, 15 years of Patch Adams to wear off first. Is that the only Robin Williams movie you've ever seen? No, that's the last one I saw, though. Oh, okay. Really? Man.

No, that's not true. Father of the Year, I saw. Oh. Have you seen it? You're picking the wrong movies. Have you seen it? No. That was good.

Oh, it was? In a weird indie way. It's a weird little movie. He did good. I think that might be his last one. I think I'm thinking of something else. Yeah, this is a little weird indie movie. Yeah, I'm thinking something different.

I think Bob Goldthwaite directed it. Oh, well, then it's good. And then we move on. We're getting into the 1915s. No, we're getting into the mid-40s, and I got into this stuff, too, the beat poets. I think every college student probably went through a little phase

where they listened to Ginsburg, but Red Ginsburg and Kerouac and those, that generation definitely sort of embraced the do-what-you-want with the style. Yeah, bongos. Yeah, I liked it. I thought it was cool. Oh, the beats were awesome, man.

Yeah. Yeah, Kerouac, in particular, I never got into any of the other guys, but I liked him a lot. Everyone should read Howl by Ginsburg. Yeah? Yeah, I mean, that's his most famous poem, and I'm sure Ginsburg, big Ginsburg fans,

will say, ah, of course you can recommend Howl. Yeah, I've tried. You should read Howl. Sure. We should, take a break. Yes. Stuff, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

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This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. So, Chuck, we are back. And we are done talking about the history of poetry.

Let's talk about poetry itself. OK. OK. So a poem has four lines. And they all rhyme. Yep, they all rhyme. A, A, A, A. They're all in iambic pentatonic. They're a tammeter, which we'll describe later.

And they're each made up of four stanzas. That's a poem. Anything else is just commie propaganda. Right? Yeah. Boy, we're silly today. Yeah. I guess we should talk about the genres.

And this is one of those topics where we're going to do 50 Minutes on Poetry when there are, We could do 15 podcasts about poetry. So forgive the over-view-ness of this, because that's what we do. Sure. You have narrative poetry, which is a poem that tells a story.

Yeah, which doesn't have to be an epic poem. It doesn't have to be, you know, book length. It can be a very short poem that tells a story, but it's got like basically a plot and action and characters. Yeah, car chase, right? At least one. But epic poetry does fall under that banner, though. Right. Yeah.

You have dramatic poetry, which we talked about with Shakespeare. Yeah. A lot of people maybe don't even realize that Shakespeare was writing poetry for the stage. Yeah. You know? I guess so. Or maybe they don't think about it that way. I thought everybody thought that's what it was, was poetry.

Oh, well. Talk about dense and impenetrable, too. Yeah, it's tough. Can be. Again, need a good teacher. A good teacher, sure. I wish I could remember my teacher's names to shout them out.

My college teachers, it really like were so great at that. But I think I've talked about them before. I had a great Shakespeare teacher. He would just, we just read it out loud in class and he would say, well, this is what's going on. After each, after each like, you know, couple of stanzas. So you need, yeah, it's like an annotated, live annotated version of Shakespeare.

And his theory was, you know, this is what you gotta do to make these kids get it. But once they get it, they realize that these are modern stories. Right. Just, you know, told in a way that no one can understand. Right, timeless stories. Yes, exactly.

Lyric poetry is probably if, what a lot of people think of as a poem. Right. You know, it might rhyme. Doesn't have to tell a story. It doesn't have to have a plot. It's like rhyme and rhythm and it creates just like this. It's for effect of a feeling maybe.

It uses a lot of imagery usually of different types to get you to visualize something or to hear something or imagine what the poet's trying to get across. There's lots of different meanings. It's like, yeah, it's like what people think of when they think of poems. Yeah. Lyric poetry.

Remember that one. And there are many other kinds and genres, but I think those are kind of the main ones that a lot of people consider the three main genres. Yeah. Is that fair? I think so. So when you, we already kind of said it,

when you're reading poetry, most of the time you're reading it silently to yourself. And that is not what you're supposed to do. Most poems are written to be read out loud. Even if just to yourself. Yeah. Yeah, and apparently the first time from this how to read a poem essay,

the first time you go to read a poem, just read it out loud. And the author points out that you will notice a lot of stuff about the poem and you don't have to get the meaning right away, but you want to just basically read it out loud at least once. And that alone is going to raise a lot of different flags

and markers about the poem to you. Because when you read it out loud, the sounds that the words make start to really come out. And that's really what starts to differentiate poetry from prose. The fact that basically sound effects are used in this written art. Yeah.

Like a laser. Pew, pew. Right. That's how you read a poem. Yeah. Rhyme obviously is the most common, or maybe at least most recognizable sound effect. Pew, pew.

Dude, that might be alliteration. Yeah. In fact, I think it is. It's onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia, right. Ah! Yeah, yeah. Snap, crackle, pop.

English major. We all know what rhymes are, so we're not going to insult you with the definition, but there are also things like near rhymes. Yeah, yeah. Or slant rhymes, which are when, well, kind of when you can't think of a word that really rhymes, but you can get one that's close.

So, Emily Dickinson apparently was a master of the slant rhyme. Oh, yeah? Yes. How about bear and far? Yeah. I mean, it's close. You're not gonna be like, oh, that's stupid,

and like, swap the book off of your desk. It's not like bear and orange. Well, nothing rhymes with orange, right? That's why I said it, supposedly, right? I've never heard anything that rhymes with orange. I'm sure there's some emails coming on that one. Orange. Right.

There are a couple of other things we can talk about, like alliteration and consonants with N-A-N-C-E, and consonants is a good example. Mommy's mommy was no common dummy. Yeah, you get that mmm sound. Yeah. But it's not necessarily at the beginning of the word. Right.

They were at the beginning of a bunch of different words close together. That would be alliteration. Right, but they are specifically consonants, alliteration, you're right. That is, you know, the big brown bear bit, Benny's butt. Poor Benny.

Yeah, what about assonance? That's one of my favorites. That one's tough. That's where it can be tough to pick up on. That's where a vowel is repeated, or a vowel sound is repeated in a number of words close together, somewhere in the word. Right.

Like the rain in Spain falls gently on the plane. I think mainly on the plane. Whatever. Or I like the example that you use in here. I might like to fight nine pirates at a time. Yeah, that's a good one. I don't know. All this stuff I love.

Like this is poetry's kind of playful quality to me. Right. Or when a poet sits down and you can put a lot of thought into it if you're trying to pull off something like that, you know? Yeah. As you're trying to also tell a story. Oh yeah, no, like to be a genuine poet

is to be probably one of the most creative and technically proficient artists around. Agreed. It's gotta be one of the most difficult things to do well, I think. Agreed. You know, just think about it. You're a great director.

Well, you've got a camera to assist you and really get your vision across. You've got this technology. You're an author of prose. Well, how many pages did it take you to get your point across? Right. You are a musician.

That's great. You got violin, bravo, a poet. You got a quill, an inkwell, some paper. Better get it right. It's tough. You're wearing your breeches. Yeah, exactly. Well, what I say earlier,

alliteration, but you said it was onomatopoeia? Yeah, that's the one where it's, the word sounds like the word it describes. Right, like bang, beep. Snap, crackle, pop. Buzz, snap. Yeah, and crackle. Crackle.

Don't forget. Purr. And pop. Clash. I like those words. I would love to see this episode animated. Do you remember the dude who used to animate? Yeah, they were great.

Oh, man, they were better than the actual episodes, right? And this one, I think, would be virtually impossible to animate. I think you're right. And these, of course, are just some of the most common sound effects or many tools that a poet can pull out of the old toolbox and use at their disposal. So sometimes I've found that when you are forced to work within a structure, a very highly structured environment,

you're able to be more creative than you might be if it's just like, here, go crazy, no rules. Because then you have to, like, you're just thinking about the edges, the boundaries, and then you have to think about how to get creative. People need structure. So if the structure is given to you, it's easy sometimes to kind of play within that structure

and to really let your wings spread, which I think is one reason why poems have certain structures, even though, really, it's a free-for-all. You can basically do whatever you want and call it a poem. But there are plenty of structures, and there are certain parts of a poem structure that you can find in almost any poem. Well, yeah, and these structures are just things

that were repeated enough by enough people, because someone did it first, and someone else thought, hey, that's pretty clever. Yeah, I like that. And enough people did it to where it became canon. Canon? Sure. All right, canon.

Structure. Yeah. Like, for instance, I said stanzas, and prose you have paragraphs, and poems you have stanzas. It's like a poem's paragraph. Yeah, and how you actually type that on the page is very much thought out as in where you take the line breaks to the next line

and where you might put that period. If you break a sentence up, or you can have one sentence that's super long on one line, and then three words of a sentence on another line, and then one word, one word, one word on each line. Everybody's going to hate your poem, but. No, not necessarily. You could do that.

Or if you choose to break a sentence in the middle of a line, that actually is the name. It's called enjambment. And it's all part of this wacky, crazy, poetic structure world. But that's the thing. And there actually is a type of poetry called concrete poetry, where the shape that the poem takes

on the page is meant to visualize something, or to be a depiction of a picture, basically. Yeah, I'm not into that. I'm not either. I think most poets aren't. Oh, really? Yeah. I think the ones that do, it's like.

So like a poem of a windy river is typed in such a way that if you blur your eyes, it looks like a windy river. Sure, right. That's called a concrete poem, I believe. I think on the nose is another word for it. Right, yeah. So most poets aren't breaking lines. They're not doing enjambment to make a picture.

It's meant to have to either point out a word, to play with a series of words, or just to create a rhythm that otherwise they wouldn't be able to if they just did sentence by sentence on a line. Yeah, and you know, even when I wrote as a novice that poem that I submitted, I found myself doing that just instinctively after studying poetry and stuff like, oh, this word, I'm going to capitalize it,

and it's going to go on a line by itself. Right, oh, they'll love this, and New Yorker's going to go crazy for that. That's what I thought. So I ran across a guy named Robert Creeley, who's apparently very well known for his enjambment. So he can hear it, seriously. So here's a poem from The Language.

You're part of some lines from his poem, The Language. Locate, I love you, somewhere in teeth and eyes. Bite it, but. So if you just read it like that, it's whatever. It's a poem. But this is how he has the line breaks, and apparently he's well known for reading his poems out loud and leaving a beat after just about every line.

Locate I. Love you some. Wear in teeth and eyes. Bite it, but. Right, now can't you just see everybody in a cafe going like this? Yeah, that's what happened. After that, but this guy's like a master of enjambment, because if you take it and you look at it especially

when you look at it, it just really changes the meaning of the words, you know? I think master of enjambment should be your rap name, for sure. Oh, apparently you take your. Oh, is there a thing? Yeah, you take your last, the last meal you ate and put lil in front of it.

I'm lil ramen. Yeah, I'm lil fried chicken and collards. Really, that's what you had? Yeah. Where'd you get it? Hopstern. Oh, downstairs. Good.

Yeah. I've had the chicken, I haven't had the greens. Oh, they're great. I'll try them out. Perfect, they're not mushy, they're not undercooked, they're just, they're great. I had the ramen from downstairs. Yeah, that's good stuff.

This is my most common meal here. Lil ramen. Or I had the don, the don-don, maybe lil don-don would be better. Or lil don-don ramen. Yeah. Lil don-don's good. I was lil nachos for a lil while, then I ate something else.

Then you had another meal? Yeah. I was lil nachos for about eight hours. All right, so there's something else called a cesura, C-A-E-S-U-R-A. And that's a pause in the middle of a line. And again, these are all just. That's usually where there's a period in the middle of a line.

Well, that's an enjambment. No, an enjambment is like a break. Oh, a break in a sentence. Yeah, the cesura is where there's punctuation, typically a period in the middle of a line. Yeah, yeah, I had those backwards. And these are all just ways to play with the structural effect of your poem, basically.

Exactly. You can rhyme scheme is a. If you've taken any kind of English class, you definitely would hammer home the rhyme scheme of. It's a test question. What is the rhyme scheme of this poem? And that's the pattern and the rhyming pattern in the lines, basically.

And it's A, B, A, or A, B, B, depending on what rhymes with what. Right. And the rhyme scheme is always described by like that. So depending on how many lines, let's say you have four lines, you've got A, B, C, and D. Well, the lines that rhyme, say you're first and third and second and fourth rhyme, they're going to share the same letter. So A, B, A, B is how your rhyme scheme would be written out.

And anybody who knows poetry would be able to look at that and understand what lines of the poem rhyme. It's pretty simple. Yeah. I think I just made it way harder than it actually is. No, I don't think so. Meeder, you've probably heard your teacher talk about Meeder, too, and that's the actual rhythmic structure.

And there, you're mainly talking about the stresses on the syllables. Right. And this, to me, is one of the really neat things about poetry is the sort of, and the sentence they use in here is actually a good one. He'd like to have some pumpkin pie, the way that's stressed is just very singsong-y and sort of playful.

You know, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's almost like a dance in your mouth. I always dance around when I'm asking for pumpkin pie. I'd like to have some pumpkin pie. Yeah, and that's how you just did jazz hands. And again, that's just how you're stressing the words and how you're playing with the words, and that's the meeder.

Yeah. It creates that rhythm. Right, so in a meeder, the basic unit of a meeder is a foot. And it's a foot is, it can be any number of stressed and unstressed syllables. Usually it's up to four, right? And there's different names for different types of feet. So everyone's heard of iambic pentameter.

Yeah. Up until yesterday, I had no idea what iambic pentameter really was. I just knew Shakespeare wrote in it a lot, right? Well, an iamb is actually, it's a foot. It's a type of stressed and unstressed syllable pairing that is used to create the meeder of a poem. So an iamb is an unstressed syllable

followed by a stressed syllable. Right. The example this article gives is the word partake. Yeah. Right, so par is unstressed. Take has a little more of a stress to it, right? And if you put five iams together, so partake, partake, partake, partake, partake.

Very creative. All right. One line of a poem. Yeah. What you have there is iambic pentameter, pentamining five and five iams on a line making up the meter, iambic pentameter. But there's plenty of different kinds of meters

that a poem can have based on the type of stressed and unstressed syllable pairing and then the number of times that type of pairing appears on a given line. Yeah, so if you had four iams, it would be iambic tetrameter and so on and so on. Yeah. There's another one if like the word banjo, is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.

That's a trochee. Yeah. And you could have a trochaic pentameter and that's five trochees in a line. Yeah, which sounds, I mean, all this sounds very dense, but it's actually pretty straightforward. Yeah, once you kind of know what the words mean behind it. Right.

What else is there? There's a dactyl, which is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, like capital. Capital. Yeah, not a fan of those. Now, what about the anapest? Not bad. That's two unstressed followed by stressed.

The example they give is 17. Kip Winger was a big fan of the anapest. An amphibroc is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable and then another unstressed syllable. Right. Like archaic. Yeah, and then lastly, there's the critic. That's my favorite.

So it's stressed, unstressed, stressed, like trampoline. Yes. Or trampoline. I'm a big fan of the critic. Are you? Critic for life. But think about this though, like, this is, again, we're now we're starting to kind of like pull back the curtain

and this is what poets are dealing with. This is just kind of stuff describes a line. Yeah. A line will have different types of meters, these different feet that make up these different types of meter. Well, yeah, and my hope with this episode is that if you slept through this in English class,

you might listen now and say, oh, hey, that's actually kind of neat when you think about it in those terms. Yeah. At the very least, I hope you realize how hard poets are working to go unappreciated by most people. Yeah, they're earning the lack of money that they don't make. Right. All right, well, let's take another break.

Pour one out for the poets, and we'll be right back. Star, stuff you should know. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point,

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Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander, each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. So Chuck, there's different types of poetry, too. Oh, yeah. You take, yeah, you take all of these,

this structure, or these different effects, and you'll have different types of poem. You're putting it together, right? So a sonnet has a specific rhyme scheme. It's got to be 14 lines long, or else you can just take your poem and go home, because it's not a sonnet. A ballad is one that's written in stanzas of four lines each,

has a specific meter of iambic tetrameter, which is four, four iams per line, and then it alternates with iambic trimeter, three iams per line. Yes. And that one I've always heard also is supposed to basically, it's supposed to be a narrative, right? Aren't ballads, at least as far as music goes, a narrative song? Yeah, but I'm not sure.

It's probably the same thing in poetry, right? I would think so. I mean, I definitely know it isn't a song, in like a murder ballad specifically, which is, in fact, I think I wanted to put that down as one of our ideas to do an entire show on. Murder ballads? Yeah.

Are narco ballads? Cool, rich tradition. Is there such thing? Oh, yeah. It's like huge, huge in Mexico, like singing basically ballads about these outlaws. There's a Heisenberg got his own on Breaking Bad. Really?

It's called Bad Ombre. I can't remember what it was called. Haiku, boy, oh boy, in the early days of stuff you should know. We put out a call for haikus, or haiku. Is that haiku? Plural? Haiku. And traditionally, a haiku is three lines long,

five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second, and five in the third. And all these years later, occasionally, we will still get the random haiku from a listener. But we got them a lot for a while until we said stop. Remember that guy who got us by sending in a haiku, and it was a well-known t-shirt? Oh, yeah, we read it on the air.

I think that's when we said stop. Yeah. He fooled us. Yeah, I remember that. A sestina, S-E-S-T-I-N-A. This one's a little different. Instead of a rhyme scheme, it repeats words. So it's broken into stands as each with six lines.

And the six words that end each line, I'm sorry, yeah, end each line in the first stanza, are then repeated as n words in every other stanza. And I think you have an example here, the John Ashbury poem, Farm Implements in Ruta Begas and a Landscape. Yeah, everybody go look up that poem and read it out loud to yourself. It's actually really kind of difficult the way it's laid out.

You should read the first couple of stanzas, maybe. OK. The first is kind of long, though. You ready? Yeah, it is a little long. The first of the undecoded messages read, Popeye sits in thunder, unthought of, from that shoebox of an apartment,

from livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges, a country. Meanwhile, the seahag was relaxing on a green couch. How pleasant. See, if you start reading it like William Shatner poetry really comes out. To spend one's vacation on La Casa de Popeye, she scratched her cleft chin solitary hair. She remembered spinach.

And so throughout this poem, spinach, thunder, apartment, and, well, apparently, three other words come through and are reused throughout the whole poem. And it gets really, really dense. And then all of a sudden, it just zooms out onto Popeye, who finally makes an appearance at the end. And it just becomes kind of. And it goes, eh, eh, eh.

It's a neat poem, actually. It's called, what's it called again? Farm Implements in Ruta Beg is in a Landscape by John Ashbury. Check it out. Yeah, and again, to me, this is like the fun of poetry. It's almost like a challenge to a writer to say, all right, try to write a sestina, like this weird structure. And not only do you have to meet the needs of that structure,

but it has to be good and creative and interesting. Just really neat to me. I love the kind of word play. I might start writing poetry. I think you should. A Villanelle, one of the most famous poems of all time, Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, is a Villanelle.

And it's a 19 line poem that it's made up of only two end rhyme sounds that are repeated throughout the poem, which is tough on its own. But then to make things even worse, or not worse, but more trickier, tricky for the writer. Worse. First and third lines are repeated in a specific pattern all through the poem.

And I guess I'll read the first couple of bits from this one. I won't read the whole thing, though. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, though wise men at their end know dark is right. Because their words had forked no lightning, they do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright. Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. So that's probably the most famous example of all time of the Villanelle, don't you think? Oh, yeah, for sure. It's a good, it's a good, I think one of the reasons why that poem's so famous and universally loved is because you understand what it means. It's pretty superficial, really, as far as poems go.

I'm sure there's way more stuff going on right beneath the surface. Sure. But you can also appreciate it on its face as well. Yeah, it's about a dying father or something, right? Sure, but it's also basically a call to arms to go live. Like, don't ever just give in to death in your impending mortality.

Like, live, live until, live so much that you rage against the idea of dying eventually. You need to go home and watch Dead Bow at Society. You're basically just described the plot. Oh, really? Yeah, what? An ode is something, it usually celebrates, well, it's an ode, it celebrates a person,

or not even a person, it can just, it can celebrate anything. But it's an ode to them. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's to say, hey, you did a great job, here's a poem for you. Which is sort of like an elegy, but an elegy is about someone who died. Yeah, did you read An Elegy for Five Old Ladies

by Thomas James Merton that this article calls out? No, it's good. Yeah, it's unusual in that it's about an actual real life event where apparently at an assisted living home, maybe in the 60s, I think, five older women were in a car waiting for the driver. No, no. And I think the car, the transmission came out of park,

and it rolled into a lake, and they all drowned. And Merton, I guess, read about it in the New York Times, and was moved to write a poem about it. Wow. Which is the whole, it's a bizarre poem all around, especially the fact that it was based on a true story. We'll have to check that out. There are epigrams.

That one's good. Did you read that one? Yeah, go ahead. So an epigram is a poem that's satirical or funny. Yeah, I don't know if this one's funny, but it's maybe satirical. It's existentially satirical. All right.

A man said to the universe, sir, I exist. However replied the universe, the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation. Yeah, you've got to read it a few times. It gets better. Then you have a really, really niche type of poem, an obeyed, A-U-B-A-D-E, I believe, is how it's pronounced.

And it's about the arrival of morning. If it's not about the arrival of morning, it's not an obeyed. If it is, it's an obeyed. Yeah, and a lot of times, wink, wink, arrival of morning means, hey, I just made some sweet love, and I'm really bummed that the sun's coming up, because last night was a gas.

Right. I think you just wrote an obeyed off the top of your head. I think so. And then an epistle is a poem, usually, that's addressed to someone very close to the poet. And there's some overlap with these, for sure. Yeah. Like an epistle can also be, well,

could be an epigram, I guess. Sure. This epistle that this article, this article on how stuff works did a really good job. I suspect it was written by an English professor. Oh, yeah? Yeah, a poetry expert clearly wrote this. This is not just from research, right?

So the author calls out a poem called Dear Mr. Finnelli, as an example of an epistle. And I went and read it. And it is really interesting. It's about this guy who notices. So it's basically, it's like an open letter to Mr. Finnelli. But Mr. Finnelli invited correspondents because he's the manager of a subway station, the 79th Street

subway station. And there's a sign that says, notice any need of improvements or anything wrong? Get in touch with me, the manager, Mr. Finnelli of the 79th Street subway station. And so the author is writing to him with suggestions. And it searches. He's just kind of devolve into like this existential crisis

that the guy's going through. And he reveals that he hasn't been sleeping very well because he's really worried about the world. And it just really goes off the rails. It's a pretty neat poem, Dear Mr. Finnelli, by Charles Bernstein. I'll have to check that out. Should. And we've talked unspecifically about what

a lot of these poems are using, literary effects, and anything that you use in your prose. Symbolism and metaphor and simile also can use. And in fact, oftentimes do use in poems. Simile obviously is something where you have to use like or as. That hillside is like a great poet. That hillside is like a beer belly.

There you go. I like that. Whereas a metaphor is saying something is something else, that hillside is a beer belly. And the example they used is the wonderful poem, The Road Not Taken. When you're talking metaphor, it's maybe more about your life choices than the actual road

that's written about. Right, but they point out that Frost in The Road Not Taken doesn't even say, and by the way, these roads are really a metaphor for your life choices. It's just left to the reader to make that guess an assumption, which makes it a far better poem than he's like. And at the end, he's like, and these are really your life choices I was talking about this whole time.

Yeah, I think if I remember my poem correctly, it wasn't about the pile of leaves even that I didn't reference. It might have been about the boys, the childlike qualities that ultimately fade away with age, which I was right in on that when I was 22 years old. You got to find that poem. Yeah, it's probably not as good as I remember.

You got a poem to read? Yeah, I got two. OK, and I may have one. I was talking about newer poets. And I mentioned Derrick Brown, who is a good dude. And you should go see Derrick if you have a chance. It's always a fun time. Because some of his poems are very funny.

Some of them are just beautiful love poems that you see the ladies in the audience squirming in there, see a little bit. They're swooning? Yeah, they swoon. He does a good job with that. But this one's called Ringlets. And he has quite a few books out.

I think one's coming out soon. Here we go. Young prom ladies in loud dresses and ringlets mingle outside the restaurant in oversized men's suit jackets. Their dates smile smoking, shivering, pretending not to shiver. The thing you said was dead is not dead.

No virgin deserves a cigarette. We should head to the emergency room and just pop our heads in and say hello. Tell them we are all right so they don't think we only visit when things are bad. We are breathing without tubes today. They don't make pills yet for this feeling. It's like finding fruit in the snow.

I want to call down cocktails and black tire jacks from the heavens. I want to break into something that kind of good. Your eyes are the kind we have all been waiting for. When I hear a single note sustain in a room with bad lighting, I think of us, both of our bodies shivering. Nice. Good stuff.

Yeah. And that's an example of just one of fizz. I mean, sort of playful, but some of them are really, really funny. Like, he's kind of part comedian up there sometimes. Nice. Yeah. Derek Brown.

Derek Brown. Good stuff. Yeah, we didn't even talk about poetry slams. Do we need to? Yeah, well, it's kind of like a championship. A tournament. Yes, talk about poetry slams. It's like a tournament.

Yeah. Where you got your poetry and you move on. And I'm assuming I've never seen one, but I don't think you take the same poem from round to round. Round to round. Hopefully you have different poems, so people don't have to hear the same one like four or five times.

Yeah. And I think at the end, if you end up tied, you like Russell. Sure. As is the tradition. You got one? I do. I'm going to say f, but that's not what Philip Larkin writes. Oh, OK.

Philip Larkin, he's a British, I think. He's writing in the 50s, 60s, maybe, I think. And he is good. You may introduce me to him. This one's called This Be the Verse. They eff you up, your mom and dad. They may not mean to you, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had,

and add some extra just for you. But they were effed up in their turn by fools in old style hats and coats, who half the time were soppy stern, and half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.

Wow. I love that guy. I love that poem. This Be the Verse. And I'm going to finish with probably my favorite new poet, new meaning just around now, is David Berman of the band Silverjuice, who I got into them because he did an album. He's buddies with Steve Malchemist and Bob Nistanovich

from Pavement. Well, wasn't Malchemist in Silverjuice? He was for a couple of albums, and so was Nistanovich. And Berman was the songwriter. I got you. And it was kind of Mountainous's side project. And shout out to Nistanovich, who I kind of know now. Wow.

Because of this podcast. I'm getting to meet my heroes. Anyway, Berman, he's putting out many books of poetry. One of them is called Actual Air, which on the cover features the King and Queen building over in Dunwoody, which is kind of funny. Anyway, it's called Imagining Defeat by David Berman. She woke me up at dawn, her suitcase

like a little brown dog at her heels. I sat up and looked out the window at the snow falling in the stand of blackjack trees, a bus ticket in her hand. Then she brought something black up to her mouth, a plum, I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler. I love that line. I reached under the bed for my menthols,

and she asked if I ever thought of cancer. Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead in the distance, where it doesn't matter. And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree so far behind his wagon, where it also doesn't matter, except as a memory of rest or water. Though to believe any of that, I thought, you have to accept the premise that she woke me up at all.

Dave Berman. Wow, that was good. Good one. That's what I want to go back and read again. You can do that here. OK. Man, we did poetry, man. Yeah, we didn't mention illustrations.

You can have illustrations with your poetry. It's not like the Great Shell Silverstein article points out. It was very famous for using great illustrations to enrich the poetry. Yeah, and sometimes you wouldn't really get the poem without the illustration. Like, Something's Missing is about a man who's sitting there like, I dressed myself, and he lists off all the stuff

that he put on. But he still feels like something's missing, and then in the illustration, he's not wearing pants. So you wouldn't quite get it, you know? Or my poem, I might have an image of a kid crashing in a pile of leaves. But you would never say that that's what he was doing. It would just end and then have an arrow pointing to the picture

and underneath the arrow would say, get it? Right. And a question mark. If you want to know more about poetry, there are a lot of places that you could start. Like, go to the Poetry Foundation, for example. That'd be a great resource for you to just find some poems to start reading out loud to yourself

in your bedroom at night, alone. You were starting to sound like Steve Perl. Go to the stupid library. Put that in your milk. Since I said put that in your milk, it's time for Listener Mail. This is about band names. Hey, guys.

Been listening for a while now. I'm loving it. Also, really enjoy all of Josh's Simpsons references. Since I know, hey, Matt, by the way, we met Matt Groening once in person. And he was very kind to us. And we said that we had a podcast where we mentioned the Simpsons quite a bit.

And he actually asked for the name and wrote it down. And then he looked at us, bent the eye, crumpled the paper, and threw it away. Right. He was very nice. So I wonder if he listened. Yeah, we have signed. Scripts.

Scripts. That was awesome. Yeah, that was bucketless stuff. And big thanks to Jesse for the millionth time. Yeah, for that experience. Anyway, here we go. Since I know you two can appreciate solid band names, I want to tell you this story.

The other day, my wife was trying to tell me about a time she went to see a band. She said, I can't remember their name. And like a genius bolt of lightning out of nowhere, I just blurted out, pig Chesterton and the knuckle ducks. It was if my brain and the universe were one solid band name creating machine. Wow.

I was super impressed with the odd combo of words my brain created in that split second of time. Also to further the laughs and validity of this is a band name, my wife actually said, I don't know who they are. Still makes me laugh. Anyway, thanks guys for such a fascinating, informative, and funny show. And that is Matt Burns from Gilroy, California.

Nice. Thanks a lot, Matt. That was a pretty good email. Yeah, just to channel that band name, not bad. He's a band name generator. Agreed. Oh, I've got one for you. The Benedict Cumberbatch name generator.

It just comes up with all sorts of random stuff. My favorite is. That's a website? Yeah. Bend and Snap Cumberbund. What is it? Just rearrange. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Yeah. It's good stuff. Man, I love the internet. If you want to get in touch with us like Matt did, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh M. Clark and at SYSK Podcast. Charles is at Charles W. Chuck Bryant on Facebook

and at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.