Day: July 13, 2016

I have heard grass singing in the wind.

I have  heard  grass singing in  the wind.
I   have walked through poppy fields in  sun
I have  suffered  when dark rain descends

I have watched  trees’ shadows in the ponds
I have  known the  arctic wastes of pain
I have  heard  grass singing in the wind.

Another soul is writing  with my hand
Yet I have  wept  while loaning him  my pen
I have  suffered  when dark rain descends

I have known  the edges  of the mind
I ‘ve   sensed  hollow silence un-contained.
I have  heard  grass singing in  the wind.

I have sorrowed for  humans confined
I have  watched  the antics  of bad  men
I have  suffered  when dark rain descends

I have seen the storm by camera lens.
I have felt the   solar system bend.
I have  heard  grass singing in  the wind.
I have  suffered  when dark rain descends

 

 

 

 

 

Precision in poetry

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/articles/detail/68419

“Poetry charts the changes in language, but it never merely reproduces or recapitulates what it finds. The lyric poem defamiliarizes words, it wrenches them from familiar or habitual contexts, it puts a spell on them. The lyric is cognate with those childish forms, the riddle and the nursery rhyme, with whatever form of verbal art turns language inside out and draws attention to its categories. As the eighteenth-century English poet Christopher Smart put it, freely translating from Horace’s Art of Poetry:”

It is exceedingly well
To give a common word the spell
To greet you as intirely new

In Smart’s belief, as Marcus Walsh observes in Christopher Smart: Selected Poems(1979), “every creature worships God simply by being itself, through its peculiar actions and properties….

Saying much with little in poetry

 

https://allpoetry.com/column/7541033-Compression-Saying-Much-with-Little–by-micol

 
Extract:

Of all the parts of speech, then, prepositions (and their accompanying nominal phrases) most often work against tightness, compression, and clarity in poetry. Lines needn’t be stripped down as far as I have taken this one, but on almost every level, particularly in early drafts, finding prepositions and prepositional phrases, identifying the underlying verb, defining the actor performing that action, and restructuring accordingly may at least present new alternatives for expression.