Essay: The Feel of Thinking – Sarah Howe on lyric connections and incisions

Quote:

Can lyric think? I want to work towards this question of poetics by way of a related one in philosophy, whose crispest articulation I’ve yet found swims up in the course of a long, fragmentary lyric by Denise Riley: ‘It is called feeling but is its real name thought?’ This line from ‘A Shortened Set’ unpicks the traditional opposition between thought and feeling, which holds that immersion in one diminishes or even precludes the other. In terms of poetic history it’s a notion we might associate with the Romantics – recall Keats’s jibe at ‘consequitive reasoning’ – though they simply revived a still older view of reason and emotion as fundamentally at odds. As Riley the philosopher is aware, this internal division within the psyche was also traditionally a gendered distinction. Along with feeling, mental operations such as intuition and belief aren’t usually granted the status of thinking. Yet it’s these hinterlands of thought that have the most to tell us about contemporary poetry and its relationship to consciousness. I want to touch on two poets whose work offers us, in very different ways, a picture of thinking in action – what Wallace Stevens called ‘The poem of the act of the mind.’

At the end of the day, the USA is level with the UK.People love to learn.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/ralph_waldo_emerson.html

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Robert Frost

Sometimes, when sad, I feel it is like climbing a  long staircase to get out of bed in the morning.But don’t climb this one!

I have studied books about the  history of Germany ,The holocaust and what follows.One writer  asks if it even POSSIBLE  for the Jews to grieve the destruction of European Jewry ans the destruction of Yiddish as a common language.Inability to grieve leads to paranoia.
I am asking, is it  not the duty of  us in Europe to mourn  our loss too  and our destructiveness?For who needed WW1?Who began  it?Why? Was it neccessary?
I think not.
We lost also gypsies,disabled children,homosexuals and political   people who  attempted to change what was going on.
And why did Churchill bomb  innocent Dresden but not  the railway lines taking Jews and others to the Death Camps?
Why do we have no shame?

”It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of peace.”

Leonard Cohen (b. 1934), Canadian singer, poet, novelist. “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal,” The Spice-Box of Earth (1965).

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6386/the-art-of-translation-no-5-peter-cole

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2013/september/what-use-poetry-meena-alexander

Poetry takes as its purview what is deeply felt and is essentially unsayable; that is the paradox on which the poem necessarily turns.

3

Poetry takes as its purview what is deeply felt and is essentially unsayable; that is the paradox on which the poem necessarily turns. A poet uses language as a painter uses color, a primary material out of which to make art. But language that is used all the time and all around us—in sound bites, advertisements, political rhetoric, newsprint—needs to be rinsed free so that it can be used as the stuff of art.

The poem in its act of meaning-making turns away from the literal, its truth bound to what can be evoked. And evocation is sparked by memory. Abhinavagupta (ca. 950–1020 ce) realized this clearly. In his reflections, he writes of how poetry—far from dealing with the literal—reaches into what lies in memory, in memory fragments. It is in this way that rasa, the quick of aesthetic pleasure, is reached:

On the other hand rasa is something that one cannot dream of expressing by the literal sense. It does not fall within workday expression. It is rather of a form that must be tasted by an act of blissful relishing on the part of a delicate mind through the stimulation of previously deposited memory elements . . . beautiful because of their appeal to the heart. . . . The suggesting of such a sense is called rasadhvaniand is found to operate only in poetry. This in a strict sense is the soul of poetry. (Source: The Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta, Harvard University Press, 1990)

4

While poetry is bound to the sensorium, to the sensual powers of bodily being, to memory that draws its power from feelings heightened by the senses, it is also bound to place. It is in place that we locate ourselves, mark ourselves in relation with others; it is in place that we survive. But what becomes of the past when place is torn away, when the sensorium is radically displaced, and when exile or dislocation marks out the limits of existence?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/01/the-purpose-of-poetry/304497/

Write Tight

Quote:

Etymology doesn’t help—it only highlights that the apples and oranges here are how the thing is made and how it moves. Poetry is from the Greek poiein, “to make”: a poem is something made, or in English we would more naturally say crafted. Yet everyone agrees good prose is well crafted, too. Prose means, literally, “straightforward,” from the Latin prosa, proversus, “turned to face forward” (whereas verse is all wound up, twisty and snaky, “turned” in every direction except, apparently, forward). Yet we all know that poems can be clear and direct, too, especially when they’re songs.

Sidelining sonnets and quarantining quatrains in the poetry ghetto does produce a certain clarity. But of course it also creates problems when translating from languages that gerrymander poetry differently. In German, for example, writer is a word even more literal than the English “someone who writes”: it’s Schriftsteller, a put-down-on-paper-er (Schrift = “writing,” stellen = “to place, to put”). Autor is a word used a bit less often for pretty much the same thing, unlike in English, where there’s a difference: author expresses a professional and financial identity (there are no “unpublished authors,” unless maybe the manuscript is finished and the contract is signed), while a writer is someone pursuing an activity (published or not, paid or not, read or not).

And then there’s a Dichter, usually translated “poet” but meaning a creator of poetry in the grand sense. The verb dichten means “to write poetry, ” and a poem is a dichten-ed thing, a Gedicht, but dichten means more generally to write poetically and well. The good stuff. The writer as hero of the spirit. How do you say that in English? We don’t have heroes of the spirit.

http://www.funeralplan.com/griefsupport/signs.html

A single tear fell
Into the peace lily’s pot
I hope it will grow.

I’m good at weeping
I got my D.Phil early.
It does not help me.

Intellectual
Studies do not dissolve  pain
But they distract me.

Love lasts for a day
Is it a good idea,
Like a flower is?

http://flavorwire.com/413949/20-poets-on-the-meaning-of-poetry/2

There are a few more choice snippets from Shelley’s 1821 essay, A Defence of Poetry, that articulated the essence of poetry:

“Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.”

“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”

“Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination’: and poetry is connate with the origin of man.”

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

“Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”

“All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/91088

150 Resources to Help You Write Better, Faster, and More Persuasively

He stole my heart and then he stole my love
I had to boil his linen in a pan
He was a demon, not one from above
He was a person usually called a man

A man expects his food and a clean bed
He  consummates his love when he’s inclined
And whatevera  wife  has done or even said
His temper  needs by  wine to be refined.

They are another species quite remote;
Although they have a face in human form.
Their maleness pulls them without  further thought
Until the sexual act has been   performed

I think  instead I’ll buy a dozen cats.
Or maybe I’ll play cricket with a bat.

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/organizing/g3753/nightly-habits-of-professional-organizers/

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21706525-politicians-have-always-lied-does-it-matter-if-they-leave-truth-behind-entirely-art

Too many flukes recalled his   learning  probablitity theory.
Many hands make nights worth it.
You are never too  bold for  the above.

When spurious frogs  have spawned  our beauteous lands
When songs of platitudes all  blend and keen
When earth’s tectonic plates  glide by in bands
Then my feat I shall to  your ex  scream

Like a shard  in a tyre
Like a word of desire
I have tried all  the ways to write   free.
Like a curl in a spire
Like a drunk dog inspired
I had died long before I was me
Like a wish to conspire
Like an ash in the fire
I have cried all  the way  to meet me.
Like a word in a suit
Like a bash in the boot
I drove all the way here  just to flee

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/disability-rights-donald-trump_us_582487fae4b0e80b02cefa2f

• Seek and ye shall  be find.
• Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.
• Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.
• .Stupid people always think they are right. Wise people listen to advice.
• The borrower is servant to the lender.
• The heart of fools proclaims foolishness.
• The prosperity of fools shall destroy them.
• The rebellious dwell in a dry land.
• The righteous are bold as a lion.
• The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Read more: http://www.special-dictionary.com/proverbs/source/b/biblical_proverb/4.htm#ixzz4Q7PNUh5V

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky —
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness –
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.