http://www.poetseers.org/poem-of-the-day-archive/poems-on-sympathy/index.html
Month: June 2018
Poetry and change
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/can-poetry-change-your-life
Extract
The disconnect between what people say about poetry and how people respond to poetry is probably as old as writing.
Illustration by Tamara Shopsin
The first eight pages of Michael Robbins’s new book, “Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music” (Simon & Schuster), make reference to Annie Dillard, Harold Bloom, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Kenneth Burke, Geoffrey Hill, Kenneth Koch, Adam Phillips, Frank O’Hara, Emerson, Boethius, Nietzsche, Freud, and Miley Cyrus. The book is a collection of mostly previously published pieces, some on poetry, some on pop music, some on both, written, as the names suggest, in a critical style that could be called advanced pop.
Advanced-pop criticism would be criticism premised on the belief that you can talk about cultural goods loved uncritically by millions in terms originally developed to talk about cultural goods known mainly to an overeducated few. Advanced pop is Boethius and Springsteen, Artaud and the Ramones, and it yields sentences like “I assume that what Burke”—the literary theorist Kenneth Burke—“says about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard.” It’s erudite but caj, geeky and hip, alienated and savvy—on the inside of the outside. Another word for the attitude might be “Brooklyn,” which is indeed where, as an author’s bio unnecessarily informs us, Michael Robbins lives.
“Equipment for Living” is funny and smart. It does feel a few bricks shy of a tome. The first and last chapters perform the same work: they unpack, uneasily, the claim stated in the title, which is that poems and songs can make a difference. Most of the chapters are essay-reviews, ranging in length from very brief to brief. Robbins has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and an excellent discussion of rhyme in the work of Paul Muldoon is apparently adapted from his dissertation.”
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Strange that ” Peace on Earth” is lacking most in the place where civilisation began…. now there’s a thought….. back to the primitive life?
Why did Macbeth not have a first name? And Hamlet has no surname
Hamlet McBeth… MP for Gomorrah, Sodom and Kensington North.Sirens a plently
King Lear, again Lear is an unusual name.It sounds like Fear.And then we have men who leer at women [ if only that was all they did]
And Jesus had a Spear in his side.I see plently of rhymes here.
Of course Kings don’t have surnames.Except William Wales
Since William is in Israel maybe he should keep away from the sea.We don’t want him to be swallowed by a whale unless it will produce peace in Palestine and all the Middle East.
Good Will,Good Will…… ?
My surname is Danish.But if I marry again I will choose a man with a short name and I will change mine>Even though it’s 1,000 years since the Vikings even English people can’t spell it and as for poor Eastern European men delivering parcels…. it gives them the heebie jeebies
Basically I am a Nord on the outside but as for my skeleton… an orthopaedic surgeon tole me .You are only one step away from the treetops.My big toes have rotated as if trying to be thumbs.If I lived in Africa I would be happy.I have Celtic feet so Celts are more lime monkeys than Angles and Saxons.Is it too late to climb a tree?
I wonder why some of us are nearer to monkeys than others are?Still my mind is alright yet without a body what use is it? Dualism again!
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I don’t know who wrote this
“No written word, no spoken plea
can teach our youth what they should be;
nor all the books on all the shelves —
it’s what the teachers are themselves.”
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Which is which?
From Ynet
On Gaps
http://www.janandcoragordon.co.uk/
I recall that I first came across ideas about gaps when studying art. Jan and Cora Gordons’s writing mentions this.Even the best artists must have the experience of completing a work and finding that it is not what they had hoped.Certainly for beginners it can be very depressing and may be the reason why many people who did poorly at art in school never try again… as they felt this gap very painfully.But as with many of the painful aspects of life,it is better to accept and honour the gap.Strangely when we look back at some of our work we may find it has much more in it than we saw at the time.But wanting some pre-conceived notion of perfection we fail to notice the value of what we did in reality.
Turner’s late work was thought by some to be a sign of madness.This doesn’t mean our daubs are the next great advance in Art or Writing…. but we may need to be more tolerant of ourselves and our productions whilst also being genuinely critical and accepting criticism.
Failed
Failed again
Fail better
Samuel Becket
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Whose cliches ring like sand dropped on a beach
Oh,people whose dead words obscure our pain
Whose cliches ring like sand dropped on a beach
We know well your agenda’s not our aim
Cliches make your speech robotic ,maimed
Yet you cling to others like a leach
Oh,people whose dead words obscure our pain
As you are inattentive to the lame
So to the spies, dead letters you will teach
We know well your agenda’s not our aim
Wittgenstein said that language is a game
We need not be imprisoned in a niche
Oh,people whose dead words obscure again
Do not spread your fog on matters plain
We can use expression to enrich
We curse your dark agenda and its aims
To people their own language is a crutch
But self direction,instinct ,matter much
Oh,people whose dead words obscure, defame
We know well your agenda, and its crimes
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Barry Schwartz is a very good writer and thinker
175 choices of salad dressing in the supermarket!
6.5 milliom stereo systems can be made from the items in one store.
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Winning or succeeding?
My favourite crooks
A Tale of two Pities
Gulliver bevelled
A Christmas Barrel
Census and Sensibility,
My Shield Smarts
The Man’s Field Snarks
Whores of Humour with paper and scissors. [ voice acticated typing]
Eight whores a day at work is wrong
The Oxford Roars
Minimum Rages Now!
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Sodom,Gomorrah!
Sinning with my own husband in the trees
I’ll go to Sodom Gomarrah
I’ll get some prayers ; rite after death
I went to Confession;it’s smashin’
I wish we could still buy “Indulgences”
Oh,God, be fair to aged present!
Give me oil for my lamp, keep me burning.
Is desire a sin ,and for” whom”?
We should meet others without memory or desire especially in a “brothel”
He asked for a whore more in bed.He’s; hard, to; please.
I am now a ” sinner” having committed more than 11,000 sins right here.They are called posts officially!But we all know about mass deception and wholly disunion.
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How to seem well educated:Jesus was a foreigner!
Put as,many, commas and semi;colons in your sentences as you, can;.
Never, use; ” obscenities”; on a, “blog”
Always be polite to; your follower,your lover, your cat, especially if ;they are all the same “being”
Never ?!!! disagree with, anyone who;” loves” “you”
Write: about love, and hate
Write: about love and hate
Write about hate, and love!
People like to; hear, about “crimes of r
Fashion”
Always shock ,your, self; or “soul” or ;be ;” good for “nothing””
.Begin with a full stop!:.”””:)* and end with a lie.In.
Never mention your bed or your under;wear,parts,carriage,pants,neath
Never make men sin, on purpose
Never make men sin on purpose
Men like, to be “embedded” or is it “embodied”?l;……?
Never tell a “lady” she must have been “beautiful”#####, when she was Jung;young, or hung!?><*^(((
e pi i ,,,,,,,,. don’t you just love maths:***? foreigners;Jesus.?
Jesus was a foreigner!
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Cables and cameras: the aliens keep moving them
j
June in my so ;called “Garden”
I went through 5 bags of cables and cords looking for the charger for Canon batteries.No sign of it.So I put them back into the cupboard and stood back; there on the floor was a charger! I found part of another but I couldn’t see how to connect it to a power source.
I will never buy another Canon.They are the only ones which I have seen which can’t be charged via a usb cord.But I like them.
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Well known authors
PG Woodlouse
Malcolm Flowery
Detective CUES Lewis,
Doris Blessing,
James Cog
William Smouldering,
Stella Ribbons,
John Bellsworthy,
Silky Lollings
Joyous Caring,
Elizabeth Shouting
Arnold Academic
Sybille Oxford,
Pet Barker,
Pat,Hark Her
Evelyn Awe
Anthony Wallop,
Paul Spotte
Barbara Gym
Barbara Win
Philip Pullperson
Willy Pull Larson
W Somersault Norm
DH Awed Sense
DH Passed Tense
Thomas Bawd
Jesus Said
George Belly Ache
Joseph Washbad
Where is our Dock?
DH Torrents
George Delicate
Jane Lost-in
Lane Caution
John Bust In
Moses Noble Aim
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We may as well try it:stop ruminating and keep stress intermittent.
Mark Twain’s work space
Extract”Research from the University of California, Berkeley, reveals an upside to experiencing moderate levels of stress. But it also reinforces how important it is to keep stress under control. The study, led by post-doctoral fellow Elizabeth Kirby, found that the onset of stress entices the brain into growing new cells responsible for improved memory. However, this effect is only seen when stress is intermittent. As soon as the stress continues beyond a few moments into a prolonged state, it suppresses the brain’s ability to develop new cells.
“I think intermittent stressful events are probably what keeps the brain more alert, and you perform better when you are alert,” Kirby says. For animals, intermittent stress is the bulk of what they experience, in the form of physical threats in their immediate environment. Long ago, this was also the case for humans. As the human brain evolved and increased in complexity, we’ve developed the ability to worry and perseverate on events, which creates frequent experiences of prolonged stress.”
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Gone away
Where are you, love?
I heard you in the sea breeze
Where are you love?
Indifferent to me, to please
Gone away,death.
Going away tomorrow
Gone away death,
Gone away such sorrow
Where are you love?
Where, why’ve you left me?
Show the hand.I see
Show the hand in glove
Where are you,love?
Why are the trees crying?
Where are you love?
Why, your baby’s dying.
Come back,my love
I am still here trying
Gone away, gone away,gone,
A way, but which one?
The trodden or the new
Where love are you?
Love , where are you?
Love,oh my love
Gone away, gone away,gone away, away,away}
On your way,
I cannot stay
I cannot play
Gone away
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What as hell is perfect; about grammar?
Guardian news
What as hell is perfect; about grammar?
Can we learn; it while we “use” a scanner?
A semicolon; it is some;thing to for:get
On my oath;I never took a cheque
What is hot like? hell is your own structure.
Should I tell you at a formal;punctured…
Colon is a word , of double; meaning~
I don’t like to see, men, when have I been dreaming?
If you” love ” the English; language meets you
If you like the Celtic words,I do too.
If you prefer Hebrew;I will need glue
And mirrors to reverse;the image blue.
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Grammar rules to forget
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/30/10-grammar-rules-you-can-forget
Comment
56
As English is not my mother tongue I’ve a few questions about interjunctions.
What do all the following words actually mean?
1. Err
2. Ugh
3. Hm or Hmm
4. Ermm
And which other interjunctions are most commonly used in English? Thanking you in anticipation (Could I also say “Thank you very much in advance”?).”
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He serves the grass with salads of wildflowers
The sun a nuclear flame thrower so empowered
From which we have no safegauard and no shield
Burned the grass and bit the newborn flowers
In the sky for more than fifteen hours
The bare skinned Christian folkd to cancer yield
The sun a matchless flame thrower empowered
Deprived of thunder,lightning and sharp showers
The trees are dying and the ground is seared
Now burns the grass festooned with frames of flowers
Underneath dead leaves the frogs now cower
The toad is bolder,oh,I see him peer
The sun a matchless flame thrower empowered
The Xmas tree grown mighty will endure
At its peak a blackbird sings out clear
Well burns the grass festooned with its wild flowers
At first the heat was glory ,now we fear
First snow and ice then Joan of Arc’s great pyre
The sun’s no crime, the burning is desire.
He serves the grass with salads of wildflowers
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Couples therapy and Eugenics [ and the Nazis
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/29/fixed
This is very interesting article.I had no idea couples therapy had such a history
Extract:
” In 1933, he wrote to Bell, asking for photographs of Carrie Buck and her mother and daughter for his archive. He told him, “A hundred years from now you will still have a place in this history of which your descendants may well be proud.” Popenoe, in fact, had become something of a historian. Later that year, Grant published “The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America,” a “racial history” based on “scientific interpretation,” recommending “the absolute suspension of all immigration from all countries,” to be followed by the deportation of illegal aliens. Popenoe had spent four years conducting the research for Grant’s book; he had also compiled the bibliography. Unlike “The Passing of the Great Race,” Grant’s American pseudohistory met with a furious reception. Ruth Benedict said that the only difference between it and Nazi racial theory was that “in Germany they say Aryan in place of Nordic.” Franz Boas attacked Grant in The New Republic; Melville Herskovits did so in The Nation. The Anti-Defamation League said that “The Conquest of a Continent” was “even more destructive than Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”
In 1934, Popenoe wrote about “Mein Kampf” admiringly, and at length. “Hitler himself—though a bachelor—has long been a convinced advocate of race betterment through eugenic measures,” he observed. In 1937, L. C. Dunn, a geneticist at Columbia, delivered a radio address condemning American immigration restriction and Germany’s sterilization campaign, both of which he attributed to the quackery of eugenics. “What can science do for democracy?” Dunn asked. “It can tell the people the truth about such misuses of the prestige of science.” Not until the end of the Second World War did Popenoe stop publishing on racial purity, and then only begrudgingly, complaining in 1945, “When it comes to eugenics, the subject of ‘race’ sets off such tantrums in a lot of persons that one has to be very long-suffering!” The next year, at the Nuremberg trials, lawyers defending the Nazi doctors cited Madison Grant’s work. “My interest in eugenics . . . is as keen as ever,” Popenoe wrote, privately, in 1949, “although most of the work I am doing is in a slightly different field.” Four years later, Ladies’ Home Journal began publishing “Can This Marriage Be Saved?””
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Alfred did not die
My hands are hurting when I write but it usually goes in 2 or 3 weeks.So let’s hope this will be the case.
Many hands make light work but mine are the exception,They turn out the lights
My mother’s hands were very lined blackened by coal and dirt that would not come off.Her hands were big and square.I loved them,Her nails were flat.Her little toe was flat.She used to say an elephant trod on it.Then,curiousity killed the cat.But Alfred didn’t die.He was given to someone else
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Evening song
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Eats the little flower
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Curtsey may harm May
From the Independent
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Bear or bare?
I don’t know how you can bare it.
In childbirth there’s not much choice
Well.I didn’t know how women got pregnant
Well. you ken the noo [know now]
I’ll never do it again
What, we are just having our first child
” And the first shall be last”
How do you bear this pain?
I have no choice.
Pull yourself together
I say, that’s a platitude
Stop showing off, just because you went to Cambridge
I only went on a day trip
So why have you got an M A?
It was what we call self awarded
You,too!
What is the bear doing?
Looks hungry to me.
Shall we run or pretend to be dead?
I’ll run and you pretend to be dead and then we can get proof one way or the other
If it’s a fast eater we won’t be here to tell!
Byeeee.
Are you Father Bear?
How can you tell?
You look so kind.Just go and get that lady who’s running away
I never run after women
How about men?
That’s all that’s left
Actually I am gender free.
Are you kosher?
No and I’m full of gluten
I’m not Jewish, you know
No,God doesn’t expect animals to listen to Moses.
Still, I am hungry
Just grin and bear it.
Wow,a pun!
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And people looked like watercolour flies
The morning sun still low in winter sky
Made brilliant light with darker shadows thrown.
And people looked like watercolour flies
As , nonchalant ,through the shopping mall they roamed.
Here we see in colours black and white.
We do not see the usual shades and hues.
And so inside our mind, a too great light
May prejudice our judgement and our views.
We learn to understand by metaphors.
As did our loving ancestors before.
As cats lie by the fire with softened paws
We were sheep not wolves with slavering jaws
What we see depends upon the light.
So we shall give less credence to our sight
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The buttercups are burning in the fields
The buttercups are burning in the fields
The sun is hanging low as if to see
The Ash fall to the earth, the level sealed
The grass turns brown ,the barley ripe will kneel.
The hares are leaping,wait, I watch them flee.
The buttercups are burning in the fields
The Honeysuckle curves like a red wheel
Hanging flowers still humming with brown bees
The ashes to the earth dark riches yield
This fiery land will flaunt its bright appeal
As from the trees hang ghosts of still born leaves
The buttercups are burning in the fields
The spiders wait, the rabbits ,raunchy, reel.
What is this Earth our eyes, all new, perceive
Where ashes to the earth dark riches yield?
Who are we such dark gold to receive
When humans trick each other and deceive?
The buttercups are burning in the fields
Their ashes shall redeem as richness yields
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Platitude?
https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&source=hp&ei=DwEtW96BHsuRkwXpor2oDA&q=platitude&oq=platitude&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l10.3051.6560.0.7451.10.9.0.0.0.0.132.867.7j2.9.0..2..0…1.1.64.psy-ab..1.9.865.0..0i131k1.0.c5bTotwsaDQ
“platitude
ˈplatɪtjuːd/
noun
noun: platitude; plural noun: platitudes
-
a remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful.“she began uttering liberal platitudes”
synonyms: cliché, truism, commonplace, hackneyed/trite/banal/overworked saying, banality, old chestnut; More
Origin
early 19th century: from French, from plat ‘flat’.”
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Only the desperate would want to go to the USA now
”
But virulent hatred for immigrants isn’t just a matter of rural rubes. Trump himself is, of course, a wealthy New Yorker, and a lot of the funding for anti-immigrant groups comes from foundations controlled by right-wing billionaires. Why do wealthy, successful people end up hating immigrants? I sometimes find myself thinking about the TV commentator Lou Dobbs, whom I used to know and like in the early 2000s, but who has become a rabid anti-immigrationist (and Trump confidant), and who is currently warning against a pro-immigrant plot by “the Illuminati of K Street.”
I don’t know what drives such people — but we’ve seen this movie before, in the history of anti-Semitism.
The thing about anti-Semitism is that it was never about anything Jews actually did. It was always about lurid myths, often based on deliberate fabrications, that were systematically spread to engender hatred.
For example, for centuries people repeated the “blood libel” — the claim that Jews sacrificed Christian babies as part of the Passover ritual.
In the early part of the 20th century there was wide dissemination of “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a supposed plan for Jewish world domination that was probably forged by the Russian secret police. (History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as more tragedy.)
The fake document received wide dissemination in the United States thanks to none other than Henry Ford, a virulent anti-Semite who oversaw the publication and distribution of a half-million copies of an English translation, “The International Jew.” Ford later apologized for publishing a forgery, but the damage was done.
That is a short extract from the article
How my heart sings 