http://www.poetry.org/whatis.htm

Extract

Sound in poetry

Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm. Often the rhythm of each line is arranged in a particular meter. Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry. In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence.

Poetry in English and other modern European languages often uses rhyme. Rhyme at the end of lines is the basis of a number of common poetic forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry, for example, avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Furthermore, Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. In fact, rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language. The Arabs have always used rhymes extensively, most notably in their long, rhyming qasidas. Some classical poetry forms, such as Venpa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar), which ensured a rhythm.

Alliteration played a key role in structuring early Germanic and English forms of poetry (called alliterative verse), akin to the role of rhyme in later European poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry and the rhyme schemes of Modern European poetry alike both include meter as a key part of their structure, which determines when the listener expects instances of rhyme or alliteration to occur. In this sense, both alliteration and rhyme, when used in poetic structures, help to emphasise and define a rhythmic pattern. By contrast, the chief device of Biblical poetry in ancient Hebrew was parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three; a verse form that lent itself to antiphonal or call- and-response performance.

http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie/vol7/murdoch.html

“Thus, virtue consists in searching for, seeing and knowing the goodness in others, and not in discovering the permanent truth of abstract values and norms. So, according to Murdoch, the modern philosophers’ focus on human will fails to dismantle selfishness, the central dilemma of moral life, which distorts the moral agent’s perception of others. As Murdoch’s moral psychology locates egoism directly at the image-creating processes of human consciousness, this process must be disrupted: “increasing awareness of the ‘goods’ and the attempt to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing unity and interdependence of the moral world” (1997, 375). Hence, virtue consists partially in the complex movement beyond the self, toward what Murdoch calls “virtuous consciousness,” and partially in the developed capacity for love. While Murdoch believes that virtue is the movement beyond the self, nonetheless life often shows that we constantly look after ourselves, day-dreaming in seeking consolation, for, “We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world” (1977, 369). Such fantasies about ourselves and the world around us, in Murdoch’s judgment, inflate the ego to the point of becoming a world unto itself preventing us from ever achieving the real knowledge of other people.

While Murdoch opposes idle fantasy she elevates creative imagination, for the faculty of imagination and our aesthetic sensibility help us to generate and rehearse possible situations in which the reality and uniqueness of others can be revealed. The disciplined, creative use of attention and imagination, as opposed to fantasy, becomes central to our aesthetic perception of others, disrupting fantasy-beliefs about them resulting in the transformation of consciousness. ¹ Given these considerations, it is not surprising that Murdoch sees unselfishness as an acquired condition through knowledge of the good because, “Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings … In the moral life the enemy is the fat, relentless ego” (1997, 341-342). For Murdoch, the fundamental moral problem is to acquire clarity of vision as the condition of virtuous consciousness. Virtue comes then through a complex process called “unselfing.” ² A shift occurs through knowledge of the good, from focusing on others’ outward conduct to cultivating one’s own inner life of virtuous consciousness, from choice to vision, from will to consciousness, from outward conduct to inward knowledge.”

The future’s fiction and the past is gone
In a flash of fishes’ scales and eyes
False memories   create playlets  we act in

We work too hard ,ignoring love’s kingdom:
The kingfisher, the  heron,  the dove’s sigh
The future’s fiction and the past is gone

Like  Felix  we will go to earth alone
No Jesuit  priest to pray before we die.
False memories  comfort, when the poet’s done

The acts we do when mindful urge love on
Create direction,  for the future pay
The future’s fiction and the past is gone

God may be a fiction to the  dumb
God may be a monster   to defy
Mixed memories   frozen  hard  our ethics stun

The eye may open like the silver sky
We see with wider vision, feel and sigh
The future’s fiction and the past is done
Our memories   create movies  we act in

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20171013-the-people-saving-lost-words

Extract

“Seyfeddinipur has been working with London’s Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library to preserve words that would otherwise be lost. “The doomsday linguistic view is that by the end of this century, in the next 85 years, we will lose 3500 languages – half of the 7000 languages that are spoken today will fall silent,” she says. “We’re losing languages at the same speed at which the world lost its dinosaurs at the fifth mass extinction.” Although it’s a natural process – “people move somewhere, they give up their language and adapt another language, it’s the beauty of language that it’s a social tool,” she argues – it’s now happening at an unprecedented rate. “Because of globalisation and urbanisation and climate change, this process has sped up beyond what we’ve ever seen.”

Going for a song

The newly launched Endangered Poetry Project aims to tackle that loss at another level. “Languages are dying out at an astonishing rate: a language is being lost every two weeks,” says the National Poetry Librarian Chris McCabe. “And each of those languages has a poetic tradition of some sort, whether it’s written or aural – within that poetry will be all the different approaches and styles of writing poetry, as well as everything that poetry can tell us about those people: what they’re interested in; what their concerns are.””

The face that was familiar is no more
Yet in my dreams ,he is alive again
If ,by a chance, his life could be restored
It would affect me like the hidden chord
King David composed and played  for love of God.
Oh, one must die and one must here remain
The face that was familiar is no more.
Yet in my dreams ,he is alive again

My doctor does surgery too
He cut off the lace from my shoe
I said, that’s my trainer
He said, you’re a failure
You can’t tie a knot without glue

But  how can we sleep in our bed
When our shoes to our feet have been wed?
Our feet would be grey
Our nails would decay
It came from the top of his head.

I  think that  a buckle would do
As alternative tye for my shoe
Then we could remove ’em
And wash our denouement
Oh,dear,now  my face has gone blue.

This astounding sketch was done by Katherine.Hope to learn how to draw trees soon

Do my clothes need itoning?
No, they match your face!

Will I wear a hat?
I’ll wait and see.

I’ve not made a Will
You silly willy
I’ll leave you out
Don’t threaten me.
Why not?
I get mad.

Are we going out tonight?
Ask yourself first then if you agree ask me

I am married so this is just a fling
What does ” a fling “mean?
Fling Flong Flang
To a fling
Of a flng
In a fling
What, are you crazy?
How would I know?
Well,I know.
That is  2/6 as you get a discount
Why?
Stupidity
How cruel!
Tell God!
How?
By a prayer
With a  prayer
In a  prayer
On a prayer
Goodness me,
Hello, it’s God,Who are you?
You should say, how are you
You nitwit.I’m God.
You don’t sound  like God
Seem like God
Talk like God
Look like God
Feel like God
I’ll send a Flood
How?
Amazon Prime
My days are numbered
Aleph null
Aleph one
I never knew Alef won
Who is Alef?
He’s a  Hebrew letter
Alpha in Greek,Aleph ib Hebrew
Which was first?
Never mind.
No matter
I matter
We all matter

Extract from book named at the end

“I came to the conclusion then that “continual mindfulness” could certainly not mean that my little conscious self should be entirely responsible for marshalling and arranging all my thoughts, for it simply did not know enough. It must mean, not a sergeant-major-like drilling of thoughts, but a continual readiness to look and readiness to accept whatever came…. Whenever I did so manage to win its services I began to suspect that thought, which I had always before looked on as a cart-horse, to be driven, whipped and plodding between shafts, might be really a Pegasus, so suddenly did it alight beside me from places I had no knowledge of.”
― Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own

https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/proved-upon-our-pulses-keats-in-context

Mary decided to go to bed early..She sat down on the  green velvet chair in the corner and took off her outer  woollen woven clothes which were  pale pink and ready for the wash.As it was so cold she decided to leave her red   damart thermal underwear  on over which  she donned a  purple fleece nightgown and a  mauve woollen bed jacket.She put some long  green woollen bed socks on too and a  tan sheepskin hat from  East Norfolk.
By her bed were some sheepskin slippers. from Drapers of Glastonbury.
After cleaning her teeth  with her gas powered toothbrush she climbed into her  bed and began reading Ted Hughes’ letters in a fat volume which she had had for a few years but never finished as she only read them in bed to save carrying the heavy book about.
He certainly knew how to write letters she murmured to herself.
Suddenly her door opened with a thud  and a large ,handsome old  man came into her bedroom looking puzzed and amazed.
Good evening,baby, he said.
Good evening,she replied slightly angrily as she was busy. reading.Why she’d had enough of all that with her husband and her ex lover Bill Clinton
Why are you wearing all that  heavy clothing,?he asked nosily.
What’s it got to do with you? she demanded sarcastically

Well,it’s going to be hard to make love to you,he told her chastely with  his loving eyes.
What on earth do you mean,Mary cried mysteriously.He came a bit closer and  looked  down at her face.
I’m terribly sorry,he said.I must be sleepwalking,
What number are you?
78 ,she told him calmly.
Oh my, I am dyslexic.I should be at 87.
But how do you get in Mary asked him ,her face red with the warm clothes
I just  open the lock with a credit card,he replied intellectually.
A policeman in Oxford showed me.It was the only useful thing I learned at the University

Well,  you are here would you mind making me some  fresh tea.I am sweating so much I am dehydrated.Julius went into the  teal  and cream colored kitchen where he found all he needed.
He got a tray and took the tea up to Mary just like her husband once did.
Here you are,dear.he said kindlily.

OMG,y ou’re Stan,  she shouted.
Sorry to disappoint you, dear but  I am Julius Tweezer from round the corner.
I didn’t know there was a corner,she said curiously.
I like your kitchen,he told her.My wife liked red but it was too bright for me so I left he .
I think that’s ridiculous,Mary cried.To get divorced over a red kitchen is really stupid.

Well,it’s less embarrassing  in court than to say you are frigid,impotent a bully and mean as well,he said coyly.
Very cunning,Mary said,I didn’t know men were frigid and why were you so mean?

I am a hermaphrodite,actually ,he boasted.I don’t know why I am mean;it must be genetic like intelligence was once imagined to be.
Well drink your tea and  don’t think of England,she whispered.
I am too old for all that,she lied gently

You look  young to me,he faltered.It’s all in the mind.so they say.
Suddenly a policeman came in wearing a floral apron
Sorry,madam,he cried.This poor man has got lost and I have come to take him home
You can take me home,Mary said flirtatiously.I’m only 32 and full of beans
Madam ,control yourself.This is  a Christian country. Which is odd as Jesus was not a Christian and never saw the Vatican and all that tat.
Well,Jesus would not mind,she  bragged, because he understands women taken in adultery.
So you are married then,he asked sycofrantically

Well I have a wedding ring on but I’ve lost my husband,Mary yelped like a terrier at a foxhole.
They are a nuisance sometimes aren’t they , said the officer.
He’s probably hunting rabbits by the old  greenwood with  Ted Hughes.You go to sleep now.He began to sing,”Golden Wonders kiss your eyes” and Mary was lulled to sleep under her old  duvet and a thick acrylic and mohair rug she had knitted herself.Let’s hope she doesn’t wet the bed because she’s just had cystitis and drunk 3 pints of water.

What a funny day, mewed Emile.But nobody heard him except the mice in the wainscotting.He put on his hat and went into his basket with a rosary to play with or is it pray with?

Good night

https://godblog.org/paying-attention-with-simone-weil/

The quotes below  are from Iris Murdoch [ see the article above}

The enemies of art and of morals, that is the enemies of love, are the same: social convention and neurosis.

Love is the perception of individuals.  Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. (Sublime, p 215)

Hamas TV  building from Guardian,com

What a shame, people in Gaza can’t  watch the News now.

Nothingness has caught me by the throat
Tossed me  to the innards of  its prayer
Joan of Arc unhorsed in  a nightmare
Burgundy makes  offers for her coat

When we’re real and know the here and now
Do we entertain our thoughts and dare
To let   perception grow in all its  flair
Lamenting   foreign   insights we won’t know

From the mountain, I see Windermere
I see Coniston and Morecambe Bay
I see sheep and  flat  green fields arrayed
The shadows of the hills , the dread, the fear

Where can we be now on this  our March?
The moon, the sky , the aluminium arc
The universal suffrage of the dark
The  rights  of strangers, the Triumphal Arch

In the third part of the unknown Play
The lost beginning in the  mire just past
We act as if we’re real just for today

We seem to know  what we don’t  need to say
To leave old Auntie cackling at her post
In the third act of this rolling Play

She says she’s ready, now she airs a prayer
The actor paralysed, she ‘d gutted loss
The bones were real, the flesh was laid out bare

Acting badly adds a special  glare
The gap between the face and  candy floss
In the third act of this wooden Play

Here’s her winter coat, it’s coal pit grey
The actress holds the knife, the cruci-cross
We act as if we’re  here occasionally

Will there be an end, a deepening frost
One by one the actors are each lost
In the third part of the unknown Play
Everyone will die eternally

The cause of sin was flesh of pleasured fame
From the Devil,  tempting envious bile
The world, the politics, the evil  games

The Armies of the West, their grand  parades
Killed one God, gained power   to  us beguile
Was most of sin our  flesh and  pleasure  gained?

The devil dwelled our genitals,  priests claimed
Sex was  bad unless it  made a child
The vulgarity, the lowlife  loving games

How we feared the overwhelm,were tamed
We did not see   our Father´s  cold strained smile
Most of sin was ignorance, hearts maimed

The cloven hoof of Pan, his foot arraigned
God of nature changed to devil  wild
The world, the gambles and the snake filled  games

Is every human soul  born dark and  soiled
As Adam plays, the great serpent uncoils
The cause of sin was flesh, its pleasure   lamed
The views, the politics, the old,sad  games

https://apcsweb.wordpress.com/2016/06/27/disgust-and-contempt-in-the-white-house-susan-b-miller-ph-d/

“It hasn’t escaped notice that Donald Trump is easily disgusted, Not as much has been made of Trump’s inclination to contempt, a related but distinct emotion.  Donald Trump liberally uses both the sneer of contempt and the psychic heave of disgust to define his place in the world.

When Mr. Trump calls an opponent “loser,” “basket case,” “moron,” “clown,” “third-rate,” “dope,” “pathetic,” or “desperate” (NYT, March 4, 2016) while at the same time portraying himself as a hugely loved and successful winner, he is talking contempt, not disgust.  When he refers to another as “grubby” (NYT March 4, 2016) or he talks of the awfulness of imagining his female adversaries’ body functions, he is expressing disgust, which he communicates with his face as well as his words.  Can  psychological insights about the nature of these emotions allow us to elaborate on why a person might be so quick to feel and express them and how they might serve the person’s psychological balance and influence his leadership behavior?”

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/pw-select/article/78384-from-self-published-to-mainstream-an-indie-success-story.html

No longer human,nor  two gendered flesh
Just numbers in equations’ tight knit net
But when did numbers eat, make love or dress?

In friendship or in love we tightly mesh
But  this cracks open for the dealers’ bet
No longer human,nor  two gendered flesh

Now we can fulfill    erotic wish
Without the need , the  other in our pit
But when did plastic eat ,befriend or dress?

Turn the current off and what a mess
For nothing now remains of holy writ
Nor human beings ,nor  two gendered flesh

See  vibrators  cancel   love’s access
Then two hearts can scarcely ever knit
But when did dildos eat, make love or bless?

As in mindfulness we senseless sit
The soul is ravaged in  the wild bear pit
No longer human,nor  two gendered flesh
But when did numbered  labour pray, confess?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69592/poems-for-peace

Extract:

And how to overcome—in ourselves, in the poetry world, and in all the wider communities in which we situate ourselves—our own resistances to an engaged poetry that stakes specific claims about the world, a poetry that could be partisan and provocative and even utopian? After all, many of us feel as John Keats did, despite his friendship with the partisan poet Leigh Hunt: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.”

And if the poetry that presses “palpable design upon us” were not challenge enough, then what to do about poetry that proposes something about peace, the very word of which veers into a kind of New Age ganja haze and evades the pungency of real life; or, to let Keats muse on the subject, “for axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.”

The nearer  peace,more savage are the acts
Abhorrent to the atheist in us all.
History, undigested ,splits and cracks

As we whites  did evil to the black
With little difference, hate  for glory calls.
The nearer  peace, the more savage the acts

All of us can  disremember facts
Israeli hands  have gripped and then appalled.
History, undigested ,splits and cracks

As ,with Bomber Harris, Dresden packed
Burned  like grass the refugees to ghouls
The nearer  peace, the more savage the acts

We deny the  healing  we have lacked
For Jesus' Jews we let be killed ,de-souled
History, undigested ,splits and sticks

Palestine’s own Arabs are  ill ruled
And in return,  explode  like stubborn mules
The nearer love, the more  the  hatred whacks
History., inconceivable,   directs