http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/can-poetry-change-your-life

Extract

As radical as empathy and imagination can be, these qualities exist in the mind. But there is also a poetic language of embodied experience, one that uses poetry to seek out the body. In “Feeld,” the trans poet Jos Charles bends language, via willful spelling, to a place where it must be parsed slowly, struggled through, read not so much with the brain as the mouth. Language becomes a felt thing, a terrain to be crossed. The title itself toys with such a transformation, the word feeld being a marriage, perhaps, of feel, felt and field. Reading lines like “i care so / much abot the whord i cant / reed / it marks mye bak / wen i pass / with / a riben in mye hayre,” I can’t help feeling that the body — itself a shifting and malleable possibility — is the target for these poems.

Through the strange labor of deciphering the text, I come to understand that Charles is transmitting an experience that I must allow to travel from her body into mine. When I do, the distance between us alters. It grows smaller and strangely charged. I’m made to realize that the very vernacular of the poems also tampers with history; it announces a continuum where Chaucer and 19th-century enslaved blacks and a 21st-century white trans woman seem quite effortlessly to share a lexicon.

Justin Phillip Reed, whose “Indecency” received the 2018 National Book Award in poetry, writes close to the flesh. His poems take up the body in desire and violence, and they do so by thrusting the reader into a stark visceral encounter with their material. The poem “Portrait With Stiff Upper Lip” is graphically rendered so that it can’t be read line by line; the page must be turned, repositioned so that text, overlapping and running every which direction, can be seen. Beyond typography, the poem asks the reader to take on the physical and emotional sense of a black man hearing himself, or someone like him, discussed via fragments. A reader staggers through a field of statements like “looks like planet of the apes” “probably has / a huge” “probably has a parent” “in / prison” “NO” “[in / the / pen]” “I’ve never had” “with a really hot BLKguy.” The reader, dragged forward yet afraid to keep reading, is made to feel caught in a hostile gaze, shoved around by heedless voices.

Suzette Haden Elgin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzette_Haden_Elgin

Recognizing language that escalates

Acknowledging that there are times when escalating a conflict is the appropriate thing to do, if your ultimate goal is discussion and some kind of mutual agreement, how you bring that conflict into the open and force others to deal with it–the language you choose, the process you follow–will make or break your chances of productive engagement.

• Blaming others.
• Being over-apologetic or accommodating. “That’s okay, you just go ahead and have a good time without me.”
• Asserting one’s rights, stating one’s perspective with absolute certainty, globalizing (what’s true for me is true for everyone else).
  Everyone knows that he steals. No one has a right to talk to me like that.
• Attacking someone’s personality or morality, someone’s motivations. You knew we had a different plan yet you went ahead unilaterally just to spite everyone. That manager is out to get us. I know you meant well, dear, but you lack judgment.

As hidebound as a leather chair-

As thoughtless as a broom;

He is more stuck  than is despair

Which hovers round his room

Hurt by  bullies in his school.

He made protective rules.

Never go out  with a girl

Never aid a fool.

Never vote in case you err

Never wear red  socks.

Be angry that life’s  so unfair

Live inside a box.

Always say your prayers at night#

Never read in bed

And never ever think about

What  you might do instead.

His menu was so regular,

From  change he gained no pleasure

He cut his meat up with  an axe

To make it hard to measure.

He counted every step he took

And every time he  wheezed.

He wrote it in his diary

And this act made him sneeze.

He was allergic to the air;

Allergic to the sun;

At least the tickle in his throat,

Made him laugh in fun.

He had a job with a big bank

He always wore a suit

Till one day his colleague said

That only plants had roots.

The implication seemed to be

He was in stasis glued.

He always wore the same old clothes

And ate the same old food.

Could he help himself and how?

Could he be softer skinned?

He dreamed he climbed up a great cliff

Despite  the gale and wind.

And so he  left the bank and moved

To work in a coal mine.

He crawled along the tunnels black

And measured them with twine

.

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«

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509585.2014.899763?src=recsys,

Extract:

I argue that the oft-discussed connection between Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness” and Keats’s “negative capability” has led scholars to overlook Keats’s own notion of passivity as a persuasive, as well as receptive, force. I argue that Keats saw passivity as an embodied, and even physically demanding, attitude, that could prompt the interest and attention of others – an understanding that builds on the theatrical attitudes adopted by Romantic stage actors, who struck exciting poses to suspend dramatic intensity.

http://www.literary-articles.com/2010/02/wordsworths-views-on-poetic-truth.html?m=1

0

Aristotle was the fist who declared poetic truth to be superior to historical truth. He called poetry the most philosophic of all writings. Wordsworth agrees with Aristotle in this matter. Poetry is given an exalted position by Wordsworth in such a way that it treats the particular as well as the universal. Its aim is universal truth. Poetry is true to nature. Wordsworth declares poetry to be the “image” or “man and nature”. A poet has to keep in mind that his end (objective) is to impart pleasure. He declares poetry will adjust itself to the new discoveries and inventions of science. It will create a new idiom for the communication of new thoughts. But the poet’s truth is such that sees into heart of things and enables others to see the same. Poetic truth ties all mankind with love and a sense of oneness.

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https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-currently-at-war

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