The Divine can only be accessed through the human other to whom the self is infinitely responsible. (Urbano, p 51)

Emmanuel Levinas

Often silence is the better choice
When your soul’s at risk, why invent lies?
But if you speak, make sure it is your voice
Often silence is the  wiser choice
Rudeness hastens many to divorce.
We  feel that Satan’s minions roll the dice
Often silence is the only choice
When your soul’s at risk, why proffer lies?

t

A Triolet is a poetic form consisting of only 8 lines. Within a Triolet, the 1st, 4th, and 7th lines repeat, and the 2nd and 8th lines do as well. The rhyme scheme is simple: ABaAabAB, capital letters representing the repeated lines.

Make writing a Triolet more challenging! Make each line 8 syllables in length (4 metrical feet), written in iambic tetrameter (the more common way), or try it in pentameter (English version) where each line only has 10 syllables (5 metrical feet)

The tender words invented as we loved
Now have no other speaker but myself.
Lost, unique, the husband, so beloved
And special words called forth by touch and love-
In my speech , these words no longer live
I cannot use our words, our loving wealth.
The chosen words invented as we loved
Now have no other listener but myself

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/68755/does-poetry-have-a-social-function

Major Jackson:

The function of poetry is that it does not have any function beyond its own construction and being-in-the-world. For this reason, poetry makes everything (and, yes, nothing) happen, especially in a consumer society prone to assessing and dispensing value to everything from lap dances to teachers’ salaries. Whether as a form of witness, as a medium which dignifies individual speech and thought, as a repository of our cumulative experiences, or as a space where we “purify” language, poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry’s social value.

I hope this does not sound like an exercise in ambiguities. If so, let me add another: one of poetry’s chief aims is to illumine the walls of mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable. I think poetry ought to be taught not as an engine of meaning but as an opportunity to learn to live in doubt and uncertainty, as a means of claiming indeterminancy. Our species is deeply defined by its great surges of reason, but I think it high time we return to elemental awe and wonder. Such a position is necessary to our communal health.

I try to teach my students the full magnitude of what can happen during the reading of a poem. The readerly self, if the music and strategies of the poem are a success, fades away to assume the speaker’s identity, or the poem’s psychic position. Once a reader has fully internalized the poem’s machinations, she collects a chorus within her and is transformed. This ritual generates empathy and widens our humanity. These might seem like grand dreams, but it is just such a belief in the power of poetry that spurs my pen to action, whether I am getting paid or not.

Emily Warn:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9420356/Now-metal-thieves-target-lampposts.html

I hear him in the  morning yet he died
I think I’ve got a phantom husband, oh!
I feel an instant touch when my eyes close

His funny faces made me laugh out loud
I called him India Rubber, flexed his nose.
I hear him in the  morning,  though he died

At night I hear him whisper, don’t you go!
Yet the worlds of dreams and image forward flow
I  hear him say my poetry is prose

His sense of humour  was  both deep and wide
He used to  rub my feet  and my bent toes
I hear him every  morning, he’s my guide

I overwhelmed him with my rapid voice.
Up in Hebden we  all speak to go.
I feel  his hand on my silk underclothes

We were children playing, did we know?
A phantom husband  can’t play dominoes
I sense him in the morning as I breathe.
I feel his careful touch, I do believe.

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/matthew-zapruder-on-how-to-write-and-read-poems/

Your new book is called Why Poetry? and it speaks to why so many people don’t read poetry now and why perhaps poetry isn’t valued in the same way it used to be. Can you give me the short version of why you think that is?

It’s a complicated question. One reason is that people think poetry is hard and their idea about what’s hard about it is wrong. They think it’s hard because you have to decode it, but that’s actually not what’s hard about poetry. What’s hard about poetry is just accepting what is actually being said and not doing what we’re taught to do in school all the time, which is to translate things or decode them or try to unpack what they really mean. It’s not about that.

The other thing is that people think poetry is hard because we have a mistaken idea about what it’s for and what it is. We don’t understand why people make poems at all. We think, or we’re taught to think, that there are basically these riddles or messages that are hidden inside these containers called poems, which makes the poems just these annoyances and distractions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this: Why don’t they just say what they mean? Why do they make it so complicated? I think that would be a completely reasonable question if poems were what people typically say they are, but they aren’t what people say they are. They’re not. They aren’t riddles. Those are really the two things that keep people from reading poetry: This idea that they’re hard, coded messages and this general confusion about why people would make them at all.

The irony of it is that most people I know have had an experience at some point with poetry, either with reading it or writing it, where they cut through all that stuff. They have this personal, individual encounter with a poem and they forget to treat it like it’s a secret message, and they totally understand why it’s necessary, because clearly it says something in some way that could never be said otherwise. That’s something I try to touch base with a little bit in the book–remember that experience, that is the real experience. Not all this stuff that’s in your high school English class or that you’re taught in order to get the right answer on the test.

Students are often uncomfortable with the ambiguity of poetry. They want to know exactly what it means. They want there to be one correct interpretation.

It’s not their fault. They’re taught to treat poetry that way. I spent an undue amount of time looking at the textbooks that students have to read and the standardized test they have to take. The way those things talk about poetry is just horrendous. It’s no wonder nobody likes it. If this is what they say poetry actually is, then I don’t like that

I wandered  lonely in a crowd
That wars all night  so untranquil
When in a trance, I saw  heads bowed
And march   on these green, rabid  bills

Confused by the stairs  we climbed
I saw an escalator bend
Then two mechanics  served their time
I pressed the bell and did descend

I heard my brother on the phone
I don’t know how he turned it on
His favourite phrase was : oh, don’t moan!
The kettle boiled, the  liar  has come

At the  bottom of my blog
It tells Old Pests to press right here.
Then will we hit them with  a log
Before we steal their dark brown beer?

He asked me if I’d love to hate
And envy Wilfred Bion’s gun
But I prefer to  have a date
Although they make my bowels run

Fantastically ghosts  sit here
And look upon the sky refined
They have no bodies, do not fear
They are real but undefined

So I lay down and felt my love
My man, my mate, my inspired date
Flutter o’er me like a dove
I fell asleep and now I’m late

When I go out I am no longer me
Not a woman, not a poet nor clown
My stick confers invisibility.

My singing voice is now an enemy
“Talking to herself ” is written down
When I go out I am no longer me

Madness, crime and sin are easier
Like entry into studies labelled brown
My stick confers invisibility.

And if my grooming is what some call free
It stops me  spending money in the town
When I go out I am no longer me

I drink sherry, wine and Earl Grey Tea.
Before I get the habit, a nun’s gown
My stick confers invisibility.

Yet if by chance I wear a sullen frown
The bus conductor says I put him down
When I go out now, dead men stare at me
My stick confers invisibility.

A lamppost has been cut down and stolen from a footpath in Hertfordshire, police say.

The suspects used a hacksaw to cut down the lamppost on a path off Studio Way in Borehamwood at 10:30 GMT, Hertfordshire Police believes.

Dear All

Well, I must get on with this or it will  be Xmas before I know where I am.In fact I do not know yet where I am but Leibniz’s theory that we are all monads is looking good.Don’t ask me what a monad is.Just invent it.It means we have no community, no connections, no sharing.A bit like bricks.You can build a wall with them but they never talk and but for the cement, they would all fall over and make a big mess.
You could say, the government is removing the cement as that is the wish of the people.When we all fall down then they will have us made into dust.
Which reminds me, why not try Philip Pullman’s  new book as a Xmas gift? It’s about Dust but not as we know it.I loved his Dark Materials.No, that is not his suit!
Anyway, have you noticed how brilliant geniuses also seem odd? Newton invented Calculus but never told anyone until he heard Leibniz had done it too.So he was very put out.He managed to get most of the credit
That reminds me, don’t use a credit card at Xmas.Because then someone in  MI6 will be able to see all  you have bought and where… see what I mean? You may have quite accidentally bought all the ingredients for making a bomb.For example, an alarm clock seems innocent but if you also bought some Christmas Crackers it points a suspicious finger at you.Don’t buy any gunpowder.
The best way to shop is to go to the Bank and draw out some cash!Yipes!Money… then nobody will ever know what you do with it.
For my  New Year Resolution instead of going shopping on Saturdays, I am going to get £100  in notes and throw it out of my bedroom window when a gale is blowing.I might as well do that as buy all sorts of rubbish that I don’t need

However if you can’t control your buying, do this: only buy little cheap things like soap bars, socks, biros, tissues etc.That’s cheaper and just as satisfying as buying a down jacket and ten pairs of shoes.I should know as I have 24 down jackets and an infinity of shoes.I have even got some yellow shoes and a yellow down jacket.That’s one way of ensuring no man is an island.
Well, time to feed the twins.My daughter has gone to Australia and I have them for 3 weeks.They are only 8 months old and I am very anxious.The cat will be sad if  they die but she does have a singleton as well so here’s hoping I can get them onto Carnation milk while Genny is away.I didn’t really agree with her breastfeeding them but she liked it apart from the biting and scratching.Why they are almost human which is more than I can say for her.Her father might have been a milkman but that’s no excuse
Byeeee

Kristy

Bereavement left me  lonely and distraught
The maps I  used were no guide for this time
So love  seems dead, the left  feel mute, betrayed

The place where love once lived is now a void.
Yet even here a poet  can find new  lines
Bereavement left  me low, I felt destroyed

The thought of making love fills with distaste
To our own death, we seem to be resigned
For love  seems dead and we are mute, betrayed

Though we eat, our food has no real taste
Our meals  unbalanced lose thir past design
Bereavement leaves us lonely and destroyed

Yet on what narrative are such thoughts based?
The axioms can change, create new times.
Is love dread and how were we betrayed?

There can a meaning other than divine
Love’s down low  between these very lines
Bereavement   may not   totally destroy
Love may touch my heart , no demons’ toy

Your face is map enough for me,

Your gaze, your smile, your frown, your glee.

And if I want to know the rest

The shape your posture‘s made is best

For showing what your life is now.

A look, a gesture all this show.

Till who you are is then disclosed

And I am in your arms enrobed.

Love vanishes when analysed,

And thinking too

by  Love’s despised’

Choose the means to fit the end

And then I’ll be what you intend

Václav Havel

The relativization of all moral norms, the crisis of authority, the reduction of life to the pursuit of immediate material gain without regard for its general consequences—the very things Western democracy is most criticized for–do not originate in democracy but in that which modern man has lost: his transcendental anchor, and along with it the only genuine source of his responsibility and self-respect . . . . Given its fatal incorrigibility, humanity probably will have to go through many more Rwandas and Chernobyls before it understands how unbelievably shortsighted a human being can be who has forgotten that he is not God.

“Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache; do be my enemy–for friendship’s sake.”
William Blake

Through the barbed wire fence, I saw a stream
Water washing down to  river wide
A field of daisies and wild grasses green

Inside my pulsing heart,  the blood did plead
That history and myth can take a ride
Through the barbed wire fence, I saw a stream

So lack of hope conspires to kill our dreams
And memories that lie can be no guide
To fields of daisies and wild grasses green

The silver birches light with sun’s soft beams
In their way, they are discreet disguise
Through the barbed wire fence, I saw a stream

About the cruelty  of human deeds
There is a library, shattered and demeaned
By fields of daisies and wild grasses green

Few can bear to enter and to read
What the minds of sufferers could mean
Through the barbed wire fence, they saw a stream

As Icarus was falling unperceived
Farmers tilled their meadows blithe, deceived
Through the barbed wire fence, we saw a stream
A field of daisies and wild grasses screamed

There was an old hermit in Cromer
Who wanted to befriend a loner
So he went on to Tinder
He opened a window
He picked me for he liked my aroma.

Cromer is too remote for a lady
Who likes to go out somewhere shady
I went to Soho
As I did not know
It’s for harlots,  and folk who feel flakey.

Sin is   a category error
Which fells  folk like me with its terror
So I decide  not to brood
Nor ruminate food
In case I go blind or turn yellow.

I think  my retina has conked out
And also I’ve grown far too stout
So chop off my head
When I am in bed
That will be a full cure for my doubt

Luther was an evil man, I find
Maybe sinner is a better term
He hated Jews and made up Hitler’s mind

To his own sins, he seemed  rather blind
And he sowed a seed, or call it germ
Luther was an evil man, I find

Only someone mad could thus align
A tasty Diet made  up out of worms
He hated Jews and aided Hitler’s mind

Whatever he decided was defined
To make the bellies of the Churchmen churn
Luther was an evil man, I find

The grace of God confined him in a bind
Good works were of no use, did nothing earn
He hated Jews and lived in Hitler’s mind

Let the  sinless  one take the right turn
While the rest of us  in flames shall burn
Luther was an evil man, I find
He hated Jews, bedevilled Hitler’s mind

How dangerous is technology?

“The tangible benefits of technological progress are wonderful, but are matched by irreversible damage to our global resources. To support almost eight billion people, our attempts to provide sufficient food are made with limited regard to the land or other creatures, and we have destroyed cultures and hundreds of languages. Crop yields and health care have advanced with the aid of drugs and chemicals but they are not, and cannot be, confined to their original locations. Food and water supplies are seriously contaminated with a cocktail of chemicals and drugs which no earlier civilization has ever experienced. Despite warnings and research, the potential for allergies, ill health, and mutagenic and fertility changes are ignored by the majority. Humans have always been concerned with the present, self-interest, and profit. This is why we have advanced. The difference now is that we have outgrown our potential resources.”

He told me I looked happier than him
Standing by the rack of magazines
He’d like to die, but it is still a sin

Instead, I wondered how about a gym?
And  prayer to fill the emptiness that looms
He told me I looked happier than him.

He was handsome , smart and also very slim.
A pity we were not just two baboons.
He’d like to die, but it is still a sin.

He has good eyesight, and has lost no limb
I can hum about a million tunes.
He told me I looked happier than him

His cup compared to mine is full to brim
Yet I desire to lick the plastic spoon.
He’d like to die, but it is still a sin.

We in Europe rich, feel full of doom
We are going blind, one may presume
He told me my attraction  was a sin
He’d like to harass me  like life has him

“If we wish to find a scapegoat on whose shoulders we may lay the miseries which Germany has brought upon the world — I am more and more convinced that the worst evil genius of that country is not Hitler or Bismarck or Frederick the Great, but Martin Luther.” Reverend William Ralph Inge,

1944.http://www.jpost.com/Blogs/The-Jewish-Problem—From-anti-Judaism-to-anti-Semitism/Foundations-of-the-Holocaust-Martin-Luther-Theologian-of-Hate-365321

Did Luther Suffer from Recurring Depression?

“1) Martin Luther: the Christian Between God and Death, Richard Marius (Harvard University Press, 1999, 576 pages):

[H]e was perhaps like many others at the time prone to melancholy — we would say say depression, even (as modern psychological jargon has it) “clinical” depression of a sort that might require treatment by a good paternal figure.

(p. 54)

She [his wife] was a consolation to him in his bouts with tristitia, a word meaning “sadness” that I think is here best translated by “depression,” attacks that he said in 1533 were greater afflictions than all his enemies and labors . . . He had these attacks often, he said . . .

(p. 439)

2) Martin Luther, Michael A. Mullett (Routledge, 2004, 240 pages), mentions Luther’s “recurrent bouts of depression” (p. 256).

3) True Faith in the True God: An Introduction to Luther’s Life and Thought, Hans Schwarz, translated by Mark Williams Worthing (Augsburg Books, 1996),

[H]e was frequently plagued by sickness during the remaining decade of his life, especially from pain caused by stones but also by severe headaches and depression.

(p. 33)

4) The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, by Donald K. MacKim (Cambridge University Press, 2003, 338 pages), cites “occasional bouts with what may tentatively be identified as clinical depression” (p. 266).
5) Martin Luther: His Road to Reformation, 1483-1521, by Martin Brecht, translated by James F. Schaaf (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993; at least 529 pages):

When we survey Luther’s illnesses after 1527, it is obvious that in the meantime he had become an unstable man. Again and again can be seen the connection between his circulatory problems and an emotional depression, combined with his spiritual Anfechtungen, . . .

(p. 210)

6) Martin Luther: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives), by Martin E. Marty (Viking Adult, 2004, 224 pages): “. . . the decade [1535-1545] of his disease and depression . . .” (p. 182).

7) The Revolt of Martin Luther, by Robert Herndon Fife (Columbia University Press, 1957, 713 pages):

[T]he friar was assailed by hours of restlessness and agonizing doubts. It is quite probable that this began to be the case early in his cloister life. “When I was first inducted into the monastery, it happened that I would always go about sad and depressed and could not shake off this melancholy,” This is one of the recollections from his early middle age. There is reason to think, as we have seen, that fits of depression beset him before his entry into the cloister . . . Nevertheless, though physical causes may have accentuated the attacks of depression, their source lay in his psychical personality and therefore far below the reach of the investigator’s plummet. They play a large role in his reminiscences and undoubtedly began early in life, for they recur throughout the middle years. It was a part of the mythology implanted in childhood that he should have regarded these visitations as temptations of the devil. “It seems to me,” he declares in 1521, “that from childhood Satan foresaw in me something of what he is now suffering from me. That is the reason he has raged against me with unbelievable tricks to hamper and destroy me, so that I have often wondered whether I was not the only one among mortals in whom he was laying his traps.” 62 The attacks followed him through life, but with advancing age he worked out a system, based largely on the Scriptures, by which he gave himself successful treatment. The strife against mental depression, he concluded, is a struggle with the devil 63 God is happiness and hates melancholy; the devil is melancholy, 64 and the Christian who fights off its attacks is resisting the devil. 65 . . . He himself seems to have escaped any real mental difficulty, but the tension of life showed itself in pronounced hysterical symptoms which may be noted from time to time in the monastic years and tended to present themselves also, though less acutely, at middle age and even on the threshold of old age. These “temptations,” as he calls them, brought him occasionally to the verge of despair. We have read the story of the fit in the cloister choir as reported to Johann Cochlaeus by certain Augustinian brothers. It bears marks of probability, for Luther himself records another instance of strikingly similar character which happened some years later, probably in 1515. Then, as he tells a scribe at table sixteen years after the event, he was struck with terror at sight of the sacrament borne by the vicar general, Dr. Staupitz, in the Corpus Christi procession. 69 His sensitivity to powerful attacks of depression is shown by several experiences recorded later but evidently belonging to the days when he was still in the Augustinian order. A vivid recollection of this kind comes down from the period of the struggle over indulgences and is found in the Explanations on the Power of Indulgences in 1518. Here, in a remarkable passage on the tortures of purgatory, he describes pangs of conscience which he had endured. “They lasted, to be sure, only a short while, but they were so hard and infernal that no tongue can express their power, no pen describe it, nor can anyone believe it who has never had the experience. If they should remain at their most extreme point for an hour, yes, even six minutes, the victim must quite perish and all his bones be turned to ashes.” 70 About the same time at which these words were written, possibly two or three years later, he seems to have suffered severe attacks of despair, especially the feeling that he was hated of God. “I was beset by the most extreme temptations [fear of the wrath of God]; they devoured my body as with fire so that I scarcely remained alive.” 71 Respecting a similar onset at the same period of life, he declares that no one could console him, so that he was obliged to ask: “Am I the only one to suffer the spirit of sadness? I saw so many apparitions. But ten years ago when I was alone, God comforted me with his angels to go on struggling and writing.” 72

Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2016/04/did-luther-suffer-from-recurring-depression.html#dFDmp10voGF5sM47.99″

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/writing-saved-life

“If you don’t know where to start, here are a few recommendations:

• Use fast, stream-of-consciousness writing. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, etc. After all, in a conversation about something important, words just flow with hardly a breath in between.
• Don’t worry about what anyone else thinks. Your writing can remain private if you so desire. You can jot down your deepest feelings and then immediately shred them, which is therapeutic in itself.
• If you want to take this to the next level, challenge someone you trust to do the same thing and then exchange what you produced.

These days, my writing is meant to inspire others and to provide an antidote to the negativity and sensationalism we see in the news and on social media. In my third and fourth books—the first instalments of the (Extra)Ordinary series—I looked for people who are lighthouses for the rest of us, and they were not hard to find. Extraordinary people are all around us!

I’m thankful to know that and to know them. And I’m thankful for the life-saving gift of writing.

Writing has taken me out of myself and connected me to people in new ways. I’ve discovered more about who I was, who I am and who I want to be, all while learning about others in the process. Writing gave my life a renewed purpose. Writing saved me. “

Mary was sitting at her desk trying to decide whether to throw out a book called Schrodinger ‘s equation for Idiots.That title had more than one meaning, she thought to herself.
I think that is for the recycling bin, she told her cat, Emile.What a pity you can’t read.You could have read it.
I don’t want to read stuff like that.I only like Dad’s cartoon books.
Where are they, Mary asked him, her eyes shining like melting Danish butter on a hot croissant?
They are in that plastic box in the kitchen, Emile told her.I read them at night.
How can you read if there is no light?Please don’t start sinning as I don’t want you to have to become a Catholic and go to Confession
I can’t become a Catholic, said Emile.I am Jewish.
Well, St Paul was Jewish, Mary told him.Until he had an epileptic fit .
So having a fit can make you a Christian.That is very strange, the black cat told her with a twinkle in his eyes
Well, it’s not automatic, Mary replied.You have to pay.
What, pay to become a Christian, I don’t believe Jesus would like that.
Well, he may be quite indulgent, sometimes Mary giggled.However, the Vatican and its wealth might not be quite what he was thinking of when he gave the Sermon on the Mount.
What sort of mount was it, Emile enquired.Was it a horse?
No, it was  more likely to  have been a donkey  as he was quite poor, you know
But he had things money can’t buy, the cat said philosophically.
Like women who poured oil over his feet.What sort was it,?Was it like that stuff Stan put in the car engine sometimes?
Don’t be so ridiculous.It was olive oil, Mary told him sternly.
Can we prove that Emile murmured? His feet were no salad iin need of dressing
No, I am using inductive reasoningMary stated logically.Olive trees are grown in that part of the world even now.
What is inductive reasoning, Emile mewed
Why it’s the opposite of deductive reasoning, of course, Mary stated wildly
I am glad I can’t read, Emile said.It’s bad for you to have to learn all of that.It was ok for the ancient Greeks.They had no televisions.I’d rather watch Andrea Bocelli and Hayley Westenra singing Vivo per lei.Whatever that means.She is from New Zealand by the way.
What difference does that make Mary teased him?
No need to be rude, Emile cried.I was only passing a remark
That was what Stan’s mother used to say when he told her off for saying my maple mousse was like something out of a tin.
Where was it from?
The Joy of Cookery. a big American cookbook or maybe Jewish Cookery by Florence Greenberg or I bought it in Marks and Spencers
Did you get that book because I am Jewish, Emile purred?
No, I didn’t even know you were.How did it happen?
My mother was living with a Rabbi in Liverpool and he told her she could not miaow on the Sabbath so she kind of assumed she was Jewish.As for my father.. nobody knows.
Emile, don’t start saying you are the Messiah.I have enough trouble already.I don’t want you to be  walking on water and helping women taken in adultery
I was not me who took them, said Emile.I don’t even know where Adultery is.
I think I’ll ring 999.We need help before we go mad.
Sometimes going mad seems the better option, Mary said sadly.A few  voices telling me what to do might be helpful
As long as they are not Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, Emile replied courteously. As for Freezer May…… we’ve suffered enough from seeing her in miniskirts holding DT’s hand!
And so say all of us.For he’s a jolly good  yeller! Emile  loves every cat