http://www.huffingtonpost.com/megan-devine/death-and-dying

Anticipate, don’t ask.
Do not say “Call me if you need anything,” because your friend will not call. Not because they do not need, but because identifying a need, figuring out who might fill that need, and then making a phone call to ask is light years beyond their energy levels, capacity or interest. Instead, make concrete offers: “I will be there at 4 p.m. on Thursday to bring your recycling to the curb,” or “I will stop by each morning on my way to work and give the dog a quick walk.” Be reliable.

My computer went offline most of the day so I realised I must buy Mr Cohen’s music.
Anyway it just came back on

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/articles/detail/69588

Practice of an art is more salutary than talk about it.
There is nothing more composing than composition.
—Robert Frost, from his notebooks[Poetry and Prose,
edited by Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson
(Holt, 1972)]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/university-of-toronto-news/why-you-can-and-should-wr_b_4718395.html

Quote

http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/what-is-the-value-of-poetry

http://www.citylab.com/work/2016/11/new-yorks-atms-are-thriving-with-human-skin-bacteria/507998/

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/02/smartphones_are_killing_us_and_destroying_public_life/

Quote:

Personal technology may be only a small part of McCullough’s interpretation of “peak distraction,” but for most people, the computer, tablet and phone are a focal point. What permanent connectivity does to our minds is the subject of great debate. What it does to public space is less often acknowledged. Essentially, smartphone users in public operate under the illusion that they are in private. They exist, in the words of two Israeli researchers, in “portable, private, personal territories.” Their memories of visited places are much worse than those of control subjects.

•  

  It takes a long time for a tree to die.
  Though its trunk be almost severed with the axe.
  There was plenty of sap above
  Then the leaves began to wither
  and fall though it was spring time…

  It takes a long time,to forget.
  Not to remember
  How to live.

  First the tree stops growing.
  It pauses,as if waiting for a message.
  Then,as I said, the leaves turn brown.
  It all takes time.Time to stop waiting

  The leaves drop,then the smaller branches shrivel.
  Humans also find that when ill, the hair may stop growing
  And the finger nails.
  We sacrifice the less important pieces of ourselves.
  Even the most.

  The small branches shrivel and dry out….
  Yet the tree still looks alive.
  Then gradually we notice it’s drying out;
  it’s branches are parched and soon the trunk dries too.
  It may split in places and insects make their home there.

  It takes a long time before the trunk dies.
  From the top down it dies.
  The sap is too limited in quantity
  To climb the trunk….
  So the sap stays near the ground.
  Eventually the whole tree seems dead
  Yet in the roots there is still subterranean life.

  The tree has died and is now brown and leaning a little sideways
  No longer magnificent in display.
  Time is all it needed
  After the sharp cut…
  And sometimes the roots are strong enough
  To begin to send up new shoots
  Another tree may grow..
  I have seen that.

  People ,of course ,die more quickly.
  We have no roots.
  And what of love,how does love die?
  Like a tree,like a tree,like a tree

Many a fickle makes a  mad cackle
Many are fickle  until their love buckles
There’re many  fine  quips  seen  crossing my lips.
Too many hooks will fishes engross
Grow as I grew,not  that old freak
Howling bones will frighten the lost

The hook of the wind caught my jacket
And spun me around on  its rope
The look of the wind wasn’t happy
As I spun on that strange gyroscope.

The rain drenched my hair and my glasses
I could not see where I was flung
All I could see was the passing,
As from the wind’s hook I was flung

Then as I hung down from an oak tree
The sun made a brilliant return
So I could see how the birds see
Above  the  grey smoke I could learn

My jacket came loose , the wind whooshed it
Until I fell into a ditch
I think I may purchase a broomstick
And become  the new neighbourhood witch

My jacket still hangs in the oak tree
But my hat has  stayed glued to my head
The crows were delighted to see me
But I will not let birds share my bed

Non lurkers here.Lurkers will not wear distinctive clothing.They want to  see but not to be seen

Lurkers are Like Dophins or Unicorns!

https://onlineeconomy.hbs.org/submission/confessions-of-an-internet-lurker/

http://blog.mersive.com/confessions-of-a-cto-lurker/

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.