YAWB – Yet Another Writing Blog
Just another Poetry site
In looking to come up with new poems to place into my thesis manuscript, I continue to write things which don’t relate too closely, either by voice or by theme. This, needless to say, is frustrating.
I have no solution, except the solution damp ink, sweat, and tears create of paper. This is also not an ideal solution. Print them, and revise. There is no forcing the poetry muse.
There is no forcing of poetry.
For those of you who’ve been following the project here, you know I’ve been writing a lot of poems based around science, and specifically the disciplines of astrophysics and particle physics. They have tended to ask the reader to shift his/her viewpoint and maybe become uncomfortable with the poem. In particular, this stems from the poems’ atheistic / agnostic viewpoint, which is in conflict with the majority of (at least) American sense of order. A lot of them have also been a lot less grounded in the human experience, and more so in the explanation of how I see the universe.
Some may even categorize these poems as Romantic.
I’ve been reading a lot of great books lately… Some, I’ve read through and am going back to spend more time with, and some are new for me. As I work through them, I’m posting a lot of quotes up here on the blog, and not really offering a whole lot of analysis to go along. I’m trying to get volume taken care of, I suppose.
Continue reading “A Few Thoughts on Poetry, Reading, and Writing”
I guess I haven’t yet described the particular direction of my thesis collection. I’m not entirely sure yet, in fact.
But I do have an inkling. I suppose one is never sure anyways about these things.
The inkling is this: Poetry and Science complement each other. There is a divide in U.S. society about the society’s cosmology, as Pattiann Rogers describes the term. The vastness of the universe – the incomprehensibility of it – begs for poetry. Poetry is how we humans explain to ourselves things we do not fully comprehend. Old myths have fallen by the wayside throughout human history. Progress always supersedes old myths, but only once society has made that choice. Old myths and world views – old cosmologies – fight hard to maintain their power, even to the point of violence. New cosmologies open doors to progress. New cosmologies beg poetry to further their cause. Poetry opens doors to new cosmologies. This is accomplished through wonder, beauty, and honesty. Poetry butts heads. Poetry breaks doors. Poetry does not know everything. Science does not know everything. Neither can describe things they don’t yet know about. Both are necessary for human progress and survival – to maintain a humanity in the face of the vast necessity of everything, in the face of the void, in the face of unknowing.
Discussion, of course, is welcome.
As I previously wrote here, I intend to follow up on the ideas I wrote about in the Introduction to Wallace Stevens Encounters. This is that post.
In that post, I mentioned that Pattiann Rogers expands Stevens’ ideas in her essay “Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation”; however, although her ideas line up and extend Stevens’, she does not specifically mention his name. Perhaps Stevens’ theory has become so ingrained as to be an accepted part of the modern condition of humanity; in Rogers’ words, a piece of our contemporary cosmology.
As I previously wrote here, I intend to follow up on the ideas I wrote about in the Introduction to Wallace Stevens Encounters. This is that post.
In that post, I mentioned that Pattiann Rogers expands Stevens’ ideas in her essay “Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation”; however, although her ideas line up and extend Stevens’, she does not specifically mention his name. Perhaps Stevens’ theory has become so ingrained as to be an accepted part of the modern condition of humanity; in Rogers’ words, a piece of our contemporary cosmology. Continue reading “More on Wallace Stevens’ Concept of the Pressure of History”
My summer reading pile is about 18″ high, primarily poetry collections, so that’s about 25 books or so, I’d guess. I haven’t actually counted. And I know there are more that somehow wound up actually on my bookshelf. And I definitely know there are more sitting on my Amazon wishlist (don’t get mad, they make it easy).
– Sidenote here: One benefit, I’ve just realized, of physical books over, say, the Kindle or something, is that you get the sense of accomplishment by shrinking the aforementioned pile as books are read. Awesome sauce – Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Cosmology and Where We Are”