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Where are You Going, Where Have I Been?

While I haven’t been posting here (or at Poetic Idealism) lately, that’s not to say things haven’t been very busy.

One thing I’m very proud of is the state of the new issue of Barely South Review, which has taken up most of my time these past two weeks. It’s turned out beautifully, with no small thanks to the contributors who sent us wonderful materials to work with, and the staff who put in many long hours.

On the other hand, this workload also means my thesis has taken somewhat of a back seat recently. I’ve written a couple of new things, but still feel about fifteen poems short. These are in me somewhere, and now I have time to go mining for them.

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Left Turn Approaching

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.

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from Neil deGrasse Tyson

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.

– Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Beyond the Big Bang”, The Universe, The History Channel, 2007

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Some Thoughts on The Measured Word

This collection of essays edited by Kurt Brown[1] offers an interesting collection of writers, from those dealing in both poetry and science (Miroslav Holub), to poets intrigued by what science both unveils to and hides from us as people (just about everyone else). I have found a lot of interesting quotes in most of these essays (read here), and a lot that doesn’t quite fit inside the quotation format. Some ephemeral knowledge building that won’t quite fit into language right now.

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One More from Gander

The father of Western logic, Socrates, claimed that he had only one real talent: to recognize at once the lover and the beloved…

….

Maybe the so-called contemporary indifference to poetry is nothing more than dread, dread that poetry is so penetrated by silence.

– “The Nymph Stick Insect”, The Measured Word, 43

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from Kelly Cherry

…poetry, for all the use it makes of emotion, is the way we come to know the thing itself, the simple undeniable fact of existence, of existence in all its manifold particularity…

– “The Two Cultures”, The Measured Word, 31

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via Forest Gander

Poetry doesn’t compete, Louis Zukofsky asserted; it is added to like science.

– “The Nymph Stick Insect”, The Measured Word, 38

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The Pain Body

In Kim Addonizio‘s Ordinary Genius, she writes about the “pain body,” a concept borrowed from a book called The Power of Now, which I’ve never read. But the exercises discussed in this chapter (18, pp.148-155) look interesting enough to give it a go. And here is where I record that experiment. I invite you to follow along and conduct your own…

I’m going to do this live, so check back on the post and I will be sure to note when it’s ended.

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