YAWB – Yet Another Writing Blog
Just another Poetry site
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
…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
Poetry doesn’t compete, Louis Zukofsky asserted; it is added to like science.
– “The Nymph Stick Insect”, The Measured Word, 38
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.
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”
The Friend, Does a drop
stay still in the Ocean?
Move with the Entirety,
and with the tiniest particular.
Be the moisture in an oyster
that helps to form one pearl.
– “1022” (14-19), Like This
***
When I press my hand to my chest,
it is Your Chest.
And now You’re scratching my head!
Sometimes you put me in the herd
with Your other camels.
– “543” (1-5), Like This
One day when the planet was idly
pressing stegosaurs in her scrapbook
she threw out a whole plateau
of souvenirs…
…
you get distracted, you put down that scribbled
fossilized note about Martian microbes
and once you set a tectonic plate on top of it,
you may never find it again…
– “Mount Clutter”, (1-4, 8-11)
***
She drifted along his side and touched his face,
then felt the wind lift her arms,
wind under her hair, in her mouth.
“Dear love,” said her mouths
that were also her hands and hair
shaken out by the wind.
She bowed, he bowed,
they began forming rings for each other.
– “Turn Us into Trees”, (33-40)
Poetry is not just about language, though language is its medium. Poetry’s true subject is the spirit, the divine, the sacred, the ineffable. If you prefer God, use that word. It’s just a word, though one that’s loaded with baggage. And it makes poetry sound loftier than it is, since by God and the sacred I mean everything, the “what is” of life. [and from the previous paragraph] If you believe there is nothing beyond the body, you probably still have a sense of what I’m talking about. (100)
and
All poems are seductions. When you fall under the spell of a poem, it’s an infatuation that can become a love affair. A poem wants you to feel like this; it doesn’t feel complete unless it makes a personal connection. (115)
– Ordinary Genius, 2009
… Wise men tried to convince me otherwise. They explained that men were made in the image of God. We must live godly lives. God never had orgasms. Neither should I. … (16)
– from “The Quest”, The Book of Orgasms, Bloodaxe edition, 2003.
Summed up, our position at the moment is that the poet must get rid of the hieratic in everything that concerns him and must move constantly in the direction of the credible. He must create his unreal out of what is real.
If we consider the nature of our experience when we are in agreement with reality, we find, for one thing, that we cease to be metaphysicians. (58)
– Necessary Angels, 1942