A lot of people don’t feel qualified to analyze or talk about poetry. A lot of people don’t “understand” poetry or they think they are missing something about poetry, and that the fact that they are missing something means they don’t understand it. And I am one of these a lot of people, and also, my favorite poets are Rilke and T.S. Eliot, long ago dead, and if I threw Robert Frost in there you’d really think I was a jackass so I won’t even mention Rumi but… Rumi yeah I love Rumi … all of that addressed here by John Ciardi … also probably dead. I’m too lazy to look it up…
“Everyone who has an emotion and a language knows something about poetry. What they know may not be much on an absolute scale, and it may not be organized within them in a useful way, but once they discover the pleasures of poetry, they are likely to be surprised to discover how much they always knew without knowing they knew it. They may discover, somewhat as the character in the French play discovered to his amazement that he had been talking prose all his life, that they have been living poetry. Poetry, after all is about life. Anyone who is alive and conscious must have some information about it.”
– John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean, 1959
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Feelings … what the hell are they? The idea I am proposing is that consciousness is an Ancestral Relay Race that moves in two or more directions (to the past and to the future). Meaning we are all alive right now the way we have all been alive at all times. DNA is the grand designer and it uses emotions to evolve itself through our physical bodies. Emotions are entities, or beings of some kind, we are not the beings. We tell ourselves we are. Or our egos tell us that. Envy for me is the same as envy for you. Despair for me is the same as despair for you. Love, lust, excitement, disgust, etcetera. We are all in this together and nothing is changing. Except for the understanding the ENTITIES (our feelings) have of themselves. Even as I write this I know it sounds crazy and I am not claiming that’s it’s true. It’s just an idea. Okay?
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I attributed the vedic interpretations to Patanjali wrongly; these words are the translations of Swami Venkatesananda, who studied the Sanskrit sutras attributed to Patanjali.
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I found this wonderful, wonderful blog post about emotional resonance and the reason it is so wonderful is its humility PLUS turning me on to the most, most fantastic poetry readings by Ron Perlman as the Beast in a TV series I had never heard of, Beauty and the Beast with the most delicious Linda Hamilton … I have a soft spot for her. She’s awkward.
MORE FUN (“You darkness” by Rainer Maria Rilke).
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David Rattray in conversation with Ken Jordan for Semiotexte: artist as prophet.
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This is the thesis that I used to catch up on Ralph Waldo Emerson. How great it is that we can see people’s graduate school thesis work online? Fresh and smart and often radical. The as-yet-unsullied academics.
“The Embodied Poet in the Work of Emerson, Whitman, and Hesiod, ” by Kathleen Hensley
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The poetic fragment at the top of the video is courtesy of Nicki Minaj.
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The original video background was great and wild and horrible. I would have used it, shocking as it looked, but YouTube blocked it for Copyright Infringement. You will have to imagine it running behind my emotional entity rant.
