Category Archives: Poetry

Lines that Stay with Us

Poetry, Rhetoric

From W.B. Yeat s:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

But is it true now, as it has been before? Or is the reasoned voice, propelled with conviction, and tempered by reflection, muffled by the shrill of certainty? Masquerades.

That was Then (and Now): War, Poetry and Human Nature

Philosophy, Poetry

History, as presented through historians, is the accumulation of selected data, woven into overlapping, contradictory, reinforcing, alternative, independent narratives. We animate the narratives through our individual, evolving, understandings. The scope of history is as broad as everything and as narrow as something (or someone). As students, we shape the shapes presented and represented by historians.

Akin to history, particularly the historical narrative of a participant in the events within the narration, poetry, a poem, kindles our imaginations, our imaging, of realities without images, without physical representations, other than those birthed out of our imagings. Through excursions through poems, composed through centuries, and across the globe, we can track unbroken threads, chords, that link descendants to ancestors, and that join, introduce, past to present.

All life is mortal and death is ubiquitous. But organized killing, sanctioned or not, by the state or by appeal to a higher (or lower) authority, if at times seemingly ubiquitous, is never inevitable. And, yet, killing runs unbroken from dawn to dusk.

Reading a recently published anthology of war poems, poems of, on, about, war, from the dawn of the printing press, or quill, ink and papyrus, to a dusk that eludes our grasp, we observe (no, we imagine, we image, we see, we feel, we hear) how some things, and each of us, “never change.” To paraphrase Norman Maclean, eventually all things merge into one and a poem runs through it.

Organic Apercus

Poetry, Rhetoric

In one of our earlier posts, “Savoring (Once Again) Alexander Pope,” we joined in (and enjoined) Pope’s sharp and funny skewering of the critic whose critical mastery consists in the easily-achieved expertise of alleging deficiencies in the contributions of others.

A defining feature of a brilliant observation (one that differentiates it from the banal, vapid, platitudinous) must be, if it is to warrant a glittering adjective, its seemingly effortless stimulation of refractions of itself, propelled by no more, or less, than our very attention to, and on, it.  And so with Pope’s lyrical “An Essay on Criticism,” with sparks ignited by our gaze, and its flames and flakes altered, flickering – alternating versions of Pope’s expressions:

In Poets as true Genius is but rare,
True Taste as seldom is the Critick’s Share;
Both must alike from Heav’n derive their Light,
These born to Judge, as well as those to Write.
Let such teach others who themselves excel,
And censure freely who have written well.

Nabokov must rank, on any scale, a master of inversions, the ingrained habit of flipping the apparent and viewing two sides of an object at once, as if metaphor’s challenge to physics.

In his recent review of Nabokov’s letters to Vera, Michael Wood highlights Nabokov’s talent for the comic inversion. We start with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Is the observation a fair characterization of families, or is the unstated proposition that unhappy families enrich dramatic plot more than do happy families?  Having framed the point, Wood then segues to Nabokov’s comic and “perfectly serious” counter-suggestion: “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy families are more or less alike.”

Unless awareness that we are in the hands of a master tips us off to the dramatic tension that will circulate through Wood’s review, we proceed (with mind open) along with Wood into his biographical excursions of the life of Nabokov. Restless curiosity sets in even as we remain confident that the excursions are a purposeful diversion, a diversion that (we can expect) will pivot and revert to the point of origin, where, upon arrival, we find conversion, we are enveloped in the peak, climactic, ephemeral dramatic tension. The moment passes as we take its measure, leaving us breathless as we appreciate the alterations in our point of view, and our refreshed and expanded understanding.  All that remains, and all that we need, to restore our equilibrium is a worthy apercu, one that emerges organically from, and seals, the drama.

Wood does not leaving us wanting.

(See Michael Woods’ review of Nabokov’s Letters to Vera in the October 2014 edition of London Review of Books)

Humility and Brilliance: a Postscript

Economics, Philosophy, Poetry, Rhetoric, Uncategorized

Having moved on to the activities of today, I was pleasantly struck by an Opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal.  Titled “A Nobel Economist’s Caution About Government,” the piece quotes from the great Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really  know about what they imagine they can design.”

While I suspect the authors of the piece have not visited our Blog, the themes our readers have come to expect from us resonate in the articulation by the authors of the risks of certainty in an inherently uncertain world.

We close with (what else?) but a closing thought: Those who relegate poetry to the idlings of idiosyncratic daydreamers deprive themselves of the riches of ambiguity and expose themselves to a deceptive clarity that leads to unintended consequences and ossification.

Poetry and the End of Life

Philosophy, Poetry, Rhetoric

At deeper levels, conventional analytics and conventional wisdom are, at once, coercive and liberating. We’ll leave this apparent paradox for another day. But before we leave, let’s stake out a position: within, and outside of, the boundaries of the sciences and humanities and transcending (or indifferent to) the border between them resides poetic imagination: the imagination expressed in, and offered to us, by, through and in, our engagement with the poem.  The imagination planted by another and that kindles our own.  The imagination that takes optical microscopy into the nanodimension. What other human expression animates our imagination by inviting us, gently and with no expectation of reciprocity, and when our spirit moves us, when we stir, to engage and explore and bring what we find, in the introspection and through our self-inspection, to enrich our appreciation of ambiguity, frailty, insecurity, fear of the unknown and craving for sustenance in the face of our mortality. To displace our fears and harness the energy of displacement to foster and fortify resolve.

In a recent post we encouraged health care providers to develop, to practice, imaginative empathy. To minister to the patient with an acute awareness of, and compassion for, the person, the person who is, or will be, us, the person who has moved from the island of health to the island of illness. The person whose movement will soon have moved him to the past.

When the surgeon has left, when the lights have been dimmed, when the birds have flown, where will the dying find comfort?  How will the care-giver who has not looked deeply into himself, who has not explored and made peace with, death and the fear of dying, soothe the soul and fortify the spirits when fortification and sustenance are all that we ask for and what we need most?

Two Dimensions of Poetry: Dolce et Utile

Poetry

At the outset we emphasize that the title of this post points to only two of multiple dimensions of poetry, and the following observations scarcely elucidate the contours or hint at the densities of either.

1. Dolce – the pleasure in and of itself, whether in, from, through, the rhythms, rimes (and rhymes), meter – the sounds, the imagery, the internal and external enunciations, the patterns. A case in point: “Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.” With this as its concluding sentence, Nomad Exquisite (Wallace Stevens) holds inexhaustible delights, and waits for us to visit, as our spirit moves us, always there (and here) to rekindle and restore past joys that merge into present joys.

2. Utile – the mirror of, the receptacle for, the affirmation and enhancement of, our understanding; and in reverberations, what some call “soul.” A case in point: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Who would dare answer? How can we know the answers, or seek to seek them, apart from the questions; and where within us emerge the impulses to revisit, to repose, the questions?

The Pleasures of Acknowledgements

Poetry, Rhetoric

I recently came accross a book I first read when it was a raging sensation (circa 1978) in Hyde Park, prominently positioned at all the bookstores – and there were many back then – in and around the University of Chicago. Pride in a native son.

The genesis of “A River Runs Through It” is as fascinating and inspiring as the novel itself, and I cannot think of the book without rekindling the thrill of reading the Acknowledgement. “Although it’s a little book, it took a lot of help to become a book at all. When one doesn’t start out to be an author until he has reached his biblical allotment of three score years and ten, he needs more than his own power.”

With the thrill rekindled and lingering, I find myself recalling Acknowledgements, Dedications and Author Prefaces that continue to reverberate long after I first delighted in their stirring artistry.

A few that have reverberated consistently over the years (and I rely upon an imperfect memory):

1. “All that is meant, And that will be understood, Cannot be expressed in a dedication. This book is for Claire.” A glimpse into a deep and private love. Spare and voluminous. From Bork’s “The Antitrust Paradox.”

2. “Some people, once met, simply elbow their way into a novel and sit there till the writer finds them a place. Dick is one. I am sorry I could not obey his urgent exhortation and libel him to the hilt. My cruelest efforts could not prevail against the the affectionate nature of the original.” Lines that are infused with pathos and vitality in the work that follows. From Le Carre’s “The Honorable Schoolboy.”

3. And, finally, to close out this entry, I commend the entire oeuvre of Graham Greene. Quoting Leon Bloy in “The End of the Affair”: “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.”

To would-be Literature PhDs in search of a dissertation topic, may I suggest, as a topic, an exploration of the jewels and gems within Acknowledgements, Dedications and Author Prefaces.

The Asymmetry of Poetic Emotion

Poetry

Rarely do we offer declaratives on this Blog. They are generally simplistically misleading, empty, coercive or the like. They speak isolated from the contingencies and uncertainties of context.

May I diverge with a Saturday morning declaration: the emotional force of poetry is one-directional: poetry exerts its emotional force upward; and upward only. When spirits are high, poetry lifts them higher, and when they are low and sinking, poetry reverses the course, infusing our imaginations with a wonderment and marvel that rescue, restore and recover our spirits. When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, observed the Bard, I all alone be-weep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, And curse my fate…..but soon a lark will appear and sing hymns to heaven’s gates…we join with, and become one with, the Bard as we think of, remember, thy sweet love; and soon, stirred and inspired, calmed and ennobled, with that thought and memory, we scorn to change our state with kings.

Reading Poetry – Reflections Forty Years Later

Poetry

Looking back 40 years after I first encountered Wordsworth’s magical “Intimations of Immortality,” this poem embodies, sustains, indeed inspires (poetic) reflection, engagement,  and understanding.

In hindsight, I see a youth, nearly a youthful adult, inhibited, inexperienced, intimidated, insecure, unwittingly unable to relax into the marvels of the introspections of the poem.

Three decades and countless turns and returns to the Intimations, with each reading and with the alterations in hopes and fears, encounters with triumph and defeat, joy and despair, peace and distress, with distance behind and the horizons disconcertingly apparent, I at last find myself in the narrator’s shoes. In and from this stance I achieve the comfort that comes with familiarity and empathy.

As with the narrator’s experience of nature, as he casts his eye on meadow, grove, and stream, so do I cast my eye on the readings and re-readings that layer my journey from that initial encounter to my encounter today.