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  1. #376
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    Poetry can be a depth experience
    Posted: Dec. 06, 2006

    By Michael Hickey


    Poetry can be defined as an attempt to try to understand the world in spiritual terms through literary composition. It allows the writer and the reader of poetry to communicate on personal and universal levels. A poem can point to a reality beyond itself and beyond the words it contains. The poem may not exactly represent reality, but is usually created in a language that is intended to convey meaning. As an art form, poetry does what all art does, and that is to represent something of and to the world.

    Any poem stands on its own merit and is self-defining. The words of a poem cannot be put into a test tube where a particular reaction by the reader can be predicted each time, like you can do with chemistry, nor is it like a recipe where the words are the food ingredients. On the other hand, poetry doesn't operate in a vacuum either; there are certain literary techniques which can enable the poet to possess the ability to touch others who read the poem at the deepest level of their humanity.

    Because poetry can be a depth experience, it has the potential to touch, evoke, arouse, and move some of its reader's deepest feelings and emotions. Poetry can stir the soul. Not everyone will have the same depth experience in reading every poem, but when a particular poem resonates with a reader at the deepest levels of their humanity, something spiritual happens, and a depth experience occurs. The reader's mind and heart are opened in both conscious and unconscious ways. The poem is then seen through the eyes of the soul. The same poem that is cherished, read, and reread by one individual may appear not understandable, useless, and not resonate or move another at all; poetry is like that.

    Furthermore, the words of certain poems have the ability to touch some individuals at their very depths in a way that the words of prose simply cannot. This is because the poem is written in a language that conveys more than logic, thought, and reason and goes beyond the words to speak from deep to deep in the language of life experience; this makes poetry a wisdom language. Poetry has a way of speaking to an individual through words which were heretofore inexpressible. When one is moved by a poem at the deepest level of humanity, the transition is often one where the reader is moved within from a point of having read the words of the poem, to a silence within their very depths that lies beyond words, thoughts, feelings, or emotions.

    What follows is a short poem. I do not say that the poem will resonate within the depths of your humanity; that would be the height of pride and arrogance. I can only say I wrote it, in part, from my depths. I hope you enjoy it.

    Slaying the great

    sea dragon


    By Michael Hickey


    You never see him on the

    surface

    Only at deepest of the deep

    His one and only purpose

    Is the life he wants to keep

    Falseself is his name

    He's fully self sufficient

    Worship him - he's tame

    His pride; eternally

    deficient

    He'll not allow me

    Prayerfully to seek

    Or open inner eye to see

    God is humble and is meek

    I turn away - he chases

    He's relentless in pursuit

    Masked with many faces

    Even hiding at my root

    I can find my self at center

    Beyond dragon's bounded

    reach

    There's a place he cannot

    enter

    For that would cause a

    breach

    Christ leads the way

    To my victory at sea

    I claim that word today

    "Love God; neighbor

    as me"

    To yield on my sea-journey

    Allows Falseself to live on

    I can slay him by my dying

    Trueself would then be born

    (Michael Hickey is a local writer and poet who lives in Pelican Bay and Swampscott, Mass. His new book, "Get Wisdom," is recently published by Xlibris Div. Random House Publishing and is available at 1-888-795-4274 ext. 822 or at www.xlibris.com. If you have feedback or have a poem you have written and would like it considered for publication in this column, you may e-mail him at MikeHic@Nii.net.)
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  2. #377
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    Humanities › Literature
    The Genre of Epic Literature and Poetry
    A Blend of Narrative Fiction and History Found World Wide

    Achilles sacrificing to Zeus for Patroclus' safe return
    Achilles sacrificing to Zeus for Patroclus' safe return, from the Ambrosian Iliad, a 5th-century illuminated manuscript.
    Wikimedia Commons/Public domain

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    By N.S. Gill
    Updated on May 09, 2019
    Epic poetry, related to heroic poetry, is a narrative art form common to many ancient and modern societies. In some traditional circles, the term epic poetry is restricted to the Greek poet Homer's works The Iliad and The Odyssey and, sometimes grudgingly, the Roman poet Virgil's The Aeneid. However, beginning with the Greek philosopher Aristotle who collected "barbarian epic poems," other scholars have recognized that similarly structured forms of poetry occur in many other cultures.


    Two related forms of narrative poetry are "trickster tales" that report activities of very clever disrupter beings, human and god-like both; and "heroic epics," in which the heroes are ruling class, kings and the like. In epic poetry, the hero is an extraordinary but also an ordinary human being and although he may be flawed, he is always brave and valorous.


    How to Choose Genre, topic, and Scope for an Essay
    Characteristics of Epic Poetry
    The characteristics of the Greek tradition of epic poetry are long-established and summarized below. Almost all of these characteristics can be found in epic poetry from societies well outside of the Greek or Roman world.

    The content of an epic poem always includes the glorious deeds of heroes (Klea andron in Greek), but not just those types of things—the Iliad included cattle raids as well.

    All About the Hero
    There is always an underlying ethos that says that to be a hero is to always be the best person he (or she, but mainly he) can be, pre-eminent beyond all others, primarily physical and displayed in battle. In Greek epic tales, intellect is plain common sense, there are never tactical tricks or strategic ploys, but instead, the hero succeeds because of great valor, and the brave man never retreats.


    Homer's greatest poems are about the "heroic age", about the men who fought at Thebes and Troy (a. 1275–1175 BCE), events that took place about 400 years before Homer wrote the Illiad and Odyssey. Other cultures' epic poems involve a similarly distant historic/legendary past.

    The powers of the heroes of epic poetry are human-based: the heroes are normal human beings who are cast on a large scale, and although gods are everywhere, they only act to support or in some cases thwart the hero. The tale has a believed historicity, which is to say the narrator is assumed to be the mouthpiece of the goddesses of poetry, the Muses, with no clear line between history and fantasy.

    Narrator and Function
    The tales are told in a mannerly composition: they are often formulaic in structure, with repeated conventions and phrases. Epic poetry is performed, either the bard sings or chants the poem and he is often accompanied by others who act out the scenes. In Greek and Latin epic poetry, the meter is strictly dactylic hexameter; and the normal assumption is that epic poetry is long, taking hours or even days to perform.

    The narrator has both objectivity and formality, he is seen by the audience as a pure narrator, who speaks in the third person and the past tense. The poet is thus the custodian of the past. In Greek society, the poets were itinerant who traveled throughout the region performing at festivals, rites of passage like funerals or weddings, or other ceremonies.

    The poem has a social function, to please or entertain an audience. It is both serious and moral in tone but it doesn't preach.

    Examples of Epic Poetry
    Mesopotamia: Epic of Gilgamesh
    Greek: The Iliad, The Odyssey
    Roman: The Aeneid
    India: Loriki, Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, Ramayana
    German: The Ring of the Nibelung, Roland
    Ostyak: The Song of the Golden Hero
    Khirghiz: Semetey
    English: Beowulf, Paradise Lost
    Ainu: Pon-ya-un-be, Kutune Shirka
    Georgia: The Knight in the Panther
    East Africa: Bahima Praise Poems
    Mali: Sundiata
    Uganda: Runyankore
    Source:
    Hatto AT, editor. 1980. Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry. London: Modern Humanities Research Association.
    When and where modern schools fail to use what I call heroic poetry they have done a great disservice to our kids.
    Of course, the omission is by deliberate design, imho. As one may surmise, the better educated a citizen is the less likely there are to be gullible and
    thus swayed to vote against their own best interests and as well vote against the well being of this nation.
    Question is what group is sold on fostering such an agenda.
    Answer is quite easy to find out....
    At least it is for any wanting to not be made a fool of and used like an ignorant slave to that political group.-Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  3. #378
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    ESSAY ON POETIC THEORY
    The Mind’s Own Place
    BY GEORGE OPPEN
    Introduction
    In the 1930s, George Oppen was considered a member of what Louis Zukofsky termed the objectivist poets. After publishing his first book of poetry (Discrete Series, 1934), he withdrew from publishing, and, largely, writing, for more than 25 years. He later explained this silence as a combination of political activism—Oppen was first an active member of the Communist Party and then served in World War II—and a commitment to actively raising his daughter with his wife. When his daughter left for college, Oppen rejoined the poetry community and began to publish again.

    “The Mind’s Own Place” was originally written in early 1962 for The Nation, who ultimately rejected it. It appeared in the literary journal Kulchur in 1963, and stands as Oppen’s defining statement of poetics. The title is a quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost:

    Hail horrors, hail
    Infernal world, and thou, profoundest Hell,
    Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
    A mind not to be changed by place of time.
    The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

    In the essay, he examines the evolution and responsibilities of the American poet, particularly in terms of the tension between political and artistic action. Oppen does not see poetry as a form of political action, and he dismisses the political poem in which poetry is used as “an advanced form of rhetoric” as “merely excruciating.”

    Oppen complicates his assertion, “There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning,” by binding it to William Stafford’s sense of a poet’s work: “Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.”

    Refusing to simplify the context in which an American poet seeks to write, Oppen sees the existential act of perceiving as the core of poetry. Notes Oppen, “The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics.”

    Sargent is reported to have said to Renoir that he painted “cads in the park.” And Sargent was of course quite right.(1) The passion of the Im*pressionists to see, and to see more clearly was a desire to see past the subject matter and the art attitudes of the academy. It is true that the artist is not dependent on his subject in the sense that he can be judged by its intrinsic interest, or that the discussion of his work can become a discussion of its subject. But the emotion which creates art is the emotion that seeks to know and to disclose. The cocoon of “Beauty” as the word is often used, the beauty of background music and of soft lights, though it might be an art, is an art of the masseur and the perfumist.

    Modern American poetry begins with the determination to find the image, the thing encountered, the thing seen each day whose meaning has become the meaning and the color of our lives. Verse, which had become a rhetoric of exaggeration, of inflation, was to the modernists a skill of accuracy, of precision, a test of truth. Such an art has always to be defended against a furious and bitter Bohemia whose passion it is to assist, in the highest of high spirits, at the razing of that art which is the last intrusion on an onanism which they believe to be artistic. In these circles is elaborated a mock-admiration of the artist as a sort of super-annuated infant, and it is the nightmare of the poet or the artist to find himself wandering between the grim gray lines of the Philis*tines and the ramshackle emplacements of Bohemia. If he ceases to be*lieve in the validity of his insights—the truth of what he is saying—he becomes the casualty, the only possible casualty, of that engagement. Philistia and Bohemia, never endangered by the contest, remain pre*cisely what they were. This is the Bohemia that churns and worries the idea of the poet-not-of-this-world, the dissociated poet, the ghostly bard. If the poet is an island, this is the sea which most lovingly and intimately grinds him to sand.

    There comes a time in any such discussion as this when the effort to avoid the word reality becomes too great a tax on the writer’s agility. The word of course has long since ceased to mean anything recogniz*ably “real” at all, but English does seem to be stuck with it. We cannot assert the poet’s relation to reality, nor exhort him to face reality, nor do any of these desirable things, nor be sure that we are not insisting merely that he discuss only those things we are accustomed to talk about, unless we somehow manage to restore a meaning to the word. Bertrand Russell wrote “If I were to describe reality as I found it, I would have to include my arm.”(2) In the shock of that sentence—out of context—perhaps the meaning of the word maybe restored, or in the fragment of Heraclitus: “If it all went up in smoke” that smoke would remain.(3) It is the arbitrary fact, and not any quality of wisdom literature, which creates the impact of the poets. The “shock of recognition,” when it is anything, is that. If we can hold the word to its mean*ing, or if we can import a word from elsewhere—a collective, not an abstract noun, to mean “the things that exist”—then we will not have on the one hand the demand that the poet circumstantially describe everything that we already know, and declare every belief that we already hold, nor on the other hand the ideal of the poet without any senses at all. Dante’s “sweet new style” presaged a new content, a new attitude: and it was a new vision, an act of vision that ushered modern art into France, as it was an extension of awareness that forced the development of a modern poetry in this country.(4) The early moderns among painters of the United States found themselves promptly identified as the Ash Can school, and it happens that Lindsay, Sandburg, Kreymborg, Williams—the poets of the little magazine Others which came off a hand press in a garage somewhere in New Jersey about 1918—were almost a populist movement.(5) Though it is hard to register now, the subjects of Sandburg’s poems, the stockyards and the railroad sidings, gave them their impact. Of the major poets it is only William Carlos Williams, with his insistence on “the American idiom,” on the image derived from day-to-day experience, on form as “nothing more than an extension of content,” who shows a derivation from pop*ulism.(6) But it is the fidelity, the clarity, including the visual clarity and their freedom from the art subject which is the distinction also of Pound and Eliot and the force behind their creation of a new form and a new prosody; the “speech rhythms” of Pound, the “prose quality” of Eliot. Their intelligence rejected the romanticism, the mere sentimen*tal “going on” of such men as Sandburg and Kreymborg, but for them too art moves forward only when some man, or some men, get their heads above—or below—the terrible thin scratching of the art world. It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the im*age is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet’s perception, the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness.(7) They meant to replace by the data of experience the accepted poetry of their time, a display by the poets of right thinking and right sentiment, a dreary waste of lies. That data was and is the core of what “modernism” restored to poetry, the sense of the poet’s self among things. So much depends upon the red wheel*barrow. The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics. It is a part of the function of poetry to serve as a test of truth. It is possible to say anything in abstract prose, but a great many things one believes or would like to believe or thinks he believes will not substantiate them*selves in the concrete materials of the poem. It is not to say that the poet is immune to the “real” world to say that he is not likely to find the moment, the image, in which a political generalization or any other generalization will prove its truth. Denise Levertov begins a fine poem with the words: “The authentic!” and goes on to define

    the real, the new-laid
    egg whose speckled shell
    the poet fondles and must break
    if he will be nourished

    in the events of a domestic morning: the steam rising in the radiators, herself “breaking the handle of my hairbrush,” and the family break*fast, to the moment when, the children being sent to school,

    cold air
    comes in at the street door.(8)

    These are, as poetry intends, clear pictures of the world in verse, which means only to be clear, to be honest, to produce the realization of reality and to construct a form out of no desire for the trick of grace*fulness, but in order to make it possible to grasp, to hold the insight which is the content of the poem.

    T.S. Eliot’s immense reputation was already established by the end of the twenties: Pound’s somewhat later. It is within the present decade that Williams has achieved a comparable position. It was Eliot’s influence, far more than Pound’s, and Eliot’s influence by way of Au*den which formed the tone of the so-called Academic poets who domi*nated the field during the forties and early fifties, and whom the Beats assailed. It is quite possible that both Eliot and the Academic poets tend at this moment to be underrated: the Academics are perhaps suf*fering the difficulties of middle age. They are not Young Poets nor Old Masters, nor are they news in the exhilarating sense that they might bite a dog. But they too are not writing in complacent generalities, and the word academic can give a false concept of their content and form. The fact is, however, that the poets of the San Francisco school, the poets called Beat, took off not at all from Eliot, but from Pound and still more directly from Williams, and to varying degrees from Whit*man, and the influence—perhaps indirect—of such men as Sandburg and Lindsay and even Kreymborg is, as a matter of fact, perfectly evi*dent in their work. But it is to Williams that the young poets of this school acknowledge the greatest debt, and if the word populism applied to Williams may not be entirely justifiable, it is at any rate true that Williams is the most American of the American poets of his generation, and these young poets have been markedly and as a matter of course American.(9) I think it has been part of their strength, and in fact I fear the present pilgrimage to Japan and the exotic arms of Zen. I feel quite sure, to begin with, that Hemingway has expressed Zen to the West about as well as is likely to be done. The disciple asked: “What is Truth?” And the Master replied, “Do you smell the mountain laurel?” “Yes,” said the disciple. The Master said, “There, I have kept nothing from you.” What Master was that? “The archer aims not at the target but at himself.”(10) Nor, as we have read, at the bull. If we are to talk of the act performed for its own sake, I think we will get more poetry out of the large fish of these waters—even out of the large fish in these waters—than from all the tea in Japan. But this may be because I be*long to a generation that grew more American—literarily at least—as it approached adult estate: we grew up on English writing—and Ger*man fairy tales—as I think no American any longer does. Starting with Mother Goose—in the absence of “It Happened on Mulberry Street” or “Millions of Cats” or whatever has become current since my daughter grew up—and proceeding to Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson and the Rover Boys, perhaps the only American writing we saw was in the Oz books and in Mark Twain. I have not discussed this with other writers, and risk the statement, but I believe that many a young American writer-to-be was astonished on reaching adolescence to discover that he was not easily going to take his place as the young master, or even as a Thackerayan young man who manages, with what*ever difficulty, to equip himself with fresh linen and varnished boots for his crucial morning call on the Duchess. We found ourselves below stairs, possibly: certainly among the minor characters. Which was a factor I believe in our need to make our own literature. Huck Finn, if this were a scholarly work, might be contrasted to Tom Brown, or even to Christopher Robin of Pooh Corners. Alice wandered from her gov*erness; Dorothy of Oz ran too late for the storm cellar and was caught in a Kansas cyclone. Together and contrastingly they dawned on our infant minds, and may have contributed to the aesthetic, if not social sentiment, which went in search of the common, the common experi*ence, the life of common man. Or it may be, more simply, that the more open society made possible the literary career of the obviously non*-aristocratic spokesman who, once he tired of Invocation to Someone Else’s Muse, had to make his own poetry. I myself was not the barefoot American boy. Having been born near New York, like many of these young poets, I was undoubtedly shod by the age of three months. But neither the barefoot boy nor Robert Frost is really the most American thing in the world, and there are facts to consider beyond the orthope*dic. I am constantly amazed by the English response to the Angry Young Men,(11) whose news-value appears to be that they are not of the aristocracy and are bitterly concerned with that fact in all its ramifications, whereas I have not met an American writer who had ever wondered what Vanderbilts or Morgans or Astors felt about his accent, his vocabulary, or his neckwear. Or if he wondered, he would not know, as the English seem to know, and the setting of Henry James’s novels is to us—and even to Henry James—a curiosity, a lit*erary paradox. And the search of the Beats, the thing which they have in common with the Ash Can school of painting and the Chicago liter*ary renaissance of the twenties is an authentic American phenomenon, a search for the common experience, for the ground under their feet. I have strained matters considerably using the word populist: certainly no more specifically political word could be used. The poet means to trust his direct perceptions, and it is even possible that it might be useful for the country to listen, to hear evidence, to consider what indeed we have brought forth upon this continent.

    The DAR is not a notably liberal organization.(12) I am aware that there must be descendents of Old Families in all possible political groupings, but a considerable portion of the population, and I think a considerable proportion of the most liberal population, is made up of the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants. Certainly the DAR is of that opinion. But I need not assume statistical facts which neither the DAR nor I know. The oldest families are of puritan background, and the American family histories of the descendents of later immigrants begin typically with men and women who found refuge in the tenements of these shores from political and financial shipwreck. There they developed a morality of crisis, an ethos of sur*vival, a passionate philosophy of altruism and ambition. To a puritan morality—or I should say a puritanical morality—they added altruism in some cases, solidarity in others, and thereby completed a political morality. But neither ambition nor solidarity nor altruism is capable of establishing values. If the puritanical values proved themselves in material well-being, in the escape from danger of starvation, in TVs and radios, electric toasters and perhaps air-conditioners, electric ra*zors and strawberry corer, and are now pushing the electric toothbrush, then altruism demands these things also for the other man. It cannot, of itself, get beyond that. We can do so only when, with what*ever difficulty, with whatever sense of vertigo, we begin to speak for ourselves. Be-razored and be-toastered, and perhaps anarchist and irresponsible, the grandson of the immigrant and the descendent of the puritan better begin to speak for himself. If he is a poet he must. If he is not, perhaps he should listen. For mankind itself is an island: surely no man is a continent, and the definition of happiness must be his own.(13) The people on the Freedom Rides are both civilized and courageous; the people in the Peace Marches are the sane people of the country. But it is not a way of life, or should not be. It is a terrifying necessity. Bertolt Brecht once wrote that there are times when it can be almost a crime to write of trees. I happen to think that the statement is valid as he meant it.(14) There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning. If one goes on to imagine a direct call for help, then surely to refuse it would be a kind of treason to one’s neighbors. Or so I think. But the bad fiddling could hardly help, and similarly the question can only be whether one intends, at a given time, to write poetry or not.(15)

    It happens, though, that Brecht’s statement cannot be taken literally. There is no crisis in which political poets and orators may not speak of trees, though it is more common for them, in this symbolic usage, to speak of “flowers.” “We want bread and roses”: “Let a thousand flowers bloom” on the left: on the right, the photograph once famous in Germany of Handsome Adolph sniffing the rose. (16) Flowers stand for simple and undefined human happiness and are frequently mentioned in all politi*cal circles. The actually forbidden word Brecht, of course, could not write. It would be something like aesthetic. But the definition of the good life is necessarily an aesthetic definition, and the mere fact of de*mocracy has not formulated it, nor, if it is achieved, will the mere fact of an extension of democracy, though I do not mean of course that re*striction would do better. Suffering can be recognized; to argue its definition is an evasion, a contemptible thing. But the good life, the thing wanted for its elf, the aesthetic, will be defined outside of anybody’s politics, or defined wrongly. William Stafford ends a poem titled “Vocation” (he is speaking of the poet’s vocation) with the line: “Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.”(17) And though it may be presumptuous in a man elected to nothing at all, the poet does under*take just about that, certainly nothing less, and the younger poets’ judgment of society is, in the words of Robert Duncan, “I mean, of course, that happiness itself is a forest in which we are bewildered, turn wild, or dwell like Robin Hood, outlawed and at home.”(18)

    It is possible that a world without art is simply and flatly uninhab*itable, and the poet’s business is not to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to seek to give to political statements the aura of eter*nal truth. It should not really be the ambition even of the most well-meaning of political and semipolitical gatherings to do so, and to use verse for the purpose, as everyone perfectly well knows, is merely ex*cruciating. Therefore the poet, speaking as a poet, declares his politi*cal nonavailability as clearly as the classic pronouncement: “If nomi*nated I will run: if elected I will hide” (I quote from memory).(19) Surely what we need is a “redemption of the will”—the phrase from a not-yet-produced young playwright whose work I have read—and indeed we will not last very long if we do not get it. But what we must have now, the political thing we must have, is a peace. And a peace is made by a peace treaty. And we have seen peace treaties before; we know what they are. This one will be, if we get it, if we survive, like those before it, a cynical and brutal division of the world between the great powers. Everyone knows what must be in that document: the language of both sides has been euphemistic but clear. A free hand in Eastern Europe to Russia: to the United States in Western Europe and in this continent and some other places. And the hope that China will not soon acquire a bomb. And where is the poet who will write that she opened her front door, having sent the children to school, and felt the fresh authentic air in her face and wanted—that?



    NOTES

    (1) John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), American portraitist and painter; Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), French impressionist painter.

    (2) Oppen is paraphrasing, not entirely faithfully, a recurrent image in Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy used to illustrate the epistemological complications of traditional philosophy. In chapter 1 (“Appearance and Reality”), for example:

    It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair, at a table of a certain shape, on which I see sheets of paper with writing or print. By turning my head I see out of the window buildings and clouds and the sun. I believe that the sun is about ninety-three million miles from the earth; that it is a hot globe many times bigger than the earth; that, owing to the earth’s rotation, it rises every morning, and will continue to do so for an indefinite time in the future. I believe that, if any other normal person comes into my room, he will see the same chairs and tables and books and papers as I see, and that the table which I see is the same as the table which I feel pressing against my arm. All this seems to be so evident as to be hardly worth stating, except in answer to a man who doubts whether I know anything. Yet all this may be reasonably doubted, and all of it requires much careful discussion before we can be sure that we have stated it in a form that is wholly true.

    Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 7-8. Again, in chapter 3 (“The Nature of Matter”):

    [I]t is rational to believe that our sense-data—for example, those which we regard as associated with my table—are really signs of the existence of something in-dependent of us and our perceptions. That is to say, over and above the sensations of colour, hardness, noise, and so on, which make up the appearance of the table to me, I assume that there is something else, of which these things are appearances. The colour ceases to exist if I shut my eyes, the sensation of hardness ceases to exist if I remove my arm from contact with the table, the sound ceases to exist if I cease to rap the table with my knuckles. But I do not believe that when all these things cease the table ceases. On the contrary, I believe that it is because the table exists continuously that all these sense-data will reappear when I open my eyes, replace my arm, and begin again to rap with my knuckles.” (page 27)

    (3) Oppen’s adaptation of Heraclitus’s fragment number 7, translated by G.S. Kirk thus: “If all existing things were to become smoke the nostrils would distinguish them.” See G.S. Kirk, ed., Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 232. Oppen later used the fragment as the title to a poem in Primitive (NCP 274).

    (4) The dolce stil novo, or “sweet new style,” was the mellifluous style of Dante’s early philosophical love poetry, as well as that of other Italian poets in the late thirteenth century. The phrase itself comes from Dante’s Purgatorio 24.57.

    (5) Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931); Carl Sandburg (1878-1967); Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966); William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). The “Ash Can” school was founded (loosely) by painter Robert Henri (1865-1929) in 1891 in Philadelphia. The group’s dictum was “art for life’s sake” and their aesthetics centered largely on subject matter, rather than form and/or style (see Oppen’s comment on Sandburg’s poetry).

    (6) The phrase is misidentified as Williams’s; it actually occurs in Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse,” where Olson in turn attributes it to Robert Creeley. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 240. Oppen may have read the phrase in Williams’s Autobiography, however, and misattributed it thus.

    (7) See “West” (NCP 208; SP 124): “In wrath we await // The rare poetic / Of veracity that huge art whose geometric / Light seems not its own in that most dense world West and East / Have denied have hated have wandered in precariousness.”

    (8) The poem is Levertov’s “Matins,” in The Jacob’s Ladder (New York: New Directions, 1961), 57.

    (9) “Williams was a populist,” Oppen says to Burton Hatlen and Tom Mandel in an interview, “but he really didn’t know what he was talking about” (MP 25). The subject is political poetry, and Williams is contrasting Williams’s populism to Pound’s elitism.

    (10) A commonly cited proverb in Chinese Buddhism. Oppen’s source is unknown.

    (11) A term used by British journalists to refer to a diverse (and otherwise unorganized) group of politically radical British novelists and playwrights. The term gained prominence in the mainstream press after a press release for the first performance of John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger used it to describe the play’s author.

    (12) “DAR” refers to the Daughters of the American Revolution.

    (13) Oppen misappropriates (purposefully) the famous lines from John Donne’s “Meditation 17” (1624): “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main…”

    (14) From Brecht’s poem “To Those Born Later” (“An Die Nachgeborenen”): “What kind of times are they, when / A talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?” See Bertolt Brecht Poems, 1913-1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Methuen, 1976), 318.

    (15) Also in the Hatlen/Mandel interview, in response to a question regarding his return to the writing of poetry, Oppen says: “Rome had recently burned, so there was no reason not to fiddle”(MP 34).

    (16) “We want bread and roses” is a slogan associated with a textile strike that took place in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. “Let a thousand flowers bloom” is a misquotation of Mao’s 1957 slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.”

    (17) In William Stafford, Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 107. Incidentally, the line appears in the poem as a quotation of the speaker’s father’s advice.

    (18) Robert Duncan (1919-88). The quotation is from an unknown source.

    (19) Ironic misconstrual of American civil war general William Tecumseh Sherman’s response to the notion that he might be drawn into the 1884 presidential race: “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.”

    George Oppen, "The Mind’s Own Place" from Selected Poems, copyright © 1962 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
    Originally Published: October 8th, 2009
    George Oppen, a prominent American poet, was one of the chief exponents of Objectivism, a school of poetry that emphasized simplicity and clarity over formal structure and rhyme. Born in 1908 to a wealthy family and expelled from a high school military academy, Oppen and his wife Mary traveled across..
    Along article. Take what you will from it as poetry is in itself a very diverse animal.--Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Default What Is Modern Poetry?

    What Is Modern Poetry?
    Alan Rankin
    Last Modified Date: June 30, 2023

    Modern poetry refers to the verse created by the writers and poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. The actual definition of “modern” varies, depending on the authority cited. Some people would define modern poetry to include the poets of the 19th century, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. Recognizable aspects of modern poetry include an emphasis on strong imagery and emotional content and less reliance on the use of rhyme. Modern movements such as Beat poetry and poetry slams also would be included.


    Poetry is one of the oldest forms of literary art. Preliterate societies used rhyming verse as a method to make stories and passages of history easier to remember. These verses were passed from one generation to the next as oral narratives. Some of these were eventually written down and have survived to this day. Epic tales such as Beowulf and The Odyssey were originally written in verse, influencing later poets such as Dante and John Milton.


    American poet Walt Whitman is one of the founders of modern poetry.
    American poet Walt Whitman is one of the founders of modern poetry.
    American poet Walt Whitman, who published his influential book Leaves of Grass in 1855, is one of the founders of modern poetry. His disregard for traditional rhyme and meter led him to be called “the father of free verse” and made him an influence on later writers. Edgar Allan Poe, working a few years earlier, brought his own approach to traditional methods. Although he was a literary master who wrote short stories, novels and journalism, he is perhaps best known for a poem, The Raven.

    Is Amazon actually giving you a competitive price? This little known plugin reveals the answer.
    Modern poetry emphasizes less of a reliance upon the use of rhyme.
    Modern poetry emphasizes less of a reliance upon the use of rhyme.
    In the early 20th century, T.S. Eliot fled the United States for England and produced a series of important poems. The Waste Land is considered one of the great works of English literature. It contains many aspects of modern poetry: strong imagery, obscure details of high significance to the poet and a lack of rhyming verse. William Carlos Williams was another American poet with a strong influence on the Beat generation that would follow him. Rainier Maria Rilke and Pablo Neruda brought these modern influences to their own languages, German and Chilean Spanish, respectively.

    Poetry is one of the oldest forms of literary art.
    Poetry is one of the oldest forms of literary art.
    The 1950s saw an explosion of modern poetry in the form of the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. Allan Ginsberg’s Howl caused controversy and won a devoted following, two surefire signs of a literary movement. As the 20th century ended, modern poetry took on new forms, including rap songs, spoken-word performances and poetry slams. Meanwhile, more traditional poets such as Tony Hoagland and Charles Bukowski brought their own sensibilities to an art form as old as literature itself.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    “The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics.”
    this is like the difference between me and gunny.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot View Post
    1.B
    On May 19, 2009 at 10:20 am Michael J. wrote:
    I find that the moment one says “there are exceptions”, the act of generalization becomes a fallacy. It is impossible to generalize unless you are willing to deal in stereotypes and false structures.
    I grew up in a family of women, a house of women. And when I say this, I don’t mean we were outnumbered by a small margin… I mean we equaled 3 or 4 other men in the range of 50 women. If that. And if I were to remove those other men, I was usually alone with upwards of 15 women at a time.
    But I agree female creatives are way more fascinating to me than my male counterparts. I recently bought Sandra Beasley’s “Theories of Falling” and Olena K. Davis’ first book “And her soul out of nothing”. They should arrive this week. But they aren’t the only ones tickling my poetics.
    Anyway… I really don’t think it comes down to simply male and female, though we have our differences… but those differences, I am realizing, are less inherent.
    You could view me as the exception, meaning, I am very in touch with my feminine side — what does that mean? Nearly all the personality qualities you may associate with the feminine, you could see in me. Same with the masculine. Which then tend to cancel each other out and simply allow one to be themselves, without the need to tag certain qualities with “masculine” or “feminine”.
    And if I am then viewed as an exception, I am not special enough to believe I am *the* exception. This means there is another, and if this is two, there is likely three, and so on and so on… which then possibly leads us back to the phrase: there are exceptions, but I will deal in generalizations…
    It is possible then that when people say this, they are saying (obviously, I guess) generalizations outweigh the exceptions… of course, this is impossible to account for. As generalizations exist in this outer realm of opinions and wants and other things…
    You did mention personal experience coloring ones self and in turn ones work… which I agree with…
    And I haven’t attempted to answer your original question — why are women creatives so enticing (read: popular?) these days when put parallel with the male creatives…
    Maybe it is the swing of times that we, males that is, are truly and finally noticing such things? Maybe there are more women on the position to give notice to other women who may go unnoticed? (this I want to doubt, because I’d hope art is the only space where such prejudices and sexism do not exist… but this is only a wish, as I have seen mass amounts of ego and childish antics involved in poetry when I used to perform with a poetry group).
    I feel I am contradicting myself here.
    It is very likely we are all exceptions…
    I dunno…
    On May 19, 2009 at 12:14 pm Zachary Bos wrote:
    The will to debunk this post point-by-point has been leached right out of me by the solar intensity of the poor reasoning on display. Among the topics misunderstood are ontology, gender, Heidegger, instinct, creativity, and logic. Pious affirmations of generally agreeable statements do not give shoddy thinking a pass. To self: is my hyper-critical response a masculine trope?
    On May 19, 2009 at 12:20 pm Joseph Hutchison wrote:
    Michael J.—I take exception to your statement about generalities and exceptions. We can all agree that there are mammals, and that mammals are distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of their young, and by giving birth to live young. The platypus and the spiny ant-eater are exceptions: mammals that lay eggs, i.e., monotremes. The problem is not with the generalities; the problem is that our systems are not completely congruent with the world.
    This is part of Martin’s point, I think: in a world where gender equality is assumed, we still find women writing stronger poems. By “we,” of course, I mean Martin and me; I share his feeling but know as well as he does that it’s highly personal and subjective.
    Nevertheless, I think what Martin says is true about the superiority of women poets, especially in certain “camps.” I’ve especially felt this when criticizing so-called Language poets for their many weaknesses. I always have to insert the caveat that I admire several poets in that camp, and that for some reason they are all women. (Not that I admire all female Language poets!) I too wonder why this should be so. But I’m a poet and a reader, not a critic and certainly not a theorist. So I’ll have to wait for someone with talents in that direction to suggest an answer….
    On May 19, 2009 at 1:27 pm Daniel E. Pritchard wrote:
    I’m interested to know who the women are to which you refer. (Also, I think it’s accepted generally that anyone over 40 isn’t young anymore, by any standard except comparison.) Also, though my memory may not serve me, I recall that in the late 19th and early 20th century, most of the most popular and well-respected authors, essayists, and poets were women, though few have persisted — how would this be a substantially different phenomenon?
    On May 19, 2009 at 2:02 pm thomas brady wrote:
    Who is this mysterious gunslinger leaning quietly against the wall?
    Be still, my heart!
    On May 19, 2009 at 2:51 pm Desmond Swords wrote:
    I think this measuring the contemporary quality of one’s writing based on gender, contains elements of both truth and fantasy, but is ultimately a defective and redundant position to put forward.
    Consider the following statement, which is the exact same as Jason makes, but with the genders reversed:
    “Men make better bloggers than do their female counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the men are clearly superior.”
    The comedian in me calls to mind a (good looking and cunning) pal i knew when i was in my mid twenties, who donned a right-on cloak of ultra PC Femminism when in his university years.
    any (often totally innocuous) comment which he construed as sexist and/or insulting to women, even when the (inevitably) student-men making what he considered to be such, did so in innocence and even if though most others would not see the anti-woman slant — my pal would stand up for the sisterhood and generally sing to the skies of his battle for the gals.
    But in reality, it was all an act he engaged in purely to ingratiate himself with the women, in order to pursue a thoroughly male agenda of bedding as many women as he could. And it worked. he got a name as the metro-sexual all caring fella, amongst early twenties women and when this three year period of his life finished, went back to being the sexists git i always knew.
    My own background is, i was reared with four sisters, three older, one younger and myself and my father, the only men.
    Currently i have seven neices and three nephews, all seven necies arriving on the scene before the nephews. Growing up, i was effectively a token girl in the sense of having no brothers.
    ~
    I think the Amergin text i have been banging on about, which explains what Poetry is, the fundamental of it, that 50% of all humanity will be born with the poetic gift, can be appropriated to this debate.
    Rather than reversing it and elevating Woman to the position Man previously held in the delsion that He was God, my learning has brought me to making Jason’s statement this:
    “wo/men make better bloggers, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the wo/men are clearly superior.”
    This is true 50/50 gender neutrality.
    Our mind is neither male or female, but a s/he and once we transcend gender, come to understand it in these plain terms. The bnest writing is gender neutral, a third person eye speaking for all pronouns.

    generalizations are valuable.

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    Quote Originally Posted by AHZ View Post
    this is like the difference between me and gunny.
    Stay out of tyr's poetry threads unless you have something to contribute directly to the poetry or tyr. His threads have nothing to do with politics or personal issues with other members and will not be cluttered up by such garbage.

    This is your one and only warning on this matter. Next will be a permanent thread ban. You already have been advised where you can take up your personal issues with other members.
    “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edumnd Burke

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    Quote Originally Posted by Gunny View Post
    Stay out of tyr's poetry threads unless you have something to contribute directly to the poetry or tyr. His threads have nothing to do with politics or personal issues with other members and will not be cluttered up by such garbage.

    This is your one and only warning on this matter. Next will be a permanent thread ban. You already have been advised where you can take up your personal issues with other members.

    I've contributed much to his poetry threads.

    if he wants me to stay out I will.

    but it has to come from him.

    He's actually a fan of mine.

    and me of him also too.
    Last edited by AHZ; 08-12-2023 at 01:35 PM.

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    histrionic.....

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    Quote Originally Posted by AHZ View Post
    I've contributed much to his poetry threads.

    if he wants me to stay out I will.

    but it has to come from him.

    He's actually a fan of mine.

    and me of him also too.
    I have no problem with that. Stick to poetry. What I stated stands.
    “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edumnd Burke

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