January 18, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

It has been a short time but it's good to see you anyway.

News and Jabber

This from the South China Morning Post: http://www.scmp.com/culture/books/article/2128480/ts-eliot-prize-goes-vietnam-born-us-poet-debut-collection-night-sky.

TS Eliot prize goes to Vietnam-born US poet for debut collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Two years after Hong Kong-born Sarah Howe became first poet to win the prize with debut collection, Ocean Vuong repeats the feat; at a London ceremony, the chairman of judges hails ‘the definitive arrival of a significant voice’

7 Jan 2018

After becoming the first literate person in his family and a prize-winning poet festooned with awards, Vietnam-born Ocean Vuong has now won perhaps his most prestigious accolade yet for his debut collection: the TS Eliot prize.

Reflecting on the aftermath of war over three generations, the collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, has already landed 29-year-old Vuong the Forward prize for best first collection, as well as the Whiting and the Thom Gunn awards.

I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter

The book has also been critically acclaimed, with Observer critic Kate Kellaway describing it as “a conduit for a life in which violence and delicacy collide”, and The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani praising Vuong’s “tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words”.

Vuong is only the second debutant poet to win the TS Eliot prize, two years after Hong Kong-born Sarah Howe became the first, winning for Loop of Jade in 2016.

Ocean Vuong reads from Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Before announcing Vuong as the winner at a ceremony at the Wallace Collection in London on Monday, chair of judges Bill Herbert called Night Sky With Exit Wounds “a compellingly assured debut, the definitive arrival of a significant voice”.

Vuong was the only non-white poet in the running for the prize.

“There is an incredible power in the story of this collection,” said Herbert. “There is a mystery at the heart of the book about generational karma, this migrant figure coming to terms with his relationship with his past, his relationship with his father and his relationship with his sexuality. All of that is borne out in some quite extraordinary imagery. The view of the world from this book is quite stunning.”

Hong Kong-born poet’s TS Eliot prize win ‘will change British poetry’

The cover of Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds.

Vuong was selected as the winner by judges Herbert, James Lasdun and Helen Mort from a 10-strong shortlist, which was initially criticised by some for its lack of diversity. Vuong was the only non-white poet listed, in a year when several poets of colour had been nominated for and won other big poetry prizes.

Born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vuong spent a year in a refugee camp as a baby and migrated to America when he was two years old, where he was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt. Two aspects of Vuong’s life – his sexuality and the absence of his father – recur in his work, with several poems evoking Greek myth to explore the roles of fathers and sons.

“Western mythology is so charged with the father,” he told The Guardian in 2017. “Personally, I’m always asking who’s my father. Like Homer, I felt I’d better make it up.”

Hong Kong-born Sarah Howe, winner of the TS Eliot prize two years ago. Photo: Dickson Lee

Vuong, who now lives in the US state of Massachusetts and works as an assistant professor in the Master of Fine Arts programme for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, only gained a taste for poetry in his 20s. He initially put together Night Sky With Exit Wounds for a competition that promised personal rejection to all entrants.

“I said, ‘Oh my, a personal rejection. Maybe that’ll give me some tips and push me back out there with a better idea,’” Vuong has recalled – but he received a publishing deal instead.

Hong Kong writers have much to say – and not just about democracy and politics

After winning the Forward prize, Vuong told The Guardian that he suspected dyslexia runs in his family, but felt it had positively affected his writing. “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.”

To mark the 25th anniversary of the prize, Vuong received £25,000 (US$34,500) – up from £20,000 last year – and will feature on a special UK postmark issued by Royal Mail.

Vuong joins a prestigious list of previous winners, including Don Paterson, Ted Hughes, Sharon Olds and Carol Ann Duffy, and will also be the first poet inducted into the new TS Eliot prize winners’ archive, which has been established to preserve the voices of winning poets online for posterity.

The prize was founded by the Poetry Book Society in 1993 and is now run by the TS Eliot Foundation.

Eurydice

By Ocean Vuong

It’s more like the sound

a doe makes

when the arrowhead

replaces the day

with an answer to the rib’s

hollowed hum. We saw it coming

but kept walking through the hole

in the garden. Because the leaves

were bright green & the fire

only a pink brushstroke

in the distance. It’s not

about the light—but how dark

it makes you depending

on where you stand.

Depending on where you stand

his name can appear like moonlight

shredded in a dead dog’s fur.

His name changed when touched

by gravity. Gravity breaking

our kneecaps just to show us

the sky. We kept saying Yes—

even with all those birds.

Who would believe us

now? My voice cracking

like bones inside the radio.

Silly me. I thought love was real

& the body imaginary.

But here we are—standing

in the cold field, him calling

for the girl. The girl

beside him. Frosted grass

snapping beneath her hooves.

Jenny Joseph: 'I shall wear purple' poet dies

16 January 2018

The sun has burst the sky
Because I love you
And the river its banks.

The sea laps the great rocks
Because I love you
And takes no heed of the moon dragging it away
And saying coldly 'Constancy is not for you'.
The blackbird fills the air
Because I love you
With spring and lawns and shadows falling on lawns.

The people walk in the street and laugh
I love you
And far down the river ships sound their hooters
Crazy with joy because I love you.


Jenny Joseph

Here is the link to the article about her:

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-42700952

"When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

And run my stick along the public railings

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

And pick flowers in other people’s gardens

And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

And eat three pounds of sausages at a go

Or only bread and pickle for a week

And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

And pay our rent and not swear in the street

And set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple."

Jenny Joseph, whose poem Warning was twice voted Britain's favourite poem, has died at the age of 85.

It is perhaps best known for its opening lines: "When I am an old lady I shall wear purple / With a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me."

Despite it being about old age, Joseph was in her 20s when she wrote it.

She wrote several poetry and prose collections, the most recent being published in 2009. Joseph died earlier this month after a short illness.

'One of best-loved poets'

Born in Birmingham, Joseph studied at the University of Oxford and went on to work as a newspaper reporter, pub landlady and lecturer.

Her agents described her as "one of Britain's best-loved poets".

Warning was voted Britain's favourite modern poem in 2006 - having previously been named the nation's favourite post-war poem 10 years previously in a BBC poll.

It went on to inspire the launch of the Red Hat Society - a women's group whose members wear purple, accessorised with a red hat.

However, the success of the poem is said to have annoyed Joseph, according to her publishers Bloodaxe Books.

"At the same time, she was delighted that it had been translated into numerous languages and was known throughout the world," they said. "What she disliked most was that this early poem written in her 20s overshadowed the rest of her work, which was largely concerned with the duality of existence...

"She viewed her poems as attempts to present 'how things work' at the core, at the edge."

'New ways of telling stories'

Joseph was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999 and won the James Tait Black Prize for fiction for her work of prose and verse Persephone. She had previously won the Cholmondeley Award for her second poetry collection, Rose in the Afternoon.

She also had work published with Enitharmon Press. Its director Stephen Stuart-Smith, who worked with her on 2009's Nothing Like Love, described that last collection as "exploring a wide range of literary forms, new ways of telling stories, and demonstrating her skill in introducing cadences and everyday speech into the lyrical movement of her verse.

"As a person and as a poet she was warm and witty, as a friend loyal and supportive, as a performer entertaining as well as unpredictable."

Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.

The Current Assignment

3/5/3/3/7/5 is a total of 26 syllables, shorter than a tweet. I started by lifting lines of the right length from another couple of poems of mine. This didn't work but did prompt me to start experimenting with the words I had chosen. The result wasn't bad.

The Next Assignment

The next assignment is to write an anti-Valentine's Day poem. Make it serious, or not. Any form, any topic as long as it connects in some way to Valentine's Day. Here is a link to the wikipedia entry for Valentine's Day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine%27s_Day.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on February 1, 2018.

Other Jabber

The South African Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile died recently. He is a pot worth checking on. Here is one of his poems.

CASSANDRA WILSON WILL SING

                             - Poem by Keorapetse Kgositsile

Let me sense the chaos

I will respond

with a song

why else 

was I 

born

says Jimi of the purple haze 

through Kalamu ya Salaam

Now look, at those eyes

look at her arms 

follow her little finger

I wonder what

Jean Toomer who could see

the Georgia Pike growing

out of a goat path

in Africa

would say about

Cassandra Wilson tonight

Perhaps Cassandra

does not even sing.

Here of course a voice there is

possessed by music like the rest of her

her whole body is song

her whole body has sensed the chaos

I say look at those eyes 

look at her arms

follow her little finger 

and understand perhaps why 

you were born with ears 

Keorapetse Kgositsile

And here is a link to Cassandra Wilson singing "Fragile": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTsOyV0k4QU

January 11, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

We'll meet both today and next Thursday so I'll make the assignment short, or maybe not.

News and Jabber

The last couple of meetings have, while fun, devolved into too many competing conversations, sometimes at the expense of whoever was trying to read. I counted twice when we had three distinct conversations going on around the table at the same time, all while someone was waiting to read. Let's return to a more attentive respect to the reader and the poem. We'll all be the better for it. I take this new year moment to remind you too of the words of my good friend, former Director of The Robert Frost Center for the Performing Arts, Don Sheehan, that when the choice is between intelligence and compassion, choose compassion and the result will be a higher intelligence. I also remind myself and you that we critique poems, not poets. 

Don remains one of the few saintly men and women I have been privileged to know. This picture is from a review of a collection of his essays. It is a religious work but I urge you to check out the review since the language in it is the very language this wonderful, gentle man used when he spoke. 

Here is the link: http://myocn.net/grace-incorruption-selected-essays-donald-sheehan-orthodox-faith-poetics/

 A quotation from the article:  “...the ruining oppositions of actual experience are held within the musical disciplines of lyric art...”  Don believed this simply, beautifully and lived accordingly.

The Current Assignment

This assignment was somewhat of a revelation to me, something I'll get to when we read. I suspect many of you had fun with it. I didn't so much have fun as I made a discovery-- a re-discovery really-- as a by-product of the project. 

DaCosta Muckenfuss...I still await a second response from him on Facebook. He has confirmed that he did basic training in 1968 at Fort Jackson  so  I'm certain I have found him.

The Next Assignment

Write a Shadorma:

I recently discovered a poetic form called shadorma (thanks to P.J. Nights via Tammy Trendle) that I had no record of in my two poetic form handbooks [kind of like my recent posting about hay(na)ku]. Shadorma is a Spanish 6-line syllabic poem of 3/5/3/3/7/5 syllable lines respectively. Simple as that.

Also, you can link multiple shadorma (shadormas? shadormae?) like in my example below:

“Miss Shadorma”

She throws birds
at the school children
on playgrounds
made of steel
who run intense spirals to
the chain-link fencing.

Sad teachers
watch as they spiral
into air
like reverse
helicopter seeds searching
for their maple trees.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be one week from today on January 18, 2018.

Other Jabber

Although Richard Wilbur died in October, 2017, and I spoke of him then and included a remembrance from some other source, in a recent (January 10, 2018) edition, The Times of London printed an excellent piece on him that has brought me to reconsider my somewhat cool attitude toward his writing. One of the quotes I like is:

"Wilbur’s Walking to Sleep opens thus:

As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,

Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses,

Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.

Something will come to you."

This is how I write. 

Here is a link to the article:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/obituary-richard-wilbur-zd8p6klb2

And, consider this poem:

First Snow in Alsace

The snow came down last night like moths
Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn,
Covered the town with simple cloths.

Absolute snow lies rumpled on
What shellbursts scattered and deranged,
Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.

As if it did not know they'd changed,
Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes
Fear-gutted, trustless and estranged.

The ration stacks are milky domes;
Across the ammunition pile
The snow has climbed in sparkling combs.

You think: beyond the town a mile
Or two, this snowfall fills the eyes
Of soldiers dead a little while.

Persons and persons in disguise,
Walking the new air white and fine,
Trade glances quick with shared surprise.

At children's windows, heaped, benign,
As always, winter shines the most,
And frost makes marvelous designs.

The night guard coming from his post,
Ten first-snows back in thought, walks slow
And warms him with a boyish boast:

He was the first to see the snow.

Several things to note about the poem:
Rhyme scheme, very tight.
The almost drowsy texture against the fury of war
The age of the soldier-- it is not given but we know him to be young
The presence of the children in a war zone, both as civilians and soldiers
The presence of beauty draped over the scene
"Absolute snow" implying absolution
The presence of white, a heavenly cover
The chilling feel when the poem is done.
The contrast between the last line and the 14th and 15th lines, which come at the center of the poem.

December 21, 2017

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

News and Jabber

I don't go through Christmas without reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales." Here is a link to the entire thing, which, at 3016 words won't take long to read. 

http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/xmas.html

And here is a link to Dylan Thomas reading it, recorded in 1952:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HoxycLmMOk

The Current Assignment

I have seen several poems for this assignment and they are terrific.

The Next Assignment

Write a humorous poem, one to help mitigate SAD (seasonal affective disorder)

The Next Meeting

Other Jabber

December 7, 2017

December 7, 2017

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

News and Jabber

 

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/us-poet-first-holder-of-fellowship-in-seamus-heaney-legacy-project-36384969.html

Mark Doty has just been chosen the first holder of a fellowship in the Seamus Heany Legacy Project. I haven't been a long-time fan of Doty but find him growing on me.

And here's a poem by Mark Doty:

Golden Retrievals

BY MARK DOTY

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention

seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.

Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh

joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue

of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?

Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,

thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning

—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:

to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,

my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,

entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

Mark Doty, “Golden Retrievals” from Sweet Machine: Poems. Copyright © 1998 by Mark Doty. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: Sweet Machine: Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1998)

The Current Assignment

Who did it? I found it challenging and actually more interesting than I expected it to be. The result is lengthy since it doubles the length of the original. Nonetheless, a worthy exercise, at least for me.

The Next Assignment

As the song says, "Watch out, Sally!"

The assignment is to write a Christmas poem but without any verbs.

The assignment is to write a Christmas poem but without any verbs.

It can be done.:

“In a Station of the Metro”

By Ezra Pound, 1885 - 1972

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

“memoir without verbs”

a challenge

Snow

a crystal touch on a baby’s face

four feet of white across a frozen land

purple moon shadows under pines

diamonds on tree limbs in the morning sun

weapons for school boys

walls in the school yard

my tracks across a field and those of a hare

a hundred telephone poles along my way to school

After deep winter’s darkness

spring lake

and summer field

acres of riches

the black earth

dust

dust

and yellow harvest

combines

tiny harvest mice

The table full:

potatoes, pumpkin, corn, beans , cabbage, strawberries, saskatoons, blue berries,

raspberries, choke cherries, pincherries, cranberries, carrots, turnips six inches across, bitter horseradish, beets.

Time for the fall supper

November snow

Don’t overlook haiku as verbless verse.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on December 21, 2017. Same time, same place.

Other Jabber

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/books/review/poetry-children.html

An article from the NYTimes about how we became interested in poetry caught my attention. It's worth pondering as we find ourselves getting more and more into free verse, that is, the un-rhymed, and why we love to hear those poems that retain the charm of good, old-fashioned verse like that GraceMary writes.

An excerpt from the article:

"The most remarkable thing about poetry’s unpopularity isn’t that it exists, but that it exists in the wake of a period in which poems were not merely popular, but embraced with a fierce and unembarrassed joy. That period, of course, is childhood. For children, the questions often asked about poetry’s status are so beside the point as to seem almost absurd. Can poetry matter? Obviously, say more than 850,000 copies of “Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site,” among many, many other rhyming best sellers. Can poetry be widely recited and remembered? Indubitably, say half a million nightly tours of a great green room containing mittens, kittens, a bowl full of mush, and a quiet old lady who is whispering “hush.” Can a poem be overtly instructive while still being worthwhile as poetry? Well, “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” says a determined elephant named Horton. If adult poetry sometimes seems to exist in the shadow of fiction and music, children’s poetry more than holds its place in the sun."

and this:

"Because we are returned to the peculiar fact that, for all its allure to children, poetry is a game most adults left behind long ago. And it is fascinatingly alone among the arts in this respect: If children love fiction, music and drama, their parents frequently do as well. There are many reasons for this situation, as there are for all complex cultural phenomena. But it’s interesting to think about the handful of poets who do have adult readers outside the academy — Frost, Eliot, Bishop, Dickinson — and to observe how easy it is to imagine them writing children’s poems (as Eliot in fact did in “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”). Is there a lesson for poets in that? Here is Eliot in “Little Gidding”:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree …

Do we read this for its intellectual complexity? Or because it sounds mesmerizing? “We read it for both,” most people would answer, and this is perhaps true. But it can be easy to forget the ungovernable, un-footnoteable attraction of sound. It can be easy to forget that this, more than anything else, is what first draws us to poetry, before we become wise enough to think less of it, before we put away childish things."

November 15, 2017

These are the complete notes from "Tension in Poetry." They are rather randomly arranged but should cover evything we discussed. I don't think the links are all live but I trust you'll be able to track down anything you want. Put any questions into the comments section below.

Tension in Poetry

• 
  Ernest Hemingway's six-word story: "Baby shoes for sale. Never used."
• Connotation vs denotation
  • Connotation: an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.
  • Denotation: the literal or primary meaning of a word, in contrast to the feelings or ideas that the word suggests.
    Anecdote of the Jar BY WALLACE STEVENS I placed a jar in Tennessee,    And round it was, upon a hill.    It made the slovenly wilderness    Surround that hill.  The wilderness rose up to it,  And sprawled around, no longer wild.    The jar was round upon the ground    And tall and of a port in air.  It took dominion everywhere.    The jar was gray and bare.  It did not give of bird or bush,    Like nothing else in Tennessee. This poem is meaningless without connotative understanding.
    • Comment
      Anecdote of the Jar From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Anecdote of the Jar" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1919, it is in the public domain.[1] Anecdote of the Jar  I placed a jar in Tennessee,  And round it was, upon a hill.  It made the slovenly wilderness  Surround that hill.  The wilderness rose up to it,  And sprawled around, no longer wild.  The jar was round upon the ground  And tall and of a port in air.  It took dominion everywhere.  The jar was gray and bare.  It did not give of bird or bush,  Like nothing else in Tennessee. This famous, much-anthologized poem succinctly accommodates a remarkable number of different and plausible interpretations, as Jacqueline Brogan observes in a discussion of how she teaches it to her students.[2] It can be approached from a New Critical perspective as a poem about writing poetry and making art generally. From a poststructuralist perspective the poem is concerned with temporal and linguistic disjunction, especially in the convoluted syntax of the last two lines. A feminist perspective reveals a poem concerned with male dominance over a traditionally feminized landscape. A cultural critic might find a sense of industrial imperialism. Brogan concludes: "When the debate gets particularly intense, I introduce Roy Harvey Pearce's discovery of the Dominion canning jars (a picture[3] of which is then passed around)."[4] Buttel suggests that the speaker would arrange the wild landscape into the order of a still life, and though his success is qualified, art and imagination do at least impose an idea of order on the sprawling reality. Helen Vendler, in a reading that contradicts Brogan's and Buttel's, asserts that the poem is incomprehensible except as understood as a commentary on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The poem alludes to Keats, she argues, as a way of discussing the predicament of the American artist "who cannot feel confidently the possessor, as Keats felt, of the Western cultural tradition."[5] Shall he use language imported from Europe ("of a port in air", to "give of"), or "plain American that cats and dogs can read" (as Marianne Moore put it), like "The jar was round upon the ground"?[5] The poem is a palinode, retracting the Keatsian conceits of "Sunday Morning" and vowing "to stop imitating Keats and seek a native American language that will not take the wild out of the wilderness."[6] Wallace Stevens wrote the poem in 1918 when he was in the town of Elizabethton, Tennessee.
• Intension vs extension
  • Intension is connotative, extension denotative
    Intension:  In linguistics, logic, philosophy, and other fields, an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase, or another symbol.[1] In the case of a word, the word's definition often implies an intension. For instance, intension of the word 'plant' includes properties like "being composed of cellulose" and "alive" and "organism", among others. Comprehension is the collection of all such intensions.  Extension: In any of several studies that treat the use of signs—for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, and semiotics—the extension of a concept, idea, or sign consists of the things to which it applies, in contrast with its comprehension or intension, which consists very roughly of the ideas, properties, or corresponding signs that are implied or suggested by the concept in question.
• Binary thinking vs poetic language
  • Politics has become binary in that binary thinking sees just two choices, one right, one wrong
  • Poets, on the other hand face the perplexing reality that not only are there shades of meaning, reality is too complex to be contained within language.
    • The poet therefore relies upon implied meaning, fuzzy math, sort of; in fact, the poet relies upon connotation and intension
• Tension in poetry does not denote only opposites
  • It connotes other
  • It may connote competing others, cooperating others, what some refer to as a co-presence of meanings, inplications,insinuations
• For most of us denotative language is inadequate to the expression of complex truths
  • This is why we and teens choose poetry
  • Berryman
    Epilogue He died in December. He must descend Somewhere, vague and cold, the spirit and seal. Somewhere, Imagination one’s one friend Cannot see there. Both of us at the end. Nouns, verbs do not exist for what I feel.
• Negative Capability
  Negative Capability A term used many times on this website... 'The concept of Negative Capability is the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try and reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed and rational systems.' Keats was a romantic poet, full of intense passion and desire, yet shy and reserved. He was a young man with all the determination and melancholy of a teenager on a romantic quest to be among the English poets when he died. He is an inspiration to all of us, full of colourful language and imagination. He battled through tuberculosis and only lived to be 25. He wanted to be famous, and he has well and truly lived up to his dream. Keats longed to find beauty in what was often an ugly and terrible world. He was an admirer of Shakespeare, and his reading of the Bard is insightful and intriguing, illustrating the genius of Shakespeare's creativity. In a letter to his brothers, Keats describes this genius as 'Negative Capability': 'At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' This description can be compared to a definition of conflict: 'An emotional state characterized by indecision, restlessness, uncertainty and tension resulting from incompatible inner needs or drives of comparable intensity.' These two definitions are very similar; the meaning of conflict sounds very negative and hopeless. However, Keats' creative concept seems positive and full of potential by leaving out 'restlessness' by avoiding an 'irritable reaching after fact and reason'   From <http://www.keatsian.co.uk/negative-capability.php> 
• Questions about "The Groundhog" by Richard Eberhart
  The Groundhog BY RICHARD EBERHART In June, amid the golden fields, I saw a groundhog lying dead. Dead lay he; my senses shook, And mind outshot our naked frailty. There lowly in the vigorous summer His form began its senseless change, And made my senses waver dim Seeing nature ferocious in him. Inspecting close his maggots’ might And seething cauldron of his being, Half with loathing, half with a strange love, I poked him with an angry stick. The fever arose, became a flame And Vigour circumscribed the skies, Immense energy in the sun, And through my frame a sunless trembling. My stick had done nor good nor harm. Then stood I silent in the day Watching the object, as before; And kept my reverence for knowledge Trying for control, to be still, To quell the passion of the blood; Until I had bent down on my knees Praying for joy in the sight of decay. And so I left; and I returned In Autumn strict of eye, to see The sap gone out of the groundhog, But the bony sodden hulk remained. But the year had lost its meaning, And in intellectual chains I lost both love and loathing, Mured up in the wall of wisdom. Another summer took the fields again Massive and burning, full of life, But when I chanced upon the spot There was only a little hair left, And bones bleaching in the sunlight Beautiful as architecture; I watched them like a geometer, And cut a walking stick from a birch. It has been three years, now. There is no sign of the groundhog. I stood there in the whirling summer, My hand capped a withered heart, And thought of China and of Greece, Of Alexander in his tent; Of Montaigne in his tower, Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament. Richard Eberhart, “The Groundhog” from Collected Poems, 1930-1986. Copyright © 1960, 1976, 1987 by Richard Eberhart. Used by the permission of Oxford University Press, USA.
  • Why the title?
  • What differences are there among the sticks in the poem?
    • How are they used?
  • How many different relationships are there in the poem?
    • The relationships vary
    • What is the relationship between the poet and the reader like?
  • Why Alexander, Montaine, St Teresa?
    • St Teresa
      Around 1556, various friends suggested that her newfound knowledge was diabolical, not divine. She began to inflict various tortures and mortifications of the flesh upon herself. But her confessor, the Jesuit Saint Francis Borgia, reassured her of the divine inspiration of her thoughts. On St. Peter's Day in 1559, Teresa became firmly convinced that Jesus Christ presented himself to her in bodily form, though invisible. These visions lasted almost uninterrupted for more than two years. In another vision, a seraph[12] drove the fiery point of a golden lance repeatedly through her heart, causing an ineffable spiritual-bodily pain. I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...
      • How does this information about Saint Teresa change the scope of the poem?
    • Of Alexander in his tent;
      Long-Legged Fly That civilisation may not sink, Its great battle lost, Quiet the dog, tether the pony To a distant post; Our master Caesar is in the tent Where the maps are spread, His eyes fixed upon nothing, A hand under his head. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence. That the topless towers be burnt And men recall that face, Move most gently if move you must In this lonely place. She thinks, part woman, three parts a child, That nobody looks; her feet Practise a tinker shuffle Picked up on a street. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence. That girls at puberty may find The first Adam in their thought, Shut the door of the Pope's chapel, Keep those children out. There on that scaffolding reclines Michael Angelo. With no more sound than the mice make His hand moves to and fro. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence. © by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
  • The layers of meaning as the poem moves are denser and denser. By the end, despite a somewhat satisfying conclusion, not much is really resolved.
• First, notes about the last meeting
  • I did not mean to short-change Frost's "The Road Not Taken" when I mentioned its intention as a joke. Frost held that when he began a poem he never knew how it would end. Thus I assume that he knew full well that by the end of the poem his intention had been subverted although I doubt he knew how important the work would become to his readers and those beyond. "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
  • How does tension enter into our poems?
    • There is tension, simple tension, in the triggering event
      Ultimately, no amount of data can replace rigorous, flexible, imaginative human thought. Bernard Levin made a similar point almost 40 years ago in The Times (October 1978): “The silicon chip will transform everything, except everything that matters, and the rest will still be up to us.” Brendan Kelly Professor, Dept of Psychiatry, University College Dublin, Ireland I include the above thought because it implies the next point, namely that language is inadequate. James Thurber once lamented the existence of those things, actions, expressions, situations, etc, which exist but have not yet been named For twenty years I have been writing, writing, writing. It began after I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church. Suddenly I had something to say, and being Catholic provided the structure and foundation on which to say it. So the words spilled out. Twenty books or booklets, hundreds of essays for magazines, newspapers, journals, and newsletters. From the tapping fingers came film scripts, a bad novel, a book of poems, hymns, children’s stories, sermons, and plays. The internet became my friend. It was a many-mouthed monster hungry for copy, and editors seemed to want what my mind and fingers conspired to produce. I churned out three, four, five, or more essays a week. People asked whence I got my ideas, and I replied that my mind was always picking over something like a scavenging beast looking for a scrap on which to feast. But now I am weary. I am not weary of ideas or the need to communicate. Some complain of world-weariness. I have realized that I am weary not of the world, but of words. My heart echoes the feelings of my hero (that fragile, tough contemplative, T.S. Eliot) who wrote, “Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place.” It may be worse than word weariness. I read on in his Four Quartets and his sentiments startled me further: “So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres— Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a whole new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling. Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission has already been discovered Once or twice or several times by men whom one cannot hope To emulate… And I realize not only the inadequacy of words and worry at the waste, but also realize, with some hope that the word weariness may be a pointer to something better. It is a reminder and a pointer to the status of the soul which is at first sub-linguistic and later super-linguistic. What I mean, is that the human mind and heart is formed first in the nine months of wordless wonder in the womb. Then for another nine months the human child is weaned in a world without words. There in that foundational period the experience of the soul is sub-linguistic. It exists in an amorphous ambiguity of emotion. It exists in the inchoate ocean of emotion. It squirms in the clashing instincts of the animal and the aspirations of the angel. Then we enter the linguistic realm. We learn to listen and speak. We learn to read and write. We learn to filter our existence through the matrix and magic of language. Our world becomes words and our words become our world. The literature and liturgy of language become our means of existence and our means of making sense of the confusion that reigns around us. We philosophize with words. We theologize with words. We joke and jest and argue and debate with words. We murmur words of love and tenderness and scream imprecations and curses to our mortal enemies. Our tongues are flames that set off wild fires. Our words instruct and deceive, and with our words we sing praises like seraphim and howl curses like fiends. But I am weary of words and wonder why. It is perhaps because I want to ascend to that silence that echoes the innocence of the sub-linguistic bliss. I want to attain what the hymn writer called “the silence of eternity, interpreted by Love.” In other words I want to move from the literalness of the linguistic to the Love of the super linguistic.   From <http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/12/t-s-eliot-inadequacy-words-dwight-longenecker.html> 
      • The poem, beginning as a lump in the throat, by a moment we wish to consecrate, is already outside the realm of language and yet we are called to name it. This is not a small deal. Consider Rilke's ninth of the Duino Elegies:
        The Ninth Duino Elegy                                                                                                                       —Rainer Maria Rilke   Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all other green, with tiny waves on the edges of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze) – : why then have to be human – and, escaping from fate, keep longing for fate?…   Oh not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss. Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which would exist in the laurel too…   But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.   And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it, trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands, in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart. Trying to become it. – Whom can we give it to? We would hold on to it all, forever… Ah, but what can we take along into that other realm? Not the art of looking, which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing. The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness, and the long experience of love, – just what is wholly unsayable. But later, among the stars, what good is it – they are better as they are: unsayable.   For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window – at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand, oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t the secret intent of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together, that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy? Threshold: what it means for two lovers to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door – they too, after the many who came before them and before those to come…, lightly.   Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness. More than ever the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act. An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.   Between the hammers our heart endures, just as the tongue does between the teeth and, despite that, still is able to praise.   Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one, you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe where he feels more  powerfully, you are a novice. So show him something simple which, formed over generations, lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze. Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile. Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours, how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form, serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing –, and blissfully escapes far beyond the violin. – And these Things, which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient, they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all. They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart, within – oh endlessly – within us! Whoever we may be at last.   Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us, invisible? Isn’t it your dream to be wholly invisible someday? – O Earth: invisible! What, if not transformation, is your urgent command? Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over – one of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood. Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first. You were always right, and your holiest inspiration is our intimate companion, Death.   Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future grows any smaller… Superabundant being wells up in my heart.                                                 (Translated by Stephen Mitchell) Although he is telling us to say something, to name something, we are as Adam and Eve in the garden seeing things that are un-named, speaking their names for the first time. We discover, as poets, that the triggering event and the language available to us to sanctify it are both beyond our limits and yet are real beyond doubt.
    • There is tension in the inadequacy of language
      For twenty years I have been writing, writing, writing. It began after I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church. Suddenly I had something to say, and being Catholic provided the structure and foundation on which to say it. So the words spilled out. Twenty books or booklets, hundreds of essays for magazines, newspapers, journals, and newsletters. From the tapping fingers came film scripts, a bad novel, a book of poems, hymns, children’s stories, sermons, and plays. The internet became my friend. It was a many-mouthed monster hungry for copy, and editors seemed to want what my mind and fingers conspired to produce. I churned out three, four, five, or more essays a week. People asked whence I got my ideas, and I replied that my mind was always picking over something like a scavenging beast looking for a scrap on which to feast. But now I am weary. I am not weary of ideas or the need to communicate. Some complain of world-weariness. I have realized that I am weary not of the world, but of words. My heart echoes the feelings of my hero (that fragile, tough contemplative, T.S. Eliot) who wrote, “Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place.” It may be worse than word weariness. I read on in his Four Quartets and his sentiments startled me further: “So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres— Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a whole new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling. Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission has already been discovered Once or twice or several times by men whom one cannot hope To emulate… And I realize not only the inadequacy of words and worry at the waste, but also realize, with some hope that the word weariness may be a pointer to something better. It is a reminder and a pointer to the status of the soul which is at first sub-linguistic and later super-linguistic. What I mean, is that the human mind and heart is formed first in the nine months of wordless wonder in the womb. Then for another nine months the human child is weaned in a world without words. There in that foundational period the experience of the soul is sub-linguistic. It exists in an amorphous ambiguity of emotion. It exists in the inchoate ocean of emotion. It squirms in the clashing instincts of the animal and the aspirations of the angel. Then we enter the linguistic realm. We learn to listen and speak. We learn to read and write. We learn to filter our existence through the matrix and magic of language. Our world becomes words and our words become our world. The literature and liturgy of language become our means of existence and our means of making sense of the confusion that reigns around us. We philosophize with words. We theologize with words. We joke and jest and argue and debate with words. We murmur words of love and tenderness and scream imprecations and curses to our mortal enemies. Our tongues are flames that set off wild fires. Our words instruct and deceive, and with our words we sing praises like seraphim and howl curses like fiends. But I am weary of words and wonder why. It is perhaps because I want to ascend to that silence that echoes the innocence of the sub-linguistic bliss. I want to attain what the hymn writer called “the silence of eternity, interpreted by Love.” In other words I want to move from the literalness of the linguistic to the Love of the super linguistic.   From <http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/12/t-s-eliot-inadequacy-words-dwight-longenecker.html>  Frost also told us the poem begins as a lump in the throat. Add to that John Berryman's "nouns, verbs to not exist for what I feel."
    • The effort to express something will present the writer with the tensions that we are trying to attend to.
      • i.e. ambiguity and conflict are present from the start and, as with the leaves whose colors are there all along but are obscured by chlorophyll until the frost, you will find it
        When we start writing, then, the first draft is not only the first version of your poem, it is the first time anyone has tried to name what you are naming, if only since you experience life only as yourself. This is the call for the poem to be original, use new terms, combine words imaginatively to, in fact, excite the reader with a new dawn, a new paradigm of words. CF the poetry teacher who said there is one rule: Don't bore me!
      • The act of writing in and of itself changes the experience we try to consecrate since the experience is rooted in emotion, not language. Its nature is to be felt, not written, not said.
        In encouraging a niece who was challenged to write about her mother who died while the girl was young (12 or so) we came to the point where feeling was more effectively conveyed by saying that at Thanksgiving dinner her chair was empty rather than saying she was dead.
    • We can consciously insert opposites, conflicts
      Returning to "The Road Not Taken," we find the poet intentionally inserting opposites. Part of the reason is that he knows, as Frost was known to repeat, that poetry is what is in between the lines. He consciously inserts opposites, disagreeing assertions (Re-read "Directive") in order to sidestep the inadequacy of language to get to the truth, the emotion, the experience that occupies the starting point of the poem. The Road Not Taken Launch Audio in a New Window BY ROBERT FROST Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—   I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Directive Back out of all this now too much for us, Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town. The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost, May seem as if it should have been a quarry – Great monolithic knees the former town Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. And there's a story in a book about it: Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest, The chisel work of an enormous Glacier That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole. You must not mind a certain coolness from him Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain. Nor need you mind the serial ordeal Of being watched from forty cellar holes As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. As for the woods' excitement over you That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves, Charge that to upstart inexperience. Where were they all not twenty years ago? They think too much of having shaded out A few old pecker-fretted apple trees. Make yourself up a cheering song of how Someone's road home from work this once was, Who may be just ahead of you on foot Or creaking with a buggy load of grain. The height of the adventure is the height Of country where two village cultures faded Into each other. Both of them are lost. And if you're lost enough to find yourself By now, pull in your ladder road behind you And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me. Then make yourself at home. The only field Now left's no bigger than a harness gall. First there's the children's house of make-believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad. Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, Now slowly closing like a dent in dough. This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. Your destination and your destiny's A brook that was the water of the house, Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, Too lofty and original to rage. (We know the valley streams that when aroused Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.) I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it, So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't. (I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.) Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. Robert Frost Dear Li Po, It’s no joke: I have to leave you to find Du Fu. He is fighting somewhere, nowhere to be found chasing the moon. I am told he is great, greater than you whose poems I have knelt before, whose wine I have drunk. There was a lover who bought me postcards from the Du Fu Museum in Chengdu twenty-two years ago. I looked at them yesterday for the first time. They claim to depict scenes he wrote of although the translations may be flawed. The paintings are of horses, soldiers, women; of partings, returns, heroes, funerals. It is the poems I want. I will accept the translations without question if my spine shudders at what I read as it does when I read your poems. My lover died shortly after giving me the postcards. I do not miss her much. We fell apart as lovers will when their poems seem to search for a different way to the end, never got to read Du Fu together on the Newgate Cliffs as we meant to. I will write on the postcards, short verses of love, war, the meanings of mountains, the eerie songs of the colluding stars that bring fateful ends to even important poems. I will write like Du Fu and dress as you, Li Po. When I finish I will step from the pier into the river. Your bright moon will wrinkle in  the crazy water. I will wait until it stills then report to your swamped soul on my journey to Du Fu and the gift I have finally received from my dead lover. Unpublished work Copyright 2017 Emerson Gilmore
    • Furthermore, we don't know what we are saying anyway
      This means that we, despite our every assertion otherwise, cannot know what the reader will find in our poems. We cannot fully manipulate the reader to see exactly want her to. Take Trish's poem about riding a horse. Where she saw a poem consecrating the moment of horseback riding, many of us thought it very much a sexual encounter. The author didn't see that coming. Remember that the reader himself is entitled and expected to see the poem through his own experiential lens. This adds depth as long as the poet invites the reader by recognizing that the act of writing creates a relationship with the poem and the poet and the poem and the reader. Once the poem is turned over to the reader, it no longer belongs only to the poet. That very sharing adds layers of complexity to the poem that the writer has no control over.
    • This brings us back to Negative capability, the strength to let the poem be what it wants to be. This is the hardest part of writing poems: The ability to let go of what we want the poem to be so that it can become something greater. Don't resolve the competing tensions; don't choose "the right one." The reader can stand and the poem demands ambiguity. This is what invites the reader into the place where the writer stands, the point at which the lump in the throat is understood and the poem transcends itself into another experience that goes beyond words. The poem's job becomes one of leaving itself behind. It's not easy.
      • This is accomplished by using all the elements we already know of:
        The poem does not merely eventuate in a logical conclusion. The conclusion of the poem is the working out of the various tensions — set up by whatever means — by propositions, metaphors, symbols. The unity is achieved by a dramatic process, not a logical; it represents an equilibrium of forces, not a formula. It is “proved" as a dramatic conclusion is proved; by its ability to resolve the conflicts which have been accepted as the donnees of the drama.   From <https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.34395/2015.34395.Well-Wrought-Urn-Studies-In-The-Structure-Of-Poetry_djvu.txt>  
      • "No one ever yet thought their way to a great poem." Campbell McGrath
        • Follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U00ybFDTRU for a great two-minute piece of advice
        • His point is that poetry comes from the writing of poetry.
        • You must write and write and write and learn to let the poem tell you what it wants to say and how to say it.
        • In the assignments I hope to prompt you to write outside of your normal groove, to get you to widen the horizons available to you
        • Make up your own assignments. Challenge yourself.
        • Write like a poet you like. Copy styles. Try styles.
        • Begin with a line you find really good, powerful and then riff on it for three pages
        • Never, never edit your first draft. Let everything go,let it all out. Make it a verbal jailbreak
          • Then look it over and start selecting, choosing, seeking patterns
            • Then, in the patterns, find what the poem wants to be
    • Regarding binary thinking, keep in mind that the poem is the result of the journey from data (facts) to information to knowledge to wisdom and you as poet are the charged with caring for wisdom. LIke I said, it's not easy.
  • "this indifference and trust is in itself a mystical grace" Merton
  • How to put tension in out poems?
    • DON’T DO IT
      The reason for this is two-fold: first is that tension exists already in whatever you are putting to paper. It just is. It becomes enhanced as you distill the experience you want to consecrate through the craft of poetry, that of selecting the best words in the best order, employing metaphor, simile and whatever devices the poet has at hand in her effort to say the unsayable. Second is that tension is a critic's term, one designed to enable us to understand the mystery of how the poet works, how the poem means. It is a lens for looking at how the poem comes to its truth, how it gets the reader to participate in that experience that prompted the lump in the throat that began the poem. Thus, the way to put tension into your poems is, initially to write poems. Preceding this is the self-aware journey through life that leaves you without the option to not wrote poetry because, as Wordsworth said, "“What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.” ― William Wordsworth tags: creation, poetics Read more quotes from William Wordsworth