Victoria Blake exacts from her keyboard,
Most recently, I posted my attempt at imitating the late Blake’s style of poetry. As I mentioned in the post, that is all very well and fine as an exercise, but is not an end in itself.
Here, I want to propound a different style of poetry–the style that I am working toward as an end in itself. I would like to call it the style of the current Blake, but that is probably too arrogant, not to say untrue. I will simply call it exact poetry.
In exact poetry, the poet simply writes down exactly what he means. View Full Post
Mark DenHoed writes,
I have decided to open up my heart and share the outpourings of my delicate soul.
Xanthus
The blossom of hope,
That glimmer of youth,
Tumble down the slope
Oh, dear, forsooth!
The blue of the sky,
The wash of the sea,
The fear to soon die,
A shattering plea
Laura Russell writes,
The poem under examination can be found here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15806
Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963) was a prize-winning American poet, and his poem “The Storm” serves as an excellent example of his talent. The basic structure of this poem is fairly simple. It is divided into three parts: the first begins with detached images of the approaching storm; the second part extends these images and introduces a first person perspective; the third stanza chronicles the violence of the storm through this perspective. Roethke employs a plethora of poetic tools; the most prominent are grammatical structure, imagery, and sound.
Ella Hansen muses,
Twice I had ventured toward the realms of gold,
Clutching a crutch with feeble hand, and feet
Stumbling along the ancient pathways told
By ghosts of voices that I could not meet,
Dark words and shadows. Still they lured me on,
Echoes of scales that Sirens so have sung,
Until I saw my road in my clear dawn
And heard the poet speak in his own tongue.
Then I felt like some child who sees a star
Fall, and then holds the pitted stone in hand;
Or, having plunged into the sea blue-clear,
Trusts to the guidance shouted from the sand,
And thrashing smoothes to rhythmic strokes and strong,
First feels sharp salt, bright fish, tide’s hollow song.
Philip Hilton scribbles,
C. S. Lewis once said that one of the proofs for the soul’s immortality was the way we perceived time. Sometimes we perceive time as practically infinite — an hour can seem like an age — but sometimes we see time as infinitely small. Anybody who has spent an intensely fun day can tell you about the feeling at the end — can tell you that it all passed in an instant. Because we see time in these different ways, says Lewis, it is clear that we are ‘timeologically disoriented.’ And what reason could there be for this? The only possible reason is that our immortal soul is not ‘used’ to dealing with finite periods — hence the disorientation.
Victoria Blake writes,
As I have mentioned a few times, I’m struck every so often with obsession about William Blake, just because he’s my ancestor. I got a book of his poetry and other random blats and studied the style a bit. He really has a strange style, especially with his forceful use of capitals.
It made me wonder, what is the place of imitation in writing? On the one hand, imitation can’t be an end in itself–unless you’re a parodist. It can’t be an ultimate style. Who would want to read an imitation of a great author when they could read the great author himself? Also, the aspiring author can only get so far into the brain of his idol, so an imitation will end up either being a slavish devotion to mechanical devices, or it will read like a cheap rip-off. View Full Post
Laura Russell pontificates,
Accurately defining an educated man is a somewhat complex process, but as an education in the colloquial sense generally encompasses some form of study in the major fields of knowledge – philosophy, literature, and the arts is a fairly safe generalization – an educated man may be said to be one who is well informed in these fields. Note that this is not an exclusive term: by these standards, a man may be wise without being educated. The objective of this essay is to determine how such a study should be undertaken in order to attain the latter state. I submit that the process of becoming an educated man consists of three stages: exposure, absorption, and discussion. View Full Post
Mark DenHoed and John Ahern write (or, rather, transcribe),
A Love Lost and Regained: Installment VI
Hannah Roorda writes,
Regina has already discussed Up some here, but because the film contains a lot of material worth talking about, I think I can write about it again without touching on much that’s already been covered. This post does have some spoilers (well, it gives away a fair part of the story) but if you’re deciding whether or not to see Up, I hope I can convince you. It’s not a very complete post, not by any means, but maybe we can get some good discussion going and see what comes next.
I went to Up expecting a lot from the film (as I’m sure most of you did, too) and Pixar, like always, didn’t disappoint. You’ve probably heard it over and over– breathtaking animation, compelling story, lifelike characters. It is a film accessible to all, and I do highly recommend you watch it as soon as you get the opportunity.
Everything the film presents is hard to take in during the first viewing. I went to see it four times (three of those times, I admit, someone else paid for my ticket) and I discovered new nuances at every showing. It’s a complex story, and I wanted to appreciate every little bit of it. I think I succeeded in understanding it better by the fourth time I saw it, but I anticipate its arrival on DVD– there’s more to be found.
View Full Post
John Ahern writes,
I remember, once, watching a “Journey Home” episode that some Catholic friends of ours gave us, where Marcus Grodi, in a moment of tangential, theological exuberance, explained what has often been described as the three-legged stool of Catholic infallibility – Scripture, the Holy See, and Church tradition. I’m not going to pick on that from a specifically Scriptural standpoint right here, in the sense that I won’t be providing verses and the exegesis of smart men, but a more philosophical and indirectly Scriptural argument about the messy places this position is inevitably going to get you in. Church tradition won’t be my concentration, either, as much as the inevitable tension between an infallible Bible and an infallible Church, especially as the two relate to the issue of the canon. Pushed far enough, the issue of Who Made the Canon turns out, I argue, to be a point in Protestants’ favor and puts the Catholics in the uncomfortable position of having to deal with circular reasoning (of the wrong kind).
