Blog Archives

In Disregard of Fame

10/31/2016

Any such fame as I might seek
Has been established early,
Yet all that coveted mystique
I would forgo, not dearly—

If I might but obtain, and have
In secret, by your favor
The consummation that I crave,
My body formed to savor.

Let you and I dissolve into
Obscurity’s embrace,
If I might have the chance to view
And kiss your smiling face—

Then if no remnant and no trace
Remains, to tell of me,
Still I have lived a life of grace
Sans immortality.

Haha, you would not deign to stoop
Your favor an iota,
So what’s to me if I recoup
Proportionate fame’s quota?

Fame, Like a Wayward Girl, Will Still Be Coy

10/31/2016

In The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Liu Hsien writes (in the translation of Vincent Yu-chung Shih):

[W]ith respect to the universe, it is everlasting and boundless, and in it we find people of all types. He who wants to stand out above the others must depend on his intelligence. Time is fleeting and life itself is transitory. If a man really wants to achieve fame, his only chance is to devote himself to writing. In his appearance, man resembles heaven and earth, and he is naturally endowed with five talents; his ears and eyes are comparable to the sun and moon; his voice and breath are like the wind and thunder; yet, as he transcends all things, he is really spiritual. His physical form may be as fragile as the grasses and trees, but his fame is more substantial than metal and stone. Therefore, a man of virtue, in his relationship with the people of the world, aims at establishing both his character and his words. So it is not that I simply happen to be fond of argument; it is that I cannot do otherwise than write.

In light of climate change, mass extinction and the threatened annihilation of the human species, desire for fame seems the height of man's vanity. Nevertheless, prior to the Anthropocene it made sense, and it was out of this sublime rationality that Keats wrote. Here is his second sonnet "On Fame":

Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
   To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
  And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsey,—will not speak to those
  Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper’d close,
  Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gipsey is she, Nilus-born,
  Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards! repay her scorn for scorn;
  Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

John Keats was born on this day in 1795, the only holiday I consistently celebrate.

Luxuriant Warmth

10/30/2016

If your door opened, I would shut
These other twenty doors ajar,
The ties with humankind to cut
Save paragon and exemplar.

That you do not excel the rest
I know for truth, per analytic,
But knowledge gains within my breast
No beachhead, nor stands heart the critic.

“Feeling is first,” and by emotion
You are the sea on which I ride,
My rickety craft upon the ocean,
A mote upon the face of pride.

Yet, keeping you apart from me—
By your volition, never mine—
My words find their vol’tility
Thereby approaching the divine.

Ergo these other doors I keep
Ajar or even open wider,
News to transmit, in verse to reap
Luxuriant warmth surpassing eider.

The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons

10/29/2016

From the Introduction by Vincent Yu-chung Shih:

"The term 'literary criticism' is used here in its broadest possible sense. It includes literary history, literary theory, and literary appreciation and evaluation. In the case of Liu Hsieh, these three are closely interwoven and give his work an underlying unity in the midst of apparent chaos.

"Liu's desire to write the Wen-hsin tiao-lung arises from his dissatisfaction with the general state of literary production of the times, and with the fragmentary manner in which literary criticism has been dealt with. As a prelude to his work, he reviews existing critical works and gives to each an epigrammatic verdict which implies some general criteria of his own. Of Ts'ao P'ei, Lu Chi, Chih Yi, and others, he says, 'Each... reflects a particular corner of the field; few have envisioned the whole open vista.' And he further comments, 'They are all unable to trace back from the leaves to the roots; or back from the tide to its source.'
. . .

"Liu has an interesting idea of a competent critic. In his opinion a competent critic is one who, to begin with, is widely acquainted with literature and highly sensitive to its intrinsic values. Then there are other prerequisites to the understanding of a piece of literature: the ability to recognize the genre and style, the ability to evaluate the quality of the rhetorical elements, the ability to determine if the work complies with the principle of adaptability to change, and the ability to distinguish between the extraordinary and the orthodox in subject matter and to pass judgment on the appropriateness of historical allusions and musical patterns. Above all, the critic should be able through imagination to trace back from the words to the feeling of the author, a criterion that vaguely indicates a belief in the oneness of the creative genius and appreciative taste. Through these abilities, a critic is enabled to grasp the meaning or the esthetic beauty of a literary work. But an understanding critic is rare, because most people depreciate their contemporaries and worship only the Ancients. However, an appreciative critic is essential to the realization of the value of a literary work. For works of art are never completed once and for all. Their value is ever enhanced by the appreciation and re-interpretation across the ages by critics who bring to their perusal their ever deepening experience. So, Liu Hsieh suggested, a literary work loses much of its richness if it is not appreciated."

Link to The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons

Twain Opposites

10/28/2016

My course is opposite of yours:
You hasten toward ‘connection,’
I move away, and shut all doors,
Burn bridges by election.

The hardest door to shut is this,
That leads to you, by far
The most resistant door it is—
I leave it just ajar.

Yet, days spent listening for the creak,
That pivot on the hinges,
Wastes day by day and week by week
In fever hot that singes.

Last night I dreamt of you again
And there was so much horror,
Violence in the world of men,
An end-of-times uproar—or:

Perhaps signal to make retreat
Recusal’s hermitage,
Where nary sound my ears may meet
Distracting eyes from page.

*The original last stanza may be better in all ways except metrically:

Maybe a signal to retreat,
Recusal to my hermitage
Where nary sound may ever meet
My ears while eyes survey their page.

Put Down That Book!

10/26/2016

Somebody said, and I can’t remember where I read it—maybe the Aphorist Blogger had it—that the point of virtually all poetry is to say: “You’re alive! Now put down this book.”

Falling like Shadows

10/25/2016

Yesterday I told of some lines which occurred to me maybe a half dozen years ago that demanded "filling out"—at least the addition of a matching couplet to round out the meaning.

Some others have been in my mind since the days of Paul Carroll's undergraduate poetry workshop, that have cried for not merely a matching set of lines but the stanzas of an entire poem:

While the course of time shall run
We fall like shadows by the sun
Distributed upon his flight
Between the morning and the night.

They have an archaic feel to them perhaps unmatchable by anything that I might come up with now. Maybe they are complete as is. If so, why—like yesterday's lines—have they hung around so long in mind without being forgotten?

The Perfect Complement

10/24/2016

Years ago I wrote the immemorial couplet:

If all days passed as this one
I wouldn't want to miss one.

And since then, it has stuck in my mind, demanding the perfect complement, which I have been unable to supply. This morning it came to me:

Alas, they do not pass so
Unless you're in El Paso.

Which is a shame, really, because El Paso has nothing to do with it.

Poverty without Poetry

10/23/2016

Former poet laureate of West Hartford, CT, James Finnegan, has a blog, ursprache, where he posts aphoristic thoughts mostly related to or applicable to poetry. This entry, from November, 2012, is a touching testament to his relationship with poetry, one which, I hazard, is shared by untold numbers of people—contrary to the assertion that poetry changes nothing:

When I think of all ways in which chance led me to poetry, and I think of how easily I may have missed this art, no matter my occasional frustrations and even exasperations with my own writing, I know my life would be so much poorer without poetry, and I’m thankful down to my core for poetry.

There is a good decade's material at the blog, hard to take all at one sitting, but much that is thought-provoking and insightful, though the above sample is something of an anomaly for its personal revelation. Occasionally piquant quotes about poetry are presented, presumably culled from the author's reading material, and other blogs, accessible from his profile page, present a variety of literary material (or non-literary aphoristic thought). Taking it all at once, as I have done, is not the best approach—but a nibble here and there, if not always earth-shattering, can be delectable.

Sleight of Mind

10/22/2016

My whole life it distracted me,
The truth before me lay,
And consequence impacted me
On each and every day.

That which I sought was not the thing
Which lay before my eyes,
Chimeric, soul-enlivening,
But vestige of disguise

Concealing merely nullity,
Vacuity of will,
While, as the chance escapes from me,
I stare, mesmerized still.

Will-o’-the-wisp, have I grown old
While, comet-like, you darted?
Have foolish hopes sparked like fool’s gold
Too instantly departed?

Debris and wastage in my wake
I strew, and keep on strewing,
Splinters and shards of old heartbreak
That newly I keep ruing.

<<Previous