Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was on the verge of getting into Heidegger at uni but like all these things I dropped it very quickly. I had an inspirational lecturer there, and the luxury of nobody else turning up to the lecture/seminar, but that rarely happened. Philosophy is hard work, unlike literature (or better to say that literature doesn't HAVE to be hard work).
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i got one of his new collection of poems in the mail and it's even more undecipherable as his other work, it feels like he's pranking actually.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I found out today that Wallace Stevens was a lifelong republican. T.S. Eliot, another philosopher-cum-poet was a conservative. Is it a "thing"?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I doubt it. You could look for more or less any political persuasion and find a bunch of artists who fell under it.

True but there's a certain type of poet that I'd expect to be conservative now, knowing about Eliot, Stevens, Pound etc.

I think refering the classical tradition e.g. suggests that you'd be opposed to a radical overturning of the canon/west civilisation.
 

luka

Well-known member
I always feel like I had some of the raw materials needed to be very clever but I lacked e.g. the work ethic to ever pull it off. OTOH if I hadn't lacked those things I'd never have snorted crushed up pills and ketamine off a bar.

Say something clever brilliant insightful about this poem then. Lend a hand. Pull your weight.
 

luka

Well-known member
'sway' has the most powerful centrifugal implications (in-foldings) arising from the root sense of 'bend, swing, turn' To hoist then perhaps contains the force of: sling upwards & into the wind current, to catch and belly out, bending before the onset. I haven't looked into this (pure conjecrture) but Old Norrse sveigja holds this notion of yielding partly but not wholly to pressure. The power swirling behind suchlike is quite intoxicating.

Best
J.H Prynne


(leeter to Olson)
 
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luka

Well-known member
'I am struck with the need to readjust parts of THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER as a chap-book, towards some of the hinges in European language or its northern groupings considered in general. "The transference of force from agent to object" writes Fenollosa, "which contitutue natural phenomena, occupy time. Therefore a reproduction of the in the imagination requires the same temporal order"... Hence the simple declarative sentence with one transitive & acrtive verb, furnishes the kinetic type."
 

luka

Well-known member
"But where are the sources of this force, how is access to them won out of the ambient silences which surround the man on the brink of speech? From the things themselves has been the answer, and in the final reckoning always must be. Things are nouns, and particular substantives of this order are storehouses of potential energy, hoard up with the world's available motions. But there are other energies: the compelling human necessities, the exhaling of breath, the sugar which feeds the muscles of the diaphragm and lung."
 

luka

Well-known member
"It seems probable that this source was channelled into speech simultaneously with if not before, the substantive pictogram or derived lexigraph. To sing is to modulate and make audible the breathing, declare the body's functioning, it's various rhythms, like shouting or the groan of agony."
 

luka

Well-known member
but i think that helps a great deal with the reading. yesterday i overheard a woman on the phone saying
"i appreciate that..."
and that helped me to. as a fragment of speech and type of communication, I appreciate that, being a way to attest to a shared feeling and resonance from one breast to another. it's that fellowship of feeling which is being announced and used as the basis for further understanding. how little bits of speech work and the centres they are acting upon be it shared feeling or shared logic or whatever it may be.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've experienced dribs and drabs of it, but I've come to think that I'm fundamentally quite as dead to the sensuous properties of language as some are to the sensuous properties of music or painting. Dead is the wrong word, since I can sometimes nurture the guttering flame, but for the most part I see language as a vehicle for ideas and evocation. I only really respond to very crude linguistic effects, such as alliteration and rhyme, assonance. Mind you, somebody like Pope writes in a way that makes all this things very obvious and pleasing, but much more subtlety than that is lost on me unless I squint hard. Sad!
 

version

Well-known member
I'm in the same boat as Corpse, but I agree with Luke. I think it can be worked at. It's just another way of reading. You learned one way. There's no reason you can't learn another. Drugs would definitely help, mind you. I find it much easier to appreciate form in that state.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I've experienced dribs and drabs of it, but I've come to think that I'm fundamentally quite as dead to the sensuous properties of language as some are to the sensuous properties of music or painting. Dead is the wrong word, since I can sometimes nurture the guttering flame, but for the most part I see language as a vehicle for ideas and evocation.

Perhaps we can set utility/communication as the primary parameters of language, and set poetics as a rupturing of these parameters, operating/dancing in and out and in and out the systematized utility of language. Like what the good poet Poet has to say is too complete to be expressed by a consistent (hence incomplete) system/grammar - or perhaps it just takes skill to reconcile the two, to contrive a consistent system to express something that somehow stretches beyond the system.
 
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