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It's always gratifying to see someone recommend the Iliad once more.
Whether Homer's view of war includes any ironic elements is doubtful. His
view seems to be entirely tragic: though war is an evil (he calls Ares "the
most hated of the gods,") it is an inevitable one, like disease. But
ultimately Homer isn't really talking about war; he's using it as a
metaphor. His heroes understand that in war the risk of dying is the price
they pay for honor, and they ask themselves if it's worth it. To understand
Achilles, you don't need to imagine yourself as a soldier, you should
instead imagine yourself as a person who understands that the certainty of
dying is the price you pay for being alive and is asking if it's worth it.
Which shouldn't be hard. Homer's answer is there in the scene between Priam
and Achilles. It seems to have something to do with compassion, but I don't
understand it yet. If I ever do, I'll probably feel really dumb not to have
seen it all along.
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I found David Bircumshaw's now notorious scatological sketch interesting,
but more so in theory than in poetic practice. Interesting, because in
psychoanalysis the unconscious connection between defecation and childbirth
is a truism. The full nexus is faeces = penis = baby = money = gift, all
bound up with the issue of control and thus by implication with aggression,
in the sense of insisting on imposing one's order on the world
("anal-compulsive" has passed into common usage.) But the poem seems to
posit these connections as an intellectual exercise rather than as something
felt; it fails to rise from metaphor to symbolism. It might have been
poetically more interesting to have considered the connections less
directly; for instance by describing a bombing run using diction which could
also be used of childbirth or defecation.
Interesting too in this respect is that the word shit means "that which is
split off" in its Indo-European root (cf. schism, Germ. scheiss.) This is
quite in accord with the Freudian viewpoint: the overwhelmingly important
thing about faeces is that they are split off from the body; they are self
turned into not-self, and so is a baby.
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Allison Croggon's "Poem for John" is beautifully clear and gains great
impact from its calmness. I think though that the lines
but your voice
speaks
and moves
are putty; it would be stronger to go right into "you are right." I had
already written my "The Soldier Poet" email before reading this poem, so I
didn't deliberately send mine as an answer, but the counter-echoes are
interesting.
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Heaven forefend that I should make rules for other people's behavior, but
perhaps I may be permitted to share three principles of on line discussion
which I myself try to follow, since I've learned they will make both my own
discourse and the responses it elicits more productive: 1) if an email
makes you angry, don't write an answer to it until you've stopped feeling
angry; 2) if you find yourself saying. "I'm sorry but I can't let this pass
in silence," that is a sure sign that you should let it pass in silence; 3)
if someone else wants to have the last word, let them.
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Quote of the week:
How good bad music and bad reasons sound, when one is
marching to war!
-- Nietzsche
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
http://www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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