Oh, yes, I am here. And, yes, I did use a list of my own making of
definitions of poetry by various poets when we discussed poetry. It always
started the ball rolling! I also gave examples of formal, informal and
revamps ancient forms - plus looked at the English diction in translations
and the variations of forms from their originals to the translated item.
Sigh.

I'd also like to announce the arrival of my latest collection from Walleah
Press: 'One Hour Seeds Another'. It has a variety of forms, to say the
least. (And I do often say the least.) $20AUD from
http://walleahpress.com.au/ Here's a blurb statement:

*Blurbs for 'One Hour'*



In a voice that is simultaneously unified and diverse, Burke explores
traditional and non-traditional forms, collaborations, etc in a restless
avoidance of cliché or tired repetition.



His poetry has an openness and candour that is a form of honesty. Mundane
things - ants, birds, garden plants, pets etc - are seen so clearly that
they are transfigured and made vibrant with luminous immediacy.



Also, several moving elegies for dead friends draw on the powerful sense of
memory that infuses the whole collection with depth and
multi-dimensionality.



-        *Andrew Taylor (poet, friend, academic)*





In *One Hour Seeds Another*, Andrew Burke is writing at the height of his
powers. In this collection he has the confidence and quiet wisdom of
someone who knows his particular patches of mind and craft and experience
inch by inch, never ceases to be surprised by them, and has learned how to
pass that surprise on to us, without spilling a drop. His pleasure, irony
and compassion are contagious. You could give him five ordinary things on a
table top and he would show you just how to place them, to let in the
pleasure and the wonder.



-        *David Brooks (novelist, poet, essayist, editor)*


On 24 June 2014 06:52, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Oh yes Lawrence.
>
> And Rush rejoices in how Housman and Arnold were confined to a poetry that
> excluded Alexander Pope, Byron of 'Don Juan', et al!
>
> I recall my 1952 school text, the old Golden Treasury, which also ignores
> Donne and Herbert.
>
> This Christopher Rush, writing on the Felix Dennis website (Dennis's death
> is announced),
> comes on openly as a former secondary teacher now a full-time writer, so I
> was reminded
> of the handouts teachers compile hoping to 'kick-start' young students.
>
> It's like a page in a dictionary of quotations, or a website of handy
> quotes -
> something a few lucky people never need, having done their own reading
> already.
>
> I expect Andrew Burke, quondam writing teacher, to look down the list and
> say:
> 'I used to press six or a dozen of these on my groups -
> now here's a knockout very long list that I can use.'
>
> Are you there, Andrew?
>
> Max
>
>
> On 23 Jun 2014, at 11:22 pm, Lawrence Upton <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > With respect, and friendship, these reminds me of why I wanted so badly
> to
> > leave the R C Church and could never bring myself to join a Marxist party
> >
> >
> > L
> >
> >
> > On 23 June 2014 13:42, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >> Here then are my two dozen standing stones.[writes Christopher Rush
> >> http://www.felixdennis.com/subject/poetry-subject/poets-playlist/]
> >>
> >> (1)                     Poetry is more philosophical and serious than
> >> history. (Aristotle)
> >>
> >> (2)                     The truest poetry is the most feigning.
> >> (Shakespeare)
> >>
> >> (3)                    Poetry should be simple, sensuous, passionate.
> >> (Milton)
> >>
> >> (4)                     Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
> >> feelings. (Wordsworth)
> >>
> >> (5)                     Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity.
> >> (Wordsworth)
> >>
> >> (6)                     Poetry is the best words in the best order.
> >> (Coleridge)
> >>
> >> (7)                     Poetry should surprise by a fine excess. (Keats)
> >>
> >> (8)                     If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a
> >> tree, it had better not come at all. (Keats)
> >>
> >> (9)                     Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
> >> (Flaubert)
> >>
> >> (10)                   Poetry is a means of overcoming chaos. (I.A.
> >> Richards, literary critic)
> >>
> >> (11)                    Poetry is what gets lost in translation. (Frost)
> >>
> >> (12)                    Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
> >> (Frost)
> >>
> >> (13)                    Genuine poetry communicates before it is
> >> understood. (Eliot)
> >>
> >> (14)                    Poetry is what heals by cauterising painful
> >> emotion.  (Felix Dennis - with apologies to Felix for my verbal
> >> shorthand)
> >>
> >> (15)                    Poetry is what makes you more human than you
> were
> >> before.  (Rush)
> >>
> >> (16)                    Poetry is what makes you fall back in love with
> >> life when you have fallen out of it.  (Rush again!)
> >>
> >> In addition to these landmarks, there were some general pronouncements
> on
> >> poets, all of which seemed to cast their various lights on my top-ten
> cull.
> >>
> >> (17)                   The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of
> >> imagination all compact.  (Shakespeare)
> >>
> >> (18)                   The poet's task is to take this bronze world and
> >> make it gold.  (Sidney)
> >>
> >> (19)                    To the poet nothing can be useless.  (Johnson)
> >>
> >> (20)                   The poet must preside over the thoughts and
> manners
> >> of future generations as a being superior to time and place.
> >>
> >> (21)                   The language of the age is never the language of
> >> poetry.  (Gray)
> >>
> >> (22)                   The language of the age is always the language of
> >> poetry!  (Wordsworth)
> >>
> >> (23)                   A poet is a man speaking to men.  (Wordsworth)
> >>
> >> (24)                   Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
> >> world.  (Shelley)
> >>
> >> There were others that sprang to mind.  But life is short - and weekends
> >> shorter.  There were, however, two passages about poetry which I've
> always
> >> kept on a bedside cabinet composed of little grey cells on the left-hand
> >> side of my brain.  One is from The Cave of Making by another old bugger,
> >>
> >> W.H. Auden:
> >>
> >> After all it's rather a privilege
> >> Amid the affluent traffic
> >> to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
> >> background noise for study
> >> or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
> >> cannot be 'done' like Venice
> >> or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly insists upon
> >> being read or ignored.
> >>
> >> The second passage is from a lecture given by A.E. Housman at Cambridge
> in
> >> or around - I think - 1932.  Housman said there was such a thing as sham
> >> poetry, a counterfeit deliberately manufactured and offered as a
> >> substitute, the best example of it being the kind of verse written
> between
> >> Samson Agonistes in 1671 and the Lyrical Ballads in 1798: the kind
> >> dominated by intelligence, which involved, as Matthew Arnold also wrote,
> >> 'some repressing and silencing of poetry ... some touch of frost to the
> >> imaginative life of the soul'.  The eighteenth century poets wrote not
> out
> >> of the depths but out of their heads, and poetry does not come out of
> the
> >> skull but out of the gut or soul.  If poetry came out of the head the
> >> Augustans would have written it rather better.  And when you look at the
> >> four eighteenth century poets who did write it better - Collins, Smart,
> >> Cowper and Blake - you see at once why they did so, why they were able
> to.
> >> You see the only thing they all had in common - they were all mad!
> >>
> >> Aha!  Remember Plato?  'He who without the Muses' madness in his soul
> >> comes knocking at the door of poetry, and thinks that art will make him
> >> anything fit to be called a poet, finds that poetry he indites in his
> sober
> >> senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.'
> >>
> >> It's dangerous to offer examples, but perhaps the last obvious madmen to
> >> write true poetry were Dylan Thomas and R S Thomas - both Welsh!  Larkin
> >> put himself into a most effective poetic straight-jacket, successfully
> >> creating the impression that he was almost sane.   But he wasn't.  He
> >> wasn't simply the intelligent Hull Grump.  He had the madness in his
> soul
> >> that Plato talked about.  I read many contemporary poets on the other
> hand,
> >> and find them dismayingly sane.  They have something to say but can't
> say
> >> them in the way that will move as Milton once moved.
> >>
> >> What is it about those six simple words of his - Housman asks - that
> >> almost draws tears?
> >>
> >> Nymphs and shepherd dance no more
> >>
> >> Is it that they evoke a sense of that older England which Felix writes
> >> about in one of my chosen poems?
> >> Housman gives the only answer he can:
> >> 'I can only say, because they are poetry, and find their way to
> something
> >> in men which is obscure and latent, something older than the present
> >> organisation of his nature.'
>



-- 
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
'Undercover of Lightness'
http://walleahpress.com.au/recent-publications.html
'Shikibu Shuffle'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/new-from-aboveground-press-shikibu.html