"Poetry is bunk." After Henry Ford.
"*Vraiment*,
Poetry can be so many more things
Than what people mostly believe it is."
--Anselm Hollo
Halvard Johnson
================
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<http://www.amazon.com/Remains-To-Be-Seen-Works/dp/1933132787/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367618323&sr=8-1&keywords=Halvard+Johnson>
New from Gradient Books
<http://gradientbooks.blogspot.fi/2014/06/halvard-johnson-songs-my-mother-taught.html>:
*Songs My Mother Taught Me*
Poems by Others . . . <http://anotherpoetrysite.blogspot.com/>
On Barcelona <http://onbarcelona.blogspot.com/> (submissions sought; email
to my address above)
Truck <http://halvard-johnson.blogspot.com/> (no submissions; new
drivers/editors monthly)
Entropy and Me <http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/>
Images without Words <http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com/>
Hal & Lynda's homepage <http://sites.google.com/site/halvardjohnson/Home>
Hamilton Stone Editions <http://www.hamiltonstone.org/>
Hamilton Stone Review <http://www.hamiltonstone.org/hsr.html>
<http://www.hamiltonstone.org/>Vida Loca Books
<https://sites.google.com/site/vidalocabooks/>
*Songs My Mother Taught Me
<http://gradientbooks.blogspot.fi/2014/06/halvard-johnson-songs-my-mother-taught.html>,
Remains
To Be Seen <http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/remains-to-be-seen.html>, *Sonnets
from the Basque & Other Poems <https://sites.google.com/site/vidalocabooks/>
*, *Mainly Black <https://sites.google.com/site/vidalocabooks/>, *Obras
Públicas <https://sites.google.com/site/vidalocabooks/>; **The Perfection
of Mozart's Third Eye and Other Sonnets
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/27039868/Halvard-Johnson-THE-PERFECTION-OF-MOZART-S-THIRD-EYE-Other-Sonnets>;
**Organ
Harvest with Entrance of Clones
<http://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Entrance-Clones-Halvard-Johnson/dp/0965404390/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283182804&sr=8-1>;
**Tango
Bouquet <https://sites.google.com/site/vidalocabooks/>; **Theory of Harmony
<https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://xpressed.wippiespace.com/fall04/theory1.pdf>;
**Rapsodie
espagnole
<https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://xpressed.wippiespace.com/rapsodi.pdf>;
**Guide
to the Tokyo Subway
<http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Tokyo-Subway-Other-Poems/dp/0971487316/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283183153&sr=1-3>;
**The
Sonnet Project
<https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://xpressed.wippiespace.com/hsonnet.pdf>;
**G(e)nome
<http://xpressed.wippiespace.com/fall03/genome.pdf>; **Winter Journey
<http://capa.conncoll.edu/johnson.winter.html>; **Eclipse
<http://capa.conncoll.edu/johnson.eclipse.html>; **The Dance of the Red
Swan <http://capa.conncoll.edu/johnson.dance.html>; **Transparencies &
Projections <http://capa.conncoll.edu/johnson.transp.html>*
On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 10:16 AM, Tim Allen <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Poetry is the attempt through language to retrieve what language has
> already taken away from us. (Tim Allen - epigraph to Default Soul from The
> Red Ceilings Press 2014)
>
> On 23 Jun 2014, at 13:42, Max Richards 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.’
>
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