Congrats on the new book, Andrew.
I gave up on definitions after a while because poetry kept outstripping them…
Just provided lots of poems…
(or what I thought were…)
Doug
On Jun 23, 2014, at 10:18 PM, Andrew Burke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuation 2 (UofAPress).
Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
Something else is out there
godamnit
And I want to hear it
C.D.Wright
|