The Prose Thread
Barroom Hero
Posts: 76
A lot of good poetry here. Here is an assignment for English that I thought captured my feelings on literature and its significance.
Log on “Why Do We Read Literature?”
John Kennedy
Literature encompasses a broad range of written genres, each representing the wide spectrum of human faults and triumphs. These literary genres give light to what makes us a more feeling animal. Human beings are separate from the Earth’s animals because we have managed to develop intelligence and emotion; these developments make up the crowning achievement in our history: literature. We read literature only because we have to; it is a by-product of our instinctual human demands.
Literature is a medium that was invented from the distinctly human intellect and represents our most profound advances. It has taken hundreds upon hundreds of years to develop our language so that it sufficiently expresses our desires, motives, and cares. This long period of perfection has resulted in a language – one of many in the world – that has literary sources of interest, each interest feeding particular needs of certain individuals. But, intelligence alone does not make up the human psyche…
If we were an unfeeling, intelligent animal, we would have only written literature about constructions, building plans, how –to manuals. This is not the case, as is represented in recorded in human history – we feel pain, suffering, joy, and happiness. We read literature because we can identify with the emotions felt by the characters and the varying turns their lives go through. Shakespeare is still popular today - though he wrote for Elizabethan audiences – because the messages in his plays are not constrained by time; they speak on universal human emotions that people can identify with easily.
I sincerely believe that literature is a demand for the human person, that it must be appreciated to be fully human; hence, this is why the question should not be “Why do we read literature?” but “How could we not read literature?”
A bit redundant at the end there.:)
Log on “Why Do We Read Literature?”
John Kennedy
Literature encompasses a broad range of written genres, each representing the wide spectrum of human faults and triumphs. These literary genres give light to what makes us a more feeling animal. Human beings are separate from the Earth’s animals because we have managed to develop intelligence and emotion; these developments make up the crowning achievement in our history: literature. We read literature only because we have to; it is a by-product of our instinctual human demands.
Literature is a medium that was invented from the distinctly human intellect and represents our most profound advances. It has taken hundreds upon hundreds of years to develop our language so that it sufficiently expresses our desires, motives, and cares. This long period of perfection has resulted in a language – one of many in the world – that has literary sources of interest, each interest feeding particular needs of certain individuals. But, intelligence alone does not make up the human psyche…
If we were an unfeeling, intelligent animal, we would have only written literature about constructions, building plans, how –to manuals. This is not the case, as is represented in recorded in human history – we feel pain, suffering, joy, and happiness. We read literature because we can identify with the emotions felt by the characters and the varying turns their lives go through. Shakespeare is still popular today - though he wrote for Elizabethan audiences – because the messages in his plays are not constrained by time; they speak on universal human emotions that people can identify with easily.
I sincerely believe that literature is a demand for the human person, that it must be appreciated to be fully human; hence, this is why the question should not be “Why do we read literature?” but “How could we not read literature?”
A bit redundant at the end there.:)
Liberal Douchebags that Blame Bush for Everything are Useless Pieces of Trash. I Shit on You.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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ask NOT why we read literature!
ask how COULD we NOT read literature!
LOL
no no I'm sorry...
it was pretty good, though broad. It encompasses a great many ideas in a short space, kudos for that, I'm a very flow of conscious thought writer so I happen to meander a bit, though I keep my hallways of thought in one way traffic.
nice stuff.
When I write, it is all the things I would have said if I had the voice to do so. It is why no matter how many times I read my work, in my head it always sounds so correct, so apropos, though my voice cannot inflect the ennui that I propose.
I dream on the page. I fret, I nag, I worry the words as they go. Occasionally they burst furth as a supernova of lingual froth and I can barely control the pen or the typing hand, and it is they who hold the leash merely allowing me the sway as I sniff in the breeze. You have heard me say it before: I bleed.
Poetry is what all people would have said. There are people who read what we say and write and dream and do and say to themselves "why can I not do that? what is missing from me?" It is the quiet voice you must watch.
Poetry is self knowledge, however deprecating or even arrogant, it is true self on a page... if one is being honest. I believe false poetry to be easily seen from a distance and is therefore quickly discarded on approach.
Poets are artists in a window with glass planed through the soul.
Poetry is courage of word, thoughts that stay, opinions that may only matter briefly but to be remembered as long as the letters don't fade. Poetry is the art of realtime progression, a plotline that regards structure as a foundry, though limiting, and metaphor the freeing of caged captivity. Words are never as they seem and poetry is therefore proof that magic can exist.
People have asked me what I would do if all other things were taken from me...
I would write.
Yes, they say, but what if your writing was taken from you or lost?
I would die.
Poetry is my insanity on spread, my sanity enthralled. I am merely the conduit, the paper the lodestone, and all things flow through me. There is a force that contends me to write, compells me, to the point of wordlessness. I tend to babble, I am doing so now.
Poetry is and are the things I always wanted to say. I can tell someone that I love them better in a diary than I can in real life. I can relate fear or anticipation better on paper than in any ordinary conversation.
Oh there are the certain individuals, rare but true, that allow me to vent verbally as I do on the page, but I tend to get the wide-eyed-holy-shit-look-of-freak from most folks who hear me in such a state. I feel ashamed, as if I have been caught masturbating in public and then I feel angry because someone shat upon the thoughts that mean so much to me. Poetry is, therefore, self verification. These thoughts are mine and I share them because I feel that since they affect me so profoundly, there are times when my chest hurts I feel them so, that others MUST know, MUST be told. I cannot help it. It is my calling.
If ever I lost my hands, I would truly invent telepathy.
I now have the burn, I can feel the pain in my heart and the rise of the blood pressure as my mind seeks to find the volcanic plug and reduce it to ash here and now. I could go for days. I have gone for days.
This place... to find receptive eyes for the words that come to mine... I don't know what I would have done without it. I have written some of my best work in honor of those on this board and many times with the thought, admittedly, of trying desperately to blow people's minds, mine included. I wanted to write better than I ever have, say more things and mean more things than I ever have...
Funny thing is, I don't know if I've succeeded or not. I am very particular and sooner or later I may look at this work I've done and say to myself, it could have been better.
Even if it was all for love.
Poetry is frustration. This, here, all of us, you, me, we go outside and smell the world, those cracks in the sidewalks you can feel if you concentrate, right through your shoes... the ability to watch someone from across the room and KNOW them, make love to them with your mind... stepping aside on the sidewalk as someone approaches and knowing that the rest of your day may forever be altered because of it...
I cannot... I don't....
It's all poetry. Every last drop. And I suppose this was my page on which to breathe.
Some writers try to harness the human experience in Literature, but most human experience is not had to be written about. I know that's a stupid statement... but I think what i'm trying to say is that there are a huge number of people who wouldn't crack a book to save their so-called-human lives.
I read Literature for the emotion. The excitement, and the escape. I read poetry to know I'm not alone.
(edit)
Oh, and I write poetry because cool shit happens to me. LOL. Sometimes it ain't so cool, but it looks good on paper.
you'll never walk alone
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
i sure hope not
for whatever reason
i like people
you ain't snootin' hooty are ye na?
It's as simple as that, and any more heartfelt explanation is all my bum.
I don't wholeheartedly advocate a reliance in literary criticism on the universalising tendency, originally advocated by Ben Jonson in Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio, to proclaim as an unscrutinised truism that Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time" simply because his works seem to tell us what it is to be human. Cultural materialism is a relatively new critical methodology that attempts to discuss - very successfully and enlighteningly - the socio-political as much as cultural reasons why and how late twentieth- and early- twenty-first century readers relate to themes of political and social imbalance and conflict, or sexual and gender ambiguity and transgression.
There are reasons why certain Shakespeare plays are more assimilable into school and college syllabuses than others: We have traditionally said this is because they are the most "universal" of his works. But do we mean that we perceive ideological similarities between the world-view of the plays and our own time more easily in an early play such as "Richard II", with its themes of regime change and the ethics of usurpation by popular consent versus the right of the inept ruler to last their term of office unchallenged (cf. Brown vs. Blair), than another, near-contemporary play such as "King John" which seems to speak of a different age entirely?
Yes, we must consider how our own aesthetic criteria of what is "universal" literature is conditioned by the ideological assumptions of our own time, in our reception(s) of literatures from other historical periods.
Having said all this, I read for pleasure too.
lol, guess what my first and middle names are?
John Robert Kennedy.
Poetry tends to be so full of precise diction and tone, it seems singular in the amount of effect per word that it creates. Prose can produce similar effects but over a much longer piece of writing.
That's why it feels like I need to read some of the poems on this board twice or three times to comprehend them.
I love the sound of "ever developing consciousness." That's how everyone should live, rather than stagnate.
Poetry does not have to contain an ounce of syntax, structure, or rhyme. It doesn't have to meter, and it certainly doesn't have to be fixed in line patterning of any sort.
Poetry, as written, is the ability to exquisitely express, with sustained originality, the feelings that well within or without an individual, an evironment, or a situation. How it arrives on paper means nothing to its importance other than the way it is written is the form in which it is meant to appear. If there is indeed a purposeful layout, then ask why? Wherefore the cause or does it really move the ends to a more concrete destination? Meter can make a pome more appealing in context but only because it appeals to our symmetric and tonal/rhythmic sensibilities.
We were discussing Omeros a long while back. While it is indeed a poetic achievement, one of the reasons why is merely because of his alternating line rhyme patterning structures. I think that, sure, while this takes skill, it also limits the prose ability to communicate. I also think that the very fact that people were so impressed with such structure means that they were easily impressed by the prose in and of itself. Personally, I found the book overwrought and slightly arrogant due to its structure. While an interesting take, it wasn't even an original story, and I don't believe a retelling really deserves the Nobel Prize, though I could not really give you an emphatic or logical reason why. It is just a feeling.
I do not like walls. I prefer the ability to transcend, and that is why I am willing to have structure one moment, rhyme the next, and ethereal abstract all in the same space. It is how it is meant to be. I have had literary conservatives read my work in the past and it is 50/50 of who gets it and who does not. Those who focus on the actual words and read the pome for what it is, not how its built, they are the ones who will find its means, its uses, and its soul.
And as for that constantly developing consciousness, even breathing can teach a lesson if we allow it to do so.
To limit the definition of poetry to such dictionarial formats is to limit the ability of the poem to express itself, and it also demeans the work of lessered structured writers who have far more imagination and emotive ability than some of the "greatest" writers in history.
I do, however, agree with demonstrating that complex relationship between signifiers and the signified, though I also believe in the poetic fakeout
All in all, if a poem makes it to paper and has persona within it, it is not just a developing consciousness, it is a living creature unto itself.
and amen to lack of stagnation. Though even a pond has to stagnate occasionally to allow a growth cycle... something to think upon.
I did not say poetry has to contain syntax. Just the opposite. Poetry generates meaning via effects that foreground its self-conscious literariness and distance from prose language, via equivalences between small verbal units (and assonance is internal rhyme, you know). All texts have structure, even of intertextual or socio-cultural kinds as well as formal.
Poetry in metre is not just an aesthetic-ideological effect and its conventionality is central to the very essence of bardic folklore and myth tradition. It gives you something traditional to explode from within most dynamically. It also disciplines you to write something your audience is likely to want to listen to or read. You can be as subversive as you like within the thematic content of the poem them; form doesn't limit your expressive capabilities, unless you're crap.
I have never read an original piece of literature that hasn't found a new way of synthesising conventional generic elements in the pursuit of artistic innovation. I am the opposite of a literary conservative, and I feel that anyone who thinks that literature that is well-structured is "arrogant" is being arrogant themselves.
And I say that respectfully.
I did not offer a definition but a summative description of the difference between how poetry and prose works.
You say you do not like walls in poetry but there is a difference between semantically transcendent language that defies generic convention masterfully, eloquently exposing the unspeakable nature of the reality that lies beyond the silences in our discourse, and language that mixes its metaphors, is muddled to start with rather than programmatically interrogative of its own form, and which is impossible to read 90% of the time. I'm someone who's read Joyce. I've questioned the idea of unreadability. A work has to be bad for me to struggle with it.
No poetry has a single persona within it. Every single word we use contains a trace of every single other time and context in which we've heard it used before. The words are, to quote Louis Macneice, a real poet of the 1950s, "incorrigibly plural". If words didn't have seemingly infinite communicative potentiality, echoing the mythical structures, auditory imagination and collective unconscious of myriad societies throughout history, they would mean nothing. (And my notion of meaning has to do with the interferentiality of signs, not 'reality'.)
A good poet knows how to build a poem and then knows how to use the tools to say what they like with them. Form is a means to an end and not an end in itself. I would like to see people do an apprenticeship and learn how to write with humility and engaged interest at the feet of the great writers before proclaiming that they have devised a worthy alternative. Really.
And I have to say that "Omeros" is a cultural expression of an Archipelago sensibility that communicates to post-colonial readers and is of immediate political and cultural relevance as well as operating along the structures of classical myth.
If you're saying that the canon of literatures in English needs to be re-defined to include non-canonical writers whose work is worthy of consideration alongside familiar writers, I agree with that. But I would look to writings from the Caribbean, India and Africa first because I suspect there's plenty to discover there. And I'd avoid Beat poetry like the plague.
I consider you a much better poet than those Beats, seta. (Cynics might interject that that still doesn't say much: jk.) Now, I've said it before and I'll say it again. Let's have some writing from ya! Degas was a master painter and he still did 100 life drawings a day all his life, all of widely varying quality. Got to keep busy. Just write something light. It may end up being deeper than the heavy stuff, in fact, I'll bet my life on it.
I believe it was in that iconic movie in the history of Western cinema, "Throw Momma From The Train", that I heard the immortal line, "A writer writes."
Lord Finsbury
I love listening to a recording of the Clancy Brothers - and I forget which one was saying it, maybe it was Tommy Makem or Paddy Clancy - and he is trying to tell the audience about James Joyce's book about Finnegan's Wake. This is an introduction to the song they're about to sing, of course (which I can play
Finnegan's Wake
Tim Finnegan lived in Walkin' Street
A gentle Irishman mighty odd;
He'd a beautiful brogue both rich and sweet
And to rise in the world he carried a hod.
Now Tim had a sort of the tipplin' way
With a love of for the liquor poor Tim was born
And to help him on with his work each day
He'd a "drop of the cray-thur" every morn.
Whack fol the darn O, dance to your partner
Whirl the floor, your trotters shake;
Wasn't it the truth I told you
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake!
One mornin' Tim felt rather full
His head was heavy which made him shake;
He fell from the ladder and broke his skull
And they carried him home his corpse to wake.
They rolled him up in a nice clean sheet
And laid him out upon the bed,
A gallon of whiskey at his feet
And a barrel of porter at his head.
His friends assembled at the wake
And Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch,
First they brought in tay and cake
Then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch.
Biddy O'Brien began to cry
"Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see?
"O Tim, mavourneen, why did you die?"
Arragh, hold your gob said Paddy McGhee!
Then Maggie O'Connor took up the job
"O Biddy," says she, "You're wrong, I'm sure"
Biddy she gave her a belt in the gob
And left her sprawlin' on the floor.
And then the war did soon engage
'Twas woman to woman and man to man,
Shillelagh law was all the rage
And a row and a ruction soon began.
Then Mickey Maloney ducked his head
When a noggin of whiskey flew at him,
It missed, and falling on the bed
The liquor scattered over Tim!
The corpse revives! See how he raises!
Timothy rising from the bed,
Says,"Whirl your whiskey around like blazes
Thanum an Dhul! Do you thunk I'm dead?"
My question is, what does, "Thanum an Dhul" mean?
Maybe MacLeish says it better.
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves.
Memory by memory the mind--
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--
A poem should not mean
But be.