We live our lives as the unique, “one-off” human being that we are. There has never been, and there will never be another you. You and I are the summation of a long intersection of confluences, lost in the recesses of historical time of your ancestors. We are also the result of coincidences, that…
It is the world of the imagination in which the imaginative man/woman delights and not the gaunt world of reason. The pleasure is the pleasure of powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by the reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation. The morality of the poet’s radiant…
There is life apart from politics. It is this life that the youth as virile poet lives, in a kind of radiant and productive atmosphere. It is the life of that atmosphere. There the philosopher is an alien. The pleasure that the poet has there is a pleasure of agreement with the radiant and…
Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins – 1844-1889 Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter,…
I am reading a collection of essays by Wallace Stevens, a poet of the 20th century. His insights into what words do for us “knocks me out.” I think these few lines written about poetry suggest the relationship between poetry and philosophy. The promise of reason is that we may clarify what must be…
Slept fitfully last night, but that is not unusual. Perhaps that was due to elevated blood sugar that I measured just before my breakfast of cheerios. I’ve been diabetic for a while, and controlling blood sugar is like staying on a pitching rodeo bull. I am thrown often, and I know that I will…
If we say the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all…
Continuing to think about my time at the drag strip Saturday afternoon…. Anticipation was in the air, — that adrenaline sizzle as I waited for 20 minutes in a long line of cars and pickup trucks to pay entry admission to the track. Excitement is contagious. They came out — dare I say, for…
Yesterday I visited Great Lakes Drag-a-Way at Union Grove Wisconsin. This past summer was the first year that I failed to visit the track at least once, in many summers. My first visit to a drag strip took place in my sophomore year of high school. I was hooked. I loved everything about it. The…
There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live, or, as I ought to say, no doubt, from the world in which we shall come to live, since what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he…
