Dear Mike,
re: poetry and our usual concerns
At university I did not enjoy the poetic canon. In 1971 I struggled to write anything about Gerard Manley Hopkins!
Dylan's lyrics and Jim Morrison's spoke louder.
After age 40 though, Robert Bly opened many doors.
At age 66 this evening he connected William Blake and your own closing, "Girls, girls, girls"
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.
2 comments:
One of the most beautiful and meaningful segments of poetry I've ever read. Blake was the Man.
And I'm still pissed off at the guy who interrupted Coleridge just when he had started to write Kubla Khan based on an opium-influenced dream he'd had after reading about Xanadu.
The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines.
So, some poetry has stirred me, other examples would include Sunflower Sutra, Spoon River Anthology, and Sylvia Plath's Ariel.
When I was at NYU I would go to the New Year's East Village poetry reading every year. Poetry is meant to be read aloud.
Joseph Campbell said poets were the modern myth makers, but didn't give a simple example.
But my reaction to most poetry is the same an anyone else's - say what ? A private club with its own rules and its own rules for breaking the rules, bickering over whose poetry should be celebrated.
Mary Anne Cartelli, who fairly recently published a huge book of translated Chinese poems, dropped out of the graduate poetry program at Columbia because her famous advisor was an "arrogant ass", as were other acclaimed poets she met.
PS You mention Dylan, who of course has won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Jim Morrison was not a legit poet - he tried, it didn't work out but he wrote some great songs.
People Are Strange captures a feeling of being invisible and disconnected better than anything I've ever read by anyone.
"Faces come out of the rain" is one of the great phrases in rock history.
20th Century Fox captures a certain kind of modern woman with humor and devastating accuracy.
This is the End: Apocalypse Now, enough said.
Loved his celebration of female beauty and sexuality - She Lives on Love Street and Hello I Love You.
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