Why poetry?

Poetry (I'm learning now I've graduated) isn't something you run across often outside of the classroom. But poetry is meant for more than just Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 3:00-4:00 so here is a place to always find poems and suggestions of more places to seek them out. You can agree or disagree with my choices, but my hope is that you'll be inspired to let poetry (the poems I find or ones you find on your own) be a part of your every day.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

from "My Emily Dickinson" by Susan Howe

If you love, like, or at least appreciate Emily Dickinson, this poem will give your brain something to mull over. Lots to think about here so take the poem slowly and enjoy.

from My Emily Dickinson
by Susan Howe

When I love a thing I want it and I try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from

the universal is the entrance into evil. Love, a binding force, is both envy and
emulation. HE (the Puritan God) is a realm of mystery and will always remain
unknowable, authoritiarian, unpredictable. Between revealed will and secret will
Love has been torn in two.

DUALISM: Pythagoras said that all things were divisible into two genera,
good and evil; in the genus of good things he classified all perfect things
such as light, males, repose, and so forth, whereas in the genus of evil
he classified darkness, females, and so forth.
(Thomas Aquinas, “On the Power of God,” p. 84)

Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean. What is the communal
vision of poetry if you are curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine. I go in
disguise. Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and
knowledge broken, visionary energy lost, Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse.
First I find myself a Slave, next I understand my slavery, finally I re-discover
myself at liberty inside the confines of known necessity. Gun goes on thinking of
the violence done to meaning. Gun watches herself watching.

Found at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238560

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