BREATH - Poetry

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The poems in Cian Ferriter’s pamphlet (winner of the Fool for Poetry Chapbook) have a dark beauty and power. Emotionally compelling and rich with fresh and visually successful images, these poems often surprise us by making a shift from one place or time to another.’ Notwithstanding his essay’s predominately literary focus, Olson’s ultimate interest in the concept of “Projective Verse” is phenomenological, something that becomes especially clear in an unpublished prose piece from 1965, “The Projective, in Poetry and in Thought; and the Paratactic.” Here Olson develops a notion of “practice” that far outstrips the emphasis on verse-making of the 1950 essay: Try it for yourself, anywhere is a good start. Try by using a specific subject to guide you, like the ones we looked at before. You could begin with gratitude. Now, we know from our mindfulness and meditation practice, gratitude helps us see more clearly. Goblin Market and Other Poems was the first collection of her poetry to be published, and it was the book that brought her to public attention. She went on to influence a range of later poets, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ford Madox Ford, and Elizabeth Jennings. Philip Larkin was an admirer, praising her ‘steely stoicism’. In many languages, including Arabic and modern European languages, poets use rhyme in set patterns as a structural element for specific poetic forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of structural rhyme is not universal even within the European tradition. Much modern poetry avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. [77] Rhyme entered European poetry in the High Middle Ages, due to the influence of the Arabic language in Al Andalus. [78] Arabic language poets used rhyme extensively not only with the development of literary Arabic in the sixth century, but also with the much older oral poetry, as in their long, rhyming qasidas. [79] Some rhyming schemes have become associated with a specific language, culture or period, while other rhyming schemes have achieved use across languages, cultures or time periods. Some forms of poetry carry a consistent and well-defined rhyming scheme, such as the chant royal or the rubaiyat, while other poetic forms have variable rhyme schemes. [80]

Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, [27] as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. [28] Later poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry from, and defined it in opposition to prose, which they generally understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and a linear narrative structure. [29] Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, simply known as “Rumi”, was a 13th-century Persian poet, Isamic scholar, Maturidi theologian, and Sufi mystic. The Guest HouseBase: Mindfulness is being aware of the present moment without judgment. It’s not always easy to do, especially when we are stressed out or anxious. We can practice mindfulness by taking time to focus on our breathing, noting what is around us, or simply having open awareness. To read a mindful poem with full attention is to be in the present moment without judgement, simply aware of the music of the words. Mindfulness poems ask, even demand, of us attention that excludes the outside world, the mundane and complex worries of living in this moment and time. They invite us into a world of raw beauty or emotions, challenging us to improve ourselves through their carefully chosen language. Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versification, what rules and holds together the lines, the larger forms, of a poem. I would suggest that verse here and in England dropped this secret from the late Elizabethans to Ezra Pound, lost it, in the sweetness of meter and rime, in a honey-head. (The syllable is one way to distinguish the original success of blank verse, and its falling off, with Milton.)

Metrical rhythm generally involves precise arrangements of stresses or syllables into repeated patterns called feet within a line. In Modern English verse the pattern of stresses primarily differentiate feet, so rhythm based on meter in Modern English is most often founded on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (alone or elided). [45] In the classical languages, on the other hand, while the metrical units are similar, vowel length rather than stresses define the meter. [46] Old English poetry used a metrical pattern involving varied numbers of syllables but a fixed number of strong stresses in each line. [47] Marianne MooreIt comes to this, this whole aspect of the newer problems. (We now enter, actually, the large area of the whole poem, into the FIELD, if you like, where all the syllables and all the lines must be managed in their relations to each other.) It is a matter, finally of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used. This is something I want to get to in another way in Part II, but, for the moment, let me indicate this, that every element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality; and that these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world. Alliteration is the repetition of letters or letter-sounds at the beginning of two or more words immediately succeeding each other, or at short intervals; or the recurrence of the same letter in accented parts of words. Alliteration and assonance played a key role in structuring early Germanic, Norse and Old English forms of poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry interweave meter and alliteration as a key part of their structure, so that the metrical pattern determines when the listener expects instances of alliteration to occur. This can be compared to an ornamental use of alliteration in most Modern European poetry, where alliterative patterns are not formal or carried through full stanzas. Alliteration is particularly useful in languages with less rich rhyming structures. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. A Gloucester fisherman named also in “Letter 20” of the Maximus poems ( MAX 89, 91), in “The Morning News” ( CP 122), and in Olson’s 1936 “Journal of Swordfishing Cruise on the Doris M. Hawes” ( OJ 7:10, 19).

The poems, or poetic fragments, in Savage Tales seem to quiver with a strange, uncanny sense that something is always about to happen. Bergin’s third collection manages to be both compelling and disturbing and yet also, somehow, filled with joy too.’ Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearean iambic pentameter and the Homeric dactylic hexameter to the anapestic tetrameter used in many nursery rhymes. However, a number of variations to the established meter are common, both to provide emphasis or attention to a given foot or line and to avoid boring repetition. For example, the stress in a foot may be inverted, a caesura (or pause) may be added (sometimes in place of a foot or stress), or the final foot in a line may be given a feminine ending to soften it or be replaced by a spondee to emphasize it and create a hard stop. Some patterns (such as iambic pentameter) tend to be fairly regular, while other patterns, such as dactylic hexameter, tend to be highly irregular. [64] Regularity can vary between language. In addition, different patterns often develop distinctively in different languages, so that, for example, iambic tetrameter in Russian will generally reflect a regularity in the use of accents to reinforce the meter, which does not occur, or occurs to a much lesser extent, in English. [65] Alexander Pushkin So there we are, fast, there’s the dogma. And its excuse, its usableness, in practice. Which gets us, it ought to get us, inside the machinery, now, 1950, of how projective verse is made.it is close, another way: the mind is brother to this sister and is, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpener . . .

The poem, with its recurring refrain to ‘sleep safe till tomorrow’, might be thought of as a lullaby. Leland Bardwell brings together the work of this inimitable Irish poet in this, her centenary year. Her unique view of people and circumstances is sharply conveyed in her work.’ Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American lyric poet whose work is often overlooked in discussions of twentieth-century American poetry. Yet at its best, Teasdale’s work has a lyricism and beauty which can rival that of many poets of her time. Here she meditates on the calm that a deep peace brings: it led Keats, already a hundred years ago, to see it (Wordsworth’s, Milton’s) in the light of “the Egotistical Sublime”;[3] and it persists, at this latter day, as what you might call the private-soul-at-any-public-wall)It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problem, the moment he takes speed up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is not easy. Nature works from reverence, even in her destruction (species go down with a crash). But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size. Ange Mlinko’s sixth collection, confirms her as a major American poet. Working in received forms – exploring myth, war, love and loss – her combination of technical virtuosity, humour and tenderness, make her the poetic grandchild of James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop.’ Christina Rossetti (1830-94) was one of the Victorian era’s greatest and most influential poets. She was the younger sister (by two years) of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She composed her first poem while still a very young girl; she dictated it to her mother. It ran simply: ‘Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.’