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7/11/2022 5 Comments Comfort FoodPoet's Petard for July 2022 Poetry is mostly known for its ability to excite, amuse and comfort. Right now, caught in a knot of history, with more than the average gut-punching controversies drawing down our emotional reserves, I would imagine people who normally never touch the stuff (poetry, I mean) are turning to poetry out of desperation. Yet, sometimes poetry's response to the agonizing cry “Is there Balm in Gilead?” is a resounding “Nope!” and the frown and kick to go with it. People are finding it unusually hard to develop into sane, compassionate, clear, humble and steadfast adults. How can we best make use of poetry to help us out? I'd like to offer you a few quotations from my personal trove of “words that comfort me even if I don't know exactly why.” This first one is a little nerdy, but every time I read it. . . .well, you'll see:
Here are the opening lines of a poem by Wang Wei (701-761) translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell:
Here are three from my own collection of poetry orphans. I call “parentheses” because the only thing they share is a kind of incipient randomness, like a collection of tips of icebergs*
*Footnote: Some poets have made up their own name for those groupings of words that don't quite get to 'hold down' a formal category. Mine has been “parentheses,” but others might be “studies,” “dispatches,”“monologues,” “perambulations,” “doors,” “liminals,” “short takes,” “centuries,” “conjugations.” Many poets make up their own forms as a kind of temporary generating discipline, Certain persona poems also serve this need – to act as poetic “trellises” that offer support to ideas that would likely never emerge in any other way.
5 Comments
Susan Kline
7/11/2022 08:08:34 pm
Comfort is where you find it. My parents sang in a lot of choirs, including a big church choir when I was 3 and my sister was five. My dad was in grad school, money was at a premium, and so they took us to choir practice, sending us to the nursery room, which was right next to the sanctuary where the practice took place. So large choral pieces (Fauré or Brahms Requiems, Handel's Messiah, and so on) have always had a particular magic for me. And we had a few family jokes from that time, as well, one of which you just triggered: "There is a BOMB in Gilead." And, driving along a pleasantly rural hilly, curvy little road in Ontario, chatting with my friend who also knew Handel's Messiah, roughly: "Make the curved places straight, and the high places low, and the rough places plain, and the low places high, to make a HIGHWAY for our God."
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Anita Sullivan
7/14/2022 02:10:13 pm
Thanks, Ce and Susan! Here in Western Oregon we have a line from Handel's 'Messiah' : "And It Shall Rain Forever." Is this what you call a Spoonerism?
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Gary Lark
10/24/2022 03:10:24 pm
Breakfast
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