Amos J. Hunt @RibaldFirecow@mastodon.social
poet. tutor. aspiring cyclone.
Send me a toot you wrote and think is neat.
I'll try to make it rhyme and have five feet.
My new Dr. Who Sonnet up today at https://whosonnets.tumblr.com
probably should have CW'd this as "language pedantry" but oh well
If you didn't have at least a little shame, you wouldn't say "shameless self-promotion" about your thing. You'd just promote it.
Courage, come stand me as I stir the world's pot.
Set your solid back to the rim and hold fast.
Let's not lose a drop. Let the ladle pull deep,
scraping the bottom.
Before you saw Yevgenia Medvedeva
astounding air, unraveling gravity,
you thought you'd seen a figure skater.
She is what music and ice were made for.
@scearley hello! I used to follow you on the birdsite when I was @ineffabilliken there.
Found a nice spot outside to fall deep into a reverie. A poem is on its way.
A longer poem tonight, too long to toot.
Candle flame, you bodiless creature: bless you!
Unreluctantly you release your whole self.
Your entire existence is nothing but this
constant bestowal.
Never have you stopped to admire your own light,
never dreamed of clinging in vain to false gold.
Every moment, ever again you give God
glory forever.
Candle flame, you bodiless creature: bless you!
Unreluctantly you release your whole self.
Your entire existence is nothing but this
constant bestowal.
Never have you stopped to admire your own light,
never dreamed of clinging in vain to false gold.
Every moment, ever again you give God
glory forever.
Water out of nowhere is flowing through me.
Though my soul is nothing but salt and sackcloth,
somehow still a freshness befalls my footsteps,
fills them to brimming.
Anyway, thus spake the flaming cow emoji ball
Why do we all know (or think we know) the play Oedipus Rex, but Oedipus at Colonus is completely absent from the popular mind? Its contents go far beyond what modern psychology needed from Oedipus Rex in order to prop itself up with the authority of classical literature.
What we now call "unconscious mind," Sophocles had already observed and poetically approached in the Oedipus cycle. It is precisely because Sophocles had already made this tremendous spiritual advance that psychology found it necessary to appropriate Oedipus Rex and make it emblematic of modern psychological analysis.
But in this act of appropriation, psychology cut poetry out of the poem, and thus obscured the very phenomenon it was pretending to explain.
Explaining poetry in terms of "the unconscious mind" is only the rhetorical gesture of explanation without any real content. Worse, it is a pretense that the most magnificently wild and expansive phenomenon of human life has already been circumscribed and tamed by science.
Poetry properly speaks out of the place that psychology is trying to point to when it speaks of "unconscious mind."
To be clear, there is not and cannot be any such thing as an unconscious mind. This is such an obvious contradiction in terms that it is strange how seriously the idea is usually taken. (Mind is precisely that which is conscious, so unconscious mind would not be a mind.) But the idea does correspond to a genuine phenomenon which modern psychology has observed and tried to study.
Every year on my born-day I give my mum a rosebush or little tree to plant in the garden. It's my silly way to thank her for giving life to me.
I think it started when I was in high school.
I remember running around the garden and jumping over those little trees. But one grew so tall and strong I'd climb up and peek into our neighbour's yard.
Sometimes I drive past my childhood home just to see how that dumb tree is doing.
Trying to write a poem about the simplicity and inscrutability of the sun < Trying to write a poem about being unable to write a poem about the simplicity and inscrutability of the sun < Posting on Mastodon about trying to write a poem about being unable to write a poem about the simplicity and inscrutability of the sun
Pan-Trying
Driven wild by fire as they strike the hot pan,
water droplets volley across the cast-iron,
leaping with the speed of the resurrected
souls of the blessed.
He fed my dog, and asked me, "How's the band?"
A stranger, almost. Almost like a friend.
based on a toot by @dogtrax
https://
mastodon.social/@dogtrax/19083
151
(Hope you don't mind a slant rhyme. It seems truer to the quality of the original.)
