Essays on Writing In The Between: Poetry As The Key to Education (Essay XIV)
Essay 14: System and Vision My modest proposal for poetry —- that it be recognized as the center not the margin of public education —- is based…
Essays on Writing In The Between: Poetry As The Key to Education (Essay XIII)
Essay XIII: The School of Poetry and a Modest Proposal Finishing a poem is different from starting one. Once started in the givens of a situation or…
Essays on Writing In The Between: Poetry As The Key to Education (Essay XII)
Essay XII: The Poem as Image / Voice Bipolar expressions of poetic value dominate Lu Chi’s Classic “Art of Writing.” Scholars point to his “double harness” style…
Essays on Writing In The Between: Poetry As The Key to Education (Essay XI)
Essay X1: Revision towards the Other o Song Language is complex, not under our control. It reflects the universal impermanence. But it’s all relative. In the experience,…
Essays on Writing In The Between: Poetry As The Key to Education (Essay X)
Essay X: Intermission on Truth Is there “a” truth of poetry? An old question, as old as the questioning spirit. Man is the story teller in the…
Essays on Writing In The Between: Poetry As The Key to Education (Essay IX)
Essay IX: The Loom of Time and the Sense of Ending What distinguishes a work of art in the universal impermanence is resistance to the wearing down…
Essays on Writing In The Between: Poetry As The Key to Education (Essays VI-VIII)
Essay VI: Against Formalism (A Pep Talk) As a reader-writer you dwell in the midst of the universal impermanence. You are pulled hither and on by energies…
Essays on Writing In The Between: Poetry As The Key to Education (Essays I-V)
Essay I: Coming To Be Why write? Aside from the business of writing, in which the writer is an extension of corporate will, why write? Those called…
Simone Weil’s Metaxu (Basho, Heaney)
The Poem as Metaxu As one learns more and more about poetry, one begins to appreciate how a poem relates to a universe of poetry; we haltingly…
The Porosity of the Between with a Poem by Michael Longley
The short poem or ‘lyric,’ unlike the the genres accounted for in the poetics of antiquity, seems to lack identity other than brevity. But paradoxically in Plato’s…
The Poem as Metaxu with a Poem by Mary Oliver
As Sir Philip Sidney wrote (1580), summing up the tradition which was then new, the poet nothing affirmeth. This negative defense of poetry has proved worthy in…
The Wisdom of Lyric: Deryn Rees-Jones
The metaxy or between originated in Plato’s myth Socrates tells about when he consulted about love in The Symposium. Love was the offspring of Plenty and Want.…
R. S. Thomas and the Between: Welsh Poet and Anglican Priest (1913-2000)
From R S Thomas Collected Later Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). This superb reframing of a old genre (Ben Jonson loaded it with recusant intensity) recalls Desmond’s "intimate…
The Quest(ion) of Literary Form
In his final writings, Eric Voegelin was preoccupied with paradox as an irreducible aspect of his study of participation, the classical symbol of man’s identity in light…
Elizabeth Bishop and the Metaxy
Voegelin’s exposition of the metaxy (between) in In Search of Order could be summarized this way: the metaxy emerges from the writer’s search for order in experience. …