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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) comments that in the Thirteenth-Century Quest of the Holy Grail, the wasteland motif has largely contracted into the figure of the maimed king. The…
Homer bequeaths to posterity one of the earliest visions of a wasteland, anticipating T. S. Eliot by three millennia. Eliot, incidentally, acknowledges his debt to Homer by…
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 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…
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 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.…
The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity. Paul Mariani. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2019. Ordinary Time: Poems. Paul Mariani. Eugene,…
When I first discovered Plato, I was delighted to learn that philosophy could be exciting, rather than boring. I learned that Plato wrote eloquently in praise of…