BREATH - Poetry

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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. The word patience means “to endure” or “to bear”. It can also mean “to wait for”, “to tolerate”, or “to put up with”. In Buddhism, mindfulness is defined as being aware of what is happening right now. It is not thinking about the past or worrying about the future. It is simply being present in the moment. When we use mindfulness poetry to cultivate patience, we learn to wait and be aware in the present moment, so we can truly experience it and gain the benefits of life. 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. In the Western poetic tradition, meters are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical foot and the number of feet per line. [53] The number of metrical feet in a line are described using Greek terminology: tetrameter for four feet and hexameter for six feet, for example. [54] Thus, " iambic pentameter" is a meter comprising five feet per line, in which the predominant kind of foot is the " iamb". This metric system originated in ancient Greek poetry, and was used by poets such as Pindar and Sappho, and by the great tragedians of Athens. Similarly, " dactylic hexameter", comprises six feet per line, of which the dominant kind of foot is the " dactyl". Dactylic hexameter was the traditional meter of Greek epic poetry, the earliest extant examples of which are the works of Homer and Hesiod. [55] Iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter were later used by a number of poets, including William Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, respectively. [56] The most common metrical feet in English are: [57] Homer: Roman bust, based on Greek original [58] Kate’s collection merges poetry with the fragile remains of nature — leaves, shells, plant stems — to speak about wilderness as a platform for reflection.’

The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride. Translated by May-Brit Akerholt. Poem of the Week. 52 poems throughout the year Take part in a weekly journey through 52 poems by authors from Norway throughout 2019 – Norway’s year as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. From the time when the earliest texts were recorded in runic inscriptions, poetry has had a strong position in Norway. By introducing a new poem each week throughout 2019, we aim to highlight the quality and breadth of Norwegian poetry. «Poem of the Week» presents 52 poems, inspired by the changing seasons and the passing of the year. The selection has been made by Tone Carlsen and Annette Vonberg, and consists of poems from the earliest handwritten manuscripts up until today, with a special emphasis on contemporary poetry.

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Charles Olson’s influential manifesto, “Projective Verse,” was first published as a pamphlet, and then was quoted extensively in William Carlos Williams’ Autobiography (1951). The essay introduces his ideas of “composition by field” through projective or open verse, which is a continuation of the ideas of poets Ezra Pound, who asked poets to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome,” and William Carlos Williams, who proposed in 1948 that a poem be approached as a “field of action.” Olson’s projective verse focuses on “certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.” In this article we will walk you through how poems about mindfulness can be helpful for you in your daily meditation practice, go over some of the most well known poets of mindfulness poetry and how you can write you own poetry to deepen your practice. Why Mindfulness Poetry Matters 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: Although not a rhyming poem, Breath presents us with a deliberately bold choice of rhyme in its opening tercet: “What is death, / but a letting go / of breath?” The choice is bold for a contemporary writer, because “death” and “breath” have such a long history of cohabitation in Anglophone verse. Partly because the stanza encapsulates a question – rhetorical but not uninteresting – the familiar rhyme and its antithesis seem to make a fresh start.

The objects which occur at every given moment of composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem, must be handled as a series of objects in field in such a way that a series of tensions (which they also are) are made to hold, and to hold exactly inside the content and the context of the poem which has forced itself, through the poet and them, into being. And the joker? that it is in the 1st half of the proposition that, in composing, one lets-it-rip; and that it is in the 2nd half, surprise, it is the LINE that’s the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control, that it is right here, in the line, that the shaping takes place, each moment of the going. 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). 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 The year 1910 (Olson’s own birth year) is in many ways a magnet, accruing facts the way a magnet gathers iron filings. In his 1946 poem “La Préface,” Olson drew the date thus:

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you their bad advice- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles.

In late-January 2019, I was invited to join the Durham and Derwentside Breathe Easy group for lunch at The Red Lion pub in Plawsworth, Co. Durham. Over scampi and chips, we began the process of reading and writing poetry about chronic breathlessness. Our aim was to make the invisible visible, and the seemingly unshareable shareable: by using the right words, by choosing the most striking images, by writing in the most powerful of voices. The group’s chair Jill Gladstone opened the group up to the possibilities of poetry with this: 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.’

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Something like it anyway wld be the dream of the success of what is also the usefulness, of what I have called the Projective (Storrs, Prose Series) The following three poems show a range of the vocabularies and images BE members used, to foreground themselves and their conditions: But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse (always, that Egyptian thing, it produces twins!). The other child is the LINE. And together, these two, the syllable and the line, they make a poem, they make that thing, the—what shall we call it, the Boss of all, the “Single Intelligence.” And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination. A: “Look again” from her book ‘Wild Geese’. This poem is about being present and aware of life and living in the moment. It reminds us to take time to stop, breathe deeply and reflect on our lives. Gratitude is a wonderful thing that we can learn to cultivate. It makes us happy because we are grateful for what we have and how much we appreciate our life. We can’t help but smile when we are thankful but it’s also important for our mental health, giving us a moment of peace from daily anxiety. When we use and recite mindful poems we an make a connection between the words of the poem and our practice of grateful living.