Rockwell Kent (1882-1971)
Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273)
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that
grass,
the world is too full to talk
about.
Ideas, language, even the
phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
In Praise of Self-Deprecation by Wislawa
Szymborska (1923-2012)
The buzzard has nothing to fault
himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black
panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of
their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself
without reservations.
The self-critical jackal does not
exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina,
horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.
The killer whale's heart weighs one
hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.
There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.
The Three
Oddest Words
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.
(Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh)
See also "The Joy of Writing, " by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska:
The Author of American Ornithology Sketches a Bird,
Now Extinct David Wagoner
When he walked through town, the wing-shot bird he'd hidden
Inside his coat began to cry like a baby,
High and plaintive and loud as the calls he'd heard
While hunting it in the woods, and goodwives stared
And scurried indoors to guard their own from harm.
And the innkeeper and the goodmen in the tavern
Asked him whether his child was sick, then laughed.
Slapped knees, and laughed as he unswaddled his prize,
His pride and burden: an ivory-billed woodpecker
As big as a crow, still wailing and squealing.
Upstairs, when he let it go in his workroom,
it fell silent at last. He told at dinner
How devoted masters of birds drawn from the life
Must gather their flocks around them with a rifle
And make them live forever inside books.
Later, he found his bedspread covered with plaster
And the bird clinging beside a hole in the wall
Clear through to already-splintered weatherboards
And the sky beyond. While he tied one of its legs
To a table leg, it started wailing again.
And went on wailing as if toward cypress groves
While the artist dew and tinted on fine vellum
Its red cockade, gray claws, and sepia eyes
From which a white edge flowed to the lame wing
Like light flying and ended there in blackness.
He drew and studied for days, eating and dreaming
Fitfully through the dancing and loud drumming
Of an ivory bill that refused pecans and beetles,
Chestnuts and sweet-sour fruit of magnolias,
Riddling his table, slashing his fingers, wailing.
He watched it die, he said, with great regret.
Good afternoon!
Today we will review the pieces assigned last week, including "The White Heron," and review the quizzes. I will return essay 2, graded. Not a very recent story here (2014), but an ironic one, about a former teacher and his friend whose argument over the relative merits of prose and poetry grew murderous. We cannot assume that literature makes us better people, I guess!
Famous Ballads: http://poetry.about.com/od/poemtypes/a/Ballads.htm
Camille Paglia on "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness" in the 1960's: http://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/paglia_cults-1.pdf
Note: If you have selected the piece for recitation you can earn extra credit points by giving it a practice run before the class and calling for feedback. *-*
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