Posts labeled Poetry
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"Dante in meditation"
"The Divina Commedia contains a large number of cryptograms which have never, so far as I know, been noticed.... A cryptogram, or hidden writing, is a deliberate arrangement of words, letters, numbers, or other signs, which is intended to conceal as well as express a meaning.... Among the cryptograms which I have discovered in the Divina Commedia are acrostics, telestics, interior sequences, anagrams, irregular letter clusters, string ciphers, and cabalistic spelling devices.
I am far from assuming that the cryptograms which I have discovered are all that Dante made.... The announcement that the Divina Commedia is teeming with cryptograms is likely, I am aware, to be met with incredulity."
--Walter Arensberg, The Cryptography of Dante (1921)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
Love Letter to the Milky Way Book Tour
Drew will be touring the galaxy (or at least this corner of it) to launch the BRAND NEW EDITION of love letter to the milky way, out now on White Cloud Press. Come see Drew at one of these events, and support Drew's work by giving copies of love letter to the milky way as the perfect gift!
TOUR SCHEDULE
Check back often for updates, as new dates/events are being added on a regular basis!
Occupy Wall Street Drew Dellinger
We need global
citizens for some sit-ins
again.
I say we all meet
on Wall Street
and lock down--
lock the whole block down!
[Drew Dellinger, 2001]
I take exception to the rule
of the greedy and the cruel.
This fall, school’s in session
and the lesson is Wall Street.
It’s time for action
and your name’s on the call sheet.
It’s time we all meet
and name what it is:
the game has been rigged
to enrich corporate
business interests that sent this economy spinning.
Charlie Sheen is not the only clueless dude that thinks he’s winning.
See, the one percent done spent all the rent.
And now the rent’s due, so we’re coming to a tent near you.
We’re the like-minded ninety-nine percent
standing up to corruption with loving dissent.
We stand for justice,
and the future,
and all of humanity.
Embracing all people.
Yes, even Sean Hannity.
The message is simple:
greed, injustice, and eco-destruction have to go.
Pay attention corporate media. We’ll try to say it slow.
It’s time to
rock the nation,
rock this occupation.
It’s time for the people to peacefully fight back.
Tell Congress and the media we’re taking the mic back.
Tell the jaded it’s that long-awaited revolution.
Put away the pepper spray and re-read the Constitution.
These cops are paid to go crazy, yo.
But we’re peaceful.
Don’t tase me, bro.
We came to incite insight,
unite and discuss this.
We came to hang, and to bang the drums of justice.
Let’s occupy
with our love and our light.
Let’s occupy
the earth and the sky,
and live with all beings
as a planet-wide tribe.
Occupy the divine mind residing inside.
See, I’m the type writer
that’s known to light fires
and prone to inspire
the moment’s own higher desire.
‘Cause history knows it’s the time
for resisting the team at the scene of the crime.
Tell your friends I’ll meet ‘em there at Freedom Square.
They can’t stop us, from Seattle to Chiapas.
It’s our mission to envision
what comes after the catastrophe.
How do we move past
the capitalist disaster?
Our communities need us.
We are all leaders.
How could we ask for anything less than the future?
--Drew Dellinger
(October 13, 2011) www.planetizethemovement.org #OWS copyright c 2011
As an independent scholar and renegade researcher, there's nothing I love more than coming across a super-cool book I've never seen before, especially if it's old, and awesome, and I get it for 25 cents at a library book sale.
Check out these quotes from The Situation of Poetry, a 1955 work by Raissa and Jaques Maritain. (I had known something of J. Maritain as an influence on Martin Luther King Jr., and also, Thomas Berry had mentioned to me that Maritain had influenced him. I did not know that Maritain had written on poetry.)
The Situation of Poetry:
Four Essays on the Relations between Poetry, Mysticism, Magic, and Knowledge
by Jaques and Raissa Maritain
"Poetry is the fruit of a contact of the spirit with reality, which is in itself ineffable, and with the source of reality, which we believe to be God himself in that movement of love which causes him to create images of his beauty. That which is thus conceived in the mysterious retreats of being is expressed with a certain savory illogic, which is not nonsense but a superabundance of sense."
--Raissa Maritain, p. 21
And check out this great quote from a footnote on p. 29:
"The originals of the images and forms which the language of dreams, poetry, and prophecy employs are found in the Nature which surrounds us and which appears to us like a world of Dream incarnate: like a prophetic language whose hieroglyphs were beings and forms."
--G. H. von Schubert, quoted in The Situation of Poetry (1955)
“Instinctively rather than reflectively he had reached the conclusion that the whole universe was for him not object but subject—it was he."
--Romain Rolland, on Walt Whitman, in The Life of Vivekananda (1931)
same moon
the same moon
that shone in the New
Mexico sky, shimmering
into silvery existence
in a tray of Ansel Adams' developer
the same moon that illuminated
the apples of Eden,
the same moon that shines upon my
lover in Bolinas
that inspired poet-monks
to drink and write
the same moon that rose for the goddesses and heroes
climbs the sky
above the bay
outside my door.
--Drew Dellinger
July 13, 2011
"All sorts of people can write a great song. It took Bob Dylan to rewrite our idea of what a great song can be."
--Jon Pareles
"Archetypal metaphors seem to have a special rhetorical potency.... According to [Michael] Osborn, the primary sources of archetypal metaphors are derived from the fundamental human experience of water and the sea, light and darkness, the human body, war and peace, animals, the family, mountains, sexuality, and the relationships between above and below and forward and backward."
--John Louis Luciates & Celeste Michelle Condit
blossoms in winter?
climate change has my haiku
all kinds of confused.
"Repetition is the fundamental phenomenon of poetic form... All the principles that have been or may be used to generate formal structure in poetry are describable in terms of the repetition of either a certain physical feature of language--as in rhyme and alliteration--or a relationship among such features--as in stress patterns and syllable counts."
--Barbara Herrnstein Smith
the hovering moon
i don't know how it hangs there
there's much i don't know
"Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,"
--Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill"
Drake, "Forever," featuring some guys, and Eminem who KILLS IT (starting at 4:54). There's a reason that Shady raps last on this song. Nice track.
What are some of your favorite songs of 2010?
Arlo Guthrie Never heard this cover before! Arlo sings Bob's brilliance in grand fashion. The lyrics are stunning.
come into the consciousness of clouds. enter the frequency of the flickering flame.
"A mind persuaded that is lives among things that, like words, are essentially significant, and that what they signify is the magic attraction, called love, which draws all things after it, is a mind poetic in its intuition, even if its language be prose. The science and philosophy of Dante did not have to be put into verse in order to become poetry: they were poetry fundamentally and in their essence."
--George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe (1910)
"That should be the world's national anthem, the world's global anthem."
--Rachel Kohn, ABC Radio National, Australia,
After hearing John Seed recite "Word to the Mother," by Drew Dellinger.
(April 18, 2010)
The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, Constantine, et al, eds. (Norton, 2010)
excerpt:
When I heard you were dead, Heraclitus,
tears came, and I remembered how often
you and I had talked the sun to bed.
Long ago you turned to ashes, my Halicarnassian friend,
but your poems, your Nightingales, still live.
Hades clutches all things yet can't touch these.
--Callimachus
(third century BCE; translated by Edmund Keeley)
Lucille Clifton died February 13, 2010, at 73 years old. She was an amazing poet. If you haven't checked her out, you might enjoy doing so. Below is a poem from Ms. Clifton. Blessings for her journey and gratitude for her truth-telling voice.
the earth is a living thing
is a black shambling bear
ruffling its wild back and tossing
mountains into the sea
is a black hawk circling
the burying ground circling the bones
picked clean and discarded
is a fish black blind in the belly of water
is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal
is a black and living thing
is a favorite child
of the universe
feel her rolling her hand
in its kinky hair
feel her brushing it clean
--Lucille Clifton
"Through the wild cathedral evening, the rain unraveled tales."
--Bob Dylan, "Chimes of Freedom"
February 2, 1968
In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
--Wendell Berry
I Walk Out Into the Country at Night
The moon is so high it is
Almost in the Great Bear.
I walk out of the city
Along the road to the West.
The damp wind ruffles my coat.
Dewy grass soaks my sandals.
Fishermen are singing
On the distant river.
Fox fires dance on the ruined tombs.
A chill rises and fills
Me with melancholy. I
Try to think of words that will
Capture the uncanny solitude.
I come home late. The night
Is half spent. I stand for a
Long while in the doorway.
My young son is still up, reading.
Suddenly he bursts out laughing,
And all the sadness of the
Twilight of my life is gone.
--Lu Yu
(From One Hundred Poems From the Chinese, Trans., Kenneth Rexroth. New Directions, 1971.)
Ancient Remnants
A shattered stone statue
Some old copper coins
Strange ornaments of blackened silver
Several broken bronze vessels
Were unearthed
In a desert
And people say that centuries ago
Here where there is only a desert
A city was once settled
And a thought strikes me:
Even today, at a party
A gathering
When I come face to face with you
For one second
Just for one moment
The warmth of your body
The fleeting chance of meeting our eyes
The shine of your red bindiya
The rustle of your clothes
The fragrance of your hair
And sometimes, unintentionally
A tiny flower of touch
And then again, that unending desert
That desert where once
A city had flourished.
--Javed Akhtar
(From Anthems of Resistance: A Celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry, by Ali Husain Mir & Raza Mir. IndiaInk, 2006.)
The heart is a begging bowl. The world is a luminous coyote. The heart: a mad genius. The world: a standing wave. The world is a goddess of energy. The heart is a monolith on the moon. Earth: dream-blossom of the cosmos--silent universe, speaking in species. The heart is aquatic. The world is promiscuous. The heart is a problematic documentarian. The world is a god-drunk flood of physics.
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