Sidney Lanier

An American musician, poet and author born in Macon, Georgia. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry. (from Wikipedia)

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My moments

This poem is about those jarring times when life breaks out of its usual routine. Those times can be unwelcome, but even so, they provide markers to our lives:

My moments

parade

in a row

until

Social Cohesion - Betrand Russell

 

Image: Public Domain, Russell 1936

It is clear that each party to this dispute – as to all that persist through long periods of time – is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible. In general, important civilizations start with a rigid and superstitious system, gradually relaxed, and leading, at a certain stage, to a period of brilliant genius, while the good of the old tradition remains and the evil inherent in its dissolution has not yet developed. But as the evil unfolds, it leads to anarchy, thence, inevitably, to a new tyranny, producing a new synthesis secured by a new system of dogma. The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation. The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community. Whether this attempt can succeed only the future can determine.

From History of Western Philosophy

Busy about

 

This poem is obviously about too much to do in too little time, but it's also about regret, when too late:

Busy about

until you can

no longer busy

And in the end

 

It may be that the greatest moment in life will be when life is over. And as that time gets closer it is natural to think more and more about it. (And yes, the title does come from the Beatle's song):

And in the end

you must die

and by the by

you'll live

with your mind

on those end times

Supermoon

 

A lot of communication occurs in the silence between words:

Under the supermoon

the pause in conversation

lasts just long enough

to remind us of understanding

The Axe and the Ice

 

Disaster can be simply a broken tool:

He brought the axe

to the nearest shore

to make a hole

and draw water.

My Definition of Poetry

Image: Public Domain

William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey doctor and Anglo-American poet, is probably best known for his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” But that poem was a result of his brief Imagist period when he and other poets tried to capture a scene in as few words as possible.

After Imagism, he spent most of his life searching for a new American poetry, a new cadence and rhyme, with an American diction.

American free verse he felt had been taken as far as it could by its originator, Walt Whitman. And while he was impressed by the poetry of his contemporary, T.S. Eliot, he had no desire to follow in his footsteps as when he complained:

“There was heat in us,” he wrote, “a core and a drive that was gathering headway upon the theme of a rediscovery of a primary impetus, the elementary principle of all art, in the local conditions. Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics. We did not know how to answer him.” 

In his biography of William Carlos Williams, Paul Mariani in commenting on what Williams was after in his poetry said: