[lit-ideas] Re: Poem For Your Consideration
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2011 08:22:33 -0400
Time flies. Then one day you wake up. You've just celebrated your 42nd
wedding anniversary and are about to spend the day taking your grandkids to
your little brother's retirement party fish fry.
Hurrah.
John
On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> *For a snapshot of the state of modern British poetry, below is an
> award-winning poem (by a poet and academic), described by the judge (another
> poet and academic) as "extraordinary" and "wise". But enough of the
> introductions, why not just take a...*
>
> **
>
> *______________*
>
> *LOOK*
>
>
>
> Good at figures, Fibonacci, like all merchants.
>
> So he wrote a book of counting when he wasn’t at the market.
>
> People saw the patterns later, in the petals of a flower,
>
> in the spirals of a pine cone or a ram’s horn or a sea snail’s
>
> chambered shell, the florets of a cauliflower, the whorl
>
> of sunflower seeds, a moth’s flight round a candle.
>
> All the same. And then what? Then what?
>
>
>
> *If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not discover it. *
>
> Heraclitus The Riddler. Heraclitus The Obscure. Heraclitus
>
> and his tricksy *never stepping into the same river twice*, and
>
> his *unapparent connection is better than apparent*. Yes, yes…
>
> These philosophers. And clerics. In 1555, the Bishop
>
> of Uppsala notes that snowflakes are hexagonal. Each one.
>
> And he should know, up there. But no two are the same. Ever.
>
>
>
> Abbé Haüy spends his whole life digging with a pickaxe and a spade
>
> hunting for crystals, hypnotized by haematite and cryolite and amethyst
>
> and lazulite and quartz and tourmaline. He knows (because a hundred
>
> years before, it has been documented) that for each variety of mineral,
>
> the angles between the faces of the crystal are the same. Always.
>
>
>
> Robert Hooke and Leeuwenhoek look closer through their lenses.
>
> Observation. Evidence. Method, not imagination. *Micrographia *
>
> of sputum, faeces, blood and semen, protozoa, bacteria, after insects,
>
> seeds and flowers. As if by delving deeper and deeper, all will be
>
> revealed. Finally, a little joke. An inventory of eyes: the eyes of
> flies,
>
> of bulls, the crystalline vitreous humour of a whale. Proportion. Size.
>
>
>
> And what then? What then? Heraclitus doesn’t have a clue. Neither
>
> does Pythagoras, nor Leucippus, nor Parmenides, nor Socrates,
>
> nor Plato, nor the Fathers of the Church, nor Duns Scotus, nor Erasmus.
>
> Bacon, Hobbes and Locke just think they do, like Rousseau, Kant
>
> and Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and Mao. *Necessity is unmusical*,
>
> says Plutarch. *And intolerable*, says Empedocles. Look at the moth’s
>
> flight round the candle. Look at the flower. Death and unhappiness
>
> will come. But also happiness. See.
>
>
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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