by beatriceotto | Jun 8, 2018 | poetry mojo, readers & reading
Here Christopher Logue highlights the sheer vital durability of Homer and the magnitude of such sustainability, kept alive through a hard core of ‘Unprofessional Ancient Greek Readers’. I don’t know if I qualify, since the UAGR could refer only to...
by beatriceotto | Mar 12, 2018 | language & translation, metaphors, poetry mojo
A fine and subtle way to depict a look which appears to express more than the person looking is capable of feeling. And I’ve always been struck when I come across commonplace proverbs and phrases in their original setting, and see how readily they are used by...
by beatriceotto | Feb 16, 2018 | poetry mojo
Poetry is one of the strongest channels for expressing pain, and I liked the use of the word ‘pressed’. It implies a wine-making process, as if you emptied vat loads of painful must and then pressed out a small quantity of distilled language to be...
by beatriceotto | Nov 22, 2017 | poetry mojo, writing & writers
More than just the writing of poetry, isn’t writing in general often ‘a voice answering a voice’? This touching quotation comes towards the end of Orlando and the end of Orlando’s long endeavours to complete her poem. It is the first and last...
by beatriceotto | Nov 22, 2017 | poetry mojo, writing & writers
This pithy summary of the difference between prose and poetry is as much as Orlando gleans from the convoluted accounts of a poet to whom he has opened his home, larder, wine cellar, purse and poetic aspirations, in the hope of some helpful guidance. Not forthcoming....
by beatriceotto | Jul 21, 2017 | poetry mojo, writing & writers
Thoreau has many striking things to say about poets, and even if I can’t seize on them as definitive or universal in their application, they make me think. This one is a little clunky in its expression, as if he is thinking out loud, but I like the idea of the...
by beatriceotto | Jul 21, 2017 | poetry mojo, writing & writers
First, the unusual simile, I never thought of a lamb’s bleat as free or lawless. Then the idea that a true poetic sentence is free and lawless. I found several similar comments in Thoreau, and something about them gave me a sense of liberty. I was once...
by beatriceotto | Jul 7, 2017 | metaphors, poetry mojo
The thoughts of poets likened to two types of shell, those that come from the depths and those that are washed up on shore and so exposed to the elements. Thoreau has numerous comments on the nature of poets and poetry – I will be citing a number, even where...
by beatriceotto | Jul 7, 2017 | poetry mojo
Again, a wonderful, provocative and pithy comment by Thoreau. I’m now looking at poetry and asking how far it implies the whole truth and whether it needs to do so to be fine poetry. As to philosophy, I am so woefully refractory as to be incapable of comment....
