Aphorism - Blog Post #3

Aphorism - (Definision by Dictionary.com)

noun

a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation

Poem: Autopsychography by Fernando Pessoa

The poet is a man who feigns

And feigns so thoroughly, at last

He manages to feign as pain

The pain he really feels,

And those who read what once he wrote

Feel clearly, in the pain they read,

Neither of the pains he felt,

Only a pain they cannot sense.

And thus, around its jolting track

There runs, to keep our reason busy,

The circling clockwork train of ours

That men agree to call a heart.

This poem is an aphorism because it speaks of a general truth in concise and high (optional) diction.  I like aphorisms because they make you think of different notions that require deeper thinking than just regular things you hear on the radio.  In this poem, it basically tells me that a poet writes of things that may be fictitious but they are based on real things and real feelings.  In this occasion, Pessoa focuses on a poet's pain.  And the poet transfers his pain to the poem, and then the poem transfers the pain to the reader.  However, the pain that the reader feels is not the same as the poet's pain because they have two different lives.  The pain for the poet comes from the poet's life and the pain for the reader comes from the reader's life.  It is a pain they do not sense, but it is there.  And then Pessoa attributes that pain to the heart.

I like aphorisms because all of them have an emphatic, powerful and climactic closing line.  That last line is something you think about long after I've read the poem.  in this poem that line is, "That men agree to call a heart."  When I read it, I do agree that the heart is the thing we think about when pain come from a lost love but the problem with that statement is that pain has proven to come from brain.  Even pain from love. Even though pain does not come from the heart, the whole aphoristic poem does make me think about how feelings are transferred and communicated to one another through text.  

The Angel with the Broken Wing - Blog Post #2

Dana gioia

The Angel with the Broken Wing

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,

The one large statue in this quiet room.

The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut

Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.


The docents praise my elegant design

Above the chatter of the gallery.

Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—

The perfect emblem of futility.


Mendoza carved me for a country church.

(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)

I stood beside a gilded altar where

The hopeless offered God their misery.


I heard their women whispering at my feet—

Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.

Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,

And I became the hunger that they fed.


I broke my left wing in the Revolution

(Even a saint can savor irony)

When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.

They hit me once—almost apologetically.


For even the godless feel something in a church,

A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?

A trembling unaccounted by their laws,

An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.


There are so many things I must tell God!

The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.

But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,

A crippled saint against a painted sky.




The speaker in this persona poem is the Angel statue itself and it explains how it came to be in the museum it is in.  The first impression that I get from this poem is that the statue is greatly designed, it is made by a great artist and that it symbolizes a lot of great things - coming from the word "ardor".  But I also sense that the Angel is angry at many things.  "they shut Faith's ardor in this air-conditioned tomb," lets me know that the Angel does not want to be locked up in that room.  "The perfect emblem of futility," makes me think that the Angel thinks itself is useless and unimportant.  The Angel is the only one who remembers its maker's name.  The Angel is mad that it lost its wing during some revolution (in which I don't know the time of) and that it needs to tell God something but it's stuck on Earth in a museum.  It's helpless.  It reminds me of a sad caged animal in a zoo and the feelings that animal has of wanting to be set free.  Who wouldn't want to be free?  Humans get to be.  Other animals and statues such as this don't and they are rightfully angry.  One last thing I want to talk about is the 5th and 6th paragraphs where the Angel loses its wing and describe the troops reaction, "They hit me once—almost apologetically, For even the godless feel something in a church,  A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?  A trembling unaccounted by their laws,  An ancient memory they can’t dismiss."  This feeling that the church puts on people when they do sin even when they aren't religious somehow appears and is very true.  I've noticed that crime happens everywhere else but the church.  There's a protective feeling about a church and when someone breaks that protection, you just feel that it will be extremely bad for them.

Kevin Stein - Namesake Post

Kevin Stein (1954 - Present)



Kevin Stein is an English professor and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.  He was named Illinois Poet Laureate in 2003 and is known for his funny, fluid and insightful poetry.

Arts of Joy

Now I have the Great Crested Flycatcher
amidst my Red Delicious, the tree's
spindly arm so freighted with apples
it sags under the bird's bird-weight
then springs at his departure
like the board just after a diver's flung up
and gone.  Weep weep weep, he trills
from the overgrown fence row,
his three notes so laden with gravity
I wonder is this song or his lament,
one wing among the green going going?

And that, my friends, is how reason
insinuates its bone lonely self
among the arts of joy -- the least of which
is knowing when to snip the string
that tethers us, our sky blue why.

The bird's after-image is more than
I can take, really, more than I can ask
of Wednesday's usual desultory coffers,
high noon offering its unspent zenith.
I want to say there's absolutely nothing
like this vision of bird and apples. I want
to say absolutely nothing else gives
of wings and fruit. Then I think of
nights my wife rose flushed above me --
this, the only store I put in absolutes.


I absolutely love this poem because it is beautifully descriptive while at the same time neither overly complex nor absolutely negative.  I feel like there are too many poems out there that bring the distress and agony out of people's lives and although they teach great lessons, they are not always the most enjoyable to read.  Arts of Joy, however, turns that notion around and speaks of an image so delightful, bright and quiet (I like peace and quiet) with words so true that it improves my mood.  This poem describes one of the many reasons why I love living in this world.  All of the naturally beautiful occurrences that happen around me are things that I keep in my mind and so does Kevin Stein.  There is not a complex rhyme scheme and the lines are not in perfect order.  This poem focuses on optimism and I love to see that.  I especially love the last sentence because I can relate to that feeling of when another person has such strong emotions for you that they flush.  It is a feeling of happiness that does not come along very often and it is something that makes life great.  Kevin Stein's eloquence in the description of something so simple, yet so real is one aspect of poetry I like to see and emulate.