Unowhatthesis4• Show poetry

Happiness moves like an unanchored boat
on a calm and cloudy night; moving without moving.
----------------------
All the worlds that don’t exist
are the heaviest of all; an ether
of either.
----------------------

Wherever there is a struggle to understand the self, or society, or any other complex system, there should be a form of expression that is flexible enough to hold all the possibilities; wherever there is possibility, there should be poetry.


-----------------------

I understand poetry like a dog
understands his own death, or,
his own vomit.

-----------------------

Excerpt from John Keats in a letter to Richard Woodhouse:

"A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body - The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute - the poet has none; no identity - he certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instance [have] been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature - how can it , when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identify of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a very little time annihilated - not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children: I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough so to let you see that no dependence is to be placed on what I said that day."

---------------------------

This is the start of the play W;t, by Margaret Edson:

(Vivian Bearing walks on the empty stage pushing her IV pole. She is fifty, tall and very thin, barefoot, and completely bald. She wears two hospital gowns- one tied in the front and one tied in the back - a baseball cap, and a hospital ID bracelet. The house lights are at half strength. Vivian looks out at the audience, sizing them up.)

Vivian: (In false familiarity, waving and nodding to the audience) Hi. How are you feeling today? Great. That's just great. (In her own professional tone) This is not my standard greeting, I assure you.

I tend towards something a little more formal, a little less inquisitive, such as, say, "Hello."

But it is the standard greeting here.

There is some debate as to the correct response to this salutation. Should one reply, "I feel good," using "feel" as a copulative to link the subject, "I," to its subjective compliment, "good"; or "I feel well," modifying with an adverb the subject's state of being?

I don't know. I am a professor of seventeenth-century poetry, specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne.

So I just say, "Fine."

-------------------------