A Study of Intellectual Theism in the Poetry and Criticism of Yvor Winters. John Martin Finlay Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

A Study of Intellectual Theism in the Poetry and Criticism of Yvor Winters. John Martin Finlay Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1980 The nfleshedU yE e: a Study of Intellectual Theism in the Poetry and Criticism of Yvor Winters. John Martin Finlay Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Finlay, John Martin, "The nfleU shed Eye: a Study of Intellectual Theism in the Poetry and Criticism of Yvor Winters." (1980). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 3561. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/3561 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This was produced from a copy of a document sent to us for microfilming. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the material submitted. Hie following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or nGiutions which msy appear on tins reproduction. 1. The sign or “target” for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is “Missing Page(s)” . I f it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting through an image and duplicating adjacent pages to assure you o f complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a round black mark it is an indication that the film inspector noticed either blurred copy because of movement during exposure, or duplicate copy. Unless we meant to delete copyrighted materials that should not have been filmed, you will find a good image of the page in the adjacent frame. 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., is part of the material being photo­ graphed the photographer has followed a definite method in “sectioning” the material. It is customary to begin filming at the upper left hand comer of a large sheet and to continue from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. If necessary, sectioning is continued again—beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete. 4. For any illustrations that cannot be reproduced satisfactorily by xerography, photographic prints can be purchased at additional cost and tipped into your xerographic copy. Requests can be made to our Dissertations Customer Services Department. 5. Some pages in any document may have indistinct print. In all cases we have filmed the best available copy. University M icrofilm s International 300 N. ZEEB ROAD, ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW, LONDON WC1R 4EJ, ENGLAND Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8110415 F in l a y , Jo h n M a r t in THE UNFLESHED EYE: A STUDY OF INTELLECTUAL THEISM IN THE POETRY AND CRITICISM OF YVOR WINTERS The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical PH.D.Col 1980 University Microfilms Internationa! 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M I 48106 Copyright 1981 by Finlay, John Martin All Rights Reserved Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE UNFLESHED EYE: A STUDY OF INTELLECTUAL THEISM IN THE POETRY AND CRITICISM OF YVOR WINTERS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by John Martin Finlay B.A., University of Alabama, 1965 M.A., University of Alabama, 1966 December, 1980 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like particularly to thank my major profes­ sor, Dr. Donald E. Stanford, for the generous help and encouragement he has given me not only during the writing of this dissertation, but throughout all my graduate career. Acknowledgements are also due Dr. John Wildman and Dr. James Babin for their careful reading of the text and for their helpful criticisms. I would also like to thank Lindon Stall, Cathy Edmonston, and Faye Rifkind for the many personal assistances and encouragements they have also given me. ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements ..................................... ii Abstract..............................................iv Introduction....................................... 1 Chapter I. The Free Verse of Yvor Winters: Grounds of Reaction......................... 10 II. Towards a Definition of God..................65 III. The Consequences of T h e i s m ................ 125 IV. "The Unfleshed Eye"......................... 171 Bibliography.........................................197 Vita................................................. 202 iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT Yvor Winters' early poetry, from 1920 to 1928, was written in free-verse; the aesthetic principle governing it centered on the image "purified" of conceptual content, and consisting of a "fusion" between the natural object being described and the poet's own mind. The result is a kind of naturalistic mysticism, destructive of judge­ ments and evaluations of the conscious intellect. The early poetry also registers the effect of certain scien­ tific theories on Winters' mind; these theories were mechanistic and deterministic in nature, and they turned Winters' world into one in which moral and intellectual values had no reality. Other themes that appear in the early poems are the absence, or non-existence, of God, the fear of death, and the apprehension that the ultimate nature of the universe might be demonic. In the late twenties Winters underwent an artistic and intellectual reformation in reaction to the free-verse and the stylistic violence which that verse finally de­ generated into. He embraced a classicism that respected and acted upon the powers of the conscious mind. Writing in conventional meter and employing a style both imagistic iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and abstract, he wrote poems dealing with the possibil­ ity, and the realization, of morai control and intellec­ tual order. His new poetics rested on the philosophical assumption that absolute truth exists. In order to safe­ guard that truth and save himself from subjective rela­ tivism, he was driven by what: he viewed as philosophical necessity to a theistic position. He was influenced in this process by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Only the existence of God could guarantee and validate truth and assure its independence of the human mind. Winters most reluctantly admitted theism. He had an instinctive fear of the supernatural; he was afraid the supernatural, its ineffability and absolute foreign­ ness, would generate intellectual confusion in the human realm, which he wanted protected at all cost. Conse­ quently, he defined God in the most intellectually re­ spectful terms at his disposal. God becomes Pure Mind or Perfect Concept, existentially neutral and non- providential as far as the human is concerned. Such a "perfect mind" becomes the absolute standard by which everything is judged. We see the effects of this defini­ tion and the subsequent standard in Winters' view of the natural world, the body-soul composite in man, and the "giant movements" working in society at large. Since the natural world, as well as man's own body, does not v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. participate in the reality of the Pure Mind, it was viewed by Winters with some distrust as a possible impediment to man's realizing his moral and intellectual good. Since Winters believed so much of modern society was noted for thoughtlessness, he viewed it suspiciously and recommended detachment and isolation as the means of saving oneself from moral and intellectual contamination. "To the Holy Spirit," a poem written in his late forties, summarizes all themes related to theism and is his most complete statement on the subject. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION In 1947 Yvor Winters brought together and published in a single volume, entitled In Defense of Reason, three books of criticism he had previously published separately. In those books are to be found the major critical state­ ments on which his reputation as a critic is based. They are Primitivism and Decadence (1937), Maule's Curse (1938), and The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943). Earlier, in 1940, he had issued from his own private press a volume he simply called Poemsthis book contains all the poems he wished to save from his previous volumes, to which only a handful of later ones would be added when the book was commercially published by Alan Swallow in 1952.^ In fact, by the time he came to write the Foreword to In Defense of Reason, all but four of the poems that make up his total work had already been written and published. It was consequently a time of summing up; for all practical
Recommended publications
  • Yvor Winters on Kenneth Burke | KB Journal
    2/26/2017 “I Shall, with the Greatest of Ease and Friendliness, Scour You from the Earth”: Yvor Winters on Kenneth Burke | KB Journal Search KB SEARCH KB The Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society Home » Reviews “I Shall, with the Greatest of Ease and Friendliness, Scour You from the Earth”: Yvor Winters on Kenneth Burke By David Beard, University of Minnesota–Duluth Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1987. ———. Selected Letters of Yvor Winters. Ed. R. L. Barth. Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 2000. Introduction It was Fredric Jameson who introduced Yvor Winters into the study of Burke in a serious way, precisely because he believed that Winters corrected a serious deficiency in Burke’s work. In “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis,” Jameson articulated what he believed to be a central purpose of criticism: to tell and to analyze “the narrative of that implacable yet also emancipatory logic whereby the human community has evolved into its present form and developed the sign systems by which we live and explain our lives to ourselves.” In Jameson’s view, Burke was innovative in that he saw the centrality of symbol systems but failed insofar as he “did not want to teach us history” (523). The Burke that Jameson here refers to, primarily, is dramatism. Dramatism left, in Jameson’s view, no place for the negative hermeneutic, for the subconscious and for the ideological analysis of the subconscious. We can argue whether Jameson’s reading of Burke is incomplete. Certainly, if Burke himself faced these deficiencies or limits in his own work, the work of three generations of Burkeans since then has corrected this lack.
    [Show full text]
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Concept of Skepticism and His Doctrine of the Infinitude of the Private Man
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Master's Theses Theses and Dissertations 1962 Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Concept of Skepticism and His Doctrine of the Infinitude of the Private Man Donal Francis Mahoney Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Mahoney, Donal Francis, "Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Concept of Skepticism and His Doctrine of the Infinitude of the Private Man" (1962). Master's Theses. 1770. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses/1770 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1962 Donal Francis Mahoney RALPH' WALDO nEIlSONs HIS OONOEPr OJ' SIBP!IOIS'K A.N]) ltIS DOO'.rRID OP '!1m IDINI'l'tJ'DB OP ftB PRIVA'. nw Donal J'Pnno1. K&hon.,. A !beaia S.ba1tte4 ,. tbe Paoulty of the Graduate SChool .f 'Ley.l. U'n1yua1 V in Pariial hlt1llaent ot the Bequ1r.. enta tor the Decree .f ...ter .f Arta Jlme 1962 Donal ?ranc1s ~,fahon.y was born in Chicago, Illinois, Fehru.ary 20, 19~. He was graduated from Yount Oarmel High Sohool, Jun., 1956. After atten41ng st. Procopiua Oolleg., Lisle, Illinois, he was graduate. :troll Loy.la uniTereity 1n June, 1960, with the degree o~ Baohelor of Soience in Humanities.
    [Show full text]
  • Poetry As Moral Statement (1937) Yvor Winters (1900-1968) The
    Poetry as Moral Statement (1937) Yvor Winters (1900-1968) The poem is a statement in words about a human experience. Words are primarily conceptual, but through use and because human experience is not purely conceptual, they have acquired connotations of feelings. The poet makes his statement in such a way as to employ both concept and connotation as efficiently as possible. The poem is good in so far as it makes a defensible rational statement about a given human experience (the experience need not be real but must be in some sense possible) and at the same time communicate the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of that experience. This notion of poetry, whatever its defects, will account both for the power of poetry and of artistic literature in general on its readers and for the seriousness with which the great poets have taken their art.... Rhythm, for reasons which I do not wholly understand, has the power of communicating emotion; and as a part of the poem it has the power of qualifying the total emotion... We have on the one hand the rational structure of the poem, the orderly arrangement and progression of thought; and we have on the other hand a kind of rhythm broader and less easily measurable than the rhythm of the line--the poem exists in time, the mind proceeds through it in time, and if the poet is a good one he takes advantage of this fact and makes the progression rhythmical. These aspects of the poem will be efficient in so far as the poet subordinates them to the total aim of the poem...
    [Show full text]
  • The Teacher and American Literature. Papers Presented at the 1964 Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English
    DOCUMENT RESUME ED 042 741 TB 001 605 AUTHOR Leary, Lewis, Fd. TITLE The Teacher and American Literature. Papers Presented at the 1964 Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English. INSTITUTION National Council of Teachers of English, Champaign, Ill. PUB DATE 65 NOTE 194p. EDITS PRICE EDRS Price MF-$0.75 HC-$9.80 DESCRIPTORS American Culture, *American Literature, Authors, Biographies, Childrens Books, Elementary School Curriculum, Literary Analysis, *Literary Criticism, *Literature Programs, Novels, Poetry, Short Stories ABSTRACT Eighteen papers on recent scholarship and its implications for school programs treat American ideas, novels, short stories, poetry, Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville, Whitman and Dickinson, Twain and Henry James, and Faulkner and Hemingway. Authors are Edwin H. Cady, Edward J. Gordon, William Peden, Paul H. Krueger, Bernard Duffey, John A. Myers, Jr., Theodore Hornberger, J. N. Hook, Walter Harding, Betty Harrelson Porter, Arlin Turner, Robert E. Shafer, Edmund Reiss, Sister M. Judine, Howard W.Webb, Jr., Frank H. Townsend, Richard P. Adams, and John N. Terrey. In five additional papers, Willard Thorp and Alfred H. Grommon discuss the relationship of the teacher and curriculum to new.a7proaches in American literature, while Dora V. Smith, Ruth A. French, and Charlemae Rollins deal with the implications of American literature for elementary school programs and for children's reading. (MF) U.S. DEPAIIMENT Of NE11114. EDUCATION A WOK Off ICE Of EDUCATION r--1 THIS DOCUMENT HAS KM ITEPtODUCIO EXACTLY AS IHCEIVID 1110D1 THE 11115011 01 014111I1.1101 01,611111116 IL POINTS Of TIM PI OPINIONS 4" SIAM 00 NOT IKESSAIllY INPINSENT OFFICIAL OW Of IDS/CATION N.
    [Show full text]
  • Yvor Winters: the Critic As Moralist
    Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1972 Yvor Winters: the Critic as Moralist. Shirley Sternberg Fraser Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Fraser, Shirley Sternberg, "Yvor Winters: the Critic as Moralist." (1972). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 2208. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/2208 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This dissertation was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the original submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or patterns which may appear on this reproduction. 1. The sign or "target" for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting thru an image and duplicating adjacent pages to insure you complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a large round black mark, it is an indication that the photographer suspected that the copy may have moved during exposure and thus cause a blurred image.
    [Show full text]
  • British and American New Criticism William E
    1 British and American New Criticism William E. Cain For much of the twentieth century, the New Criticism was the dominant method of textual interpretation. Most critics and teachers of literature in college and universities, both in Great Britain and the United States, were committed to “close reading”—the intensive study of the words on the page, the careful examination of the poem in itself, which was the theory and practice that the New Criticism described and promoted. The New Critics were different in important respects from one another, but, as one of their leaders, Cleanth Brooks, observed: “The one common element that I can discern among those loosely grouped together as New Critics was the special concern they exhibited for the rhetorical structure of the literary text” (Brooks 1984: 42). Few today would claim to be or would aspire to become a New Critic. The movement expired, it is generally agreed, decades ago. Yet when it arose and established itself, the New Criticism was viewed not only as significantly “new” but also as superior to ­everything that had preceded it. In the mid‐1950s, Hyatt H. Waggoner identified the New Criticism as “the best criticism we have or are likely to have for a long time. Certainly, it is the chief reason why it is perfectly correct to characterize our age as, whatever its other failings, a brilliant age for criticism.” In Waggoner’s judgment, “the greatest contribution” that the New Criticism had made was “its creation and demonstration of a way of talking about literature at once objective and literary … There are no extrinsic or irrelevant standards applied, there is no subjectivism,COPYRIGHTED and there is no mystique.
    [Show full text]
  • The Emergence of Formalist Criticism: an Overview
    THE EMERGENCE OF FORMALIST CRITICISM: AN OVERVIEW SANDEEP KUMAR SHARMA Research Scholar Department of English Punjabi University, Patiala (Punjab) INDIA In their critical theories, the stress was laid only on the ideas and intellectual contents of the work of art. Early Victorians had emphasized the moral, social and religious uses of literature which had resulted in extrinsic approach to literature. As a reaction to these movements a 'new' movement appeared on the literary scene which propagated for the study of the 'form' and 'artistic' aspects of a work of art, and was named 'Formalist' school or a school of 'new' critics. They felt that the only course open for the literary criticism to avoid being exploited by industrialism, and save literature from history, sociology and science. The concentration on the form, structure, technique, images, metaphors rhymes and such other items was thought to be worthwhile as it was thought that it could give the analysis of a literary work wider depth of meaning and help the critic explore the real depth of meaning. Key Words: Structure, Formalist Criticism, New Critics, Aesthetic Sensibility. The writers and critics of America and England were very much dissatisfied at the turn of the twentieth century. The intellectuals of that period suffered from literary unrest because their hopes and expectations which they had from the new century were going to remain unfulfilled. Though in the wake of scientific advances, the whole atmosphere was pregnant with intellectual activity, the literary theoreticians thought that there had come a stagnation in the field of literary criticism. This feeling of stagnation in criticism sustained because there were many critical schools prevalent which approached a literary work from external standpoints only.
    [Show full text]
  • Writing Communities: Aesthetics, Politics, and Late Modernist Literary Consolidation
    WRITING COMMUNITIES: AESTHETICS, POLITICS, AND LATE MODERNIST LITERARY CONSOLIDATION by Elspeth Egerton Healey A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2008 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor John A. Whittier-Ferguson, Chair Associate Professor Kali A. K. Israel Associate Professor Joshua L. Miller Assistant Professor Andrea Patricia Zemgulys © Elspeth Egerton Healey _____________________________________________________________________________ 2008 Acknowledgements I have been incredibly fortunate throughout my graduate career to work closely with the amazing faculty of the University of Michigan Department of English. I am grateful to Marjorie Levinson, Martha Vicinus, and George Bornstein for their inspiring courses and probing questions, all of which were integral in setting this project in motion. The members of my dissertation committee have been phenomenal in their willingness to give of their time and advice. Kali Israel’s expertise in the constructed representations of (auto)biographical genres has proven an invaluable asset, as has her enthusiasm and her historian’s eye for detail. Beginning with her early mentorship in the Modernisms Reading Group, Andrea Zemgulys has offered a compelling model of both nuanced scholarship and intellectual generosity. Joshua Miller’s amazing ability to extract the radiant gist from still inchoate thought has meant that I always left our meetings with a renewed sense of purpose. I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my dissertation chair, John Whittier-Ferguson. His incisive readings, astute guidance, and ready laugh have helped to sustain this project from beginning to end. The life of a graduate student can sometimes be measured by bowls of ramen noodles and hours of grading.
    [Show full text]
  • From Romance to Modernity: Poe and the Work of Poetry Author(S): Joan Dayan Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol
    From Romance to Modernity: Poe and the Work of Poetry Author(s): Joan Dayan Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Fall, 1990), pp. 413-437 Published by: Boston University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25600853 Accessed: 21-09-2017 15:38 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in Romanticism This content downloaded from 129.59.95.115 on Thu, 21 Sep 2017 15:38:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms JOAN DAYAN From Romance to Modernity: Poe and the Work of Poetry What is Poetry??Poetry! that Proteus-like idea, with as many appellations as the nine-titled Cocyra! ?Poe, "Letter to B-" Poe beganquestioned his the writingidea of poetry, career worried as about A poet, defining and it, andthroughout by his his life he own admission, failed to write poems "of much value to the public, or very creditable to myself."1 And yet, what Poe and his subsequent critics recognize as failure demands further consideration. The problem of Poe's poetry is nothing less than a demonstration of what happens when the lyric of feeling confronts the demands of a form more public and less pure than that celebrated in "The Poetic Principle.
    [Show full text]
  • Emerson's Telescope: Jones Very and Romantic Individualism
    ✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦ Emerson’s Telescope: Jones Very and Romantic Individualism clark davis The character sheds not its characteristic on its surroundings, whereas, the original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it–everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things. —Melville, The Confidence-Man In dismissing him I seem to have discharged an arrow into the heart of society. —Emerson, Journals N his 1938 essay “Jones Very and R.W. Emerson: Aspects of I New England Mysticism” the poet and critic Yvor Winters offered a reappraisal and rehabilitation of the nineteenth cen- tury American poet, Jones Very. Maule’s Curse, the study that contained the essay, mounted an unrestrained attack on Win- ters’s menagerie of bêtes noires: emotion, romanticism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ambiguity (obscurantism), and art that served what Winters considered to be undigested experience. Very was offered as antidote to Emerson, that “limb of the Devil,” and elevated as a “saintly man” who embodied the sort of mystic power his slippery Concord elder only affected.1 1Yvor Winters, Maule’s Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscuran- tism (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1938), 131, 126. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text. The New England Quarterly, vol. XCI, no. 3 (September 2018). C 2018 by The New England Quarterly.
    [Show full text]
  • Simply Haiku Vol
    Simply Haiku Vol. 10 No. 3 – Spring / Summer 2013 SIMPLY HAIKU Vol. 10 No. 3 SPRING / SUMMER 2013 Co-owned by Robert D. Wilson and Saša Važić 1 Simply Haiku Vol. 10 No. 3 – Spring / Summer 2013 Features 2 Simply Haiku Vol. 10 No. 3 – Spring / Summer 2013 Haiku is Dead TO BE OR NOT TO BE An Experiment Gone Awry Part VI: An Essay on Haiku Aesthetics By Robert D. Wilson "Since becoming the sport of amateurs and ignoramuses, haiku have become more and more numerous, more and more banal." Masaoka Shiki Tr. by Janine Beichman Masaoka Shiki His Life and Works Skinhead the words Fuck You carved on his forehead Jack Galmitz New York, U.S.A. Spot ImPress 2013 Published by Dimitar Anakiev at his facebook group Haiku Masterclass, October 12, 2013. My father, mouth and anus wide open --- a shining cloud Ban'ya Natsuishi Japan Mending the holes of my raincoat - that's the way I became a Marxist Dimitar Anakiev Slovenia Mending the Holes of My Raincoat 3 Simply Haiku Vol. 10 No. 3 – Spring / Summer 2013 new fish pond – the cat learns to swim Lorin Ford Australia Shiki Kukai, June 2005 (9th place) as the world fails saxophone in the lips of a walrus Marlene Mountain U.S.A. Haiku 21 2011 frost-covered window I add a rubber ducky to the bubble bath Roberta Beary Washington D.C., U.S.A. First Prize Winner of the 2012 Kiyoshi and Kiyoko Tokutomi Memorial Haiku Contest botanic gardens a plastic daisy dangles from a woman's hat Ernest Berry New Zealand Honorable Mention of the 2013 23rd Ito en Oi ocha New Haiku Contest nevertheless fall colors Christopher Patchel U.S.A.
    [Show full text]
  • Cynthia Article
    THEATER MOVIES BOOKS MUSIC TV ART DANCE we’ve got soul BELIEVE IT. R&B IS ALIVE AND WELL ON THE DOCK OF THE BAY. by Kevin Berg- er eshell Ndegeocello has WHILE THE people who are not me. Not an hour before, the presence of a boxer, the OLD SCHOOL I had been reading a biography of Herman faith of a preacher, the heart HAS SOLD Melville, where I came across these lines of a poet. This past May, in OUT TO from his novel Redburn: “American blood… MADISON a rare club appearance, the is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of AVENUE, MEast Bay singer strolled onto the stage at a thousand currents all pouring into one. AND TODAY’S Bimbo’s, a slow, deep funk brewing behind SOUL-POP We are not a nation, so much as a world.” her; a striped wool cap, pulled down over KIDS CARE Lingering over those sentences one minute her forehead, gave her the look of a woman ONLY ABOUT and then living them the next transformed under pressure, ready to burn. She fixed MTV, LOCAL the show into one of those special nights her eyes on the crowd. “Gonna play some SOUL ARTISTS when all of the planets seem aligned. And, ARE KEEPING new shit for you tonight,” she said. She of course, the music knocked us out in all THE TORCH began to sing—a leathery tenor, riveted OF OTIS the right ways. with anger. “You sell your soul like you sell REDDING For Ndegeocello, the gig was a coming- a piece of ass,” she intoned, beats churn- BURNING.
    [Show full text]