BREATH - Poetry

Product Information

Journeys Across Breath charts the extraordinary and mercurial work of a poet who often remains outside the boundaries of UK poetry. His commitment to the community of world poets, his sensual and proliferating world deserve our attention. He is without doubt one of the remarkable writers of our time and Journeys Across Breath is testament to his miraculous eye and ear.’ When you are reading a poem that touches you, you are immersed in the images, the musicality and beauty of the language, the felt sense that the words create – you are nowhere else. Not all poems have this effect of course but those that do are a tool for you to deepen your understanding of youself and explore the benefits of mindfulness practice. Reading mindfulness poetry can deepen your practice in ways you can not imagine. And writing it can help you explore worlds of awareness you never thought possible. A Western cultural tradition (extending at least from Homer to Rilke) associates the production of poetry with inspiration – often by a Muse (either classical or contemporary), or through other (often canonised) poets' work which sets some kind of example or challenge.

Hart Crane and Ernest Fenollosa (the latter discusses syntax in The Chinese Written Character). The criticism of Crane was later lodged by Olson against Robin Blaser as well—wit, “Id’ trust you anywhere with image, but you’re got no syntax.” See See Minutes of the Charles Olson Society, no. 8 (“A Special Issue for the Robin Blaser Conference”), p. 13. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do- determined to save the only life you could save. Not present in the poem, but perhaps subtly evoked by its narrative, is a related, traditional poetic pairing: “womb” and “tomb”. The poem summons images of new life (children, birthdays, the balloons themselves with their “futtery teats”) and makes us aware of the contrast of active, nurturing life and final, entombed breaths. iamb – one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (e.g. des- cribe, in- clude, re- tract) The following three poems show a range of the vocabularies and images BE members used, to foreground themselves and their conditions:

Always we hope someone else has the answer, some other place will be better, some other time it will all turn out. This is it; no one else has the answer, no other place will be better, and it has already turned out. At the center of your being, you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want. There is no need to run outside for better seeing. Nor to peer from a window. Rather abide at the center of your being; for the more you leave it, the less you learn. Search your heart and see the way to do is to be. Before I Leave the Stage by Alice Walker Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, simply known as “Rumi”, was a 13th-century Persian poet, Isamic scholar, Maturidi theologian, and Sufi mystic. The Guest House I want to do two things: first, try to show what projective or OPEN verse is, what it involves, in its act of composition, how, in distinction from the non-projective, it is accomplished; and II, suggest a few ideas about what stance toward reality brings such verse into being, what the stance does, both to the poet and to his reader. (The stance involves, for example, a change beyond, and larger than, the technical, and may, the way things look, lead to a new poetics and to new concepts from which some sort of drama, say, or of epic, perhaps, may emerge.)

In the third of three principles given in “A Retrospect,” e.g., “As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome ( The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot [New York: New Directions, 1968], p. 3). Each member of the Breathe Easy group has a chronic breathing difficulty: some have struggled to breathe for 65 years having had childhood tuberculosis (TB), some have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), others are living with pulmonary fibrosis or the impact of lung cancer. Although raucous over lunch, the BE group members have encountered much stigma and silencing in response to their conditions. Like many people who experience breathlessness, they have quietly made their conditions discreet and invisible. Breathing difficulties are often judged or misunderstood in wider society: a waitress at the pub responded to a coughing fit from one BE member by saying ‘don’t worry, a few germs never hurt’. This was well-meaning but missed the point of what it is to live with breathing difficulties, and the attendant terror of cold germs getting into the lungs. Jill Gladstone later wrote in response to this: One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you their bad advice- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. Translated by May-Brit Akerholt. Poem of the Week. 52 poems throughout the year Take part in a weekly journey through 52 poems by authors from Norway throughout 2019 – Norway’s year as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. From the time when the earliest texts were recorded in runic inscriptions, poetry has had a strong position in Norway. By introducing a new poem each week throughout 2019, we aim to highlight the quality and breadth of Norwegian poetry. «Poem of the Week» presents 52 poems, inspired by the changing seasons and the passing of the year. The selection has been made by Tone Carlsen and Annette Vonberg, and consists of poems from the earliest handwritten manuscripts up until today, with a special emphasis on contemporary poetry. During the 18th and 19th centuries, there was also substantially more interaction among the various poetic traditions, in part due to the spread of European colonialism and the attendant rise in global trade. [32] In addition to a boom in translation, during the Romantic period numerous ancient works were rediscovered. [33] 20th-century and 21st-century disputes [ edit ] Archibald MacLeish

Goblin Market and Other Poems was the first collection of her poetry to be published, and it was the book that brought her to public attention. She went on to influence a range of later poets, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ford Madox Ford, and Elizabeth Jennings. Philip Larkin was an admirer, praising her ‘steely stoicism’. Other forms of poetry, including such ancient collections of religious hymns as the Indian Sanskrit-language Rigveda, the Avestan Gathas, the Hurrian songs, and the Hebrew Psalms, possibly developed directly from folk songs. The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the Classic of Poetry ( Shijing), were initially lyrics. [17] The Shijing, with its collection of poems and folk songs, was heavily valued by the philosopher Confucius and is considered to be one of the official Confucian classics. His remarks on the subject have become an invaluable source in ancient music theory. [18] Christina Rossetti (1830-94) was one of the Victorian era’s greatest and most influential poets. She was the younger sister (by two years) of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She composed her first poem while still a very young girl; she dictated it to her mother. It ran simply: ‘Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.’ It is by their syllables that words juxtapose in beauty, by these particles of sound as clearly as by the sense of the words which they compose. In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously, the obedience of his ear to the syllables. The fineness, and the practice, lie here, at the minimum and source of speech. Harnessing poet Robert Creeley’s assertion that “form is never more than an extension of content” and Edward Dahlberg’s belief that “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception,” Olson argues that the breath should be a poet’s central concern, rather than rhyme, meter, and sense. To listen closely to the breath, Olson states, “is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” The syllable and the line are the two units led by, respectively, the ear and the breath:

A Gloucester fisherman named also in “Letter 20” of the Maximus poems ( MAX 89, 91), in “The Morning News” ( CP 122), and in Olson’s 1936 “Journal of Swordfishing Cruise on the Doris M. Hawes” ( OJ 7:10, 19). Poetic form is more flexible in modernist and post-modernist poetry and continues to be less structured than in previous literary eras. Many modern poets eschew recognizable structures or forms and write in free verse. Free verse is, however, not "formless" but composed of a series of more subtle, more flexible prosodic elements. [84] Thus poetry remains, in all its styles, distinguished from prose by form; [85] some regard for basic formal structures of poetry will be found in all varieties of free verse, however much such structures may appear to have been ignored. [86] Similarly, in the best poetry written in classic styles there will be departures from strict form for emphasis or effect. [87] AG: Anonymous. Does anybody know that? Does anybody not know that? – or heard/not heard that? – Oh, I think…I thought I’d gone over that… [ Allen reads the poem in its entirety] – .”What is beauty but a breath?/Fancies twin at birth & death/The colour of a damask rose,/That fadeth when the north wind blowes:/’tis such thatthough all thoughts do crave it ,/they know not what it is to have it:/a thing that stoops sometimes not to a king/and yet most open to he commomst thing/For she that is most fair/ Is open to the aire”. So the poem has a nice beginning – “What is beauty but a breath?” – anyway – and “For she that is most fair/ Is open to the aire” Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing as well as from religious hymns (the Sanskrit Rigveda, the Zoroastrian Gathas, the Hurrian songs, and the Hebrew Psalms); or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Egyptian Story of Sinuhe, Indian epic poetry, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The structure and metre of poetry can sometimes be similar to breathing – you have the rhythms, the ebb and flow, and the ins and outs (excuse the pun!) that can all help us to slow down and regulate our breathing.And give thanks for this gift of life and death. Breath Of Life Author: S. Ellis The breath of life, a precious gift Gratitude is a wonderful thing that we can learn to cultivate. It makes us happy because we are grateful for what we have and how much we appreciate our life. We can’t help but smile when we are thankful but it’s also important for our mental health, giving us a moment of peace from daily anxiety. When we use and recite mindful poems we an make a connection between the words of the poem and our practice of grateful living. There is a radical change of mood in stanza 11. The children’s quiet sleep has subsumed the mother’s anger and allowed it to pass. Her patient undoing of the balloons reverses the father’s struggles to control them earlier, but both the activities might be seen as final acts of love. There is a delicate but unmistakeable eroticism in this tercet, as, “… one by one, she took his/ last breaths into her mouth.” Mindfulness Poetry is a powerful way to cultivate mindfulness. It is an accessible poetry that connects us with ourselves, others and nature. It also provides a space for self-reflection and contemplation. As we grow in mindfulness, we become more compassionate towards ourselves and others. The work of many writers, scholars and poets shows the many benefits of daily mindfulness in our lives, decreasing our stress and allowing us to be present in the moment and appeciate what life has to give us.