Do not be cross with poetry

[QDeathstar]

would it help the quantum mechanist in any measurable way?

It would, but if he measured it it would be unhelpful again.

XD quantum humor. Nicely done.

[billy]

you can say "i don't understand it" for starters.

that is true, but if it is all there available to be figured out and you cannot understand it because you lack the aptitude, how useful is that critique?

well if you're critiquing in serious and say that when not understanding then you're possibly a twat and in the wrong forum, if you say such a thing in novice then you're probably as new to feedback as you are writing and because of that fact it's the most important critique you can give. somewhere down the line there will probably see an answer that opens the poem up for you and will save such for further interpretations of poetry. it's called learning. most of us start somewhere; saying i didn't understand this or that is probably the best place to start if you don't understand it.
adversely it really could be a piece of shite that no one else understands either in which case it reaffirms to the poet their poem doesn't work for anyone.

[Achebe]

Please don't start to draw blood you guys.

Nobody's the enemy here.

If everybody thought like you, the gracile Australopithecines would've never slaughtered their robust cousins and we'd still be snoozing by the fire, eating a balanced diet of protein and complex carbs, mating without a second thought, getting lots of exercise, and dying in the company of our loved ones. Progress would've never happened.

[Lizzie]

I just got my copy of Finnegan's Wake from the library this morning and here's the first bit of the introduction:

"There is no agreement as to what Finnegan's Wake is about, whether or not it is "about" anything, or even whether it is, in any ordinary sense of the word, 'readable.'"

Well, this should be an interesting 628 pages!

i predict either you give up after a few pages, or stubbornly, against your will, continue to the end. . . or really enjoy the strangeness of it all and read it with glee as it changes your very perception of what writing is, and what it can do. in any case, as Bob Dylan once said, good luck, i hope you make it.

what edition do you have?

So, basically your prediction will come true no matter what I do! Well played

I have to get somewhere with it because one of my best friends is from Northern Ireland and she's been after me for a while (about two months now) to start Ulysses. So, I feel like I have to make some kind of effort. I am, however, terrified that maybe I won't like something that everyone is saying is so brilliant. If I don't like it, what does that make me? I jest, but only partly.

Edition? I don't know. It's Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, does that help? It's light blue.

---

Please don't start to draw blood you guys.

Nobody's the enemy here.

If everybody thought like you, the gracile Australopithecines would've never slaughtered their robust cousins and we'd still be snoozing by the fire, eating a balanced diet of protein and complex carbs, mating without a second thought, getting lots of exercise, and dying in the company of our loved ones. Progress would've never happened.

Mmmm, carbs, sex, and a warm, cozy bed.....yup, that's my utopia! Accurate.

Although, my utopia also includes Netflix and indoor plumbing.

[Leanne]

Timms: I don't always understand poetry.

Hector: You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it... whenever.

-- The History Boys

I didn't make it through Finnegan's Wake in one go. It's worth the return though.

Poor Joycie, a drunk and a nutter,
would smother his daughter in butter,
his muse and his riddle --
did Dedalus diddle
and Finnegan wake in the gutter?

[Lizzie]

"Students of literature in particular, accustomed as they are to understanding most words in every sentence of every prose work they read, are apt to experience frustration in reading a text constructed along these lines, where it can sometimes seem that one is doing extremely well if one makes sense of only a sentence or two on a single page. If, however, one surrenders the need to be master of everything -- or even most things -- in this strange and magnificent book, it will pour forth lots of rewards. As it says in the Irish American ballad from which Joyce derived his title, after all, 'There's lots of fun at Finnegan's wake.'"

~John Bishop

[Achebe]

Joyce you allege was a paedo
for Lucia burned out like Dido
true to her name. Incest
in lines like riddles manifest
scratched out on a bill in the Lido.

                     ~ Shaksparre Pty Ltd (a part of the Francis Bacon group)

[UselessBlueprint]

People have always prefer to understand things, that is why God exists.

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
-Voltaire

I'm not sure if people prefer to understand, or just have an explanation they can accept. I've seen a lot to suggest the latter.

[QDeathstar]

I think we want to understand but we will settle for an explanation we can accept. We are so eager to understand that we create assumptions in order to reach an understanding so fast it sometimes makes us ignorant.

[Erthona]

cutie wrote "Actually, I got a PH.D. in quantum mechanics, so.... Why would you bother spouting off anything at all on a subject you know almost nothing about? Or, if you did, would it help the quantum mechanist in any measurable way?"

wasn't that just a metaphor?

I have a degree in literature, so...Why would you bother spouting off anything at all on a subject you know almost nothing about? Or if you did would it help the writer in any way as far as the writer is concerned?

It is true you cannot know simultaneously the intent of the writer of the poem and the meaning of the poem. That is to say if there were a piece of paper in a box, one would not know until opening the box if the paper contained a poem, or merely gibberish that most frequently tries to pass as a poem on this site.

Or, if a poet writes a poem, then immediately commits suicide (as any decent poet should), we have no way of knowing what the writer's intent was. So the destruction of information is much more complete than whatever falls into a black hole and no matter how long the universe continues winding down, one would never be nearer to finding that information than at the present moment. Therefore, poetry and things quantum mechanical have no meeting point whatsoever. So please do not mix them up in the future.

BTW, why do physicists continue to use the word gravity, when gravity is simply the effect of mass on space/time (it is not a force it is an effect). There is no such thing as gravity. We stick to the earth, not because of a mysterious force called gravity, but because the mass of the earth creates a hole in space/time. This is why light is bent around large mass objects. By law, gravity can only effect those things that have mass and light has no mass. Ergo, no gravity, no gravitons, no gravity waves. Please remember also that mass is energy and it takes energy to bend space/time in the form of mass. Which explains why it takes so much energy to get out of the earth space/time hole. It is the conservation of energy. It is not a gravity well. In terms of quantum gravity, it would appear there is no such thing. At the quantum level things are not massive or energetic enough to bend space/time, or so it would seem.
Just thought I'd ask since we have someone with a PhD in things quantum mechanical.

If Einstein had been a poet he would have come up with something much better than a bowling ball and a rubber bed sheet...but maybe he was thinking of something else, I mean he did marry his cousin.


dale      

dale

[QDeathstar]

cutie wrote "Actually, I got a PH.D. in quantum mechanics, so.... Why would you bother spouting off anything at all on a subject you know almost nothing about? Or, if you did, would it help the quantum mechanist in any measurable way?"

wasn't that just a metaphor?

Yeah, a bad metaphore.

I have a degree in literature, so...Why would you bother spouting off anything at all on a subject you know almost nothing about? Or if you did would it help the writer in any way as far as the writer is concerned?

Except that I do know a little about literature... a little.

Or, if a poet writes a poem, then immediately commits suicide (as any decent poet should), we have no way of knowing what the writer's intent was.

His intent was to kill himself. Says it right on the tin. The fact that he wrote a poem is just spurious information.

So the destruction of information is much more complete than whatever falls into a black hole and no matter how long the universe continues winding down, one would never be nearer to finding that information than at the present moment. Therefore, poetry and things quantum mechanical have no meeting point whatsoever. So please do not mix them up in the future.

Yes sir, poetry and astrophysics it is.

BTW, why do physicists continue to use the word gravity, when gravity is simply the effect of mass on space/time (it is not a force it is an effect). There is no such thing as gravity. We stick to the earth, not because of a mysterious force called gravity, but because the mass of the earth creates a hole in space/time. This is why light is bent around large mass objects. By law, gravity can only effect those things that have mass and light has no mass. Ergo, no gravity, no gravitons, no gravity waves. Please remember also that mass is energy and it takes energy to bend space/time in the form of mass. Which explains why it takes so much energy to get out of the earth space/time hole. It is the conservation of energy. It is not a gravity well. In terms of quantum gravity, it would appear there is no such thing. At the quantum level things are not massive or energetic enough to bend space/time, or so it would seem.
Just thought I'd ask since we have someone with a PhD in things quantum mechanical.

42.

[Quixilated]

[Leanne]

  Surrealism.doc (Size: 433 KB / Downloads: 6) One of the problems I identified very early in my #teacherthuglife was the lack of critical literacy skills in today's "readers".  For the purpose of teaching critical literacy, a reader is anyone who receives a text, and a text is not necessarily written e.g. a movie is a text, an advertisement, a painting, etc.  It became apparent very quickly that while the literal and obvious meaning is reached fairly easily, today's reader seems to have forgotten that there are connotations and figurative possibilities beyond the surface.  This is the same deficit that has allowed Rupert Murdoch to take over the world: "let's believe everything that we already agree with and want to be true."

To combat this, I used surrealism and absurdism.  Neither of these "schools", if you will, are meaningless -- but they are definitely an antidote to the need to find one single and absolute meaning.  They require significant input from the reader.  To scaffold, a reading of a text (paintings first, then poems) is broken up into elements (what IS there, what are the actual things that you can identify -- not what they mean, what they ARE) and mood (what does it make you feel like/ remind you of?).  In breaking paintings and poems down like this, students are able to put elements together to build their own meanings, and no two are ever identical.  If they find they have identified an element that then jars with the meaning they've come up with, usually without prompting they will go back and rethink their interpretation to see how it changes.  

All things being equal, I have attached the task to see if that assists anyone.

[Lizzie]

All things being equal, I have attached the task to see if that assists anyone.

It's denying access to the page.

[Leanne]

I'll see what billy can do to make it wunderbar.  During the meanwhilst:

Surrealism

Surrealism is an artistic and literary movement that explores the imagination as it is revealed in dreams.  It was a reaction against what the artists saw as destruction caused by the “rationalism” of the dominant European culture that had resulted in the horrors of World War I.  

Surrealism was heavily influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud and sought to “reunite” the worlds of fantasy and reality.  Surrealists consider the unconscious as the base of the imagination that is normally untapped.  


Absurdism

Absurdism is a philosophical idea that the desperate search for humanity to find any meaning in existence is ultimately doomed to fail, because of the sheer volume of information and the idea that the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know.  However, absurdism works on the idea that even though you know it’s absurd to search for meaning, you will anyway – because accepting that there are no ultimate answers means that you’re free to accept limitless possibilities.  

Both absurdism and surrealism rely on the suspension of disbelief, which means that to understand it you need to be prepared to let go of rational (logical) thought and accept that what you think you already know doesn’t actually matter all that much.  We already do this to a certain extent; for example, you know that a magician isn’t really sawing a woman in half, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the show.  You know that Jack and Rose weren’t real people, but you still cry when the Titanic sinks on the screen.  You know that there’s no such thing as two-dimensional yellow people with four fingers on each hand, but you still watch The Simpsons.  

Sometimes, you just need to take it a little bit further and accept what’s given to you as an invitation to think differently.  When breaking down a surrealist/ absurdist text, try to briefly describe the elements (objects, colours, phrases etc) and then let them sink in; forget about trying to decipher them according to what you already know, and let them suggest ideas to you, no matter how strange they seem.

[billy]

the word doc opened for me and as far as i can ascertain in admin it should open for anyone with the word program

[Leanne]

  Surrealism.pdf (Size: 432.29 KB / Downloads: 125) I'll try as a PDF to see if that's easier to access. It's not important anyway, just trying to help a little.

[Lizzie]

I'll try as a PDF to see if that's easier to access. It's not important anyway, just trying to help a little.

This is what it says when I try to view:


Poetry Forum You do not have permission to access this page. This could be because of one of the following reasons:

1. Your account has either been suspended or you have been banned from accessing this resource.
   
2. You do not have permission to access this page. Are you trying to access administrative pages or a resource that you shouldn't be? Check in the forum rules that you are allowed to perform this action.
   
3. Your account may still be awaiting activation or moderation. (Resend Activation Code)
   
4. You have accessed this page directly rather than using appropriate forms or link.
   

You are currently logged in with the username: 'lizziep'

[QDeathstar]

still cannot download it. can you Dropbox it?

[Leanne]

It's not that important.  Forget it.

I'll try to set it up as a tutorial thread if anyone's interested.