“in proportion as ideas and feelings are valuable, whether the composition be in prose or in verse, they require and exact one and the same language.” – William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
Braced to the ice wind
Clasp ‘gainst the Brine
Gold set obsidian
Night’s yellowed eye
Plowing
On we
Keep
Only to
Wake the deep
Earth crack like egg shell
Black yolk will rise
Poached in the dark sea
Exhuming time
That we may
always reap
Long may we
Wake the deep
“The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are every where; though the eyes and sense of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge – it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of Men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective Sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were ,a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.” – William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
Break fast and rise, a shatter of ice
Gone in the blink of an eye
But all you could save still led to the grave
And buried unanswering why
A call from the clouds, the buzzard cries out
The spider devours the fly
But the junky’s alive in the machine tonight
A spirit of heroin’s line
Tame the shame,
cast the blame
Pour decanters of wine
Barren of trees in
hurricane breeze
Gone in the blink of an eye
Old Robert Burns inside his grave turns
A body breaks down by the lye
Still would he grin at the state he’s in
Caught in the roots of the rye
Tinder the spark that flints from your heart
Til flames catch and dance as they rise
But all the while, remember my child,
That soon the smoke gets in your eyes
Tame the shame,
cast the blame
Pour decanters of wine
Barren of trees in
hurricane breeze
Gone in the blink of an eye
“Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespear hath said of man, ‘that he looks before and after’. He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.” – William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
Chicken Little said the sky is
Falling
A thundercloud and a blitzkrieg
Bombing
Deafened hell for leather by the weather by the wethering in
Vain
Holding my breath, for bright lighthouse
Flame
Lead me
Home
Leave me
Alone
A murder of crows, watch the tide climb their
Tree
And drowning I’ll die, letting inside me
Sea
And oxygen is smothered and the heart keeps pumping acid around
Me
And burning I’ll go, down to the darkest
Deep
Lead me
Home
Leave me
Alone
“I will not take upon me to determine the exact import of the promise which by the act of writing verse an Author, in the present day, makes to his Reader; but I am certain, it will appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement this voluntarily contracted.” – William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
Waking into dark waves of silence
Ninety-thousand leagues below surface
Her eyes cannot see,
a shine or a shiver of me
There comes a tear, a subtle unplugging
Flushing me through the blood-rust of piping
Out on a beach
of dried eels and blistering weeds
I cannot hide, I cannot recover My shaking arms, her palms stabbed with fingers Naked I flail, Lobster imposing a scene
And I wish to die, and the sun it came rising
With pistons so high, the steam scalding smiling
Bleeding me dry
My eyes jellied run into sea
And there they’ll find, a body uncovered
Virginal free, a choral of lovers
Devouring me
With eyes closed in deep ecstasy
Her eyes cannot see,
a shine or a shiver of me
“I had formed no very inaccurate estimate of the probable effect of those Poems: I flattered myself that they who should be pleased with them would read them with more than common pleasure: and, on the other hand, I was well aware, that by those who should dislike them they would be read with more than common dislike.” – William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
You are just my violin
Played quite out of key
Screaming loud and stuttering
Fastened to your tree
Radical and biblical,
tyrannical and pure
Satisfied and compromised
hollowed out unsure
I will be your herald bird
I will be your wren
I will cast the darkness back
With dawn’s song that I bring
Walk upon my gravery
Stand before my stone
Say you will remember me
Til all flesh falls from bone
Radical and biblical,
tyrannical and pure
Satisfied and compromised
hollowed out unsure
“This we take to be the general character of the symbolic, classical, and romantic forms of art, as the three relations of the Idea to its shape in the sphere of art. They consist in the striving for, the attainment, and the transcendence of the Ideal as the true Idea of beauty.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).
Between the morning and the dead
I watch
Nightwaking dream-slake catch
Caught
The portal has been opened but it won’t stay open long
Prolactin for lactating
My teets they fill with milk
A river cutting stone
An endocrinology all their own
Smoke and piss and lovers bliss and rise
See neighbours in their gardens of moonlight
Love and pray reflect upon your dreams
Hold and roam the rich fathomless deep
“Without this formative activity, dear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become explicitly for itself. If consciousness fashions the thing without that initial absolute fear, it is only an empty self-centered attitude; for its form or negativity is not negativity per se, and therefore its formative activity cannot give it a consciousness of itself as essential being. If it has not experienced absolute fear but only some lesser dread, the negative being has remained for it something external, its substance has not been infected by it through and through. Since the entire contents of its natural consciousness have not been jeopardized, determinate being still in principle attaches to it; having a ‘mind of one’s own’ is self-will, a freedom which is still enmeshed in servitude. Just as little as the pure form can become essential being for it, just as little is that form, regarded as extended to the particular, a universal formative activity, an absolute Notion; rather it is a skill which is master over some things, but not over the universal power and the whole of objective being.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).
Tree branches creak
like the fast melting snow
Where are you from?
Time to go
In the thaw I
feel the
awe
In the
thaw
I feel
awe
Clock snaps its arms
Guillotine swing
Darkest of beats
Marches to Spring
Resist instinct
all to end
Let light
in
Let me be
cured
In the thaw I
feel the
awe
In the
thaw
I feel
awe
“No individual inspection of a work ever exhausts its meaning” – Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834).
Reconstructions
Objective Texts
Objective historical: how language shapes text
Objective divinatory: how text shapes language
Subjective Texts
Subjective historical: text produced from author’s soul
Subjective divinatory: author’s soul produced from writing text
“It follows that ever person is on one hand a locus in which a given language is formed after an individual fashion and, on the other, a speaker who is only able to be understood within the totality of the language. In the same way, he is also a constantly developing spirit, while his discourse remains an object within the context of other intellection.” – Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834).
Prussian Plato
Feels in church
An infinite realm
Blossom within
Interpretation
Grammatical or
Technical
A woman’s intuition
Divining rod trembling
Towards the lunar pool
Comparatively his story
Flexes tenses hard
Like concrete cracking
circling
the part in the whole in the
rat in the hole in the
art n he ole
o
“Man’s most valuable faculty is his imagination” – Germaine Necker De Staël (1766-1817).
One minute I,
more Emile than Sophie,
am everything, the next,
Nothing.
Freedman under emperor
agency exercised
a violation
of parole.
Degraded heart,
mediocre mind,
my dear, do I satisfy low
expectation if not desire?
Dear sir, from beneath
courageous cloak
naked vanity is showing
shrivelled and furred.
Uncovered I stand alone and
bear my immodesty.
protect me not, but
witness.
stuartjamestaylor 