Brainstorming about history, politics, literature, religion, and other topics from a 'gypsy' scholar on a wagon hitched to a star.
This is a poem of uncreation, and it reveals both Milton's strong influence on MacLeish's strange imagery and MacLeish's powerful counter-success against Milton's impressive imagery.The sentence still needs work, mostly in its vocabulary.
Labels: Creativity
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 12:21 AM
7 comments
I am a retired professor. I last taught at Ewha Womans University, mostly composition, research writing, and cultural issues, but also the occasional graduate seminar on Gnosticism and Johannine theology and the occasional undergraduate course on European history. My doctorate is in history (U.C. Berkeley), with emphasis on religion and science. My thesis is on John's gospel and Gnosticism. I'm also an award-winning writer, and I recommend my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, to anyone interested. I'm originally from the Arkansas Ozarks, but my academic career -- funded through doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., Fulbright, Naumann, Lady Davis) -- has taken me through Texas, California, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Israel and has landed me in Seoul, South Korea. I've also traveled to Mexico, visited much of Europe, including Moscow, and touched down briefly in a few East Asian countries. Hence: "Gypsy Scholar."
7 Comments:
I'm guessing that your sentence is going for an antimetabole-like symmetry, so my question is: is the sentence's content actually symmetrical? To wit: I can see how Milton, living in the 1600s, might influence MacLeish, who lived from the 1890s to the 1980s. For there to be perfect symmetry, though, there would need to be a retro-temporal influence, which is physically impossible, so we have instead "MacLeish's powerful counter-success against Milton's impressive imagery." I'm not sure how to take "counter-success," but I assume it means something along the lines of MacLeish's influence on his contemporaries' thoughts on Milton, so as to diminish Milton's prominence, eminence, or significance. Influence, like information, can only travel forward in time, so the antimetabole doesn't quite work (assuming, of course, that you were indeed going for an antimetabolic effect).
More simply—
Hoped-for antimetabolic symmetry: Milton influences MacLeish; MacLeish influences Milton
But that's impossible because Milton is dead and can't be influenced.
Actual reality: Milton influences MacLeish; MacLeish (negatively?) influences perceptions of Milton (hence "counter-success")
My thoughts, anyway. Of course, I could simply be on drugs.
Thanks, Kevin. The "Actual Reality" is closer to my meaning, but nothing negative, really, just that uncreation means back to nothingness for MacLeish. Milton starts with chaos and God.
I'll somehow bring my thoughts together.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
"counter-success"
Not sure what to make of that?
But break it down into lines and you have a pretty good surrealist poem.
All is interpretation . . .
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Inspiring from Surrealism and meta-narrative and universal questions of language and time. *Bones*
And all because of my sentencing . . .
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Great Blog. Thanks for sharing this with us. Want to know about mechanics workshops.
Mechanicsta
Post a Comment
<< Home