![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bronze_ribbonsFrom this month's Q&A:
Inkberry also rules: Rachel posted Jack Gilbert's "A Brief for the Defense" at the end of the November newsletter, and I'm going to use it as the meditation poem for the service I'm leading later this month. (Now all I have left to do for it is to find a children's story -- any suggestions, y'all? the theme is "gratitude" -- and practice the hymns and write the sermon...)
The other highlights of the day included reuniting the dog with her stuffed septopus (it started out as a stuffed octopus, but...) and reading a provocative Sandy Kita essay, "From Shadow to Substance: Redefining Ukiyo-e" (in The Floating World of Ukiyo-e, Abrams, 2001) in which she exhorts her readers to "not fall into the old trap of trying to find one feature,one quality, one word that describes the essence of this art" and analyzes the distinctions between "ukiyo" as a common noun vs. its usage as a proper noun. I was also charmed by this bit:
* "this feature" = the artists' depictions of what they apparently saw before them (as opposed to parody and fantasy)
Q. Are poets allowed poetic license to do practically anything with punctuation? I ask this in view of a poem by Emily Dickinson that seems to use the em dash in bewildering and inscrutable ways.
A. Yes, poets are pretty much allowed to do as they please. In my experience, they are sometimes even offended by editing, believing that their misspellings and inconsistencies are inspired, if not intentional. Of course, if poetry is idiosyncratic to the point of being annoying, nobody will want to buy it, so there’s some motivation for restraint in the first place.
Inkberry also rules: Rachel posted Jack Gilbert's "A Brief for the Defense" at the end of the November newsletter, and I'm going to use it as the meditation poem for the service I'm leading later this month. (Now all I have left to do for it is to find a children's story -- any suggestions, y'all? the theme is "gratitude" -- and practice the hymns and write the sermon...)
The other highlights of the day included reuniting the dog with her stuffed septopus (it started out as a stuffed octopus, but...) and reading a provocative Sandy Kita essay, "From Shadow to Substance: Redefining Ukiyo-e" (in The Floating World of Ukiyo-e, Abrams, 2001) in which she exhorts her readers to "not fall into the old trap of trying to find one feature,one quality, one word that describes the essence of this art" and analyzes the distinctions between "ukiyo" as a common noun vs. its usage as a proper noun. I was also charmed by this bit:
...one term that has often been used for this feature of Ukiyo-e is realism. I have tried to avoid that term because the dictionary definition of realism in art is picturing things or people as they really are. I am not sure that we can ever know anyone as they really are, and maybe not things either.
* "this feature" = the artists' depictions of what they apparently saw before them (as opposed to parody and fantasy)
