Breaking at the Caesura
The beautiful red-flowered bush
Outside my window’s been
Cut back.
I can see the puddle of water
On the roof
Across the way –
Does it ever dry out?
Bright sun on the apartment building
I look at every day, top floors,
Right side only.
Reflections on their windows:
The picture of a place.
Pete, this triggers a question about creativity: Image? or Imagination?
A nice picture you paint here.
Les
What part do we play in creating our experience?
Pete, I'm sure we play a significant role in the creative process. What limits our life experience places on our creativity, I'm not sure.
Les
Les,
Neither am I...I think of our life experiences, sometimes, as the occasion for or the opening up to our creativity. On the other hand, Immanuel Kant found imagination to be the foundation of both the possibility of experience and the possibility of reason for human beings.
Peter
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/03/2022 02:24AM by petersz.
Do people who live in the artic, Mongolia, Tibet and other remote places dream of space travel? I guess I'll have to read their poetry to find out.
Les
Now, Les, all the poems in "Inside Outer Space: New Poems of the Space Age," an anthology edited by Robert Vas Dias, published in 1970, are written by people born in England, the U.S. A. Germany , the Philippines, Finland etc., but none's from the artic, Mongolia, Tibet ... but I don't think the logical parameter is geographical. That is, I think there might be more dreamers of space travel after 1970 than before 1770...yet I believe there's been such dreamers for a long, long time in most any culture...I know people who claim there're references to it in the Old Testament, but I'm not so convinced by their evidence.
Me, I never dream of space travel. I dream I am speaking French, or interacting with my former spouse, or seeing everything in red, and I used to dream I was Peter Rabbit or that I could fly. Do you dream of space travel?
Cheers,
Peter
p.s., Actually I have not asked the people I know from Alaska, [don't know anyone from the artic right now] Tibet or Mongolia if they dream of space travel.
Peter
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/05/2022 12:07AM by petersz.
Les,
Take a look at the back cover, attached. By the way, I was thinking of you when I wrote this poem because as some point you wondered about my line breaks in one of my poems, I don't remember which one.
Cheers,
Peter
Do you dream of space travel?
Never, but the topic "space travel" was used because it is a prevalent topic in video games, and western culture in general. My choice of the 3 geographical areas was used simply because they are generally outside the mainstream western culture. My point being that dreams are colored by our experience. Though I'm sure a caveman might have looked at star and thought "Hey, I'd like to go there!"
Les
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/04/2022 03:14PM by les712.
Les,
Siggy, in his book on dreams, claims every dream has in its latent content an element both of the early experience of the dreamer and of the experience of the day's experience just before the dream. I am not a Freudian, but I've found that claim often valid.
However, I have dreamt of experiences I could not have nor have even imagined. Also, I have read accounts of blind from birth people who have had sighted dreams. I sort of accept that. Do you ever have dreams of experiences you can't even imagine?
cheers,
Peter
"Do you ever have dreams of experiences you can't even imagine?"
I have not done this, but in doing research for my poem about Tesla, he "imagined" a working model of an alternating current electrical generator, before such item had ever been developed by anyone. Then, he proceded to build it from the schematic in his mind.
Les
Les,
I do think scientists and inventors, as well as artists and poets, reach into the available culture, as do ordinary people, to draw out what is to come. It is not always so dramatic as what Tesla did, but we live in such a live environment, some call it the unconscious, individual and collective, some call it culture, some prefer mystical terms of this pool of inspiration, but something is certainly available for the creative process. I have read of mathematicians going to bed with a problem and waking up with a solution, etc. ['The Mathematical Way of Thinking,' James R. Newman] There's also a book titled 'The Creative Process' filled with tales of this kind.
I also have a friend who takes the distinction between waking life and sleeping life to be an artificial dichotomy, like all dualism, fundamentally an illusion. But that's another tangent. Sleep well; pleasant dreams.
Peter
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/05/2022 04:40PM by petersz.
[1] "That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is indeed no doubt...but although our knowledge originates with experience, it does not all arise out of experience.'--Immanuel Kant
[2] My experience with the caesura, in Beowolf and Chaucer, annotated my feel for the poetic line in Williams, Robert Kelley and Tom Clark...me finding the latter three poets often play at breaking the line at the pause rather than at the closure we find in iambic pentameter, making the reader who is accustomed to 18th and 19th century poetry as a model of how line should break work uneasily with 20th and 21st Century work that does not imitate the older style from the previous two hundred years. This gives the flow of the words a kind of push in the second and third lines of my poem.
Peter