10.20.2011 - Sharing Metaphors in Poems

Ways of Knowing - October 20, 2011

Attending: Aphrodite, Mickorod, Ataraxia, Pila, Calvino, Agatha,

 

Bruce Mowbray: Hey, Mick!

Bruce Mowbray: You're the early bird!

Bruce Mowbray: Hey, Aph!

Bruce Mowbray: You and Mick are the early birds!

Aphrodite Macbain: Hi Mick, Hi Bruce

Aphrodite Macbain: I'm making up for being late at other times...

Aphrodite Macbain grins

Aphrodite Macbain: Nice t shirt

Aphrodite Macbain: I have brought quite a long poem and I hope it's OK

Aphrodite Macbain: I'll wait for others

Bruce Mowbray: I'm wearing it in memoriam for all the innocent animals that were killed in Ohio yesterday.

Bruce Mowbray: Of course, it's OK that you brought a long poem.

Aphrodite Macbain: ?!

Aphrodite Macbain: what happened?

Bruce Mowbray: I'm just hoping that folks will "do" the "limited" topic.

Bruce Mowbray: Many exotic animals (48 to be exact) had to be shot. . . not too far from where I live.

Bruce Mowbray: It's in the news.

Aphrodite Macbain: were they in a zoo?

Bruce Mowbray: they were a private collection of a man who released them all and then killed himself.

Aphrodite Macbain: OMG

Bruce Mowbray: I will find you a news copy.

Aphrodite Macbain: no worries- I'll listen to the news this evening when I get home'

Pila Mulligan: greetings

Aphrodite Macbain: Hi Pila

Bruce Mowbray: Hey, Pila!

Pila Mulligan: hi Ags

Agatha Macbeth: Hello folks

Aphrodite Macbain: Hey aggers

Bruce Mowbray: Hey, aggers!

Agatha Macbeth: Agatha Macbeth waves and smiles

Bruce Mowbray: Well, about an hour ago, Alfred sent all of us a message (through the WoK mailing list) saying that he didn't feel the topic had been sufficiently limited....

Aphrodite Macbain: wonder if Cal is able to come

Bruce Mowbray: so maybe we need to begin there. . .

Bruce Mowbray: I'm really hoping that Cal will come, Aph.

Aphrodite Macbain: Hmmm

Aphrodite Macbain: I just thought it might be nice to show some poems where metaphor has been used well

Bruce Mowbray: I thought that the group had reached consensus . . . but perhaps I am mistaken.

Aphrodite Macbain: I don't think there was ever a vote Bruce

Aphrodite Macbain: but there was no dissention when you suggested it

Bruce Mowbray thinks. . . rather difficult to vote when folks are not at meetings. . . and when they don't respond to emails sent six days ago.

Bruce Mowbray: OK.

Bruce Mowbray: Thanks, aph.

Aphrodite Macbain: yes exactly so we can never hope for consensus

Bruce Mowbray: I went back and read the transcript carefully, and I thought that we had made a decision. . . that all were happy with.

Pila Mulligan: consensus can arise from the lack of objection

Aphrodite Macbain: but if there is disagreement it s/b voiced as soon as you send out a suggestion

Bruce Mowbray: I agree with both of you. . .

Bruce Mowbray: still waiting for others to arrive . . .

Bruce Mowbray: but perhaps we should begin.

Aphrodite Macbain: Do you have a poem Bruce?

Bruce Mowbray: Yes, I do. . .

Aphrodite Macbain: Pila, Aggers do you?

Bruce Mowbray: but Pila was the first to "claim" a poem. . .

Pila Mulligan: yes :)

Aphrodite Macbain: :-)

Aphrodite Macbain: yay

Bruce Mowbray: perhaps Pila would begin. . . I hope.

Agatha Macbeth: No sorry, forgot all about it

Aphrodite Macbain: Here comes Ataraxia

Ataraxia Azemus: :)

Bruce Mowbray: Hey, Atari!

Aphrodite Macbain: Hi

Agatha Macbeth: Hello Atari

Pila Mulligan: hi Atari

Ataraxia Azemus: Hi everyone :)

Mickorod Renard: Hi, sorry was away

Pila Mulligan: wb Mick

Mickorod Renard: :)

Pila Mulligan: I can begin if you like, Bruce

Bruce Mowbray: That would be great, Pila!

Bruce Mowbray: Thanks.

Pila Mulligan: I've always loved this poem, translated from Chinese -- it seems to me to convey the essence of meditation

Pila Mulligan:

  A halo of light surrounds the world of the law.

  We forget one another, quiet and pure, altogether powerful and empty.

  The emptiness is irradiated by the light of the heart and of heaven.

  The water of the sea is smooth and mirrors the moon in its surface.

  The clouds disappear in blue space; the mountains shine clear.

  Consciousness reverts to contemplation; the moon-disk rests alone.

 

  [Empty Infinity from Richard Wilhelm's translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower]

 

Agatha Macbeth: Ah yes, I like that

Pila Mulligan: :)

Ataraxia Azemus: Me too

Aphrodite Macbain: Lovely. Very evocative. Peaceful

Pila Mulligan: it is both literal and metaphorical

Mickorod Renard: need to digest that one

Pila Mulligan: I had a dream a week ago that led to an essay relating to it -- http://waysofknowing.kira.org/6Writings%2f%2fEssays/Poetry_in_Knowing

Aphrodite Macbain: I wonder what he means by "the world of the law"

Pila Mulligan: dharma, is my guess

Aphrodite Macbain: ah -

Aphrodite Macbain: it's filled with light

Pila Mulligan: :)

Pila Mulligan: hi Cal

Aphrodite Macbain: and references to light

Pila Mulligan: yes

Ataraxia Azemus: Hi Cal :)

Aphrodite Macbain: Hi Cal. GTSY

Agatha Macbeth: Hello Cal

Aphrodite Macbain: glad you could make it

Calvino Rabeni: Hi everyone :)

Bruce Mowbray: Really glad to see you Cal. Pila is telling us about his poem now.

Aphrodite Macbain: Pila has just quoted a beautiful poem

Mickorod Renard: it seems to suggest to me dropping preconceptions and attachments, being awakened to the pureness without the darkness

Pila Mulligan: yes, the empty light

Pila Mulligan: of form

Mickorod Renard: yes

Aphrodite Macbain: I like to concept of emptiness being filled with light

Pila Mulligan: :)

Bruce Mowbray: Perhaps my question is off-base, Pila, but how do you personally "connect" with the poem? Intuitive "knowing"?

Aphrodite Macbain: I feel more comfortable with it when it's filled with light

Aphrodite Macbain: good question Bruce

Pila Mulligan: it reflects the essence of meditation experience to me, Bruce

Mickorod Renard: maybe what darkens us is what we fill ourselves with

Bruce Mowbray: ahhhh! Thanks!

Pila Mulligan: knowing may be to freighted a term there, but it also may be the only term :)

Aphrodite Macbain: can you explain that Mick?

Ataraxia Azemus: I like the image that's often used to describe sunyata, of an open sky

Pila Mulligan: seeing perhaps

Pila Mulligan: :)

Mickorod Renard: a bit like congestion of busy and pointless thoughts

Bruce Mowbray: so, a contemplative knowing . . . (into the emptiness comes insight?)

Ataraxia Azemus: Hi Boxy :)

Agatha Macbeth: Hi Boxyboy

Pila Mulligan: hi Alf

Alfred Kelberry: hi :)

Mickorod Renard: Hi Alf

Bruce Mowbray: Please join us, Alfred.

Aphrodite Macbain: an insight in the form of light

Aphrodite Macbain: form

Aphrodite Macbain: Hiya Boxy

Bruce Mowbray: Pila is presenting his poem now. . .

Aphrodite Macbain listens

Agatha Macbeth baits her breath

Aphrodite Macbain hands aggers a hook

Mickorod Renard: cleaning the windows of one's mind

Agatha Macbeth: ty

Ataraxia Azemus: :)

Aphrodite Macbain: yw

Bruce Mowbray: The metaphors in your poem are powerful, Pila.

Agatha Macbeth: Indeed

Pila Mulligan gives Alfy a notecard

Bruce Mowbray: It occurs to me that the only way to express such contemplative experience may be through metaphor.

Pila Mulligan: I agree bruce, poetry is the appropriate vehicle for some communication

Aphrodite Macbain: for me it clarifies things - using language that allows me to imagine what that emptiness might feel like

Pila Mulligan: yes, evoking the feeling

Aphrodite Macbain: offering new images to refer to

Pila Mulligan: as opposed to a spec sheet :)

Aphrodite Macbain: :-)

Mickorod Renard: me too Aph, I need some guidance like that to reach it

Bruce Mowbray: the "insight" that can be named is not the "true" insight? - - or am I doing an off-base paraphrase there?

Pila Mulligan: :)

Aphrodite Macbain: Being a visual person, a visual metaphor helps me understand a complex experience

Pila Mulligan: a picture of a mountain is not a complete mountain

Ataraxia Azemus: I think poetry may be a truer way of relating some aspects of our experience than flat descriptions

Bruce Mowbray: The poem is beautiful - - and it speaks of beautiful experience.

Bruce Mowbray: Oh I so agree with you, Atari.

Ataraxia Azemus: :)

Bruce Mowbray: Pila your essay is definitely recommended reading.

http://waysofknowing.kira.org/6Writings%2f%2fEssays/Poetry_in_Knowing

Bruce Mowbray: Thanks for sharing it.

Aphrodite Macbain: I don't think it is the only insight about emptiness but it gives me a new perspective on it

Pila Mulligan: thank you, Bruce -- it came from a dream last week, we talked about it at Maxine's workshop

Bruce Mowbray: yes, me too, Aph.

Aphrodite Macbain: yes thanks Pila

Pila Mulligan: :)

Mickorod Renard: ty Pila

Bruce Mowbray: Please say more, if you'd care to, Pila.

Ataraxia Azemus: Yes, Aph

Bruce Mowbray: or shall we move on to another poem - and another person?

Calvino Rabeni: The "picture" develops in the mind of the reader through imagination, enabled by doing things like singing or reading the poem many times .. it can't be read like a newspaper article for information ... poetry is a different way of reading and knowing

Pila Mulligan: well, I called it the Hegelian corpuscle dream -- a kind of animation of corpuscles going bout their business

Aphrodite Macbain: It also allows me to understand Pila better and his feelings towards meditation

Aphrodite Macbain: also

Bruce Mowbray listens.

Aphrodite Macbain: corpuscles and nerve endings

Pila Mulligan: well, the poem, the dream summary and the essay pretty well exhaust my stuff

Ataraxia Azemus: Yes, Cal....a more participatory way of reading, perhaps?

Calvino Rabeni: yes enactive

Calvino Rabeni: actually doing some re-creating perhaps

Aphrodite Macbain: it's a creative way of approaching knowledge and experience

Calvino Rabeni: walking onto the same path

Bruce Mowbray: thanks so much for your offerings, Pila.

Pila Mulligan: thank you

Aphrodite Macbain: Aphrodite Macbain APPLAUDS!!!

Bruce Mowbray: Would anyone else care to go next?

Agatha Macbeth: yes, ty

Bruce Mowbray: Aggers?

Agatha Macbeth: Mm?

Bruce Mowbray: did you want to go next?

Agatha Macbeth: Er, no :p

Bruce Mowbray: ok.

Bruce Mowbray: the floor is open.

Agatha Macbeth: Agatha Macbeth smiles

Agatha Macbeth: Agatha Macbeth falls into the hole

Aphrodite Macbain: Cal?

Calvino Rabeni: I can

Bruce Mowbray: Oh please do, Cal.

Calvino Rabeni: This is a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Calvino Rabeni: The title is "The Apology"

Calvino Rabeni: I removed one stanza to make it 16 lines

Bruce Mowbray: ;-)

Calvino Rabeni: It was hard to decide what to cut

Aphrodite Macbain nods

Calvino Rabeni: because it starts to seem like a body that needs all its parts

Aphrodite Macbain: :-)

Bruce Mowbray is so sorry to hear this.

Calvino Rabeni: no poet adds much unnecessary to a poem

Bruce Mowbray: can you give all of it to us, Cal?

Aphrodite Macbain: yes

Calvino Rabeni: OK it is 20

Aphrodite Macbain: :-)

Mickorod Renard: :)

Bruce Mowbray: good -- the full poem, then.

Calvino Rabeni:

   "The Apology" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 Think me not unkind and rude,

 That I walk alone in grove and glen;

 I go to the god of the wood

 To fetch his word to men.

 

 Tax not my sloth that I

 Fold my arms beside the brook;

 Each cloud that floated in the sky

 Writes a letter in my book.

 

 Chide me not, laborious band,

 For the idle flowers I brought;

 Every aster in my hand

 Goes home loaded with a thought.

 

 There was never mystery,

 But 'tis figured in the flowers,

 Was never secret history,

 But birds tell it in the bowers.

 

 One harvest from thy field

 Homeward brought the oxen strong;

 A second crop thine acres yield,

 Which I gather in a song.

 

Ataraxia Azemus: I feel too tired to soak it in....but I love that

Bruce Mowbray: a wonderful poem.

Mickorod Renard: very nice

Aphrodite Macbain: Thanks Cal

Agatha Macbeth: Yes, lovely

Calvino Rabeni: YW

Aphrodite Macbain: I love the lines: "Every aster in my hand

 Goes home loaded with a thought"

Pila Mulligan: nice imagery

Aphrodite Macbain: lovely metaphor - an aster loaded with thoughts

Bruce Mowbray waits to hear from Cal how the metaphors informed his "knowing."

Aphrodite Macbain: heavy, fecund, beautiful

Calvino Rabeni: I think my favorite stanza is the last one, that speaks of the harvest that is possible through conscious "second sight"

Mickorod Renard: I struggled with the last one

Aphrodite Macbain: wonder what the second crop is

Calvino Rabeni: It says that nature feeds our bodies, but can also feed our souls, if we contemplate, like the poem gives instructions for

Calvino Rabeni: the harvest is all the "words' of the god of nature, that we can see through nature meditation

Mickorod Renard: ahh, that makes sense

Calvino Rabeni: It also suggests to see things in both a physical way, and a spiritual way

Ataraxia Azemus: Ah, I love that :)

Aphrodite Macbain: yes, that makes beautiful sense

Pila Mulligan: and the 'apology' is to those unaware of the poet's insights

Calvino Rabeni: I find poems reveal their meaning if I read them aloud may times

Aphrodite Macbain: if we only have eyes to see this

Aphrodite Macbain: or hear it.

Bruce Mowbray: This age of "objective physical" science can perhaps learn to "see" from the past's nature poets - -  Wordsworth, Emerson. . .

Calvino Rabeni: Yes it's an apology that his "work" is productive, but not in the world of the economy and labor

Bruce Mowbray: a different way of knowing...

Aphrodite Macbain: I find I look at things differently when they have been part of a metaphor.

Aphrodite Macbain: a field is no longer a field

Aphrodite Macbain: or, just a field

Calvino Rabeni: Indeed, this is a different way of knowing

Bruce Mowbray: Do you think the "song" (last word of the poem) refers to this poem itself?

Pila Mulligan: it reminds me of Socrates' last words in Plato's 'Apology' ...

Calvino Rabeni: different seeing, different eyes

Aphrodite Macbain: yes

Calvino Rabeni: what was that, Pila?

Pila Mulligan: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows. "

Calvino Rabeni: ty

Pila Mulligan: :)

Aphrodite Macbain: Socrates

Bruce Mowbray: yes, Pila. . .

Bruce Mowbray: There is MUCH in these metaphors. . . Did you wish to say more, Cal?

Calvino Rabeni: I did think something different each time I read it

Aphrodite Macbain nods

Calvino Rabeni: for instance, do you think, it is necessary to have solitude to do this kind of seeing?

Bruce Mowbray: the sign of greatness....

Calvino Rabeni: Or could two people go an do it together and share knowledge

Aphrodite Macbain: There are fewer distractions with solitude

Bruce Mowbray: for me personally? yes solitude is necessary. . . but perhaps not for everyone.

Pila Mulligan: Cal, it *helps* to have quiet and stillness and nature

Pila Mulligan: it may not be a requirement

Aphrodite Macbain: a combination can also work - ideas discussed followed by ideas thought about, followed by ideas discussed etc

Mickorod Renard: I have found just less than a handful of people I could share with in my life

Bruce Mowbray: I would love to have a friend with whom to share such experience. . . but don't.

Aphrodite Macbain: maybe one is not enough

Aphrodite Macbain: we need different minds to feed us

Aphrodite Macbain: along with our own

Bruce Mowbray: More from Cal?

Calvino Rabeni: It also reminded me of "distributed cognition" theories .. the way the aster was able to be part of the language of knowing ... and that the clouds could accumulate their letters into a longer passage in a book of knowing

Aphrodite Macbain: distributed cognition meaning things can represent different things?

Aphrodite Macbain: many signifiers?

Aphrodite Macbain: a rose is a rose isn't a rose?

Bruce Mowbray: so the metaphors suggest sharing among different realms . . . that one thing can inform us of many things. . . (?)

Calvino Rabeni: meaning thinking is distributed in the environment ... the asters are metaphors that have their own physical presence independent of a person, but in conversation

Calvino Rabeni: the book, is the book of the world

Aphrodite Macbain: book?

Bruce Mowbray: wow. wonderful.

Calvino Rabeni: Emerson is learning to read it ... which is a literary metaphor

Calvino Rabeni: but it could also be described as a conversation

Bruce Mowbray: and the poet is giving it back to us to read -- as a song.

Calvino Rabeni: yes

Aphrodite Macbain: with whom? the reader?

Calvino Rabeni: that's an important part, Bruce?

Calvino Rabeni: bringing it back to the world of humans

Mickorod Renard: I guess, in this way of looking at nature and so forth, one can share a sort of communication with it and also see it in a more living and cohabitual way

Calvino Rabeni: it's a return from something like a shamanic journey too

Bruce Mowbray: oh yes. . . if it is possible to do so. and a poet can if anyone can.

Pila Mulligan: Bruce, time runs short -- your poem?

Bruce Mowbray: Only 15 minutes left. . . sry, but felt I should say that.

Bruce Mowbray: How about Aph?

Agatha Macbeth: Go for it Brucie!

Bruce Mowbray: me?

Agatha Macbeth: Yeah

Pila Mulligan: :)

Aphrodite Macbain: Hmm do your poem first and if there's time, I can quote mine

Agatha Macbeth: Indeed

Bruce Mowbray: ok

Bruce Mowbray: Mine is quite similar to Cal's, in a way.

Agatha Macbeth: :)

Bruce Mowbray: Robert Frost's

     "Nothing Gold Can Stay"

 

 Nature's first green is gold

 Her hardest hue to hold.

 Her early leaf's a flower;

 But only so an hour.

 Then leaf subsides to leaf.

 So Eden sank to grief,

 So dawn goes down to day.

 Nothing gold can stay.

 

Ataraxia Azemus: I've always loved this one

Aphrodite Macbain: sigh

Bruce Mowbray: -

Bruce Mowbray: me too, Atari.

Mickorod Renard: short but sweet

Aphrodite Macbain: a sad little poem about letting go

Agatha Macbeth: Mm, that's nice

Bruce Mowbray: now that I've been studying a bit of Buddhism, I feel the "impermanence" spoken by poem.

Pila Mulligan: lovely

Ataraxia Azemus: Mm

Bruce Mowbray: nothing gold -- fresh, young, shining,. . .

Bruce Mowbray: can stay.

Bruce Mowbray: not even a "bright shining" thought.

Aphrodite Macbain: but along will come another one...

Bruce Mowbray: no matter how pure or "gold"

Agatha Macbeth: Like a bus

Aphrodite Macbain: in life's cycle

Pila Mulligan: form becomes weighted with substance

Aphrodite Macbain laughs @aggers

Bruce Mowbray: I feel the impermanence more than think it.

Bruce Mowbray: I feel the "loss" of letting go -- and also the lightness of it.

Mickorod Renard: yes, maybe a suggestion that one must let go, grasp the freshness only

Aphrodite Macbain: like monks destroying a mandala after hours of making it

Bruce Mowbray: wonderful images . . . natural images.

Calvino Rabeni: 'Down' is unexpected metaphor for the rising sun and morning ... does it say something about things seeming most vivid at the moment of their change?

Aphrodite Macbain: (I always kept a bit of the powder)

Bruce Mowbray: look at the first sprout -- it is a flower,

Ataraxia Azemus: :)

Bruce Mowbray: but only so an hour.

Bruce Mowbray: then it goes into green stem...

Bruce Mowbray: no longer gold.

Bruce Mowbray: so it is with everything.

Aphrodite Macbain: but a dying leaf is usually the brightest

Bruce Mowbray: So Eden fell to grief.

Aphrodite Macbain: out with a blaze of glory

Calvino Rabeni: And something about entering the world of commerce, the day, work, when innocence of Eden is lost to the practicalities of the ordinary world

Bruce Mowbray: it's not gold, though, Aph.

Aphrodite Macbain: umm true

Pila Mulligan: :)

Calvino Rabeni: this could be seen similar to 'The Apology' in that way

Bruce Mowbray: perhaps important not to take the metaphors too literally

Calvino Rabeni: two ways of looking and valuing

Bruce Mowbray: yes, very similar, Cal.

Bruce Mowbray: Only 9 minutes left.

Pila Mulligan thinks there is still time for Aph's poem

Bruce Mowbray: I want to hear others' poems

Aphrodite Macbain: Ok

Aphrodite Macbain: I will post in 3 bits

Mickorod Renard: everything is relative, even something dying has its beginning and end

Pila Mulligan: :)

Agatha Macbeth: Do we all turn into pumpkins at 3 PM?

Aphrodite Macbain: "The Lemon Trees"

 By Eugenio Montale (1896 - 1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.

 

 Listen: the laureled poets

 stroll only among shrubs

 with learned names: ligustrum, acanthus, box.

 What I like are streets that end in grassy

 ditches where boys snatch

 a few famished eels from drying puddles:

 paths that struggle along the banks,

 then dip among the tufted canes,

 into the orchards, among the lemon trees.

 

 Better, if the gay palaver of the birds

 is stilled, swallowed by the blue:

 more clearly now, you hear the whisper

 of genial branches in that air barely astir,

 the sense of that smell

 inseparable from earth,

 that rains its restless sweetness in the heart.

 Here, by some miracle, the war

 of conflicted passions is stilled,

 here even we the poor share the riches of the world—

 the smell of the lemon trees.

 

 See, in these silences when things

 let themselves go and seem almost

 to reveal their final secret,

 we sometimes expect

 to discover a flaw in Nature,

 the world's dead point, the link that doesn't hold,

 the thread that, disentangled, might at last lead us

 to the center of a truth.

 The eye rummages,

 the mind pokes about, unifies, disjoins

 in the fragrance that grows

 as the day closes, languishing.

 These are the silences where we see

 in each departing human shade

 some disturbed Divinity.

 

 But the illusion dies, time returns us

 to noisy cities where the sky is only

 patches of blue, high up, between the cornices.

 Rain wearies the ground; over the buildings

 winter's tedium thickens.

 Light grows niggardly, the soul bitter.

 And, one day, through a gate ajar,

 among the trees in a courtyard,

 we see the yellows of the lemon trees;

 and the heart's ice thaws,

 and songs pelt

 into the breast

 and trumpets of gold pour forth

 epiphanies of Light!

 

 (translated by William Arrowsmith, Cuttlefish Bon

 

Ataraxia Azemus: I love that....thank you, Aph :)

Calvino Rabeni: Very nice .. I can see the human / nature relationship in this poem too .. this one is very inviting to a direct experience

Agatha Macbeth: ty Aph

Aphrodite Macbain: My favourite is the middle stanza - see in these silences when things let themselves go and seem almost to reveal their final secret

Pila Mulligan: "even we the poor share the riches of the world" ")

Calvino Rabeni: nods

Mickorod Renard: nice, I had to read it slowly though

Aphrodite Macbain: I want to read it over and over; it is so rich in metaphor and language

Bruce Mowbray: so rich.

Aphrodite Macbain: It has somehow the sadness of fall - I'm not sure why

Ataraxia Azemus: I like the recurring image of lemon trees....

Aphrodite Macbain: Someone sent me that poem.

Ataraxia Azemus: Their distance, and simultaneous closeness

Aphrodite Macbain: I hadn't encountered Eugenio Montale before

Aphrodite Macbain: _Italian

Agatha Macbeth: Mama mia

Mickorod Renard: it is quite an intimate experience i feel, when one shares a poem with someone else

Aphrodite Macbain: Rain wearies the ground; over the buildings

 winter's tedium thickens.

Aphrodite Macbain: I can identify with that...

Aphrodite Macbain: the concept of the ground being wearied by rain

Bruce Mowbray: more from Aph? or more about her poem?

Ataraxia Azemus: I agree, Mick :)

Aphrodite Macbain: You're all wearied by the rain of words

Agatha Macbeth: Weird?

Aphrodite Macbain: ha

Mickorod Renard: :)

Bruce Mowbray: ;-)

Agatha Macbeth: Agatha Macbeth nods vehemently

Aphrodite Macbain: That was fun. Good idea Bruce

Agatha Macbeth: Yay Brucie

Aphrodite Macbain: shall we do it again next week? Or does anyone have some other ideas for topics?

Bruce Mowbray: In previous meetings, we've said that we needed to have consensus on a "limited" topic before the end of the meeting. . .

Bruce Mowbray: open for suggestions.

Ataraxia Azemus: I like the poetic threads :)

Agatha Macbeth: You're so suggestive Bruce ;-)

Ataraxia Azemus: They're inspiring

Bruce Mowbray: ;-)

Ataraxia Azemus: :)

Mickorod Renard: I am always happy to share intimate moments with friends

Aphrodite Macbain: It seems like 4 people got a chance to do something like this per session. Would those who didn't have a chance to share a poem like to do one next week?

Bruce Mowbray listens . . .

Aphrodite Macbain: Ataraxia, Mick, Aggers?

Mickorod Renard: :)

Bruce Mowbray: Alfred?

Agatha Macbeth: He'll just go Woof

Aphrodite Macbain: alfred (sorry boxy - didn't see you)

Ataraxia Azemus: I might not be able to make it, next week....but I'll have a poem ready, just in case :)

Alfred Kelberry: I'm not much of a poem person, sorry :)

Ataraxia Azemus: If I can't make it in time, I can pass it along, too

Pila Mulligan: :)

Aphrodite Macbain wonders what a poem person is like

Mickorod Renard: I decided to back out this session cos I often donate dreams and things and didn't want to impose

Bruce Mowbray: Will someone please state the consensus about the topic for next week, then?

Agatha Macbeth: Good to listen to Aph...

Aphrodite Macbain: there isn't one Bruce

Alfred Kelberry: besides, all poems rhyme in my book :)

Pila Mulligan: none yet maybe, Bruce

Aphrodite Macbain: that's OK too alf

Agatha Macbeth: There was a young lady from ealing

Calvino Rabeni: who constantly sat on the ceiling

Aphrodite Macbain: and somebody thought she was stealing

Agatha Macbeth grins

Mickorod Renard: I am sure poems are another method of Wok, as long as we keep in the spirit

Bruce Mowbray ponders cat herding. . .

Aphrodite Macbain: in the end the laugher was peeling

Ataraxia Azemus: :) Bruce

Bruce Mowbray: OK. Do you all want to continue with today's topic?

Aphrodite Macbain: meeow

Bruce Mowbray: and continue doing what we did today?

Mickorod Renard: and we all know laughter is also healing

Alfred Kelberry: aph, it's those modernists that changed it. form was degraded, meaning supposedly heightened.

Agatha Macbeth: Mmm

Calvino Rabeni: It gets easier with practice (meaning poems)

Aphrodite Macbain: Let's do that and maybe put out another call. I may not be able to join as I'll be in Toronto

Calvino Rabeni wonders if "humor" is a good topic for Ways of Knowing

Alfred Kelberry: why spare one for the sake of another?

Bruce Mowbray: I will post the chat, then, and put out another call.

Ataraxia Azemus: Definitely!

Aphrodite Macbain: we can each tell a joke?

Bruce Mowbray: How about those of us who are here also bringing another poem next week?

Agatha Macbeth: How about Ways of Joking?

Aphrodite Macbain: an intelligent, insightful joke

Pila Mulligan: nice mix: poems and jokes :)

Calvino Rabeni: Why not?

Ataraxia Azemus: :)

Bruce Mowbray: Joking as a way of knowing. . .?

Agatha Macbeth: Joems and pokes

Ataraxia Azemus: hehehe

Bruce Mowbray: and punning. . .

Agatha Macbeth: Aha

Aphrodite Macbain: Twas brillig and the slithey toves did jire and jumble in the wabe'

Bruce Mowbray: Keep in touch through email, folks.

Agatha Macbeth: That too

Ataraxia Azemus: Punning in Circles :)

Bruce Mowbray: Bye for now.

Agatha Macbeth: and mind the Jabberwock

Aphrodite Macbain: we can do a round of puns

Pila Mulligan: thanks Bruce

Alfred Kelberry: cal, anything is better with practice. but you should not conceal it for the sake of concealment.

Bruce Mowbray: thanks everyone.

Ataraxia Azemus: Thanks, Bruce. Take care.

Aphrodite Macbain: nicker snack

Mickorod Renard: bye Bruce ty