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 |   Second blog -- answers to an ocean of prompts |
 "Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself." CHARLIE CHAPLIN  Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. David Whyte        This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts. |
| Prompt: "Poetry is meant to be heard." Mary Oliver Do you agree with this? ------ I love Mary Oliver. Still, I think poetry has to be felt internally, first. Hearing the sounds does have an effect like music comforting the soul, but to me, it comes second, not first. The sounds of the words and lines depend on an external sense, the hearing, but feeling has to do with the heart and the mind. The way I look at it, meaning tops everything else in any art but especially in poetry, which, as an arranged piece, has many sides to it such as topic, message, rhythm, and word choices. Most newbie poets have the impression that poetry means using a poetic language and techniques to express important thoughts or ideas in a more beautiful, complex, or compressed way than prose, and that its beauty, complexity, and other heightened external qualities make it what it is. I may accept their assessment only from the point of view that the full beauty of a language, any language, can only be released through poetry. It is true that poetry has a lot do with the deft handling of the language, but that may not be enough on its own because language needs the meaning and the feeling of the poet to become poetry. This is why it is very difficult to comment on, let alone review, any poem. We can only do this from our own impressions and understanding of the work. The poet herself or himself might have had a very different take on that very poem. I think, on this topic, I am more inclined to go with Emily Dickinson’s words. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” Hence, as far as poets and poetry aficionados go, I say, “To each, his own!” |
| Prompt: "The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention." Alan Watts What is your take on this? ==== From birth on, we construct the ego ourselves as some kind of an identity, but if we are smart enough, we turn it into the dynamic part of our personalities. This is because the ego becomes a mixture of all our suspicions and beliefs about ourselves that may usually stay hidden inside our subconscious but always ready to pop up and create strong emotional reactions. It may show up as being fake and artificial or as a personal strength, depending on how we treat it and look at it. For the same token, the ego is not necessarily negative, although most people think it so. It is, in fact, made up of positive and negative parts, the positive part being self-esteem and the negative arrogance. There is a huge difference between arrogance and self-confidence. I am not sure which part of the ego Alan Watts is talking about here. Possibly, as most people do, he considers the ego as being only the negative part. The ego is not the real self, but the learned/artificial self mostly with the real self attaching itself to it. Who we are is who we are whether we focus our attention on it or not. The negative part of the ego, on the other hand, requires great attention to itself. This is why it is so difficult to figure out if a person is confident of his skills and who he is or else, who he is and what he can do has gone to his head. |
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