"Phenomena, Noumena, Startling Sparrows" by Stephen Kampa
Manage episode 436596482 series 3396484
Soundtrack to this episode (it's Stephen Kampa!)
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Go read New Verse Review!
-Go listen to my talk on SLEERICKETS about Horace's Ars Poetica!
-Go listen to the mighty Fer de Lance!
-The Sleerickets Stephen Kampa episode
-Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
-From Transcendental Idealism to Transcendentalism
-Romanticism as post-Kantian reaction
-Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Freud, Coleridge, Emerson, etc. etc.
-Contemptus Mundi
-The inauthenticity of the nihilist everyman
-The Protestant anti-rationalist tradition
-Spooky Calvinist symbolism + German Romanticism + Hinduism 101 + Patriotism = Transcendentalism
-Death and Love conceived ornithologically
-More dialectical poems!
Text of poem:
Phenomena, Noumena, Startling Sparrows
Faced with the world mistaken for the world,
I’m not confused: it seems so sensible
To call the loose, cyclonic pulse of leaves
On sidewalks “physics,” and not a miracle.
I understand a prophet undeceives
Himself when, limping by the roadkill curled
Beside the curb, he thinks theodicy
Inadequate for even bestial pain,
Or when, dispersing the loud shroud of flies
That swaddles it, he wonders how the sane
Escape their own conclusions. Sense defies
Every compendium of mystery.
And if I’m senseless, then, for holding this
World most enlightening when its premises
Grow thinnest, I am glad to be struck dumb.
Look: fireflies punctuate the night with green
Epigrams on love, petunias keen
For the dead possum, and electrons hum
Concentric hymns to probability
While leaf-swirls sing in fractal harmony.
Best is this line of sparrows that have shown
Their utter distance from the disapproving
Caws of the crows by fleshing out a moving
Ellipsis leading into the unknown.
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My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight
Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug
List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)
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