People Looking Without Seeing.

"The question is not what you look at--

but how you look and whether you see."

Henry David Thoreau

Journal, August 5, 1851.

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"What's this?"

"What's what?"

"Why, look."

John Updike

The Poorhouse Fair

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"Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart."

1 Samuel 16: 7.

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   The average person living in our western hemisphere sees things. The job of the poet, the mystic, the artist, or the philosopher is to see ideas behind the things.

   I'll confess, I often find, even as I'm reading (or writing) poetry--I'm often distractable and focused on speed and finishing, rather than dwelling deep in the moment--the idea is eluding me with shameful ease. Then again, I just read an 81 page book of poetry, of which I understood less than five pages. Is it because I never slowed down? Actually, I read several poems two or three times, and it still read like stream-of-consciousness gibberish. (*see below for excerpt.)

   Whattaya think? Does that notion of looking for idea apply only to good literature? I think so...perhaps one could draw a line between popular fiction and "literary" fiction based on this distinction...or...not? Your thoughts?

This brief blog is brought to you by the underwriters of "Sidd Owen N. Lissen," and teachers and parents everywhere.

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Be still...and know...

Wisdom of King David

Psalm 46: 10

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* THE RED EASEL
Say doc, those swags are of the wrong period
though in harmony with the whole. You shouldn't take it too hard.
Everybody likes it when the casual drift
becomes more insistent, setting in order the house,
while writing finis to its three-decker novel. Only when the plaint
of hens pierces dusk like a screen door
does the omnipresent turn top-heavy. Oh, really?
I thought they had names for guys like you
and places to take them to. That's true, but
let's not be hasty, shall we, and pronounce your example
a fraud before all the returns are in? These are,
it turns out, passionate and involving, as well as here to stay.

[Now, WHAT does this poem have to say about:
--easels? let alone, red easels or harmony with the whole?
--docs?
--swags?
--hens?

   I rather pride myself on my reading and interpretive abilities--this poet, John Ashbury, is a complete and utter puzzlement to me!--DLS]