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Frederick GlaysherPoetry Reading: Frederick Glaysher, March 24, 2012March 28, 2012 at 11:09 am"Who needs warp drive when I've got Queen Mab, My escort and midwife of my dreams."
Reading from the fifth draft of my epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, March 24, 2012. From Book III, in medias res, on the moon. Copyright (c) 2012. https://youtu.be/XlWTzhNjIb4 Hibakusha NightmareAugust 7, 2011 at 6:14 amHibakusha Nightmare
O image I cannot forget, scar-fried corpse in the midst of flight, cradling a charred infant from the horrible, hot light.
copyright ©1999 by Frederick Glaysher All World Rights Reserved FROM Into The Ruins, https://fglaysher.com/into_the_ruins.html powerful image
August 7, 2011 at 6:55 am Vivid. Your portrayal has made them visible before my eyes. Thanks for the tag.
August 7, 2011 at 7:43 am In “Poetics,” Aristotle rightly mentioned that poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. The pictures, images and texts on the "explosion-affected people" of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to haunt, enrage and incite us... thus, establishing through the ‘visual’ and ‘creative’ frame a proximity that keeps us ethically responsive to the human cost of war and natural/man-made calamities in places that may be thousands of miles away geographically and/culturally. Frederick, your poem constructed “out of the remnants found in ruins” (as you quoted in your book “Into the Ruins”) provides insight into the complex and fragile character of the social bond, precariousness of life and leads us to consider “what conditions might make violence less possible, lives more equally grievable, and , hence more livable.”
August 7, 2011 at 8:33 am Thanks for the tag but the poem is carrying brutal truth. I think the poems are made for that
August 7, 2011 at 9:48 am Thank you, friends, for the good words.
@Nishat Haider, I've always savored that passage by Aristotle too. I've read a lot of history, of various nations and cultures, and respect that art, too, which is what it is, when done right, yet hope that poetry can convey the human element and feeling in a uniquely clarifying way. It seems to me, now with the tragedy of Fukushima, the world has entered a new dreadful stage of danger, threatening all of us. It seems we human beings so need to change our thinking and behavior at very deep levels, if we're to survive. So, thinking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, again, I wanted to share this poem with all of you as a gesture or appeal for our vulnerable, common humanity. In June, I wrote a short note on Aristotle's Poetics, if interested: https://fglaysher.com/TheGlobe/2011/06/02/aristotle%E2%80%99s-poetics-and-epic-poetry/ August 7, 2011 at 10:56 am Really we can never forget the image...we should not and should learn to live better.
August 7, 2011 at 9:31 pm Nightmarish and true like all nightmares..
August 8, 2011 at 1:19 am Frederick, it is always an intellectual feast to read your blog notes. I will definitely read your note on Aristotle's Poetics. Looking forward to your (yet to be completed) book, "The Parliament of Poets."
August 8, 2011 at 1:25 am Nishat, I finished the second full draft on the 1st of this month, so I feel I'm past the halfway point, having now a fairly readable manuscript. With your encouragement, I'll be sure not to slack off. Three more drafts before the end of this year!
August 8, 2011 at 2:49 am Writing, as Twain says in "Advice to Youth" (1882), requires a lot of patience, diligence and painstaking attention to detail. Wish you luck and success!
August 8, 2011 at 2:55 am Good luck!
August 9, 2011 at 5:42 am Never again shall we see this in this world. Thank you for the poem. So pertinent as Japan faces a new kind of nuclear nightmare.
August 10, 2011 at 1:55 am Yuri, I hope you're right... with all my heart and soul, but fear fallible human beings still remain in control, with fallible software, of more than enough thermonuclear weapons to destroy much of the planet, while even less balanced regimes have and seek the means of destruction. And the power planets themselves are scattered all over the world, which is much more geologically active than perhaps we previously realized before the Tohoku and Aceh earthquakes and tsunamis. Can human beings control such forces? Has it not been hubris to think that we could?
The scope of Japan's new nuclear nightmare is truly shocking and appalling as more information comes out and about what was suppressed early on. I really feel for people in Japan. You've lost an enormous and productive piece of the island of Honshu to what is essentially virulent poisons that will persists for generations, if not centuries, causing sickness and death, with various levels of radiation spread even south of Tokyo and elsewhere. Prof. Tatsuhiko Kodama's recent testimony (transcript in English) about the situation suggests how serious it is. "This means that the disaster of Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant this time is like Chernobyl, and has emitted radioactivity multiple of tens greater than an atomic bomb. We have to assume that we have much more radioactivity than the contamination by the atomic bombs." https://www.facebook.com/notes/%E7%A6%8F%E5%B3%B6%E3%81%AE%E3%81%93%E3%81%A9%E3%82%82%E3%81%9F%E3%81%A1%E3%82%92%E5%AE%88%E3%82%8D%E3%81%86/a-testimony-by-prof-tatsuhiko-kodama-transcript-in-english-version-10/264082103606328 A terrible tragedy... one clearly with no easy answer, that's going to continue for a very long time to come, for Japan, and the world, really, for the radiation has spread far beyond Honshu too. August 10, 2011 at 4:08 am Yes, a big job for reporters like me. The irresponsibility of some experts to declare things safe is mind-boggling as obviously no one can be sure. August 10, 2011 at 6:52 am PerseusAugust 9, 2010 at 6:39 amPerseus 'severed by the sword of my pen,' was very unexpected as the next line. It really did hit me.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.....??? August 9, 2010 at 6:57 am Pithy and precise. Was thinking of The Laughing Medusa..and the feminist symbolism around the figure of Medusa's murderous gaze... trying to connect it with this reading.
August 9, 2010 at 8:27 am Heroic and bold!
August 9, 2010 at 11:20 am Poor Nietzsche. To be dead and having poets sticking their pens in him still. There must be something good we can say about him.
August 9, 2010 at 12:29 pm Thanks all for commenting.
@Koyamparambath Satchidanandan, In so far as the laughing medusa stems from the same nihilism of Nietszche, structuralism, and Derrida, I see it as more of the same... @John Guzlowski, I make the point in a narrative poem, The Bower of Nil, that he cleared the ground... after that, his foreskin on my spear... @Garrett Hongo, I appreciate your good words. August 9, 2010 at 3:54 pm Splendid job here Doc.
August 9, 2010 at 5:57 pm Nietzsche would love the honorable mention---nice!!! Thanks!
August 9, 2010 at 6:47 pm beautiful think!
August 10, 2010 at 2:53 am "the Gorgon head of nihilism" Gorgeous!
August 10, 2010 at 3:10 am @Unwana Umana, @Richard Ali, - Thank you for saying so; a poet, not a doc.
@Jennifer Reeser, Nihilism has turned the heart of modernity to stone... Nietzsche's "transvaluation of value," turned everything inside out, good bad, bad good... civilization cannot do that and remain worthy of the name. The state we're in... Hitler's extensive fascinating with Nietzsche is a telling fact, one we forget to our peril. Ideas do mean something. The glorification of savagery, the will to power, his degrading of women, etc., lead to actions. Neither the individual nor a culture can have it both ways. "Soft" nihilism is not soft at all. The greatest voices of human experience affirm the value of value... August 10, 2010 at 3:49 am Frederick, thank you for this, I'm inspired. And thanks to you, I revisited Milosz and bought 'Second Space', which is too, too wonderful. Now I feel that my later years as a poet are on this trajectory. I shall affirm - though not in a Nietzschean sense. ;)
August 10, 2010 at 5:21 am "My presence in such a place was disturbed / By my duty as a poet who should not flatter popular imaginings." Ha!
August 10, 2010 at 5:23 am @Fiona Zerbst, I pulled my copy of "Second Space" off my shelf and flipped around trying to find that line, "By my duty as a poet who should not flatter popular imaginings," without success. What poem is it from?
I reread Tolstoy this morning, for August 8, his last book, A Circle of Wisdom, thinking of Nietzsche, "The opinion of a revered writer or thinker can have a deep influence on society; it can also be a big obstacle to understanding real truth." That's what Nietzsche has become for modernity, a pervasive poison, disseminated first throughout Western culture, and then the world, through sundry derivatives, Heidegger, Derrida, etc... the university, often East or West, the cave of Zarathustra... August 10, 2010 at 5:45 am Interestingly, when I became religious, I sold a lot of books (shed them like a skin). FN went with 'em. But I kept some Barthes, he's poetic. Never had much time for Derrida.
August 10, 2010 at 6:03 am "Religious," a very obscure, elastic term... I couldn't ever give up Nietzsche. He's too insightful about the nature of modernity. Milosz?
August 10, 2010 at 6:10 am I read N. from 16 - 36, roughly. Internalised him. He was a big part of me. But had enough. Gave him up. Am not big on theory, everything I read now is to serve my poetic future.
August 10, 2010 at 6:34 am I would argue one cannot give up Nietzsche, as though he were merely an unpalatable or fatty diet... Many writers and poets of various persuasions, "religious" and otherwise, have tried or thought they were doing so, for decades, a hundred years. His reasoning, arguments, and the *poetic* force of his logic must be answered in kind, at the deepest level, which requires reading and understanding what and why he thinks as he does, why he has been so persuasive for the modern world.
Only then can intellectual and literary culture, global now, move beyond Nietzsche, as I have. I answer him fully in my book The Bower of Nil... A vision beyond modernity can only be articulated in a global context, for that is what we have become, what culture has become, as I argue in an essay I'm currently finishing, Leo Tolstoy and 'The Last Station' of Modernity. August 10, 2010 at 6:46 am I look forward to that essay. Shall send you my short Nietzsche poems. I have not given him up in that way, precisely, but he no longer feeds me. It is not impossible that I'll revisit him in the future but, for now, my needs are other.
August 10, 2010 at 6:55 am @Fiona Zerbst, I'm still curious about your quotation from Milosz, "By my duty as a poet who should not flatter popular imaginings." What poem is that from?
August 10, 2010 at 6:58 am Sorry - 'Treatise on Theology' - 23. Beautiful lady. Fourth last line.
August 10, 2010 at 9:00 am @Fiona Zerbst, I think the antinomies are where the weight falls in Milosz, Treatise on Theology is a good example, the lines you quote, and others. I wrote on essay on Milosz in which I cite, from Treatise on Theology, "One day I believe, another I disbelieve." Take that away from Milosz and what's left?
For more on Milosz, see July 13 to 14 on my wall, @Duncan McGibbon - a Catholic who makes it clear, at least for him, that Milosz isn't one. The allusions to Swedenborg, Mickiewicz, the Masons, etc., are more than detritus. His "duty as a poet" should be understood in such a context, i.e., to "not flatter popular imaginings." Anyway, Milosz's attempt to answer Nietzsche was definitely unsuccessful... for the usual mythological reasons. August 10, 2010 at 10:33 am Why would one want to take that away from him? He is what he is.
August 10, 2010 at 11:08 pm That's my point. What is he? He's written that into his work... a marker in itself of modernity... its evasions.
August 11, 2010 at 1:13 am Interesting. Which poets would be the antithesis of that? If one can put it like that. Are there not 'pre-modern' poets that dissemble and evade? And if so, what is their point of reference? Breaking away from the church? Not sure I'm being very clear here... hope you know what I am trying to say. I am very tired today.
August 11, 2010 at 1:17 am Interesting. A Bloomiam "misreading"! Of Nietzsche?
August 11, 2010 at 4:59 am @Indrani Datta Chaudhuri, Harold or James Joyce... I leave them to their misreading. I don't think much of Harold's "misreading" and his various pedantic games.
Historically, Nietzsche's philosophy did fuel much of the most perverse thinking of the 20th century. "Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man." William L.Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. That's but one item in an inexhaustible nexus that people of intellectual integrity could cite. A philosophy that incites the murder of millions on the scale of Nietzsche's is an obscenity before the great traditions of civilization, East or West. The unmitigated sophistries and relativisms of Heidegger, Derrida, et al., are despicable... and unworthy of the human race. August 11, 2010 at 6:19 am Why "perverse"?
August 11, 2010 at 9:42 am Like Vattimo I feel that Nietzsche opened us up to 'Other' cultures. May be I don't understand!
August 11, 2010 at 9:44 am As a random example, a philosophy that leads to making lamp shades out of the skin of people has something perverse about it...
August 11, 2010 at 9:46 am He's wrong. All the deconstruction nihilists are. A lamp shade out of a the skin of a human being is a fact, not an interpretation.
August 11, 2010 at 9:56 am Isn't everything interpretation?
August 11, 2010 at 10:01 am No. A lamp shade made out of human skin is not a work of art, but a work of barbarism, not an aesthetic object.
Undermining humane metaphysics and ethics, Nietzsche claimed, "War and courage have done more great things than charity." There is no charity in what Thomas Mann called Nietzsche's "glorification of barbarism," his "courage" but savagery. True charity is based on the transcendent ethic of the Golden Rule, love, and sacrifice of self for the good of others... not the abstract "Other," but real, particular human beings. Far beyond Nietzsche, the nihilism of Heidegger, Derrida, and their academic flies have led to further dehumanization and prepared the way for the incineration of hundreds of millions, perhaps up to a billion, souls... not enough skin left to even make a lamp shade. August 11, 2010 at 1:00 pm Well!!!! But I feel they have taught 'us' to see beyond 'ourselves', and thus made a place for the 'Other'. This does not mean that I assert that making lampshades out of human skin is a civilized act, IT IS NOT, IT NEVER WILL BE, but isn't this what we all do? Use a theory from both sides? Atom bombs are made applying the same theory, one that can grow an oasis in the desert!
I agree with you about true charity. You're right. But I feel that the "transcendent ethic of the Golden Rule" is a bit too hypothetical, if we love and sacrifice the self for the sake of the other, the real other, it means that we acknowledge what the other believes in, be it Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. etc. Do you think that Krishna was wrong when, in the Bhagavad Gita, he said that war is a necessary evil? I believe that the significance lies in how the war is fought, sometimes with words, sometimes in silence, and non-violence can also be a mode of fighting. But once again, these are my ideas and I acknowledge and respect yours. August 11, 2010 at 8:33 pm No, it isn't "what we all do." The Golden Rule is not "hypothetical"; it has been independently tested by every regional culture and civilization on earth for millennia... the results have always been the same. Charity, Love, and concern for *other* human beings is what is best for them and the entire civilization. Altruism is its own reward...
Nietzsche's derision of humane, spiritual values led to the gas chamber... Much of the Bhagavad Gita is about duty and non-attachment, leaving the fruit of one's actions to the gods. Krishna invokes the Golden Rule repeatedly, "He whose soul is disciplined in discipline, seeing the same in all things, perceives himself in all beings, and all beings in himself"; "Whoso looks upon all beings in the same way as upon himself, and sees likeness in all, whether it be pleasure or pain, he is deemed the supreme yogin." vi.32., etc. Nietzsche jubilantly, defiantly spurned and derided the Golden Rule... articulated in all religious traditions, as did the maker of human lamp shades. The thinking of Nietzsche, et al., constitutes a distortion, aberration, and debasement of philosophy that has led to unspeakable violence and suffering throughout modernity. Heidegger, Derrida, et al., spurn and deride the transcendent realm of value, purpose, and meaning, imagining they're more intelligent, sophisticated, learned, knowledgable, omniscient, than Krishna... the results cannot be anything but an even worse disaster than the death camp of WWII... even more global now. Krishna counsels Arjuna, "Therefore get up. Prepare to fight and win glory. / Conquer your enemies and enjoy a flourishing kingdom. They are already put to death by My arrangement, and you, O Savyasaci, can be but an instrument in the fight." 11.33 It is the duty of the poet to defend civilization, what is human, and its spiritual foundations. That's why I have slaughtered Nietzsche, his nihilistic off-spring, sliced off the Gordon-head of nihilism... I invite you to read my book The Bower of Nil for the details of the battle. I respect your conscience. August 12, 2010 at 3:31 am The Bower of Nil: A Narrative Poem.
https://books.fglaysher.com/Bower-of-Nil-9780982677827.htm August 12, 2010 at 4:06 am Wow. I wouldn't be adverse to it. I hope the drama is in the language...
August 13, 2010 at 3:05 am @Beau Blue, Thanks for asking. I don't think it's really me. But I appreciate it.
August 14, 2010 at 2:24 pm I'm grateful for your interest. Though a long habit of solitude might be hard to break, I'm open to readings, but don't think the venue is quite the right one for me and the poem. I respect what you're doing, in its way. Best wishes.
August 15, 2010 at 6:49 am Also published on mediterranean.nu - September 2010
https://www.mediterranean.nu/?p=1771#Perseus January 9, 2011 at 1:25 pm Powerfully penned!
March 25, 2012 at 6:07 pm Grant-Grey Guda Thanks for the good word. I appreciate it. I've just posted today an twelve-minute excerpt from my epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, on Youtube, if interested: https://youtu.be/XlWTzhNjIb4
March 26, 2012 at 6:38 am Beautifully crafted.
January 20, 2013 at 7:01 am Neelkanth Pan, Thank you. If interested, see the first chapter of my epic poem, for free, at The Parliament of Poets: An Epic Poem. The first global, universal epic
PDF. January 20, 2013 at 7:05 am Its very nice to read it Sir Frederick Glaysher. I want to read the whole book. I will buy it online. Thank you.
January 20, 2013 at 7:11 am I appreciate your interest. It's available in India on Flipkart, if you're familiar with it, or Amazon India: https://www.flipkart.com/parliament-poets-epic-poem/p/itmdg6h4pdby5kep?pid=9780982677889&ref=e9a5a2bf-18e6-4ba6-b8ea-cfa528c5fd35&srno=s_2&otracker=from-search&query=frederick%20glaysher January 20, 2013 at 7:13 am |
The total epic, Hermead, in this first draft, is at about 24,000 lines. The average tale is about 500 to 800 lines. The tales of Plato and Aristotle are at 3,000 lines each. The tale of Epicurus is now over 1,200. I like him so I am spending more time working through his tale.
I am thinking of getting their tales published in a first volume. I will be writing about the Alexandrians, the Muslims and European Alchemists, then the greats like Galileo and Newton, then into the modern age, including Bohrs and Einstein. At the end I plan to round it all up with an exposition of Evolution from the Big Bang.