from the Poetry Foundation Obamapoetics: Elizabeth Alexander on how the Derek Walcott-toting, June Jordan-quoting president will affect poets and poetry.
Mortimer (left, w/ Leo McKern who played Rumpole) was a wonderful, hilarious, writer ... and a passionate defender of free speech and civil liberty ...
The book is modernity’s quintessential technology — “a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page,” as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book’s turning page competes with the flicker of the screen’s twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer. If it isn’t—if we choose to replace the book—what will become of reading and the print culture it fostered? And what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology?
... Every technology is both an expression of a culture and a potential transformer of it.
"The totality of the Solar eclipse of February 26, 1979 passed only through the states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota. Many visitors traveled to the Pacific Northwest to view the eclipse, since it would be the last chance to view a total solar eclipse in the United States for almost four decades [next one August 21, 2017]" -- Walter Ong was visiting at MSU during the '79 eclipse ... little did I know ... I was on a hill outside of Livingston ... when it got dark, the horses began running in a large circle with their manes and tails flying, flowing, rippling ... the hawks wheeled in the air ... when the light returned, everything became still ...
PROSPERO No harm. I have done nothing but in care of thee, Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing Of whence I am ...
MIRANDA More to know Did never meddle with my thoughts.
PROSPERO 'Tis time I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand, And pluck my magic garment from me. So: Lays down his mantle Lie there, my art. Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort. The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'd The very virtue of compassion in thee, I have with such provision in mine art So safely ordered that there is no soul-- No, not so much perdition as an hair Betid to any creature in the vessel Which thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink. Sit down; For thou must now know farther.
MIRANDA You have often Begun to tell me what I am, but stopp'd And left me to a bootless inquisition, Concluding 'Stay: not yet.'
PROSPERO The hour's now come; The very minute bids thee ope thine ear; Obey and be attentive. Canst thou remember A time before we came unto this cell? I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not Out three years old.
MIRANDA Certainly, sir, I can.
PROSPERO By what? by any other house or person? Of any thing the image tell me that Hath kept with thy remembrance.
MIRANDA 'Tis far off And rather like a dream than an assurance That my remembrance warrants. Had I not Four or five women once that tended me?
PROSPERO Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?...
PROSPERO ... Dost thou attend me?
MIRANDA Sir, most heedfully.
PROSPERO ... Thou attend'st not.
MIRANDA O, good sir, I do.
PROSPERO I pray thee, mark me. ... Dost thou hear?
Elizabeth Alexander (the poet for Obama's inauguration): "I remember a particular afternoon in the spring of my sophomore year, being blown away by the visceral impact of Seamus Heaney's [Nobel 1995] poem 'Digging'. I felt transported by the sounds of language and compelled by the ways in which looking closely and remembering rendered an almost cinematic kind of transformation."
