Per usual, the Friday selection from whiskey river:
We suffer not from our vices and our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.
(by Daniel J. Boorstin)
…and a bonus:
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
(by Eric Hoffer)
…and — not from whiskey river — this:
Introduction To Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slideor press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
(by Billy Collins)
Finally, the deep-blue version (lyrics follow):
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You Don’t Know Me
You give your hand to me
Then you say hello
I can hardly speak
My heart is beating so
And anyone can tell
You think you know me well
But you don’t know meNo, you don’t know the one
Who dreams of you at night
And longs to kiss your lips
And longs to hold you tight
Oh I’m just a friend
That’s all I’ve ever been
’cause you don’t know meI never knew
The art of making love
Though my heart aches
With love for you
Afraid and shy
I’ve let my chance to go by
The chance that you might
Love me, tooYou give your hand to me
And then you say good-bye
I watch you walk away
Beside the lucky guy
You’ll never never know
The one who loves you so
Well, you don’t know me[break]
You give your hand to me, baby
Then you say good-bye
I watch you walk away
Beside the lucky guy
No, no, you’ll never ever know
The one who loves you so
Well, you don’t know me
(by Cindy Walker and Eddy Arnold, performed by B.B. King and Diane Schuur)
“Introduction to Poetry”…very nice. There’s the creative and then there’s the analytical…I think the divide in English departments between the Creative Writing and the Literature types really breaks down when it hits the aesthetic components — lit analysis is more about meaning, creative is more about invention, and aesthetics straddles the line.
I love Billy Collins. No idea how he’s regarded within either the Creative Writing or Literature camps; I can see that the easy-going, almost apoetical nature of his poetry might cause distrust. But this poem neatly captured for me the frustration of putting just about any sort of creative work “out there.” Once you release it — heck, just a blog entry — into the wild, it always resists being just what you intended and no more. (It’s almost as though the work itself is complicit — as though it’s hidden its meaning from its creator, subverting his/her intentions from the start.)
I just had to explain to a student that same thing: authorial intent only takes you so far — readers poke at it with their own forks.
@cuff – Do you teach (creative) writing?
That message has gotta be one of the most difficult ones for young aspiring writers to accept (and for their teachers to imprint them with) — that they’re really not as much in control of the writer-reader transaction as they’d like to be.