Re: OT: poem of the day

Sally Caves wrote at 2005-03-21 00:56:11 (-0500)
 > Did anyone reply to this?  Clearing out my unopened mail, I found
 > this.  It's absolutely beautiful, Jonathan.  Do you know what
 > volume this comes from?  Is Nemerov contemporary?
 >
 > Sally
 >

I was surprised by this, when it was posted, because I'd seen it just
a few days before.  Here, on one of my favourite blogs:

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001779.php
(read for details of Hui Tsung)

It was broadcast on the radio show _The Writers Almanac_ on
2005-03-04, which is doubtless how Zhang's friend came by it, directly
or indirectly. The link to the programme:
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/docs/2005/02/28/#friday
tells us that it's from _The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov_
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/1691.ctl


 > ----- Original Message -----
 > From: "Jonathan Chang" <zhang23@...>
 > To: <CONLANG@...>
 > Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 6:21 PM
 > Subject: poem of the day
 >
 >
 > >    A friend of mine emailed me this poem... enjoy...
 > >
 > >                                   Writing
 > >
 > >        The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
 > >        these by themselves delight, even without
 > >        a meaning, in a foreign language, in
 > >        Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
 > >        all day across the lake, scoring their white
 > >        records in ice. Being intelligible,
 > >        these winding ways with their audacities
 > >        and delicate hesitations, they become
 > >        miraculous, so intimately, out there
 > >        at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
 > >        and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
 > >        balance against great skeletons of stars
 > >        exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
 > >        by echo alone. Still, the point of style
 > >        is character. The universe induces
 > >        a different tremor in every hand, from the
 > >        check-forger's to that of the Emperor
 > >        Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
 > >        the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
 > >        writers nervously of a nervous world, and so on.
 > >
 > >        Miraculous. It is as though the world
 > >        were a great writing. Having said so much,
 > >        let us allow there is more to the world
 > >        than writing: continental faults are not
 > >        bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
 > >        Not only must the skaters soon go home;
 > >        also the hard inscription of their skates
 > >        is scored across the open water, which long
 > >        remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.
 > >
 > >                                                Howard Nemerov
 > >
 > >
 > > --
 > > Hanuman Zhang
 > >
 > >>     Verbing weirds language.
 > >