Re: OT: poem of the day

on 3/20/05 9:56 PM, Sally Caves at scaves@FRONTIERNET.NET wrote:

> Did anyone reply to this?
    I don't think so :(

>  Clearing out my unopened mail, I found this.
> It's absolutely beautiful, Jonathan.
    ::grins bigtime::

>  Do you know what volume this comes
> from?  Is Nemerov contemporary?
    I would not know where from, but IIRC he is contemporary.

> Sally
>
> ----- 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.
>>