Re: OT: poem of the day

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

----- 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.
>

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