Speaker's Corner - liveblogging
I'm liveblogging the Speaker's Corner
event
I'm liveblogging the Speaker's
Corner event - h/t to Dr. Reynolds for bringing it to my attention
(Before I grabbed my laptop)
7:05 - I got there and there was an informal discussion time for the first 15 minutes. I've decided to go to the poetry session, and I saw John Donne's Batter my Heart, Three-person'd God (Holy Sonnet XIV) on the overhead. I'm looking forward to this.
7:15 - Dr. Reynolds announced that there was a prize ($20 GC to the Biola bookstore) for anyone who liveblogged the event. I decided to run back to the car and grab the laptop. I'm not really interested in the prize (I'm not a Biola student), but it gives me an excuse to liveblog.
(Grabbed the laptop, trying to catch up with the poetry session already in progress)
7:20 - I realize how out of shape I am as I'm now back at the session and terribly out of breath.
We're going over historical views on poetry - started with Plato and worked our way through different views of poetry throughout history.
Now that we've looked at historical views of poetry, what should we think about poetry:
Poetry as art. Poetry is art with words - painting with words.
We can interact with poetry on various levels - The words themselves (What rhyme and meter do we see in this poem?), what does it tell us about life?, the emotional response (how does the poem make you feel),
We are going to be reading different poems and then reacting to them by engaging them with these questions.
[Ed: Couldn't find links to Billy Collins' individual poems, let me know if you have one. Here is the book this appeared in]
First poem: Night letter to the reader (by Billy Collins)
Not much rhyme, slight meter. Some structure in the way the stanzas are arranged.
Someone observed that this is a lot like reality TV. Its simple descriptions of what is going on, rather than anything extremely fanciful.
What does it tell us about life?
It seems to indicate a correlation between humans and nature ("I am an animal in pajamas", the moon looking like Shakespeare). Even the structure seems to carry this across - slow and steady, not extremely flourished - much like someone would feel right when waking up. Seems to reduce man down to the level of an animal.
Introduction to Poetry (also by Billy Collins)
This seems to follow inline with his earlier poem. He is in a way encouraging his students to simply experience their poetry, enjoy their art, rather than beat it repeatedly and try to force everything you want to say into one poem. Keep it simple, let it simply say what it says.
Second poem: "When I have fears" (by John Keats)
What rhyme and meter do we see in this poem?
Every other line rhymes, and the last two are a rhyming couplet. It has a defined rhyming scheme. It is in Iambic Pentameter, a well defined meter. These make this poem quite different than the last poem.
What does it say?
He is speaking of his fear of death; specifically, his fear that he will die before he is able to get all of thoughts out in his poetry. Sadly, Keats did die very tragically, and was never able to marry his fiance.
It seems a little depressing, as though he hasn't completely resolved his solution. He seems to start out with this dramatic language that really brings out the fear, and the resolution seems to just be to shrug and say it doesn't matter.
It seems to indicate something about man as well - when we encounter tragedy, we want to ignore it, or reduce it to something we need not fear. In some ways, he is absolutely right about this - we honestly shouldn't worry about fame and accomplishment. When God takes me, He takes me in the right time. But should we do this with love? Or perhaps we should - love in this world is simply temporary and Heaven so infinitely more important.
Third poem: The Hollow Men - sections I, IV and V (by T.S. Elliot)
What rhyme and meter do we see in this poem?
There is some straight rhyme here and there - some rhymes at the end of lines, some internal rhyme. He changed things around a lot, moving between different meters, different stanza structures, etc. Elliot was very avant-garde for his time, very experimental.
It is a really morbid poem and that is reflected in the delivery. The structure is very disjointed, and uncomfortable, which carries across the message of the decay of the hollow men. It carries across the brokenness of humanity and creation - creation groaning under the weight of sin.
Could it be that this is an statement of the loss of belief in the soul? Men were created whole (body and soul) but as they lose the idea of the soul, they become more hollow. For instance, he hopes for the return of eyes - eyes are the window to the soul. Perhaps he is commenting on the loss of who man really is.
When looking at the concept of the shadow "between the idea and the conception falls the shadow" - perhaps this is referring to the way creation sits in between God's idea of creation and the fulfillment in Heaven. We sit amidst the shadow, always looking to the redemption of creation and the fulfillment in Heaven. This plays into the idea of hollow men mentioned earlier - having lost the idea of the soul and of fulfillment, we hollow men try to make this world of shadow all there is, and end up mere stuffed scarecrows pretending to be really alive and free.
How does this make you feel?
Despair. It is a troubling poem, very uncomfortable. Unfulfilled was mentioned several times by my fellow speaker's corner attendees.
Comedia Canto I (by Dante)
What style is it?
It is more traditional, more like Keats. It is structured in its rhyme and meter. We are not reading it in the original language, but we are reading a translation that sought to keep the original rhyming style and meter.
The Great Minimum (by G. K. Chesterton)
This is a much more hopeful poem than the others. Chesterton seems to be saying that even just a glimpse of God in this life makes it worth living.
8:20 - Our poetry session has ended, and we are waiting on Dr. Reynolds to speak. It was a really good period of discussion, and I'm glad I came. The only drawback was it was a bit loud in here with all the different discussions going on, and that made things a bit difficult to hear. The last two poems had a somewhat shortened discussion, and I wasn't able to capture much because we just ran out of time.
8:25 - Dr. Reynolds is speaking. He is summing up the experiment of Speaker's Corner. They were trying to make a format that really appeals to a wide range of people and engages them in discussion. From the more academic discussion in the art lecture (given by a PhD), to the more informal film discussion which was mostly clips and discussion. It also gives people with low attention span a chance to wander from group to group and listen to whatever they want.
Different groups are sharing the different things that they got out of it. One man said he really valued the differing views brought up in the poetry discussion. A lot of times we think we have something figured out and then someone else will come a long with a differing view that really makes us open our eyes more. Another pointed out that a lot of the discussion centered on people interacting with the world - trying to make sense of the world in which we live as follower's of Jesus Christ. Another mentioned the slow digestion of art - that we need to really take time to understand a painting or a poem. She said she was motivated to go home and read poetry more, and give it more time to digest. Dr. Reynolds pointed out that we all belive in objective truth, and yet so few believe in objective beauty. We find it strange to spend a lot of time really digesting and enjoying and understanding beauty.
Another pointed out the idea that we have become numb to art. We have elevated personal tastes so high as to only gravitate towards things that we like. We don't give art a big enough place to actually sit down and investigate what makes art truly beautiful. Another person pointed out the "comodification" of art - we've seen Monet on coffee mugs and blown up cartoonish versions of the Sistine Chapel, and now we think we've actually seen the real thing, when in fact the actual piece of art is so much larger and better.
Dr. Reynolds wonders if we are not externalizing our selves so much in art that we are losing ourselves. We place our humanness into our external world, until we lose our identity. In other words, we see our lives as movies. We've also moved away from death and we try to act as though it doesn't exist. Older cultures used to refer to the cemetery as "the last pew of the church". You had to walk through the cemetery to get to church every Sunday. People had seen their relatives die, they used to go to the cemetery and understood the necessity of death. These two ideas play together in that we seem to edit our lives as a movie, moving our death and our birth out of the story of our life. Whereas death was natural in their cultures, it seems so unnatural to us.
I think that this plays into our culture's immense fear of pain. We try to medicate and remove pain from our world because we fear it so much. We fail to understand the necessity of pain in growth - no pain, no gain to be simple. Look, for instance, at the recent determinations that if a child will have a disability (i.e. will have a life a pain, supposedly), it is ok to destroy it (h/t WorldMagBlog). We like to attend a movie and watch someone else's pain and empathize because its from a safe distance and we know it will go away in two hours; we can safely observe suffering while keeping it at an arm's distance
Dr. Reynolds hit on this as well. Our culture provides us with so much fun and enjoyment and entertainment, that we can amuse ourselves our entire lives without being confronted with real, authentic pain. We cannot live like this as Christians - we must realize the reality of Christ's pain and suffering, and the beauty of it. Christ calls us to take up our own crosses, and rather than love our lives, lose them in service to Christ.
We've run out of time, sadly, so our host has ended the night with a word of prayer.
10:00 - Home and finally able to post this. This was my first attempt at liveblogging, so I hope you'll all bear with me. Some of the thoughts listed are the group's and some were mine - hopefully all will be edifying to you.
I really enjoyed this evening. It was invigorating to have such lively discussion and think about the arts in depth. It gave me a further appreciation of the beauty in creation, placed their by the Creator. But combined with thoughts on pain - which have been bouncing around in my head as well - it makes me think more about creation's role in our lives. Sometimes creation is so beautiful that we are apt to worship it, or to simply lose ourselves in its beauty. The correct role of creation ought to be to show us that God truly is beautiful, so that when pain and suffering comes we can welcome it, for we know that we serve a beautiful and wonderful God.
I'm hoping to post a poem on this topic later, as well as link this post up to all of the poems mentioned so that all of you can enjoy them as we did.
[Update - most of the poems now linked]
[Another Update - I've now posted a poem inspired by Speaker's Corner. I'd love to hear any ocmments from any of you who may be coming via Speaker's Corner (or anyone for that matter)]
(Before I grabbed my laptop)
7:05 - I got there and there was an informal discussion time for the first 15 minutes. I've decided to go to the poetry session, and I saw John Donne's Batter my Heart, Three-person'd God (Holy Sonnet XIV) on the overhead. I'm looking forward to this.
7:15 - Dr. Reynolds announced that there was a prize ($20 GC to the Biola bookstore) for anyone who liveblogged the event. I decided to run back to the car and grab the laptop. I'm not really interested in the prize (I'm not a Biola student), but it gives me an excuse to liveblog.
(Grabbed the laptop, trying to catch up with the poetry session already in progress)
7:20 - I realize how out of shape I am as I'm now back at the session and terribly out of breath.
We're going over historical views on poetry - started with Plato and worked our way through different views of poetry throughout history.
Now that we've looked at historical views of poetry, what should we think about poetry:
Poetry as art. Poetry is art with words - painting with words.
We can interact with poetry on various levels - The words themselves (What rhyme and meter do we see in this poem?), what does it tell us about life?, the emotional response (how does the poem make you feel),
We are going to be reading different poems and then reacting to them by engaging them with these questions.
[Ed: Couldn't find links to Billy Collins' individual poems, let me know if you have one. Here is the book this appeared in]
First poem: Night letter to the reader (by Billy Collins)
Not much rhyme, slight meter. Some structure in the way the stanzas are arranged.
Someone observed that this is a lot like reality TV. Its simple descriptions of what is going on, rather than anything extremely fanciful.
What does it tell us about life?
It seems to indicate a correlation between humans and nature ("I am an animal in pajamas", the moon looking like Shakespeare). Even the structure seems to carry this across - slow and steady, not extremely flourished - much like someone would feel right when waking up. Seems to reduce man down to the level of an animal.
Introduction to Poetry (also by Billy Collins)
This seems to follow inline with his earlier poem. He is in a way encouraging his students to simply experience their poetry, enjoy their art, rather than beat it repeatedly and try to force everything you want to say into one poem. Keep it simple, let it simply say what it says.
Second poem: "When I have fears" (by John Keats)
What rhyme and meter do we see in this poem?
Every other line rhymes, and the last two are a rhyming couplet. It has a defined rhyming scheme. It is in Iambic Pentameter, a well defined meter. These make this poem quite different than the last poem.
What does it say?
He is speaking of his fear of death; specifically, his fear that he will die before he is able to get all of thoughts out in his poetry. Sadly, Keats did die very tragically, and was never able to marry his fiance.
It seems a little depressing, as though he hasn't completely resolved his solution. He seems to start out with this dramatic language that really brings out the fear, and the resolution seems to just be to shrug and say it doesn't matter.
It seems to indicate something about man as well - when we encounter tragedy, we want to ignore it, or reduce it to something we need not fear. In some ways, he is absolutely right about this - we honestly shouldn't worry about fame and accomplishment. When God takes me, He takes me in the right time. But should we do this with love? Or perhaps we should - love in this world is simply temporary and Heaven so infinitely more important.
Third poem: The Hollow Men - sections I, IV and V (by T.S. Elliot)
What rhyme and meter do we see in this poem?
There is some straight rhyme here and there - some rhymes at the end of lines, some internal rhyme. He changed things around a lot, moving between different meters, different stanza structures, etc. Elliot was very avant-garde for his time, very experimental.
It is a really morbid poem and that is reflected in the delivery. The structure is very disjointed, and uncomfortable, which carries across the message of the decay of the hollow men. It carries across the brokenness of humanity and creation - creation groaning under the weight of sin.
Could it be that this is an statement of the loss of belief in the soul? Men were created whole (body and soul) but as they lose the idea of the soul, they become more hollow. For instance, he hopes for the return of eyes - eyes are the window to the soul. Perhaps he is commenting on the loss of who man really is.
When looking at the concept of the shadow "between the idea and the conception falls the shadow" - perhaps this is referring to the way creation sits in between God's idea of creation and the fulfillment in Heaven. We sit amidst the shadow, always looking to the redemption of creation and the fulfillment in Heaven. This plays into the idea of hollow men mentioned earlier - having lost the idea of the soul and of fulfillment, we hollow men try to make this world of shadow all there is, and end up mere stuffed scarecrows pretending to be really alive and free.
How does this make you feel?
Despair. It is a troubling poem, very uncomfortable. Unfulfilled was mentioned several times by my fellow speaker's corner attendees.
Comedia Canto I (by Dante)
What style is it?
It is more traditional, more like Keats. It is structured in its rhyme and meter. We are not reading it in the original language, but we are reading a translation that sought to keep the original rhyming style and meter.
The Great Minimum (by G. K. Chesterton)
This is a much more hopeful poem than the others. Chesterton seems to be saying that even just a glimpse of God in this life makes it worth living.
8:20 - Our poetry session has ended, and we are waiting on Dr. Reynolds to speak. It was a really good period of discussion, and I'm glad I came. The only drawback was it was a bit loud in here with all the different discussions going on, and that made things a bit difficult to hear. The last two poems had a somewhat shortened discussion, and I wasn't able to capture much because we just ran out of time.
8:25 - Dr. Reynolds is speaking. He is summing up the experiment of Speaker's Corner. They were trying to make a format that really appeals to a wide range of people and engages them in discussion. From the more academic discussion in the art lecture (given by a PhD), to the more informal film discussion which was mostly clips and discussion. It also gives people with low attention span a chance to wander from group to group and listen to whatever they want.
Different groups are sharing the different things that they got out of it. One man said he really valued the differing views brought up in the poetry discussion. A lot of times we think we have something figured out and then someone else will come a long with a differing view that really makes us open our eyes more. Another pointed out that a lot of the discussion centered on people interacting with the world - trying to make sense of the world in which we live as follower's of Jesus Christ. Another mentioned the slow digestion of art - that we need to really take time to understand a painting or a poem. She said she was motivated to go home and read poetry more, and give it more time to digest. Dr. Reynolds pointed out that we all belive in objective truth, and yet so few believe in objective beauty. We find it strange to spend a lot of time really digesting and enjoying and understanding beauty.
Another pointed out the idea that we have become numb to art. We have elevated personal tastes so high as to only gravitate towards things that we like. We don't give art a big enough place to actually sit down and investigate what makes art truly beautiful. Another person pointed out the "comodification" of art - we've seen Monet on coffee mugs and blown up cartoonish versions of the Sistine Chapel, and now we think we've actually seen the real thing, when in fact the actual piece of art is so much larger and better.
Dr. Reynolds wonders if we are not externalizing our selves so much in art that we are losing ourselves. We place our humanness into our external world, until we lose our identity. In other words, we see our lives as movies. We've also moved away from death and we try to act as though it doesn't exist. Older cultures used to refer to the cemetery as "the last pew of the church". You had to walk through the cemetery to get to church every Sunday. People had seen their relatives die, they used to go to the cemetery and understood the necessity of death. These two ideas play together in that we seem to edit our lives as a movie, moving our death and our birth out of the story of our life. Whereas death was natural in their cultures, it seems so unnatural to us.
I think that this plays into our culture's immense fear of pain. We try to medicate and remove pain from our world because we fear it so much. We fail to understand the necessity of pain in growth - no pain, no gain to be simple. Look, for instance, at the recent determinations that if a child will have a disability (i.e. will have a life a pain, supposedly), it is ok to destroy it (h/t WorldMagBlog). We like to attend a movie and watch someone else's pain and empathize because its from a safe distance and we know it will go away in two hours; we can safely observe suffering while keeping it at an arm's distance
Dr. Reynolds hit on this as well. Our culture provides us with so much fun and enjoyment and entertainment, that we can amuse ourselves our entire lives without being confronted with real, authentic pain. We cannot live like this as Christians - we must realize the reality of Christ's pain and suffering, and the beauty of it. Christ calls us to take up our own crosses, and rather than love our lives, lose them in service to Christ.
We've run out of time, sadly, so our host has ended the night with a word of prayer.
10:00 - Home and finally able to post this. This was my first attempt at liveblogging, so I hope you'll all bear with me. Some of the thoughts listed are the group's and some were mine - hopefully all will be edifying to you.
I really enjoyed this evening. It was invigorating to have such lively discussion and think about the arts in depth. It gave me a further appreciation of the beauty in creation, placed their by the Creator. But combined with thoughts on pain - which have been bouncing around in my head as well - it makes me think more about creation's role in our lives. Sometimes creation is so beautiful that we are apt to worship it, or to simply lose ourselves in its beauty. The correct role of creation ought to be to show us that God truly is beautiful, so that when pain and suffering comes we can welcome it, for we know that we serve a beautiful and wonderful God.
I'm hoping to post a poem on this topic later, as well as link this post up to all of the poems mentioned so that all of you can enjoy them as we did.
[Update - most of the poems now linked]
[Another Update - I've now posted a poem inspired by Speaker's Corner. I'd love to hear any ocmments from any of you who may be coming via Speaker's Corner (or anyone for that matter)]
Posted: Wed - March 16, 2005 at 07:25 PM | | | | | | |
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