The Way of Power: Poems

Disaster Was My God: Shrine to war poet hero Wilfred Owen. Apparently personal, apolitical lyrics by Lucie Brock-Broido, say, or Alan Shapiro make us think again about the dynamics of our day-to-day relationships with other creatures, from spouses and children to the wild things that we keep forgetting are out there, where the suburban garden or the porch light ends. All of these poets insinuate their way into our lives with their music and wit, but they stay on to make us think again about how we live and what we are capable of — just as poets have always done.

As much as it has ever done, poetry renews and deepens the gift that most surely makes us human: And that is as essential to public as it is to private life, because the more imaginative we are, the more compassionate we become — and that, surely, is the highest virtue of all. Get the best at Telegraph Puzzles. A collection of the best contributions and reports from the Telegraph focussing on the key events, decisions and moments in Churchill's life.

This book tells the story of the men and women of Fighter Command who worked tirelessly in air bases scattered throughout Britain to thwart the Nazis.

Circe's Power - Poem by Louise Gluck

The essential gift book for any pet lover - real-life tales of devoted dogs, rebellious cats and other unforgettable four-legged friends. A complete edition of John James Audubon's world famous The Birds of America, bound in linen and beautifully presented in a special slipcase. Accessibility links Skip to article Skip to navigation. What about what is right, and good? I tell them to keep reading, as Hugo anticipates this objection:. Yes it does, if you are amoral and shallow. I hope it will lead you to yourself and the way you feel. Most people who worry about morality ought to. For Hugo, following the suggestions of the material of language, instead of trying to bend it to expressing what we already know, is inherently ethical.

Following our internal sense of music leads to us revealing who we really are. Keats thought this too. His great odes are the furthest things from mere aesthetic exercises.

They are mortally engaged with the deepest concerns of any living person. In poetry, beauty can be far more than mere prettiness, though it is good that for some poets that is enough. For some poets, a sense of beauty will be in sound, or in the visual images language can conjure. For others it will be in the disruption a poem can create. These poems can take on a role of advocacy or polemic, while also remaining inside the unsolvability of it all.

What is on our minds, what we care about most, we find a way to talk about. If you are a person who really, truly cares about the environment or politics or equality in matters of race or gender or economics or anywhere else, these concerns will naturally emerge in your poems. Your only job is to follow your instinctive, personal, idiosyncratic sense of what is beautiful, and to see what emerges.

The danger of course is that in doing so you are likely to discover and reveal what it is you really care about. The greatest poems written about political issues often contain within them a central ambiguity that competes with genuine certainty and rage. In it, Baraka for some reason repeats an untrue legend that there were no Jews who died in the World Trade Center attacks. That one moment in the poem, understandably, has become a focal point of much discussion.

But I also love it: We know who the people are who blew up the World Trade Center buildings.

But who blew up America? Who ruined and destroyed our country, and turned everything that is good into something awful? According to the title, somebody. The poem is a kind of increasingly desperate, futile investigation into who that somebody might be.

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This investigation is not primarily logical and rational. It is not an argument for a coherent way of thinking. It is not even an answer. It is a series of questions.

Power Poems - Poems For Power - - Poem by | Poem Hunter

We find genuine questions everywhere in poetry because they direct the language away from certainty and stasis, while also leaving plenty of room to be concrete and precise. In the best poems, often the poet does not know the answers. Who make money from war Who make dough from fear and lies Who want the world like it is Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty. Like an Owl exploding In your life in your brain in your self Like an Owl who know the devil All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl Exploding in fire.

The Way of Power by Red Hawk

We hear the questions rise In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog. This poem asks, who is responsible for the terrible things that are happening all around us? And the poem is willing to continually rest in half knowledge, to enact the feelings of anger and uncertainty and even the impossibility of knowledge. It is in this willingness that the poem makes its meaning, something far beyond mere polemic. Lorde wrote this poem after hearing the news of the acquittal of a white police officer for the killing of a ten-year-old African American boy, in April The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles.

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For her, the issue of how to speak about this murder is itself a mortal and moral question. She is also thinking about the danger that her emotions will cause her to forget poetry, and slip into rhetoric, that is, speech designed primarily to argue and to convince. Here, she knows she is locating herself in a territory of great ambiguity, expressing the rage while also standing outside it in fear and wonder. It is clear that she perceives that her feelings of anger are both justified and also a kind of trap, a continued violence that the very structure of racial violence perpetrates on her.

Though there is a logic to it, her knowledge is not primarily logical: