Free Where Seas and Fables Meet by B.W. Powe

we’d dismantled the policies of protection and care?
    Globalization is capitalism on steroids –
    Flash occupations are temporary rebel zones –

Wilde Things III
1.
    The democratic snob: he condescended to everyone.
2.
    The interpreter’s dilemma: take a three minute pop song or 30 second infomercial, or a half-hour sit-com or a piece of pithy ad copy, and write volumes on it. Maxim: A blurb needs a long interpretive essay.
3.
    Power in the hands of your friends is no guarantee that you will have any access to that power.
4.
    This dull leader: he was a good argument against evolution.
5.
    His eccentricity was taken for vigorous intelligence and independence of mind.
6.
    â€œYou’re reading too much into what I say,” she said.
    The writer replied: “But my dear I have to read too much into things. It’s part of my job description.”

Readings
1.
    Art, literature, scholarship, reading are useless activities. When I’m asked about teaching poetry, I reply: “I teach something useless.”
    But reading, like poetry, is neither pointless nor worthless.
2.
    Poetry won’t teach you how to repair a car or fix a leaking faucet. It won’t show you the easiest way to paint a wall or how to make a rocket escape earth’s gravitational pull. Poetry will tell you how the stars sing, and speak of the dream where a single lotus becomes a great city. It can show you tears on the clock’s face, happiness in a handful of atoms.
    Useless, then, but not pointless...
3.
    My neighbour – an electrician – while fixing the battery in my car, said: “Everyone has their own way of contributing... I couldn’t go into a room and talk about Shakespeare.”
4.
    I start my classes with the declaration: “If you continue with your studies in poetry, in literature, prepare to have your income earning potential slashed in half. Prepare to have your parents and possibly even your friends ask: ‘What’s the practical purpose for this course of study?’ And be prepared to reply: ‘There is none... I’m learning how... to see a world
    in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, eternity in an hour...’”
    To my astonishment and delight, most students stay.

Re-visions
1.
    Re-reading Dante’s Divine Comedy in Allan Mandelbaum’s translation... At the moment I’m stuck in Hell.
2.
    Nine weeks later, now in Purgatory: things are looking up.
3.
    Arriving at last in Paradise: it seems too late... Is paradise an acquired taste? Soon it starts coming back to me. I remember being here, once, long ago.
    Then the book becomes light.
4.
    Observation: the only character in all three volumes who is alive , who isn’t a shade – not one of the damned, not being purged by fire or one of the blessed circling in the singing radiance – is the poet-pilgrim, Dante. And therefore, can we say, outside the story, along with Dante, you – the reader, and in the case of the English versions, the translator, too? The pilgrim reader, the pilgrim re-visionary... To be a re- visionary means you can learn to have second-sight...
5.
    On reading Dante with my students:
    His certainty of belief is matched by the certainties of their disbelief. Is theirs a true scepticism, which could rigorously undo their disbelief? That is, is theirs an iconoclasm strong
    enough to turn on itself and see what the result would be? Do they recoil from his certitude because the pattern of his narrative, Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, resembles the raptures of evangelists who seek to condemn the modern world?
    I strive to remind them: Dante is first and foremost a poet, not a theologian. His faith is in his rhythmic implacability, the authority of the beat: it is the sound and pace of a poet devoted to capturing the unfolding integrity of his vision. His poetic dreams have the intensity of the visionary, and the beauty of a finely