Amen. Dale, be warned: I may swipe that phrase sometime!

In the past I would’ve focused more on making the list into a poem; this time I wanted to draw more attention to each example as a potential starting-point for something new. Still, I think every natural thing shines with strangeness and beauty when seen with open eyes. The world itself is a poem.

thanks for the rain of strangeness and beauty ~ kas

Well put.

Thanks for the light verse — I love comments like that. I also like “I am too pessimist (at least tonight).” Pessimism can be hard to maintain, can’t it? It’s not a normal, healthy habit of mind, I don’t think, even thought it may be a necessary one. I don’t know if it’s too late or not, but I rather suspect it is.

Wow. Bly says it so eloquently, I really want to believe that, too.

It is, but this is only the sixth great extinction event in the history of life on earth… and it’s now beginning to appear, from more comprehensive analyses of the fossil record, that the biosphere can take up to 10 million years to recover from such an event in terms of regaining the complexity, resiliancy, and multiplicity of lifeforms it had before the mass extinction. That’s such a long span of time in human terms, it might as well be forever.

I’ve always felt slightly differently about extinction after studying geologic time (so that I could teach it to 7th graders) and reading that 99% (?) of all species that have been on earth are now extinct. The same way that death is an inevitable part of life… maybe extinction is an inevitable part of a species.

I do, too.

I dunno. Here’s Bly from the introduction to his Sixties-era poetry in Selected Poems:

Reciting political poems at Vietnam gatherings, I experienced for the first time in my life the power of spoken or oral poetry. A briefly lasting community springs to life in front of the voice, like a flower opening — it can be a community either of excitement or of feeling. The community flowers when the poem is spoken in the ancient way — that is, with full sound, with conviction, and with the knowledge that the emotions are not private to the speaker.

One poet’s experience, anyway. It would be cool to see how poetry might lead in an electronic era that, despite some promising developments, still tends to discourage “communities springing to life in front of a voice.”