Always we hope someone else has the answer, some other place will be better, some other time it will all turn out. This is it; no one else has the answer, no other place will be better, and it has already turned out. At the center of your being, you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want. There is no need to run outside for better seeing. Nor to peer from a window. Rather abide at the center of your being; for the more you leave it, the less you learn. Search your heart and see the way to do is to be. Before I Leave the Stage by Alice Walker Pema Chödrön is an American ordained Tibetan Buddhist nun and and principal teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. She was a former acharya of Shambhala Buddhism and disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She has written many books on subjects such as heart advice, fearlessness and compassionate living. Each of these types of feet has a certain "feel," whether alone or in combination with other feet. The iamb, for example, is the most natural form of rhythm in the English language, and generally produces a subtle but stable verse. [60] Scanning meter can often show the basic or fundamental pattern underlying a verse, but does not show the varying degrees of stress, as well as the differing pitches and lengths of syllables. [61] Charles Olson’s influential manifesto, “Projective Verse,” was first published as a pamphlet, and then was quoted extensively in William Carlos Williams’ Autobiography (1951). The essay introduces his ideas of “composition by field” through projective or open verse, which is a continuation of the ideas of poets Ezra Pound, who asked poets to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome,” and William Carlos Williams, who proposed in 1948 that a poem be approached as a “field of action.” Olson’s projective verse focuses on “certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.” Mary Oliver was an American poet. Rather than the human, mundane world, her work is inspired by nature, as a result of her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.

Some 20th-century literary theorists rely less on the ostensible opposition of prose and poetry, instead focusing on the poet as simply one who creates using language, and poetry as what the poet creates. [34] The underlying concept of the poet as creator is not uncommon, and some modernist poets essentially do not distinguish between the creation of a poem with words, and creative acts in other media. Other modernists challenge the very attempt to define poetry as misguided. [35] Lifted by Olson (along with other lines) form “Mouths Biting Empty Air,” an unpublished prose piece dated 27 October 1946, now at Storrs. Composition by field opposes the traditional method of poetic composition based on received form and measure. Olson sees the challenge of the transference of poetic energy from source to poem to reader, and the way in which that energy shifts at each juncture, as particularly of concern to poets who engage in composition by field, because the poet is no longer relying on a received structure as a propulsive force. Vuong thrusts readers into language that opens and reopens, ‘a cage/that widens’ to disparate meanings. This collection is full of doors, entrances, thresholds— liquidised boundaries— on which we are encouraged to linger, remaining both inside and out of our choices, our histories and our joys.’ Queer Poems, an anthology by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, set itself quite a task and nailed it. Wonderfully warmly it captures the variousness of queerness across time and place.’Each member of the Breathe Easy group has a chronic breathing difficulty: some have struggled to breathe for 65 years having had childhood tuberculosis (TB), some have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), others are living with pulmonary fibrosis or the impact of lung cancer. Although raucous over lunch, the BE group members have encountered much stigma and silencing in response to their conditions. Like many people who experience breathlessness, they have quietly made their conditions discreet and invisible. Breathing difficulties are often judged or misunderstood in wider society: a waitress at the pub responded to a coughing fit from one BE member by saying ‘don’t worry, a few germs never hurt’. This was well-meaning but missed the point of what it is to live with breathing difficulties, and the attendant terror of cold germs getting into the lungs. Jill Gladstone later wrote in response to this: It comes to this, this whole aspect of the newer problems. (We now enter, actually, the large area of the whole poem, into the FIELD, if you like, where all the syllables and all the lines must be managed in their relations to each other.) It is a matter, finally of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used. This is something I want to get to in another way in Part II, but, for the moment, let me indicate this, that every element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality; and that these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world. Deep breathing is very important – it helps us get plenty of oxygen, plus it can really help with calming the mind and any anxieties or worries that we may have. Poetry (a term derived from the Greek word poiesis, "making"), also called verse, [note 1] is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic [1] [2] [3] qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.

Rhyme consists of identical ("hard-rhyme") or similar ("soft-rhyme") sounds placed at the ends of lines or at locations within lines (" internal rhyme"). Languages vary in the richness of their rhyming structures; Italian, for example, has a rich rhyming structure permitting maintenance of a limited set of rhymes throughout a lengthy poem. The richness results from word endings that follow regular forms. English, with its irregular word endings adopted from other languages, is less rich in rhyme. [73] The degree of richness of a language's rhyming structures plays a substantial role in determining what poetic forms are commonly used in that language. [74] Kate’s collection merges poetry with the fragile remains of nature — leaves, shells, plant stems — to speak about wilderness as a platform for reflection.’It is projective size that the play, The Trojan Women,[20] possesses, for it is able to stand, is it not, as its people do, beside the Aegean—and neither Andromache or the sea suffer diminution. In a less “heroic” but equally “natural” dimension Seami causes the Fisherman and the Angel to stand clear in Hagoromo.[21] And Homer, who is such an unexamined cliché that I do not think I need to press home in what scale Nausicaa’s girls wash their clothes. Christina Rossetti (1830-94) was one of the Victorian era’s greatest and most influential poets. She was the younger sister (by two years) of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She composed her first poem while still a very young girl; she dictated it to her mother. It ran simply: ‘Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.’

Not present in the poem, but perhaps subtly evoked by its narrative, is a related, traditional poetic pairing: “womb” and “tomb”. The poem summons images of new life (children, birthdays, the balloons themselves with their “futtery teats”) and makes us aware of the contrast of active, nurturing life and final, entombed breaths. I want to do two things: first, try to show what projective or OPEN verse is, what it involves, in its act of composition, how, in distinction from the non-projective, it is accomplished; and II, suggest a few ideas about what stance toward reality brings such verse into being, what the stance does, both to the poet and to his reader. (The stance involves, for example, a change beyond, and larger than, the technical, and may, the way things look, lead to a new poetics and to new concepts from which some sort of drama, say, or of epic, perhaps, may emerge.) I’ve long admired the topical intelligence of André Naffis-Sahely not only as poetry editor but especially in his recent High Desert for its counter to dominant narratives, its elastic sensibility (that encircles the globe) and firm sense of a politics that shapes poetry’s aesthetics.’or what a French critic[2] calls “closed” verse, that verse which print bred and which is pretty much what we have had, in English & American, and have still got, despite the work of Pound & Williams: The irony is, from the machine has come one gain not yet sufficiently observed or used, but which leads directly on toward projective verse and its consequences. It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work. In times of confusion, stress and fear, mindfulness poetry can help us act with clarity and loving-kindness. The refuge of mindfulness poetry can provide a place of solace, where we can restore energy when we feel drained. People who practice mindful activities like poetry think about how to get rid of these negative emotions by doing something that explores all emotions, even the difficult ones like misery, despair and fear. These people believe that if you do something practical, you’ll be able to overcome your negative emotions. I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind’s, that it has the mind’s speed . . .

Daring, deft and deeply affecting. Flamingo bops and shimmies with beauty, soars with all that we are.’ If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and ahead. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath. Self-Compassion is a practice, like Mindfulness, that helps you become self-aware of your daily attention, and guide it towards creating more empathy and compassion for yourself, your emotions and experiences so you can in turn be more compassionate for others. Just like mindfulness poetry is a brilliant tool to grow you ability for mindfulness, Self-Compassion poetry can be an equally handy way, to increase you ability fo self-compassion. There are a wide range of names for other types of feet, right up to a choriamb, a four syllable metric foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables and closing with a stressed syllable. The choriamb is derived from some ancient Greek and Latin poetry. [55] Languages which use vowel length or intonation rather than or in addition to syllabic accents in determining meter, such as Ottoman Turkish or Vedic, often have concepts similar to the iamb and dactyl to describe common combinations of long and short sounds. [59]

Responses to the Catch Your Breath exhibition

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American lyric poet whose work is often overlooked in discussions of twentieth-century American poetry. Yet at its best, Teasdale’s work has a lyricism and beauty which can rival that of many poets of her time. Here she meditates on the calm that a deep peace brings: Clare Shaw’s Towards a General Theory of Love was a standout for me. Beautiful, deceptively simple poems of huge weight and power. I love them for their wit and for the deep underlying emotion. Wonderful book.’