Polytricum Moss (Jeremy should appreciate that)

So it turns out Stanley Moss is quite an interesting fellow. The reading seemed a bit boring, with a few bits of humor added in to spice up the presentation, but for the most part it was listening to poetry for an hour. I have trouble with this, no matter how hard I try. I cannot get anything from a poem that is just read through (and takes like 10 min at that). My mind can’t stay focused. I become caught on one concept and wander off with that and miss the rest of what is said, try to jump back into the poem and forget the one intelligent thought that I had actually formulated. We discussed this earlier today, but I really did wish he had done some explanation or introduction to his poetry. He just read it through and maybe waited a few moments for the mass of thought to sink in. It however was like a brick thrown into a glass of water for me, nothing hit home without some help.

My shortcomings aside I found the lecture to be somewhat stimulating. His poetry to me sounded like a sort of sermon given in church, minus a pushed message. What he said was much more rebellious and personal. One line that really struck me enough for me to write down was “The night after all is a shadow”. I forget the context and what I felt at the time, but it alone is quite a powerful sentence I think. It puts the world into perspective to me on the scale of the universe. We are such a small thing, this huge phenomenon we call night is really just the turning of our planet so that we are in the darkness. Something that happens in every other solar system in existence I’m sure.

From the class appearance, putting some of the disagreements aside I found some pointers to be helpful and worth the effort of me noting. He said poetry is about the “hidden life within us”. I had some sense of this, but he made a good explanation of the concept. We write about the conflict of thoughts in our head, our contradictions and debates as a human being. That is why poetry is often oh so personal. One more take home message I found was “the devil generalizes, angels are specific”. I know I am all too guilty of being too vague and he made a good point. By being specific a reader can follow exactly what you are saying and the meaning isn’t lost. In poetry the meaning is often a bit obscured, but the point remains that by being specific in imagery and such that the poem paints a much clearer picture.