About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
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Off the Cuff / My Other Journal #699974 added June 24, 2010 at 1:15am Restrictions: None
"Re:Joyce" and The African Queen
The author Frank Delaney explains a few passages from James Joyce’s Ulysses; actually, one small passage every week.
http://frankdelaney.com/
For the RSS feed or the podcast: http://rejoyce.libsyn.com/rss
I’m really enjoying his explanations and yearning for more after each podcast.
I turn to classics every now and then just to feel the soul and the beauty in their words. This weekend I borrowed The African Queen by C.S. Forester from the library. Hubby remarked. “Didn’t we already watch the movie umpteen times?” He’s right. We did. Who could forget Bogart getting his only Oscar for the role of Allnut, but the book is so much better. It reads like poetry in places, and the ending is quite different.
What I find in the writings of 70-100 yrs ago is soul and honesty. The stories of old times make me feel the ugliness, the pain, or the joy of their characters without resorting to clever tricks or faking it.
Sometimes I think those words, should they be written today, would never see a publisher’s approval. Some, not all, contain sentences that are too long, too complicated, and sounding slightly off with their relevance, and with narrators skipping all over the page, adding in their emotions and memories, and even lecturing in places. Unlike our contemporary writing, which is clever, competent, and constricted--while missing the point, at times--thanks to the present-day teachings.
For the sake of practicality, as writers, we have to adapt to what is approved in today’s tastes, but I still like to peek into the past, so I won’t miss the point of what true literature can be like.
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