Poets and Divines

I have received a lot of flak from friends recently about the intermittency of my blog posts.  In this digital-print-rich world, frequency is as important as volume and clarity, and I have been neglecting my blog at my own peril.  Over the last two weeks, my blog has averaged two hits a day.  Boy, if I cared about stats, that would be a real blow to my ego.

Anyway…I thought of an interesting series of posts for the next couple of weeks.  I’ve always been a big fan of metaphysical poetry–that is, poetry that conveys spiritual and supernatural truths and insights.  But I’ve noticed that many of the poems I take as the most fascinating are

1. Not known by literary hacks (like me) because most of them think “metaphysical” means superstitious, and
2. Not known by many of my Christian friends because most of them aren’t literary hacks (like me) and have seen little reason to investigate the history of poetics.

So.  I’m going to start posting some of my favorites.  I’ll post one every day or two, or maybe week, for as long as I can sustain such a thing…I’ll invite comments on each of the poems and then, in typical Schmidt-classroom style, pronounce my authoritative (ha! as if) interpretation after everyone has had her/his say.

I’m going to post the first poem tomorrow night, after (perhaps) some of my old audience have seen a flag on their RSS feeds that says schmidtty is posting again.  I hope at least one of the five people who read this blog will encounter at least one new poem to add to her/his favorites…one person, one poem–that’s what I live for.

Cheers, everyone.

With just a couple of days to go…

Here’s the most helpful “case for Obama” piece I’ve found.

http://www.slate.com/id/2202163/

Enjoy.

Au revoir, Paul Newman.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obit_newman

Classes officially leveled.

A big thanks to all of you who read my last post and offered kind words for our plight.

Thankfully, as of yesterday, the English department had mostly manageable classes.  My largest class is now 35, my average 29, and my total 175.  This is a great improvement, and I have to thank my building principal and our counselors for tireless work in making it happen.

I’m sad to report, though, that about ten of my students decided that they wouldn’t be able to hang with the AP curriculum, and dropped out of the class.  So my satisfaction at having smaller classes is tinged with a sadness at having lost so many to discouragement already.

Yes, I know.  I can’t have it both ways.

It’s like symbolic.

I just wrote a post for my friends’ new communal blog.  You should, like, check it out.

On Being an American (and Giving a Damn About Politics)

“Where, indeed, is there a better show in the world?  Where has there been a better show since the Reformation?  It goes on daily, not in three rings, but in three hundred rings…

“Consider, for example, the current campaign for the Presidency.  Would it be possible to imagine anything more stupendously grotesque–a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee–the impossible, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable?  I defy anyone to match it elsewhere on this earth.  In other lands, at worst, there are at least issues, ideas, personalities.  Somebody says something intelligible, and somebody replies.  It is important to somebody that the thing go this way or that way.  But here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to a gaudy symbolism, to a disembodied transcendentalism, to metaphysics, that sweet nirvana.  Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannons with blank cartridges charged with talcum-powder, and so let fly.  Here one may howl over the show without an uneasy reminder that some one is being hurt…

“I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that nowhere else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness…

“…Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one’s ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.”

H.L. Mencken, 1922