The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Sun 4/1/07)

[RetroLounge]

Tom Thomson in Limbo

Each thing done is a thousand things not done:
to read Frost is to not-read Henry James
or Keats and/or Rimbaud or Heisenberg ...
(Calculus floors him. Physics spins his mind
beyond all equilibrium.) But worse,
to read anyone else's books is to
not-write his own. But why, when others' songs
fill all the airwaves full, should lack of song
on his own part make him feel shameful so?
If every ear already is stuffed dumb,
why want a voice? (He knows what she'd suggest:
pure egotism.) "In silence can man best
preserve his own integrity," fortune
from fortune cookie say. "And he say " ."

Troy Jollimore

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TROY JOLLIMORE is an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico, and author of the poetry collection, Tom Thomson in Purgatory.

Jollimore studied in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1999. His dissertation, on the relation between normative theories of ethics and the requirements of friendship, was advised by Harry Frankfurt and Sarah Buss and was selected by Robert Nozick for Garland Publishing’s Studies in Ethics series. His philosophical articles have appeared in journals including Canadian Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly and Philosophy and Literature.

Prior to Princeton, he was an undergraduate at the University of King’s College and in the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Before joining the faculty at CSU Chico he taught at Georgetown University and the University of California, Davis.

He has published poetry in journals including Exile Quarterly, PRISM International, MARGIE, and Ploughshares. His first book of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, was selected by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins for the 2005 Robert E. Lee & Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award, and is the winner of the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.



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RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Good morning, my dear Retro!

This is such a true sentiment....

Doing one thing certainly excludes you from doing something else at the same time......

But there's more......

Why should you write when someone else may already have done so, and done it better?

For us newbies, this is the thought that gives us pause...

How can we possibly hope to say anything better than the experts already have?

Thank you...:hug:

[wildhorses]

2. brilliant!!!!!!! fuckin' brilliant!!!!!

information overload, amen!!!!


and he is cute, too....

i bet he is marriedx(