(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best regional & cultural poetry books

Oh, well if you are actually writing a dissertation than you have a lot more space to work with. When I first read your question I thought this was for an essay; I was trying to dissuade you from trying to write about a huge chunk of the canon in 2000 words.

I am not familiar with every author on your list, but I am with most of them. I'm wondering if you might have to be careful in the works that you choose if you are wanting to talk about modernism and post-modernism. Some of the works that have been suggested, while enormously fascinating, might be difficult to classify as post-modern, unless you are playing fast and loose with the definition of postmodernism or its identifying qualities. I'm thinking particularly of 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,' where the work is essentially a contemporary re-writing of the Victorian novel. On the other hand, the re-writing of history has certain postmodern qualities anyway.

It sounds like an ambitious project and I wish you the best of luck. I would advise caution on The Wasteland, though. Are you sure you can't just omit it? It's a work of poetry after all, and everything else sounds like prose. Do you have one of these? http://www.amazon.ca/The-Waste-Land-Transcript-Annotations/dp/0156948702

As I'm sure you're aware, the development of that poem is a nightmare. I really have no idea how you can reach a concrete explanation for the use of footnotes in it. I feel like that would be a book in itself. The relationship between Eliot, Faber & Faber and Pound is so complicated. Although I heard they published Eliot's letters from that time. I wonder if there are any easy answers in there... Sorry, I'm sort of thinking out loud here.

Also, haven't most of the readings of 'The Wasteland' almost always used the notes? (Fisher King references, etc...I guess it's possible I've read only the old school interpretations) Anyway, if you haven't seen the original manuscript I highly recommend you pick up that book from Amazon. Your project sounds super interesting btw. I'm interested in hearing more about it.

1. The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry 1 -
   
   This book is heavy, so it doubles as a brick for smashing in the windows of capitalist bourgeois pigs. Reading it is like taking a shot of tabasco sauce and injecting it into your eye with a hypodermic needle.
   
   
2. Surrealist Poetry in English 2 -
   
   I had to buy this one on ebay, but it's a damn fine collection. Makes me want to hand out LSD-laced lollypops to schoolkids, then piss on the grave of H.W. Longfellow.
   
   
3. Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry 3 -
   
   These two have all the good ones of the 20th century, a clean layout, and a fine selection. Good for reading beneath a tree in the autumn, in a graveyard.
   
   
4. Penguin Anthology 4 -
   
   It's edited by Rita Dove, so you know this collection has good taste. The poems are from a wide spread of poetry movements, but personally, I find a lot of the pieces in it to be a little too 'delicate'. But very good for reading naked in bed, while softly stroking the hair of your sleeping lover.
   
   
5. English Romantic Poetry 5 -
   
   Got all the biggies like Byron, Shelly and Keats. I fuckin love Keats. This book is a great introduction to 19th century poetry. This is good for reading on a bus while driving past a field of flowers on a humid summer evening with the windows open, reminiscing about your high school crush.

Alright, so I'm not sure where to begin with this one. Personally, I'm Agnostic. I have all of the qualifications for Atheism except that I like the idea that there's something after life. So sue me. (Don't, please.) Anyway, I know Atheists, Pagans, Wiccans, Christians, and my mother calls herself a "Recovering Catholic". I've met a Buddhist turned Christian, and Christians turned Buddhist. It's a crazy world out there, and tolerance is a great place to start, because these are all great people in my life.

Now, I suggest letting her explore her beliefs, but all parents want to help, so if you're leaning that way, I suggest, when she's old enough to understand them, give her 3 things to read.

1.) Plato's Euthyphro

2.) The Way of Chuang Tzu

3.) The Gospel According to Thomas

Yes, in this order. You can sit down and talk with her after each.

1.) The Euthyphro argument is basically, if something is good because Gods says so, then there is no good, because can change it on a whim. Yet if something is inherently good, we don't need God to tell us, and he becomes an arbitrary figurehead.

2.) The Way of Chuang Tzu is mostly parables. There's a lot of verse, and was my first introduction to Buddhism and Taoism. I actually have an old version that belonged to my great grandmother. Some are really easy to understand. The general message is that you should be yourself, but be a good person, but they are each a different lesson in how one should act.

3.) The Gospel According to Thomas was one of the "Lost" versions of the gospel. If she's really researching, she'll probably have stumbled onto the bible. It's pretty hard not to. The point of this one is to say, "This was cut from the bible for not being close enough to its teachings." The way it's written is something much more closely resembling the Buddhist/Taoist writings from the Far East. It still conveys the bible's message, but with a different view. You use this one to show that everyone's beliefs are different, but sometimes they overlap. It's the message, and not the doctrines that are really important, and she should be free to believe whatever she chooses.

Alternatively, you could give her Plato last. Those are just some research suggestions.

I think he's almost got it. Women do have more sexual market value but it's not because they're inherently more attractive. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and men whether gay or straight have a lot more beauty in their eyes:

> [...] the combined flesh lust toward men of all the women in America is sufficient to sustain only one magazine, directed at women, featuring erotic pictures of men. Despite its fame, Playgirl is a small-scale publication boasting fewer subscribers than such narrow-audience magazines as Mother Earth News and Workbench. What's more, fully half its subscribers are men.

> The heterosexuality of women could not possibly be as socially suppressed as is the homosexuality of men; yet gay men find enough beauty in the flesh of men to allow gay erotica to flourish. And the heterosexual desires of men have made erotic imagery of women into a multibillion-dollar industry. But the heterosexual desires of women would seem to be only half sufficient to keep one low-circulation magazine afloat.

• Tim Golditch
  
  Also men are randier than women. These perfectly natural phenomena conspire to give women massive leverage over men in the sexual realm. It's nothing to do with women's bodies being curvy.

E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962

I remember first reading E.E. Cummings back in high school, and he was the first poet that I ever really connected with. I loved the funny way the wrote and how his lines were almost separated like thoughts. I definitely went through a copycat period where I was hugely inspired by his work, and even though my list of favorite poets has expanded since, he'll always be my "first" haha. Thanks for the contest!

Edit: OH! Used is more than fine :) The more you read the more you know

From a post I made awhile back:

If you want to go for a scholastic/western positive apologetics approach check out: The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

If you want to go for a scholastic/western negative apologetics approach check out Alvin Plantinga's God and Other Minds. This is the work that actually re-kindled serious philosophical debate on the existence of God in Anglophone philosophical circles according to Quinten Smith (a notable atheist philosopher btw). From there you could also check out Alvin Plantinga's warrant trilogy in order: Warrant: The Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief.

Personally I'm skeptical of the scholastic/western approach in general and I favor the Eastern/Mystical approach. I think the scholastic/western approach cannot escape radical skepticism, and I mean this in terms of secular and religious. If one takes seriously the scholastic/western approach in general, whether one is atheist or theist, radical skepticism follows. This video from a radical skeptic that goes by the user name Carneades.org does a good job of demonstrating this: Arguments of the Indirect Skeptic

The Orthodox approach has always been mystical rather than scholastic all the way from the beginnings of Christianity. From Jesus, to the apostles, to the church fathers, to right now we still have the original apostolic faith in the Orthodox Church. Check out this short documentary to learn more: Holy Orthodoxy: The Ancient Church of Acts in the 21st Century.

Fr. Vladimir Berzonsky explains the Eastern/Mystical approach: "To properly understand the Orthodox approach to the Fathers, one must first of all understand the mystical characteristic of Orthodox theology and the tradition of the apophatic approach to an understanding-if "understanding" is indeed the proper word-of what the hidden God in Trinity reveals to us. This needs to be combined with the insight that what is incomprehensible to our reason inspires us to rise above every attempt at philosophical limitation and to reach for an experience beyond the limits of the intellect. The experience of God is a transcendence born from union with the divine-henosis (oneness with God) being the ultimate goal of existence. This makes the requirement of true knowledge (gnosis) the abandoning of all hope of the conventional subject-object approach to discovery. It requires setting aside the dead ends of Scholasticism, nominalism, and the limits set by such Kantian paradigms as noumena/phenomena. One must return to, or better yet, find in one's heart (or nous, the soul's eye) union with the Holy Trinity, which has never been lost in the Orthodox Church."

Source: Fr. Vladimir Berzonsky, (2004). Three Views on Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism. p. 178. Zondervan, Grand Rapids

Mine:

Somewhere a Raven is Dreaming, $10
free version

 

A Soul in Baker's Dozen Pieces, $5
free version

 


Kick and the Cheese Warehouse, $5
free version

 


Mine and others:
The Best of OCPoetry, Years 1-3
free version

 

I believe the role of the modern poet to be much the same as the modern comedian or comic artist, albeit in a different format - which is to say or write in a way that is societally relevant and/or essentially forces someone to use their brain.

Starting out, I imitated Robert Frost, Robert Browning, and William Blake.

I want to be more like James Elroy Flecker (when it comes to use of meter), Brenden Norwood (the guy keeps coming up with these brilliant images that I wish I thought of first), and LF Call (an unending wellspring of creativity. I mean those birdsong poems, mein Gott...). There's plenty more, including the rest of the team here, but those are who come to mind at the moment.

The most recent thing to inspire one of my poems was playing Taps at a military funeral - not just hearing it over a loudspeaker at night, or even hearing a bugler play it as I watch the casket get loaded on the plane, but being the one to play it - the cold metal, the shifting light, the family and me both trying to keep it together, the whole experience.

The Golden Age by John C. Wright, and its two sequels, The Phoenix Exultant: and The Golden Transcendence.

It's not quite what I think you mean by transhumanism, but it's a great posthuman novel. The publisher says:

> The end of the Millennium is imminent, when all minds, human, posthuman, cybernetic, sophotechnic, will be temporarily merged into one solar-system-spanning supermind called the Transcendence. This is not only the fulfillment of a thousand years of dreams, it is a day of doom, when the universal mind will pass judgment on all the races of humanity and transhumanity.

The trilogy is written with style and humor, with a strong dash of the classics, and with an eye toward limits and implications of communication across different levels of computational capacity, mind architecture, and processing speed.

In fact I think I just talked myself into re-reading it :-)

Still learning. I've taken three years of formal Mandarin classes during undergrad (with more to come next fall), more rigorous classes while in China, and supplemented these with a shit-ton of personal study through books, podcasts, apps, and good old language cds. As for classical, along with personal study from the standard text books, I've had a couple of professors who've sat down with me for translation roundtables. Other than that, I make a conscious effort when I read a translated text or academic study, to look up characters for important names, and find the original texts. I find it invaluable to refer to them for clarification, or to just check to see If I can correctly guess a specific term or reference. I also like to just buy random ancient texts, flip open a page, and see if I find something interesting. Once you get your head around the basics, it becomes a matter of finding the right dictionary, grammar handbook, or reference guide. All the stuff I've translated here has been more of less for fun. I'd spend about a week or more perfecting a translation before including it in a conference paper or potential journal article.

If you are looking for recommendations on where to start, I'd point you towards Chinesepod (I've heard there is an awesome torrent of their episodes floating around) and Chinese Through Poetry: An introduction to the language and imagery of traditional verse.

Me personally...I started with "Black Coffee Blues". Then most people read the follow up "Do I Come Here Often?", but I read "Solipsist" before that. "Get In The Van" is specifically more about his time with legend punk band Black Flag but it's super interesting. He let's you in to alot that molded him into the man he is today. And then after that, I'd say just start going down the line with the others. Also, YouTube his live spoken word performances too. The guy is just so damn fascinating lol sorry, he had a big influence on me in my late teens...enjoy! :)

It’s a collection of poetry and motivational writings on topics of purpose, growth, dreams, love, and perseverance..

Here’s a link for the interested: Growing and Loving with the Universe

This is really cool of you :)

So, you say you like sci-fi... But do you like haiku? And more importantly, do you like both at the same time? Because if you don't, you'll hate this scifaiku book I published.

Well color me ignorant. I know nothing of what you speak. I took a look at Frederick Turner's The New world - the best I could come up with was the Amazon Page for it where you read some excerpts.

I read some of the introductory information, also the first couple of stanzas. I must admit, it feels like it must be an acquired taste. What do you think about epic poetry as an art form? (Besides to obvious - you are writing in it of course) Do you feel like it is an acquired taste? And if so - how do you find yourself composing epic poetry as opposed to some other form of poetry, or straight fiction?

When you speak of using The New World as a close analogue for your own, in what regard to you refer? Meter? Plot? Genre? All of the above, or possibly only some?

One way of sidestepping the Gettier Problem, particularly in light of examples like this one, popularized by Alvin Goldman, is to say that justification should not be thought of as wholly internal to an agents beliefs. That is, things outside of an agent’s belief such as whether the belief was caused in the right way, or whether the belief was formed by a reliable belief-forming process, contribute to whether or not the belief is “justified.” This view is called justificatory externalism and I think it’s at least partly right. If we accept some aspects of externalism, the Gettier problem becomes much less problematic.

One externalist view of justification, more nuanced in my opinion than Goldman's, is Alvin Plantinga's "proper-functionalism" as laid out in his book Warrant and Proper Function. On Plantinga's model, if our cognitive faculties (the ones specifically designed for producing true beliefs) are functioning properly in the way they were designed (either by God, as Plantinga would want to have it, but more likely, by evolution, or even "socially designed"), in the environment for which they are designed, and a true belief is formed, it is knowledge. So, in the robot dog case, since this isn't the sort of environment for which my faculties were designed (we didn't evolve in a world populated with both dogs and robot dogs) and it impairs my descriminative ability, it wouldn't be knowledge, even though it is true belief.

"Warrant" is substituted with "Justification" here, but it functions in much the same way as a JBT account.

DOOOD, i just bought The Way of Chuang Tzu. Its all Taoist poetry, and its fucking awesome so far.

Ill share my favorite quote from a parable that was inside (most of it is poetry and not parables btw)

"look at this window: it is nothing but a hole in the wall, but because of it the whole room is full of light. So when the faculties are empty, the heart is full of light. Being full of light it becomes an influence by which others are secretly transformed"

-Chuang Tzu

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

amazon.fr

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, amazon.fr, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

Since you were one of two people to respond here haha I just want to make sure you see my book is free for kindle download this week. The Cosmic Hello

I recommend Wendy Cope and Billy Collins.

Wendy Cope is a UK poet. Her first collection Maiking Cocoa for Kingsley Amis is perhaps her most famous.

Billy Collins was the US Poet Laurette. He has a wonderful way with words. Highly recommended.

I love Wendy Cope and she has some good collections - Family Values and Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis ae two of my favourites

I would add the other two books in Plantinga's trilogy on Warrant as well.

Warrant: The Current Debate

Warrant and Proper Function


Also Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Alasdair MacIntyre

I've heard that Charles Taylor is a must as well.

No worries!

> Most importantly, boys and girls alike need to be taught to view all of the above as emotional tools to be picked up and put down as the situation demands - not as permanent characteristics against which they define their identities.

Funnily enough, this is the moral of Inside Out :p (albeit with non gender stereotyped emotional responses)

Have you read Loving Men, Respecting Women? You, me and the author seem to be on the same wavelength :)

Many people that read my poetry claim I'm a mix of Frost and e.e. cummings. I'll take it. I actually have E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962. Have read through about 1/3 of it. Love it. Definitely was mimicking him without knowing.

My husband has a copy of this Penguin Anthology. It's a great collection of surrealist poetry.

I also recommend the Secret Life of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dali. I remember reading the chapter on intra-uterine memories in one of my Freshmen English classes in college.

I've heard this from a few people. We were an entire generation of kids who joined the military with the Black Hawk Down possibility playing in our heads . A single bullet is what we want. Poet veteran, Brian Turner said it best in "Here, Bullet." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LguxNDdyky8
His body of work.
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1882295552

I apologize in advance if this is not an acceptable place to share a link, so if a mod wants me to remove this comment, I'll be more than happy too.

I just wanted to share that I will be releasing my first book of poetry early next year. Pre-orders for the Kindle version went live today. (Print edition and Nook will be available in February.)

It's a collection of 80+ poems pulled from 100s that I had written between 2005 and 2017. The focus is on how the recession and technology (among other things) have changed the way young adults interact with each other.

The link to the Amazon pre-order is here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07777BQBK

If you have not yet read it you might enjoy Will Self's Dorian, which updates the story to the era of pre-cocktail HIV/AIDS.

If it is fin de siecle libertinage that attracts you then you might be interested in the Decadent Movement. My personal favorite work is Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal which is just dripping with sickly sweet amorality, but it is Huysman's Against Nature that is considered the manifesto work.

I agree. You might enjoy this particular MRA's book.

https://www.amazon.com/Loving-Men-Respecting-Women-Politics/dp/0982794800/

I haven't finished it yet, but I'm enjoying Chinese Through Poetry quite a bit.

...and it's available for pre-order on Amazon UK, at least. Thank you for reminding me of that! It will have a bunch of otherwise very hard-to-find poems that were early versions of much of the work in the book as well as, apparently, an unfinished prose story about Tom.

>The Poets of Reddit: The Best of OCPoetry Years 1-3 $5.14, 186 pgs, softcover




Do you take poems that users post in this subreddit and sell them in a book?

Autogenerated.

I just published my first poetry/self-help Book - AMA to convince you to buy it

The book in question: https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Loving-Universe-Sergio-Torres/dp/1978196938/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510211165&sr=8-1&keywords=growing+and+loving+with


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One of my sci-fi favs which is CRUNCHY in its sci-fi is The Golden Age by John Wright. The plot is twisty enough you won’t know where it will head, but the ideas in the book are so constant that many have trouble reading it. Not because it’s bad but rather it’s DENSE. The next two in the trilogy is easier though. Do please read some reviews first.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Golden-Age-Paperback-ebook/dp/B000FA5QJK/

This is a really cool book of sci-fi haikus (I know, odd right?) that I really enjoyed. Written by a Redditor.

http://www.amazon.com/white-noise-haiku-space-ebook/dp/B004S7EP84/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

I would recommend reading the book, it’s dope! here you can buy it on amazon I think. if I did it right

Plantinga wrote 3 books related to this subject. He wrote "Warrant: The Current Debate" to give an overview of the field of philosophy on what needs to be added to true beliefs to yield knowledge. Then he wrote "Warrant and Proper Function" to give his own take. Finally he wrote "Warranted Christian Belief" which basically applies his epistemology to Christian belief. So the guy has done a ton of work in epistemology and also applying epistemology to Christianity.

Links to Books:

https://www.amazon.com/Warrant-Current-Debate-Alvin-Plantinga/dp/0195078624

https://www.amazon.com/Warrant-Proper-Function-Alvin-Plantinga/dp/0195078640/ref=pd_sim_14_1/164-8766607-7794903?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=H9CQMRJ1GDZG8WF2EHQ8

https://www.amazon.com/Warranted-Christian-Belief-Alvin-Plantinga/dp/0195131932/ref=pd_sim_14_2/164-8766607-7794903?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=H9CQMRJ1GDZG8WF2EHQ8

I think maybe I just ordered it from the library. I know this is different, but I am a fan of Frederik Turner's The New World, which is also long-form, modern poetry.

If that's really the way you think, then I highly recommend that you read Solipsist, by Henry Rollins.

It's like a whole book, so not easily postable, but you can get it on the Amazon.

• By John C. Wright: The Golden Age (first in a trilogy) and the upcoming Count to a Trillion (likewise).
  
• By Greg Egan: Permutation City (in its second half) (excerpt), Diaspora (excerpt), Border Guards, Schild's Ladder (excerpt), Riding the Crocodile/Incandescence (excerpt of the latter).
  
• Possibly Iain M. Banks' Culture series; they say you should start with The Player of Games.
  
• Riding the Crocodile and the elsewhere-mentioned Thousandth Night first appeared in the anthology One Million AD.
  
• Relevant TV Tropes pages: Human Subspecies, Time Abyss, Transhuman Aliens.
  
  In response to this comment, Egan's one example of someone who wrote near-future stories in the '90s that remain non-ridiculous.

It's a bit different from other suggestions, but you might try Chinese Through Poetry by Archie Barnes.

https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Land-Facsimile-Transcript-Annotations/dp/0156948702/ref=sr_1_7?crid=2WGK69ZF8IY3L&keywords=the+wasteland+t.s.+eliot&qid=1563976937&s=gateway&sprefix=The+wasteland%2Caps%2C152&sr=8-7

Thomas Merton's book The Way of Chuang Tzu has Chuang Tzu using Lao Tzu as a character to illustrate many ideas. There's "mythic" stories of his wake, or one of his disciples Keng Sang Chu coming to visit him for advice for example. Not sure if this is what you're after?

That there is no reason to suppose we are being irrational by believing it without trying to ground it in some other belief; we are rationally entitled to take it as the foundation of our reasoning and arguments. Alvin Plantinga is known for arguing that theism is such a belief, but I think he's exaggerating when he says his epistemology means that it's rational to believe in God "without any evidence or argument at all", since a properly basic belief is still rooted in experience on his view. For a fuller picture, see Plantinga's Warrant and Proper Function, among his many other works on the subject.

Plantinga is an old-school academic philosopher, so the best way to get familiar with his ideas is his published works (Amazon links below):

• The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader - a well-edited anthology that presents a broad survey of Plantinga's ideas (leans heavily toward his epistemology, though IIRC).
  
• Warrant: The Current Debate
  
• Warrant and Proper Function
  
• Warranted Christian Belief This is the only one of the "warrant" books I've read. The three books aren't considered a "trilogy" as such, rather WCD and WPF are companion pieces and WCB then builds a different argument based on the earlier works. Namely, Plantinga responds to what he calls the de jure argument that Christianity is irrational, unjustified, and/or unwarranted (in contrast to the de facto argument that Christianity is false). Some googling will reveal reviews of the book from every conceivable angle, some with responses from Plantinga himself. When Plantinga refers to the earlier books, he gives some context, so it's possible to read this book without having read the other two.
  
  Plantinga is also on the editorial board of Faith and Philosophy, the journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, and he's contributed several articles over the years. There are even more published articles written by his students and colleagues about his ideas.