[ross hamilton hill]

I just answered Mary off the top of my head, I can't really remember if many of the poetry forums I have used had more women than men. I know the Sphere is less strictly moderated than some ( but some have no mods at all),
Getting back to the original idea I think many may feel the Sphere has declined because most of us went through a heyday, when online poetry forums suddenly opened up poetry in a way that hadn't occurred since the invention of printing.
I have a poet friend I met online who is one of my closest friends, I have watched her daughter grow up, her marriage fail, another marriage succeed, her son born and now go to school. All conveyed online.
Amazing, such a close friend yet I have never met her. I'm sure many on the Sphere feel that way, although you may have turned online friendships into actual friendships.

[Julie Steiner]

Much as I'd love to keep arguing that I'm right , I'm sorry that the gender issue seems to be derailing Andrew F's original philosophical tangent, which I frankly found more interesting. I agree with Roger that perhaps we could save the gender-specific discussion for another occasion. Right now I'd rather put time and energy into reading and thinking about people's philosophical observations, from which I'm learning a lot.

[Michael F]

If I were asked to name the most philosophically interesting contemporary poets I have read, Wislawa Szymborska and Mary Oliver would probably be the first two names I'd think to mention. Most of their work is free verse, so far as I know.

One of my favorite philosophical poems by a committed formalist is the following. It’s so simple, and yet …


Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be—
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

-- Robert Frost

[Esther Murer]

I just dropped in after a couple months of not being in poetic mode. Lots of food for thought on this thread. Lots I could say, too, but that would involve galloping madly off in all directions, so I won't.

Thanks, all.

[John Whitworth]

Philosophy seems to encompass a very wide area if it includes Frost's poem. It seems to me an essentially poetic statement.

[Michael F]

I read it as a comment on epistemology, John, and human thought's ability to grasp the "really real" -- the noumenon, in other words.

Or I should say: that is one of several ways I read it...

[Andrew Frisardi]

Seems like a good reading to me, Michael. I think the Frost poem is a really fine philosophical piece, as many of his poems are.

And John, if you believe Parmenides, who said that thought and being are the same, heck yeah, poetry and philosophy have a lot in common. Then again, what Parmenides meant by “thought” isn’t what post-Cartesian philosophy means by it. Poetic philosophy or philosophical poetry puts the mind back in the whole, even if the whole is broken. Much modern philosophy does the opposite:

A Fragment

Locke sank into a swoon;
The Garden died.
God took the spinning jenny
Out of his side.

Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium's mouth,
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.

--Yeats