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God + Other Ideas: Poems in Four Acts
God + Other Ideas: Poems in Four Acts
God + Other Ideas: Poems in Four Acts
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God + Other Ideas: Poems in Four Acts

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All religions have something to teach us, yet none of us can come to a sense of peace except on our own terms. God + Other Ideas is a refreshing work of poetry based on the idea that if we want to get our hearts right in our own way, we have to do it through the trial and error of intelligent experience. Philosophy might be the mother of the sciences, but conscience should be their queen. These are poems for people who think as well as feel, and feel as well as think.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateJul 11, 2017
ISBN9781543907841
God + Other Ideas: Poems in Four Acts

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    God + Other Ideas - Jacob G. Hope

    Copyright © 2017 by Jacob G. Hope

    ISBN: 9781543907841

    Up to 700 words of material may be excerpted and shared as long as the quoted sections reflect the letter and context of the original and do not involve monetary exchange, with the exception of compensation for a book review. If you would like permission to excerpt and share more than 700 words, or to share excerpts in a context that involves monetary exchange other than a book review, please contact the author.

    The original purchaser of a legitimate copy of this work may reproduce unlimited sections of interest to them for personal use, or for sharing with others while they themselves are present, by any means they see fit, as long as the policies for excerpting and sharing given above are followed by themselves and by those with whom they share.

    Please stop by at jacobghope.com for news on ongoing projects, including a more complete website and future publications. I hope you enjoy the book.

    For the love of life

    Table of Contents

    Table of Poems

    Acknowledgments

    Preface

    Introduction

    Act 1: Kiss the Earth

    Act 2: Fire into Air

    Act 3: Water for the Soul

    Act 4: Winds of Change

    Curtain Call

    Concluding Remarks

    Commentaries

    Poems by Titles, First and Last Lines, and Dates

    Table of Contents

    Table of Poems

    Acknowledgments

    Preface

    Introduction

    Act 1: Kiss the Earth

    Act 2: Fire into Air

    Act 3: Water for the Soul

    Act 4: Winds of Change

    Curtain Call

    Concluding Remarks

    Commentaries

    Poems by Titles, First and Last Lines, and Dates

    Table of Poems

    Act 1: Kiss the Earth

    Testimony

    In Praise of the Still and Sweet

    In Winter

    Four Values

    Temple Poem

    A Little More Time

    If I Could Dance Into My Past

    The Sparrow Outside the Diner

    Tell Someone, or, The Hourglass

    Postscript to ‘The Hourglass’

    God

    Oh What Great

    At the Great American Health Bar, Manhattan

    Beethoven on a Greyhound

    Act 2: Fire into Air

    On Passionate Love

    Desperate Times

    On Religion

    On Religion, Original Version

    Desires Are Like Fires

    Greensky Hill

    Sailors of Life

    Today is the Day

    The Flame Wilbur Kept

    Something Other than the World

    Postscript to ‘Something Other than the World’

    A Glad Good Effort

    The Heart at Wounded Knee

    In The Morning

    Encounter in June

    Long Dark Night

    Act 3: Water for the Soul

    The Symphony of Life

    The Waking Dream

    The Waking Dream, Later Version

    Streams

    The Attachment Years

    The Flower and Its Desert

    Another Tao

    Plotinus in Love

    On the Other Side of Sadness

    Not Only the Rain

    A Directionist Testament

    A Time Within Time

    Joys and Sorrows: A Poem for Pablo Casals

    Act 4: Winds of Change

    Hope Only Needs a Window

    At the Venice Glassworks

    The Cart, the Wine, the Rose, the Drummer

    A Blessing for the Game

    A Blessing for the Game: Postscript

    Some People Are Temporary Islands

    Midnight Soft Light

    Rumi, Waiting for Heaven

    Instantaneous Awakening

    Rumi and Basho and the Rain

    Fire, Do Not Fear the Rain

    Praise to He

    Postscript to ‘Praise to He’

    Cycle

    Lao Tzu and Rumi

    Hoping and Finding

    The Four Feathers

    Curtain Call

    Still Waiting for Knowledge

    Acknowledgments

    I would like to thank my family, friends, and teachers for their encouragement, kindness, and patience. This book sometimes felt like a group effort, or at least a product of many influences. Though some of the people I have known are far away, many are also here. To paraphrase a saying of Confucius in the Analects, If you really care about someone, there is no such thing as far away.

    I also want to thank Harold Bloom, the author of Genius, The Western Canon, and many other books, for his willingness to look over the manuscript. He is 87 years old, has taught at Yale for 61 years, and presumably has better things to do than examining the work of a struggling poet. He did so anyway. On his advice, I have consolidated and focused the manuscript.

    Though I have not known them personally, I am grateful to the thinkers of the past. The life of the mind can be a lonely life, but I am glad they chose to live it, whether they were lonely or not. I particularly doff my hat (though I rarely wear hats indoors) to the legendary Lao Tzu and the historical Rumi, who together conspired to invade Act 4, and did so with great style and verve. Or so I think. But I am biased, because I assisted in their invasion.

    Lastly, I appreciate the many people who have read or listened to my poems over the years.

    Jacob G. Hope

    July 29, 2017

    Preface

    The following collection of poems is chronological but non-comprehensive. It includes a selection of pieces written between January 22, 2014, and September 5, 2016, organized into four Acts, and a single-poem Curtain Call. This device was inspired by Thackeray’s use of a theatrical metaphor at the beginning and end of his novel, Vanity Fair.

    I have sometimes printed an alternate version of a poem along with the primary version. This practice, along with the ‘Postscript’ poems, is intended to provide a conversational, improvisational quality to the work.

    Some of the poems also have Commentaries about them towards the end of the book. I have chosen not to make any marks in the text to indicate which poems have commentaries on them, as I thought it would be distracting to those who wanted to read the poems on their own. If you want to see which poems have notes on them, I have included asterisks to indicate this in the section Poems by Titles, First and Last Lines, and Dates.

    Introduction

    All the way to heaven is heaven. ~Catherine of Sienna

    In selecting these works, I have tried to abide by E.B. White’s advice, which I found at Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings, that it is the duty of writers to lift people up, not lower them down. For the most part, I think this is a positive collection. I have also tried to suggest the gritty, determined resilience, and the sustained desires to connect or reconnect with other people and ourselves, that can help us pull through harder times.

    I believe in a gritty innocence. By this, I mean the choice to hope in spite of some experiences, because of others. But I do not endorse a sugar-coated view of the world. As the Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu wrote, Can a man cling only to heaven and know nothing of earth? Can a man cling to the positive without any negative? (The Way of Chuang Tzu, Merton, p. 88.) I do not claim to cling to the heaven of the positive without knowing the earth of the negative. That is the earth we rise from. And perhaps we need not think of earth as a negative, after all.

    In addition to attempting a constructive vision, another guiding principle of this collection (which I believe may also have appeared at Brain Pickings) is Freud’s statement that the meaning of life is love and work. I do not endorse Freud, but I do endorse this sentiment. There are few better three-word remarks about the good life, and this view appears repeatedly in what follows. There are other things, but they are not the things that count. Even leisure, which people so often long for, is corrosive unless it is imbued with love. But when leisure is loving, it is almost as good as loving work, and sometimes better.

    The Concluding Remarks given at the end of the work provide a prose summary of what I have tried to convey here. But I believe that the rudiments of the worldview I have sketched, and the breadth of tolerance and sympathy it seeks to express, are emotionally and intellectually present throughout this collection.

    I also want to admit that, much of the time, the worldview I seek has more tolerance and sympathy than I do. I seek goals I have not achieved. But courage is necessary for nearly everything of worth, and courage means, in effect, Keep trying.

    On a related note, a famous quotation by John Buchan says, It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken. This is close to the truth, but I would rewrite it as follows: It’s a great life, if you never stop bouncing back. It’s a little bit longer, but it’s also a little bit truer. All of us weaken sometimes. The question is whether or not we bounce back.

    Act 1: Kiss the Earth

    Testimony

    I will testify

    Despite the extraordinary difficulty of being heard-

    In the midst, not only of noise,

    But of things worth hearing,

    From everywhere in space and time,

    And from the various modes

    Of activity and thought.

    I will testify

    By saying things everyone should hear,

    Just as everyone should be heard;

    Yet each will reach only a fraction,

    However large.

    But this is not a testimony of mourning,

    For it is extraordinarily easy

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