Added notes: Shakespeare as Ozymandias
And somehow, from there, after hearing Phylicia Rashad reading some of those words from “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”, I find myself listening for the first time to another voice, that of the novelist Ruth Ozeki, reading from her book, A Tale for the Time Being. I’d learned a week or two back that the novel had resonance with the great Zen master Dogen, whose Mountains and Rivers sutra I greatly admire and enjoy:
Since the virtues of the mountain are high and broad, the spiritual power to ride the clouds is always mastered from the mountains, and the marvelous ability to follow the wind is inevitably liberated from the mountains.
Here’s Ozeki, herself a zen priest — skip the beginning intros, start at around the 9’35” point, or at 11’17” where her actual reading from the book begins:
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Again, such a voice! Two such voices in one day, new to me! Today I consider the world with fresh and thankful eyes.
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Graham:
September 16th, 2016 at 9:59 pm
That passage from Wilson is extraordinary and vivid, but would that really now be considered poetry?
What distinguishes it from prose?
Charles Cameron:
September 16th, 2016 at 10:49 pm
Oh, it is prose. It’s the preamble to his play — but such language gives me hope that poetry is also (of course itn is!) possible..
Scott:
September 17th, 2016 at 11:36 pm
Wilson is well known here in Pittsburgh. I recommend this one, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Hedley_II, which I had the pleasure of seeing the year it debuted.
That said, Shakespeare’s original language has turns of phrase that I don’t think can be always updated. I mean, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” would lose something if you updated it to “don’t lend or borrow because you’ll end up in debt and lose the friend you lent the money to.”
Charles Cameron:
September 18th, 2016 at 6:59 pm
Lucky you! Thanks, Scott.