You Are Jeff

So today I slept in. For no discernible reason I stayed up late last night. But at least I didn't have to work, and Dad doesn't get back until tomorrow, so no work until Wednesday. I decided to watch Ocean's Eleven while I ate soup for lunch, and Mom sat and watched it with me. I don't know the last time we watched a movie together, but as long as she doesn't ask too many questions (I get annoyed when people ask what's going to happen) movies are a good way that we bond. I'm also glad that we found a church that we both like. Hopefully this year we can rebuild our relationship.

Right as the movie ended I realized that I had made plans to meet Lucy after she was done with orchestra at 5, so I ran out the door. I was 15 minutes late, and Chris called and joined us for coffee and donuts at Dunkin' Donuts. It was really great to see her and talk. She's someone I always feel comfortable confiding in. Unfortunately she had to leave to go to McTyeire dinner. I dropped her off and Chris and I went to get food at Wendy's before our Soupir rehearsal.

Rehearsal was good as usual. I think we are beyond the basics now and feel comfortable enough to listen to each other and feel the music. Trey decided to leave us by ourselves in the hope that we'd figure out the piece by ourselves.

After rehearsal I had texted Lindsey but never heard back from her. But Trey asked how rehearsal was and then asked if I was busy tonight. I had just left but when he suggested Jackson's or Fido's I turned around. I tried to work on my poetry until he showed up but didn't get much done. Kaiser Wilhelm also came, which was nice.

Trey asked if I had heard of poet Richard Siken, who I was not familiar with, and we went back to his place and he found this amazing poem called You Are Jeff. I don't even know what to say. Poetry is hard for me to describe or analyze but I know when something hits me, when it moves me with it's beauty or power, or if it's raw or refined.

How should one evaluate a poem? Does it have to make any sort of sense? A poem has to be about something, right? But not in the same way as a book is about something - the plot or the information.

From P. B. Shelley's A Defence of Poetry:

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the Imagination": and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them.

Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; and additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture and the imitative arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony.

Their [poets] language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.

Sounds as well as thoughts have relations, both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts.

A Poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature.

A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.