I bet the Christian nationalists will be disappointed when they understand the current U.S. president of the U.S. has just been riding the waves of cash of Russia and the tech-bros, whilst the latter are trying to herald in #ai as the second coming.

#ai #palantir #thiel #tescreal #US #fasiscm #yeats #christianNationalism

W. B. Yeats said one big source of leprechaun wealth is that they are paid by fairies to repair their shoes, and the fairies constantly wear out their shoes with dancing. Furthermore, leprechauns have dug up numerous pots of gold buried by humans long ago during times of war.
🎨 Jean-Baptiste Monge

#FairyTaleTuesday #Mythology #Folklore #Ireland #Celtic #Fairy #Faerie #Yeats #WBYeats

https://youtu.be/cN_VPtGfsw0

Must be about time for my annual share of this too.

#Yeats #poetry

Quarante cinq poèmes de W.B Yeats

Certaines œuvres poétiques traversent les siècles comme des phares dans la nuit, guidant les âmes éprises d'éternité à travers les brouillards du temps. Quarante-cinq poèmes de William Butler Yeats, dans cette magnifique édition bilingue établie par Yves Bonnefoy, appartient à cette catégorie rare d'ouvrages qui ne cessent de nous parler, génération après génération...

La suite de la recension est à lire sur voiepoetique.com

#poesie #voiepoetique #yeats

We make poetry out of a mouthful of air

In his wonderful How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry, Edward Hirsch reflects on the orality which marks the poetic form. For most of history it was been an oral art and it retains that orality even now. Inspired by the boast of W.B. Yeats that “I made it out of a mouthful of air” Hirsch reflects that:

As every poet does. So, too, does the reader make, or remake, the poem out of a mouthful of air, out of breath. When I recite a poem I inhabit it, I bring the words off the page into my own mouth, my own body. I become its speaker and lt its verbal music move through me as if the poem is a score and I am its instrumentalist, its performer. I let its heartbeat pulse through me as embodied experience, as experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds.

At the weekend I found myself thinking about the word ‘phoneme’ and its parallel to tokens upon which large language models rely. We too compose meaningful units out of components so atomic that their constituent character falls beneath the surface of our awareness. I was making the point to a friend using the word ‘phoneme’ and was suddenly struck that ‘phoneme’ itself is composed of phonemes: pho-ne-meme. It was startling to experience the concept itself involuntarily decomposed into atomic units.

Except these aren’t phonemes. These are syllables. Phonemes are even more basic units of sound out of which syllables are composed. The fact what presented itself to me as the most basic unit was not, when I thought about it, actually the most basic unit was itself striking. This led me to discover the International Phonetic Alphabet in which phonemes can be rendered using the phonemic alphabet. In which case ‘phoneme’ is composed as /f əʊ n iː m/. This is how GPT 5.2 breaks that down phonetically:

f as in fan
əʊ the diphthong like the vowel in go
n as in no
iː the long vowel like in see
m as in man

It’s a struggle to remain at this atomic level. It’s too basic and too strange. Though it does suddenly make me regret not doing the linguistics degree I fleetingly considered as a teenager. You can stay at this level but it takes a bit of training to do it. The syllabic register is more accessible but even then it takes work. You have to manually decompose as an analytical exercise rather than seeing or feeling the composition. This highlights to me how we’re embedded in the semantic register such that we have to abstract from what words convey in order to analyse them as sign systems.

There are mysteries in the phonetic register. This exercise is akin to repeating a word until the meaning is lost. It just becomes a sound. Then a series of sounds. Until its unsettling to realise that only a minute ago, before you repeated the word fifty times, it conveyed a meaning with an immediacy which now feels inaccessible. There are mysteries in the semantic register as well though. If we instrumentalise our use of words, or rush through speaking and writing, we lose the experience of the force which animates them. There are words which energise us and words which drain us. Words which move us and which leave us cold. There’s a meeting in our experience of words between something deeply human and something…. Other.

Poetry I think is the purest form of connection to that mystery. If we rush through reading a poem it remains flat and inert. The meaning only emerges through us if we take the time to linger with what we are reading. There’s an obvious role of the unconscious here, at least in my experience of as someone who gets gripped by certain lines which I then find myself circling round and preoccupied by. Why am I gripped by these lines? What is it they are evoking in me? Why are they evoking this? I find it hard to appreciate a poem as a whole because I need that foothold to gradually learn to inhabit the poem or rather to find a way to let it inhabit me. The analytical register is too ready-to-hand for me, a tool that presents itself when I have a question but if I do that with a poem (at least too soon) the fragile life of what I’m ready withers and dies in front of me.

There’s something there which we’re encountering with poetry. How it feels and looks changes as we change. But it is in a real sense, I increasingly think, an encounter:

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

As Yeats put it we make poems out of mouthfuls of air. What I’m circling round is I think how mysterious and remarkable this is. How we have the capacity not just to produce meaningful sounds with motor movements of our mouth, tongue and throat that coordinate human action but that carry transformative meaning that transcends the very system of signs we have constructed. That reaches beyond and past it. The theme of the Other I’m just as much circling round relates to what is beyond. What is that deeper reality beyond the sign system. This makes me think that I’m unsatisfied with the obvious Lacanian reading that I’m talking about the machinic quality of the linguistic system. The alien mechanisms through which it churns away in a quasi-autonomous way. I’m talking about what’s in us that exists beyond that system yet remains utterly dependent on it for intersubjective expression.

Perhaps this is just the unconscious: the mycelium which chains together more sensory intensities then we could possibly process and out of which a mushroom of conscious meaning occasionally pops up. I don’t know, I’ve confused myself and I’m going to stop rambling now. But this feels like fertile terrain.

(I’ve also got a book to finish imminently and I’m struck that this sudden mystical fixation on inarticulacy could be the world’s most abstract procrastination exercise 🤔)

#EdwardHirsch #eliot #inarticulacy #language #linguistics #poetry #sound #Yeats

I shouldn’t hear #Yeats’ “The Second Coming” in my head when I read opinion polls.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/28/guardian-essential-poll-one-nation-coalition-liberal-national-labor-anthony-albanese-bondi-attack-ntwnfb #auspol