Enclose notes for the Blue Mugge pub discussion next Tue 4 Nov.   Roger Elkin has prepared these notes and will lead/chair the discussion.

A reminder of programme change: on Tue 25th Nov we will be debating and discussing  The Crash, 2008.

Also:      Friday 7th November   10.30 - 3.30pm
The WEA has organised:
Celebrating Tawney in 2008.
The 100th anniversary of Tawney's first University/WEA Tutorial Class in Longton.
The speakers are acknowledge experts on the subject.
Venue:  Potteries Museum and Art Gallery,  Hanley

Open Circle or Odd Group

Tuesday   4th November 08 at The Blue Mugge Pub, Leek

Some Poetry Definitions

1     S.T.Coleridge:         Poetry; the best words in the best order.
2    W.B. Yeats:        Poetry is truth seen with passion.
3.    William Wordsworth:     Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.
4.    T.S. Eliot:        It is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences… a concentration which does not happen consciously… Poetry is not a turning loose from emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

4Which of the above do you agree with?
5Is there anything that you would add to help to define what you think poetry is… and should do?
6What makes a “good” poem?           
7What features make the following poem “good”?

Mushrooms                         Sylvia Plath

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.                                       13th November 1959

Open Circle, ODD Group

A brief reminder that the theme tomorrow evening, Tue 28 Oct, will be 'Consciousness 2'.
I've had a brief chat with Bob on the phone, who will again chair the session, and I enclose a few additional notes which may be used during the evening.

==

-1Consciousness

Additional notes for Tue 28th Oct.

From The Conscious Brain  by Steven Rose - former Professor of Biology, the OU.
(Penguin Books,  Revised Edn,  1976).  

“Consciousness means many things, sometimes simultaneously, often contradictorily.
Thus, it may simply mean a state different from being asleep or in a coma;  the reverse of being ‘unconscious’.  It may be used to relate to the private world of the mind in contrast with a presumed ‘public’ world of observed behaviour.  People speak of ‘altered states of consciousness’ which may be induced by drugs, often implying by this altered awareness or altered perception of the world around.  
Consciousness may have a Freudian meaning in which some human acts, or the motivations for them, occur at a level out of reach of the thinking ‘conscious’ mind with its overt rationalisations,  buried in some relatively inaccessible ‘subconscious’.   Finally, there is the Marxist sense of consciousness.  
The difference between these uses of the term is that whilst most of the earlier ones are essentially static definitions, of consciousness as a ’state’ of being, in the Marxist sense consciousness is a dynamic force which emerges in interaction between the individual and his or her environment….

Consciousness in my sense of the term, is a continuously unrolling, continuously developing activity of minds/brains in interaction with their environment, modified, either temporarily or permanently, by changing circumstances.”