Well versed

I do in fact have one more reflection to share with the æther. Languishing in the pit of all my unposted or unfinished blog scribbles is a note comparing ‘Constraints-based writing in Leviticus and Hofstadter’. I am sure you can bear not reading that one. However, poetry has come back to my thinking this week for a couple of reasons. I would encourage you to read at the least the introductions to both Don Carson’s book Holy Sonnets of the twentieth century and John Piper’s Velvet Steel. I find the experience of reading my own writing profoundly embarrassing, like watching a shy person hear a recording of his own voice, and my own ineloquence transferred to verse is surely so far worse that you are certainly safe from it. Still, I would like to suggest that writing about ourselves or others is a wonderfully mind-clearing exercise that sweeps aside the difficulty of verbalising what we feel, helping “intensify and express feelings that cannot be captured sufficiently in ordinary language” (Piper). Do any of my friends I wonder know of a good introduction or aid to Donne’s Holy Sonnets?