Word-Wednesday for January 27, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, January 27, 2021, the 4th Wednesday of the year, the 6th Wednesday of winter, and the 27th day of the year, with 338 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for January 27, 2021
In winter, elk coats consist of two layers: thick, long guard hairs and a dense undercoat. The inside of guard hairs look like honeycomb with thousands of tiny air pockets in each hair, making them waterproof and warm. This warm winter coat is so thick it can keep snow from melting on an elk’s back, which is nice when you hunker down in the snow for a long winter's night.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for January 27, 2021
Sunrise: 8:00am; Sunset: 5:13pm; 2 minutes, 50 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 3:53pm; Moonset: 7:39am, waxing gibbous, 97% illuminated


Temperature Almanac for January 27, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             16                     44                      0
Low             -6                    -46                   -13


January 27 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Chocolate Cake Day
• Library Shelfie Day
• Thomas Crapper Day

January 27 Word Riddle
What six-letter is something many people laugh at, but subtract one letter for what many worship.*


January 27 Pun
Turning vegan would be a BIG missed steak.


January 27 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1302 Dante becomes a Florentine political exile.
• 1556 Willem of Orange becomes a Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece.
• 1778 Piccinni's opera Roland premieres in Paris.
• 1926 Physicist Erwin Schrödinger publishes his theory of wave mechanics and presents what becomes known as the Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics.

January 27 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1715 Vaclav Kalous [Simon à Scto Bartholomaeo], Czech composer.
• 1741 Hester Thrale, Welsh diarist.
• 1756 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
• 1775 Friedrich von Schelling, German philosopher.
• 1823 Edouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo, French composer.
• 1832 Lewis Carroll.
• 1942 Petr Kotik, Czech composer.
• 1970 Dwight Schrute.

January 27 Word Fact
 The shortest, non-elliptical sentence is “I am.”


January 27, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 13 of 52
The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain,
The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he stands pois’d on one leg on the string-piece,
His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hip-band,
His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead,
The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs.

I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,
I go with the team also.

In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing,
To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,
Absorbing all to myself and for this song.

Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.

I believe in those wing’d purposes,
And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.


Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:

• apricity: the pleasant surprise of warm, mellow sunlight during what has been an otherwise cold and louring winter; from Latin “apricari” (to bask in the sun).
• coopetition: collaboration between rival organizations in the hope of mutually beneficial results, sometimes on a specific project; cooperation between competitors.
• grinagog: [GRIN-uh-gog] n., a person who is perpetually grinning.
• kansatsu: Japanese, observation; gaze.
• muliebrile: [myoo-lee-EHB-rahyl] (adj.) relating to or characteristic of a woman; feminine; womanly.
• obtrude: become noticeable in an unwelcome or intrusive way.
• psychrophilic: growing and thriving at relatively low temperatures.
• ravening: adj., rapacious, extremely hungry.
• shillelagh: [SHəˈlālē] a thick stick of blackthorn or oak used in Ireland, typically as a weapon.
• whitter: to  chatter  or  babble  pointlessly or at unnecessary length.

January 27, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Poetry - Behind the Words
A few Wannaskan Almanac contributors have engaged in a fascinating discussion about “the definition of a good poem” over the last week or so. Although Word-Wednesday is all about words, our production staff humbly admits that there is more to communication than just the words.

In fact, leading research in zoology, anthropology, linguistics, musicology, neuroscience, and psychology suggests that human music predated human linguistics. In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist summarizes the implications for today’s topic this way:

But if it should turn out that music leads to language, rather than language to music, it helps us understand for the first time the otherwise baffling historical fact that poetry evolved before (italicized) prose.” 

In short, we sang before we spoke or wrote, our first linguistic communications were poetry, and what we communicated to one another prior to the development of our language made as much (or more) sense than our words mean to us today.

“But poetry is words!” True enough. Poetry deploys words in the form of metaphor to carry us to the living world behind the words [Greek: meta- across, pherein carry]. Poetry uses words to activate a broad network of connotations. Keats was talking about more than a Sosibios Vase when he wrote about the Grecian urn:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time.

As the language of poetry, the words of metaphor assert the common life experiences in the body of the person who writes about her/his life, where the readers only separation from the poet’s life experience is the poet’s words; we feel the metaphor as part of our own life experiences.
 

Not all poets or readers can live with Keats’ silences, so they try to define poetry. Here is a sample of some of the words they use to define a good poem - some metaphorical, some not…

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. Auden

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart, and is, in Emerson's phrase, 'a larger imbibing of the common heart'.
Edith Sitwell

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
Robert Frost

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
Audre Lorde

Touched by poetry, language is more fully language and at the same time is no longer language: it is a poem.
Octavio Paz

Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need.
Erica Jong

Poetry is music written for the human voice.
Maya Angelou

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
John Ruskin

Poetry is the purest of the language arts. It's the tightest cage, and if you can get to sing in that cage it's really really wonderful.
Rita Dove

One of the virtues of good poetry is the fact that it irritates the mediocre.
Theodore Roethke

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson

All poetry is a call to action.
Amor Towles

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Elizabeth Alexander

A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.
Randall Jarrell

Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell

Poetry is like walking along a little, tiny, narrow ridge up on a precipice. You never know the next step, whether there's going to be a plunge. I think poetry is dangerous. There's nothing mild and predictable about poetry. Josephine Jacobson

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
Carl Sandburg

In poetry you can leave out everything but the truth.
Deborah Keenan

Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney

Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.
Mina Loy

One I like.
Howard Moss, poetry editor of The New Yorker


From A Year with Rilke, January 27 Entry
The Solitude We Are, from Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904/
Letters to a Young Poet

To speak again of solitude, it becomes ever clearer that in truth there is nothing we can choose or avoid. We/are/solitary. We can delude ourselves and act as if this were not so. That is all we can do. How much better to realize from the start that that is what we are, and to proceed from there. It can, of course, make us dizzy, for everything our eyes rest upon will be taken from us, no longer is anything near, and what is far is endlessly far.



Be better than yesterday,
read a new poem today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow,
and write when you have the time.



*monkey - money.