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Tag: Sean Howard

Rebirth Comes Soon Enough

Rebirth Comes Soon Enough

Spring Comes to Lake Shanghai, by Wu Li. 17th Century
Spring Comes to Lake Shanghai, by Wu Li. 17th Century

It’s been a long winter. Like winter would never leave. Ever leave. Even though it was fairly mild where I live, the mood was winter for a long time. The mind of winter. The soul of cold. Perhaps it’s the state of the world. The economy. The cultural and political fights. Endless and ultimately boring. Perhaps. That said, spring is here and just in nick of time.

By the way, who is this Nick character and what did he do with Chronos?

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We have two new sets of poems on tap: Doreen LeBlanc and Sean Howard grace our pages again.… |To be Continued “Rebirth Comes Soon Enough”

Project for the Self

Project for the Self

Leo Tolstoy, by Ilya Repin. 1887
Leo Tolstoy, by Ilya Repin. 1887

What has it? What brings it? What gives meaning to our existence in the here and now? The afterlife? Paradoxes aside, the search for meaning has meaning itself, above and beyond any cleverness in the equation. To express that meaning, however, has become problematic in our late date — our cynical, jaded, post-post-guileless world. Post-guileless in the sense that we no longer can stop self-referencing or self-consciousness enough to just be. Enough to let be be the finale of seem, to borrow a brilliant phrase from Wallace Stevens.

It’s hip to search for meaning without letting others really know.… |To be Continued “Project for the Self”

Meaningful Searches, Exits and Traps

Meaningful Searches, Exits and Traps

 

The (Post-)Modern Search for Meaning:

Tolstoy’s Escape from the Trap

 

A Reflection by Sean Howard

 

For the last few years, a close friend has been complaining, with light touch but increasingly heavy heart, of a deep-seated creative malaise, an impasse in his search for an authentic voice and message. Among other sources, his depression can be traced to his intense and academically accomplished engagement with Wittgenstein, whose humbling exposé of the ‘language game’ – and, therewith, what my friend calls “capital-P Philosophy” – leaves him both full of admiration and “with everything – and nothing – to say”. Or, rather, with a desire to say ‘something true’ thwarted by sensitivity to the unrealizable nature of any such (language-based) project.… |To be Continued “Meaningful Searches, Exits and Traps”

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Library Cards, by Sean Howard

Library Cards, by Sean Howard


(taken from cape breton university)


i. the technique of oil painting

colors mixing
in the square. straw-

board fields. the buckram
coat. saucepan; stirring

sand to sun. corner-
ed: students pain-

ting…

***

the canvas
leaves. distant verid-

ian. the ochre stage. the
touched sky. (picasso: blue

tumblers.) the
wind, flak-

ing…

ii. testing: its place in education today

marks-
ism. learning

to score. strange fruit; pre-
pared minds. (the Ameri-

cannery…) waste pro-
ducts; fresh out of

school?… |To be Continued “Library Cards, by Sean Howard”

Coincidence in Cape Breton

Coincidence in Cape Breton

Belle Côte Wharf. Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Photo by Doreen LeBlanc
Belle Côte Wharf. Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Photo by Doreen LeBlanc

 

 

We have new poems from Doreen LeBlanc and an essay from Sean Howard on tap. Both authors hail from Cape Breton, though Doreen splits time between Nova Scotia and Massachusetts now. This is her first publication, and we look forward to more poetry from her in the future.

Sean’s work brings together a host of subject fields — psychology, philosophy, linguistics, science, poetry and poetics — to startle us into reading new bridges, new metaphors between them.

 

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I have some of my own poetry on display in Private, an international review of photography and text.… |To be Continued “Coincidence in Cape Breton”

Poetic Synchronicity, by Sean Howard

Poetic Synchronicity, by Sean Howard

Poetic Implications: Synchronicity and The Language of Meaning

A Personal Reflection by Sean Howard

Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Cape Breton University

November 2008

 

A few months ago, I began work on a project I’ve been putting off for over a year: an account of my time in the clutches of what Jungian analysts call the ‘puer aeternus’ complex, or neurosis; an inflated sense of the self as a precious, creative but foredoomed ‘eternal youth,’ destroyed, to quote Jung’s colleague Marie-Louise von Franz, by a chronic “unadaptedness,” which “frequently results in early death”{{1}} if not shaken off by the sufferer’s mid-twenties – the age, incidentally, I told myself as a teenager that I (like two of my heroes, Shelley and Keats) would die.… |To be Continued “Poetic Synchronicity, by Sean Howard”

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