Ginsberg: Poem Rocket

Extracts from 'Poem Rocket'

This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message

Beyond

Someone to hear me there

My immortality

without steel or cobalt basalt or diamond gold or mercurial fire

without passports filing cabinets bits of paper warheads

without myself finally

pure thought

message all and everywhere the same

I send up my rocket to land on whatever planet awaits it

preferably religious sweet planets no money

fourth dimensional planets where Death shows movies

plants speak (courteously) of ancient physics and poetry itself is manufactured by the trees

the final Planet where the Great Brain of the Universe sits waiting for a poem to land in His Golden pocket

joining the other notes mash-notes love-sighs complaints-musical shrieks of despair and the million unutterable thoughts of frogs

The moon over Imperial College and a brilliantly lit planet.....

Larkin: any-angled light

If I were called in

To construct a religion

I should make use of water.

Going to church

Would entail a fording

To dry, different clothes;

My litany would employ

Images of sousing,

A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east

A glass of water

Where any-angled light

Would congregate endlessly.

-- Philip Larkin

Feynman - do I see less or more?

'The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms.

Nothing is “mere”.

I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them.

But do I see less or more?

The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this little carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light.

A vast pattern – of which I am part – perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there.

Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together.

What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why?

It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.

For far more marvellous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!

Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?

What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia be silent?'

RP Feynman, “Lectures on Physics”