poetry corner

firstKnownWhenLost blog has a rumination on poetry and art today.

As I have observed here before, the older I get, the simpler Life seems to become.  I'm dumbfounded at the amount of extraneous luggage my mind carried around for years.  All those eventualities that never materialized, good or bad.  Scores of roundabouts and dead-ends, all bound for nowhere.
Yesterday afternoon -- the sky absolutely clear -- I walked through a tunnel of trees, beneath a canopy of interwoven branches.  Overhead, a thousand shades of green, shot through with blue and yellow.  "Life is too short," I thought, "for anything but this."

DavidWarren has an essay on Tea

actually, it is about the classic: The Book of Tea

Now, tea in its modern form — loose tea brewed in a tea pot with a handle and spout — is a development of the Sung Dynasty, centuries later. We tend to assume all progress is improvement, but Chinese scholars did not think that way. As we see in Lu Yu, the old methods were extremely complicated, and required great skills — down to the way the tea was powderized from the cakes, in specially-designed stone mortars, prior to brewing like Japanese matcha. The Japanese tea ceremony is itself derived from older Chinese rituals, which Lu Yu describes, but incompletely. One does not grab at tea, as one grabs at coffee in the morning. Rather it must be given one’s full attention.

the Book of Tea (wikipedia summary) more HERE.




heh. Actually, although Lolo always drank tea (using a tea bag with calimansi, a local citus fruit), I am lazy and tend to drink powdered ice tea...

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Professor Giles' Harvard lectures from the early 1900s about China are now at Librivox, including one on his traslations of Chinese poetry.

text here

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and for us geeks, the really important poetry question of the day:

Did the Dwarves prewrite the "crack the plates" song?