[New-Poetry] Wittgenstein

[Anny Ballardini]

I think this book you are quoting:
The Presocratics, edited by Philip Wheelwright, The Odyssey Press, 1966

has to appear on top of your already exhaustive book list. 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2007 12:24 AM


  Anny, your Wittgenstein post reminded me of Kinnell's poem for some reason. I heard him read it this week at a reading at our Town Hall (a very New England thing, being a also the public board meeting of the Friends of the Library). Anyway, Kinnell introduced the poem by saying he had attended a lecture where the lecturer had uttered a sentence with 'is is' in it. That set him to thinking about a valid locution that would involve three consecutive is's. He started jotting down some words on a notepad and just as the lecture ended & people started clapping, he said he finished the "Prayer" poem, and felt like the applause for him, then realizing he'd heard almost nothing of the lecture, and being a bit embarrassed by that. 

  Kinnell didn't mention Parmenides...but the poem made me think of his fragment quoted below. I was going to ask Kinnell after the reading about Parmenides' fragment and his poem, but the poet was mobbed with admirers and many books to sign
  Finnegan 
  -
  There remains, then, but one word by which to express the [true] road: Is. And on this road there are many signs that What Is has no beginning and never will be destroyed: it is whole, still, and without end. It neither was nor will be, it simply is.—now, altogether, one, continuous. How could you go about investigating its birth? How and whence could it have grown? I shall not allow you to say or think of it as coming from not-being, for it is impossible to say or think that not-being is. Besides, what could have stirred up activity so that it should arise from not-being later rather than earlier?

  --Parmenides, 
  The Presocratics, edited by Philip Wheelwright, The Odyssey Press, 1966

  In a message dated 4/21/2007 5:10:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time, JforJames at aol.com writes:
    Prayer

    Whatever happens.  Whatever
    what is is is what
    I want.  Only that.  But that.

    --Galway Kinnell
    A New Selected Poems, Mariner Books, 2001


    a message dated 4/21/2007 4:46:35 PM Eastern Daylight Time, anny.ballardini at tin.it writes:
      501. “The purpose of language is to express thoughts.” – So presumably the purpose of every sentence is to express a thought. Then what thought is expressed, for example, by the sentence “It’s raining”?-



      Ludwig Wittgenstein 
      Philosophical Investigations
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