Channie Greenberg, Flames and Fire

excerpt

Flames and Fire

Author: Channie Greenberg
Publisher: Seashell Books
Date: May 3, 2021
Length: 143 pages
ISBN: 979-8745801020

It’s better to attach life experiences to poems than to let them fly high and out of sight. Literature-worth resources speaks to our guts. More specifically, when groupings of words, like these one hundred instances in Flames and Fire, make us feel uncomfortable, we’re on to something good. Writing’s ability to interact with our viscera can save us, or, in the least, can shepherd us toward achieving vital goals.

Whereas it’s hardly useful to lark about, perusing worlds where venomous wildebeests run amok or where two-headed hedgehogs rule, it’s equally ineffective to stay closeted while attempting to legitimize the entirety of civilization. We might not be able to be friends with everyone, but we should, in general, manifest a little understanding and a lot of tolerance. Accordingly, the questions raised by the poems in Flames and Fire are important.

More exactly, this assemblage of poetry puts forth the idea that each of us, individually, and collectively, ought, immediately, to take accountability for our culture’s choices. This book further suggests that whether we are in the social minority or in the majority, our vociferations make a difference.

On balance, neither leaders nor insurgents can synthesize communal harmony where personal or public views emphasize contrast. Sadly, our protracted hunt for incommensurabilities creates this type of strife, and, in turn, leads to riots, government brutality, and terrorism. We win only when we look upon each other favorably.

Hence, at the same time as we follow the trajectories of our individual stations, we’re helped by concurrently looked right and left toward other folks’ situations. Forbearance is great; nonetheless, it’s smiling and acting with kindness that are phenomenal. Therefore, it’s worthy to be motivated by Flames and Fire’s patterning.

* * *

Interpersonal Exchanges Sour

With government “experts” advising on peace negotiations,
Ethicists guiding medical debates, marketeers modeling public
Relations, scholars framing news, interpersonal exchanges
Sour.

What’s more, when select rhetorical theoretical developments
Concerning establishing, maintaining, altering all individual,
Also institutional, moral responsibility, get elevated, we lose
Meaning.

After all, language’s barriers to human understanding present
Accentuated distinctions between “motivated” and “arbitrary,”
Use words to storm official footholds, make little of codified
Prescriptions.

Consequently, it continues as implausible that behavioristic,
Nativistic, or cognitive origins for communication scruples
Might succeed as descriptions of moral theories, as modern
Misunderstandings.

Given our rife, interactive nonaffinities, our reliance on dogma,
Individual and collective designations rely on influential means
Of validating intolerance, apathy, maybe even patterns of hate.
We’re hobbled.

* * *

General Speech Acts and Specific Emotional State Verbs

When adjudicating the psychological philosophy of the mind,
Whether via poetics, rhetoric, or other reaches of scholarship,
Mainly episodes provide intermittent antecedents of historical
Events, including meaning’s effects on incommensurability’s
Nexus.

Invention, as well as additional collective linguistic patterns,
Bring transmission’s processes into orbit around one another
Such that when logicians consult on policy, elsewise provide
Inchoate advice on decision-making, all discerning denizens
Choke.

Thereafter, media’s impact on communication comprehension
Triggers many official bodgers to shun the benefits that usually
Flow from unevenly egregious developments; ostensibly, few
Raconteurs narrate in a manner that eliminates invectives, else
Calms.

Ultimately, it appears that demagoguery, not rational argument,
Wins additional rounds within thinkers deluded by intellectual
Diapause. Regrettably, thalls, public and unrevealed, pander if
Tsked to talk about general speech acts or emotionally precise
Verbs.

Innocent oblasts’ servants, likewise, submit no straightforward
Accounts of experience after deemed unpopular, enhanced by
Any collection of social narratives’ needs (maybe, too, serious
Reports of pedestrian “facts” dancing zeybeks in truth’s place,
Regularly.)