"Phenomena, Noumena, Startling Sparrows" by Stephen Kampa

Soundtrack to this episode (it's Stephen Kampa!)

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Go read New Verse Review!

-Go listen to my talk on SLEERICKETS about Horace's Ars Poetica!

-Go listen to the mighty Fer de Lance!

-The Sleerickets Stephen Kampa episode

-Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

-From Transcendental Idealism to Transcendentalism

-Romanticism as post-Kantian reaction 

-Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Freud, Coleridge, Emerson, etc. etc.

-Contemptus Mundi

-The inauthenticity of the nihilist everyman

-The Protestant anti-rationalist tradition

-Spooky Calvinist symbolism + German Romanticism + Hinduism 101 + Patriotism = Transcendentalism

-Death and Love conceived ornithologically

-More dialectical poems!


Text of poem:


Phenomena, Noumena, Startling Sparrows

Faced with the world mistaken for the world,

I’m not confused: it seems so sensible

To call the loose, cyclonic pulse of leaves

On sidewalks “physics,” and not a miracle. 

I understand a prophet undeceives 

Himself when, limping by the roadkill curled

Beside the curb, he thinks theodicy

Inadequate for even bestial pain,

Or when, dispersing the loud shroud of flies

That swaddles it, he wonders how the sane

Escape their own conclusions. Sense defies

Every compendium of mystery. 

And if I’m senseless, then, for holding this

World most enlightening when its premises

Grow thinnest, I am glad to be struck dumb.

Look: fireflies punctuate the night with green

Epigrams on love, petunias keen

For the dead possum, and electrons hum 

Concentric hymns to probability

While leaf-swirls sing in fractal harmony.

Best is this line of sparrows that have shown 

Their utter distance from the disapproving

Caws of the crows by fleshing out a moving

Ellipsis leading into the unknown.