I had stopped my stains a few months ago and after about a month muscle
pain and joint pain subsided.  This latest reduction dealt with a
diuretic  and a  blood pressure med.  Just  trying to  reduce symptoms.
This of course is not for everyone so I did name name particulars.  I
come from a family with big time distrust for allopathy .  Dislike MD's
and  went with DO'S but these days I really can't tell them apart.

Never touched just prescribe.  Guess I don't fit in.

Bill who believes all healing comes from within.

.........................................................

http://www.bu.edu/agni/essays-reviews/online/2004/sherman.html

A Violence from Within: Poetry and Terrorism
by Kenneth Sherman
 
In the spring of 1941‹amid grim news issuing from the European theatre
of war‹Wallace Stevens delivered a lecture at Princeton University
called ³The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words² in which he made an
elegant and passionate attempt to deal with poetry¹s relationship to
reality. How, Stevens asked his audience, ought poetry and art in
general to deal with the onslaught of extreme events? It is a question
that has been on my mind since September of 2001. In the wake of that
catastrophe, I found myself returning to Stevens¹s words for an answer.

One does not tend to think of Wallace Stevens, who was often accused of
being overly urbane and ornate, as a poet preoccupied with current
events; yet the way in which contemporary reality affects our
imaginations was an issue that concerned him deeply. In his earlier,
1936 Harvard lecture ³The Irrational Element in Poetry,² he noted the
impact of the Great Depression: ³If I dropped into a gallery I found
that I had no interest in what I saw. The air was charged with anxieties
and tensions.² For Stevens, the pressure of reality had been ³constant
and extreme² since the First World War. ³No one,² he tells us ³can have
lived apart in a happy oblivion. . . . We are preoccupied with events. .
. . We feel threatened.² As for the poet, Stevens believed his task was
to resist such pressure.

What did Stevens mean by resist? ³Resistance,² he states, ³is the
opposite of escape.² According to Stevens, the poet must absorb the
spirit of his times and convert it into poetry. His goal is to provide a
voice, a lexicon, a rhythm commensurate with that spirit. But because
reality is ³ominous and destructive² and has a limiting effect on the
imagination, the poet must not deal directly with the subject at hand.
Poetry is not journalism. Literalism diminishes the poet¹s
effectiveness. A subject stared at directly will have the Medusa effect
of paralyzing the artist. A painter can capture the age, Stevens
observes, by painting ³a guitar . . . and a dish of melons.² It is not
the painter¹s subject that determines the contemporaneous, but rather
his style and sensibility. So for the poet, the reality of his time can
be heard in the rhythms of his lines, in his choice of words, and in the
pauses between those words.

The enormity and intensity of World War Two heightened Stevens¹s
concerns. In ³The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,² he describes a
pressure far more ominous than the Great Depression and as if to
counterbalance its effect he affords the poet a magisterial position.
The poet‹the Noble Rider‹must do nothing less than ³help people to live
their lives²; his imagination has the power to serve as ³the light in
the mind of others.² This help is concrete: in giving us words‹the very
sound of words‹as a force to counter the onslaught of reality, Stevens
sees the poet providing the necessary resource to bring us through dark
times. The poet ³makes us listen to words . . . loving them and feeling
them, makes us search the sound of them for a finality, a perfection, an
unalterable vibration. . . .² These are not the phrases of a mere
aesthete delighting in the carnality of words. For the sounds are
curative. They affirm Kenneth Burke¹s claim that literature can ³serve
as equipment for living.² Stevens¹s commitment to the effectiveness of
poetry results in a dynamic definition of the art. ³It is,² Stevens
states, ³a violence from within that protects us from a violence
without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of
reality.² Poetry is both a shield and a sword. It not only protects us
from those inimical forces arrayed against us, it counterattacks as
well. His definition is especially bracing when one considers that
³It²‹and this is apparent only if one has read the entire passage‹refers
not to poetry, but rather to the nobility of poetry. The distinction is
important: Stevens wishes to remind us of poetry¹s power to preserve our
dignity and maintain our spirit under excruciating circumstances.

Stevens¹s stature as a poet is assured: the finely-tuned nuances of his
language, the liberating richness of his imagination, secure him a
station somewhere between his ³necessary angel² and his metamorphic
blackbird. Yet Stevens‹by far the most influential modern American
poet‹took a stance that has proven in one sense limiting and
restrictive. Delmore Schwartz, an early enthusiast and keen interpreter
of Stevens¹s poetry, saw the issue clearly when he stated that in
Stevens¹s work ³everything is turned into an object of the imagination.
. . . [T]he poet is too poetic.² Oftentimes Stevens abstracted himself
into an ethereal realm, where, as Robert Lowell noted, ³His people are
essences, and his passions are impressions.²

In modern times there have been two major camps of poets: those who
acknowledge the public functions and implications of poetry and those
who follow Mallarm¹s dictum that ³a poem is not made of ideas but of
words,² that it is a verbal construct whose subject is itself. By
claiming that the very sound of words is useful and restorative, Stevens
gave us an ingenious defense of poetry, affirming poetry¹s public worth,
while remaining in the Mallarm camp.

The negative influence of his aesthetic was noted early on. In the
1940s, Robinson Jeffers, an almost forgotten American poet once known
for his remorselessly clear and ascetic verse, sensed the poet¹s
separation from his public and warned of the consequences. He complained
that poetry in our nation was becoming ³slight and fantastic, abstract,
unreal, eccentric,² and declared, ³It must reclaim substance and sense,
and physical and psychological reality.² More recently, Dana Goia, in
his book Can Poetry Matter?, notes the inability of working poets to
write about their professional worlds, and contends that this is
³symptomatic of a larger failure in our verse‹namely its difficulty in
discussing most public concerns.² Noting ³the paucity of serious verse
on political and social themes,² Goia states:

          our poetry has been unable to create a meaningful public
idiom. . . . [It]
          has little in common with the world outside of literature‹no
reciprocal
          sense of mission, no mutual set of ideas and concerns. . . .
At its best, our
          poetry has been private rather than public, intimate rather
than social,
          ideological rather than political . . . . It dwells more
easily in timeless
          places than historical ones . . . . [M]ost of our poets have
tried to develop
          conspicuously personal and often private languages of their
own.

Poets no doubt gained from this inwardness and freedom to experiment,
but, as Goia points out, they lost their audience. Nevertheless,
Stevens¹s aesthetic continues to dominate. Pick up a literary journal
and you see that for contemporary poets, an allegiance to pure or
hermetic poetry has not diminished; in Stevens¹s phrase, the poet sees
himself as ³the priest of the invisible.²

While Stevens¹s impeccable ear and virtuosity of language contribute to
his enduring effect, there are strong cultural and social factors that
account for his dominance. I am willing to venture that there is
something quintessentially New World about Stevens¹s unwillingness to
take on historical and social reality. His determined detachment from
historical particulars‹his poetic strategy‹may well be a reflection of
America¹s isolationist proclivity. Evading or resisting reality allows
the poet to maintain an imaginative ³fortress America.² The forces
behind this isolationist tendency are strong. The myth of the New World
as Arcadia‹as an alternative to Old World oppression and decay‹persists.
And what we think of as our energy and optimism does in fact stem from a
purposeful and healthy forgetting of former prejudices, a disavowal of
Old World rank and station.

Contributing to the malaise is our obsession with self-improvement. The
³art for art¹s sake² movement believed the imagination ought to heal
those wounds inflicted by the anonymity of mass society and the
mechanization of humankind. With the falling off of organized religion,
art became the prime provider of spiritual sustenance, its masters  
custodians of the injured soul. In its new therapeutic role, art became
inner-directed, endeavoring to re-create those who are broken. The
result has been a diminishment of the poet¹s role. Who today would
pretend to the outgoing reach of Milton or Blake? Who today would affirm
Pope¹s grand assertion that ³a poet¹s life is warfare on earth.²

Of course, in our time we assume such a commitment to reality to be the
prerogative of the novelist, an assumption that further relegates the
poet to otherworldly regions, to self-reflective musings‹despite the
examples of poets who have made a powerful claim on reality. Czeslaw
Milosz¹s contention that poetry ought to be ³a passionate pursuit of the
Real² is validated by Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas who respectively
confronted the horrors of the First and Second World Wars; by Mandelstam
and Akhmatova, who opened a window onto the Stalinist terror; by Robert
Lowell and Robert Bly, who captured the political turbulence of the war
in Viet Nam. These poets achieve their ends without relinquishing their
linguistic eminence or disregarding poetic craft‹the usual pitfalls of
poetry that attempts to proclaim and correct injustices. Their work is
an effective fusion of language and moral commitment.

When extremist politics play themselves out in areas once thought of as
³off limits,² our wish to see these upheavals dealt with in poetry is
natural. Those poets who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature over
the last two decades have without exception come from areas of political
unrest: Szymborska (Poland), Heaney (Belfast), Walcott (the Caribbean),
Paz (Mexico), Brodsky (USSR), Siefert (Czechoslovakia). Now that we know
politics, in the words of Terence des Pres, ³as a primary ground of
misfortune,² we might ask: will these events historicize our poets?
Cultural sensibilities run deep and it is not certain that a
cataclysm‹even one as traumatic as that of September 11‹will redirect
them.

Yet our health may depend on such a shift. Poetry reflects a nation¹s
thinking and an inordinately subjective use of language suggests an
inability to deal with reality. Images of assassinations, famine, and
military incursions play repeatedly on television and laptop screens,
and each of us has become, if not his brother¹s keeper, then at least
his mesmerized witness. In such a climate it is entirely reasonable to
expect poetry to grapple with the actual. But shouldn¹t the poet remain
free to practice his life-sustaining gift? Yes, but at the same time
we¹d like our poets to confront those forces that threaten us; if they
do not enter the fray we want them, at least, to heed the voice of
Joseph Conrad¹s Stein, who in Lord Jim advised submitting oneself to
³the destructive element.²

Stevens¹s ³violence from within,² ennobling us and restoring our
dignity, need not limit itself to the talismanic sounds of words. The
force he spoke of can confront today¹s events, transform and refigure
them so that we may bear their implications.

(Online only)

Kenneth Sherman's most recent books are The Well: New and Selected Poems
and Void & Voice: Essays on Literary and Historical Currents.

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updated July 2, 2004