Poetry-writing contest: Young poets: Christian Science Monitor announces its annual poem-competition for youth

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Deadline: Dec1,2k6

Announcement of winner/s: early January,2k7

Christian Science Monitor > The Home Forum > Kidspace
posted October 17, 2006

Calling all young poets
Announcing CSM's 11th annual Young Poets Contest.
Anyone in preschool through high school is eligible. Entries must be postmarked or submitted online by Friday, Dec. 1. We'll publish the winning poems in early January.

Submit up to three poems; you choose the subject. Remember to keep the focus of your poem narrow and your descriptions specific. [Click up the live-link at CSM, where] we provide a few tips for writing a poem. You may also want to read winning poems from previous years - see the winners from 2003, 2004, and 2005.

If you have questions, please e-mail the Home Forum.

Try your wings as a young poet.

-- Anaximaximum

Pisteutics: Scripture: Emerging philosopher Cynthia Nielsen on the Augustian line of reflection today re surplus of meaning

This blog-entry was posted on Anaximaximum's frontpage some time back, and has been moved to keep the frontpage a zone for poems (except in the Sidebar, of course). There's more prose yet to come, I guess.

I don't usually admit blog-entries explicitly philosophical-theological into the precincts of Anaximaximum, but today I do. I do so because of the deep resonance of philosophy blogger Cynthia Nielsen's latest on her Per Caritatem. One thing I've noted, is that she seems to be mining moments of truth from ancient Christian thinkers that have been repristinated in the thawt of some Christian thinkers today which have at least momentary coincidence with what are generalized as "postmodernists."

Scholarship
in a Christian line of thawt:

Now, there's a lot of brittle denunciation of "postmodernists" these days among folk who consider themselves "conservatives" but who don't know the tradition well enuff to judge what is more Christian and what is less Christian in what they themselves are conserving, nor from what century their particular fetishes of interpretation originate. And not just the theocons, but the theolefts as well, like Jim Wallis.

Be that as it may, I have two intellectual sources I love for their contribution to my mind in sofar as I have been able to keep on converting into a Christian mind. One is Bob Sweetman of the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, without a thoro knowledge of whose writings on Augustine and the Augustinian line traced by him in a free-flowing Vollenhovenian manner (consequent problem-historical method) any student of this particular giant of Western philosophy and theology is impoverished. The other is Paul Ricoeur whose entire top-notch book on Metaphor turns around the notion of "surplus of meaning," especially as metaphor-phenoms come to full flower in poetry (combine Ricoeur with Roman Jakobson on "Distinctive Features" of a given language's sound-system, plus John Ciardi's Sound and Sense, and then you understand something of what poetry is in the first instance). For Ricoeur, whose philosophical project arose out of the tradition and milieu of l'Église réformée de France, but who tawt also in anglophone countries and has been much translated, metaphor-dominated poetry when generating live metaphors and not dead ones, is a key to a language-specific aesthetic way of knowing irreducible to any other (Seerveld, Zuidervaart, Chaplin-Dengerink). This brings us to the nexus of the metaphory of Scripture, the specific structure of metaphor in Scripture (as perhaps clustered around the foursome > mountain, garden, cave, furnace), and Scripture itself as a metaphor for the whole Truth incarnate and growing in stature with God and man (to put a Christological gloss on Northrup Frye, his two books on The Great Code of the West, the second being entitled Words of Power, an important gloss if you follow the rubric of Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven of the Christian base in Creation, Fall, Redemption, and communion in the Holy Spirit).

Most philosophy and theology doesn't bother to research the specificity of this layer integral to Scripture's meaning. So Nielsen's gem from Augustine comes indeed as a breath of fresh air. Or perhaps I'm only longing for Springtime here in the grey North, and when it comes I know I shall be turning to the great heathen poet, e.e.cummings' Spring is a perhaps hand.

Nielsen: Christian philosopher cites Saint Augustine on interpreting Scripture:

Augustine On Interpreting Scripture: Always a "Plus" of Meaning, she headlines here following note, and I quote in full:

As Michael Hanby notes, in the Confessions, Augustine teaches that there is a “plenitude of true meanings for a single text” […] The ontological warrant that underlies this insistence throughout the Augustinian corpus derives, in part, from the very nature of truth’s oneness, which defies its circumscription or possession” (Augustine and Modernity, p. 34). For example, in Confessions XII, Augustine writes:

“Having listened to all these divergent opinions and weighed them, I do not wish to bandy words, for that serves no purpose except to ruin those who listen. The law is an excellent thing for building us up provided we use it lawfully, because its object is to promote the charity which springs from a pure heart, a good conscience and unfeigned faith, and I know what were the twin precepts on which our Master made the whole law and prophets depend. If I confess this with burning love, O my God, O secret light of my eyes, what does it matter to me that various interpretations of those words are proffered, as long as they are true? I repeat, what does it matter to me if what I think the author thought is different from what someone else thinks he thought? All of us, his readers, are doing our utmost to search out and understand the writer’s intention, and since we believe him to be truthful, we do not presume to interpret him as making any statement that we either know or suppose to be false. Provided, therefore, that each person tries to ascertain in the holy scriptures the meaning the author intended, what harm is there if a reader holds an opinion which you, the light of all truthful minds, show to be true, even though it is not what was intended by the author, who himself meant something true, but not exactly that?” (Augustine’s Confess. XII.27, pp. 327-328, M. Boulding translation).

I thank all readers who are tolerant of my digressive discourse on this theme that is important to me, beyond all the dreadful news of the day that usually I try to analyze in my desultory way. Thanks, Cynthia, for sparking me today to set aside momentarily my stated main thinkfield here, and to think otherwise. - Owlb

Originally posted on refWrite, a blog of political news, opinion, and outrageous rants

Battle of the URLs - Homophobe attacks homoerotic poems of Anaximaximum - Update Jul22,2km

The following is a message I sent Technorati about the attempt to misplace and thereby misrepresent my poems, another desultory move by Fred Pluthero, aka Dr Fraud. I have tracked him to the new liar's lair he is stinking up with his blog-abuse, idtheft, poem theft. and besotted whatnot. The site of his mischief this round is

http://www.technorati.com/blogs/http%3A%2F%2Fthinkersthot.blogspot.com

At one time, I used the URL: http://thinkersthot.blogspot.com

Now Dr Fraud has slithered in, performing a blog-abuse "exploit" (as the geeks would call it) and using a Chinese-text opener for that purpose. Below that opener are four poems I composed over some time and had published as they came to me, interspersed with others that came to me in the meantime, which the fraudulent Doctor has pirated and concentrated in one place. He works at times by sheer innuendo, at times by outr+t falsehood. Here's my message to Technorati.

Somehow the above URL has been penetrated by a blog now named "Thinkersthot." The URL address had been in usage by me, but I never used the blog title "Thinkersthot." My blog title which I claimed and had recognized by Technorati was/is "Anaximaximum" where I publish mostly poetry. The present "Thinkersthot" leads off with a Chinese language post (this is beyond me). On my Technorati page a blog is falsely now listed "Thinkersthot" (again, not mine, never claimed by me) but after the Chinese-language post, there are a number of my original poems (including two homoerotic ones, but not sexual); these have been pirated and somehow spliced onto the falsely-appearing blog-title with the Chinese lead post. If you click on my poems on this false blog, you will get a Not Found page from Blogger/Blogspot for each of my original poems. A dead end, but inserted where I don't want them to appear under someone else's contrived blog name.

I have been under blog-abuse assault for some time, and have exposed the individual who did this. You corrected one of his previous acts of malice against my blogging; this is apparently his retaliation for Technorati's correction.

I created the blog Anaximaximum in Aug 2004, and my profile has viewed 887 times since then. You can check this out at:

URL: [ http://www.blogger.com/profile/4313658 ]

I erased earlier material, and the first blog-entry retained is from Feb 27, 2005. For the initial period,

The URL was: http://thinkersthot.blogspot.com/

I changed the URL, but didn't/can't erase the previous versions. However, a blog-abuser has found an incomplete way to exploit the changeover which was accomplished some time back.

The URL is: http://anaximaximumfrontpage.blogspot.com/

Please restore my blog Anaximaximum to my claimed list of blogs on Technorati, and please stop the ongoing abuse by Fred Pluthero (DrFraud). He is using the moniker "itou" in this round of impersonation and idtheft. He has created further Blogger outlets for his future malice. These are the titles: guiltysecrets; thinkerthot; picknroll; cklang; antimonium. I have checked only one, which uses the element "thinkersthot" in my original URL for Anaximaximum' but, again, I have never used that element in any blog-title of mine. UPDATE: Early this morning before going to bed, I checked out the contents up to that time of all four of the blogsites for which I've just provided the titles. At that time, they were all Chinese-text blinds sometimes used by English-speaking malicious hackers to cover their tracks. Only on the URL element he rippedoff from me to make a blog title, did he use the same Chinese blind with the addition of English-text poems (my text, my poems) selected for some deviate prurient purpose known only to his homophobic mind. Altho I am forming a theory about this aspect of his hateful behaviour. What is called an "exploit" in net security, privacy, blogger-protection geekery. Even with his ripoffs and his ruses, his blinds and moral blindspots, Pluthero's new blogs sit waiting for his further acts of blog abuse. In this case, his problem is that these new blogs, including his concatenative expolt he entitles Thinkersthot, were all started by him in July 2006.

My poems on Anaximaximum pre-date the Pluthero rip-off by months, which you can check for yourself. Here's a snippet charting the facts:

Fred Pluthero (aka Dr Fraud, aka itou) has previously attacked me at length, also in part on the basis of my homosexuality and the element of non-sexual homoeroticism in my some of my poems, and and also he attacked me for one of my blogs, Christian Homomemo. I happen to be a vowed celibate, and have a zero level of libido due to illness and medication. But Fred Pluthero, as one of the facets of his carefully crafted malice, is exploiting my (quite limited) sexuality to what ultimate end of his I don't (yet) know. I just know it's mean-spirited and homophobic in an obsessisive way. (He once told me he could give me an injection that would make me hetero. This is the Dr Strangelove side of DrFraud, a PhD bioscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto.)

May I hear from Technorati? My facts check out, and I would try to supply any further info you may want.