<p>In the spirit of the old Shaker hymn, the poems in Steven Schroeder's new collection turn and turn &#8211; from a question Laozi raises to Woody Guthrie's holy ground, from Chicago to Texas to Shenzhen to Macao, in conversation with poets and philosophers from Euclid and Thoreau to Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Gertrude Stein, Buddy Holly, Lyle Lovett, and others encountered &#8220;everywhere there is // an edge. And / everywhere there is // an edge...&#8221; Sick and tired of being sick and tired, they take off their shoes, say &#8220;amen&#8221; to birds and the sympathy of cats, marvel at a red moon in Oklahoma in July, hope &#8220;it stays / a long long time // long enough for all that light to fill us with all the madness we need to remember...&#8221; They &#8220;sing the silences, wait,&#8221; stop &#8220;for coffee and a moment / of Monk under other / people's conversations...,&#8221; rejoice &#8220;in collisions that make light possible / in a world where matter, mostly / dark, mostly passes through / what matters to us, undetected&#8221; where &#8220;every poem is a dance, / every spring daisy a resurrection&#8221; &#8211; dancing on the page, &#8220;where / fiber and fiber embrace to make // a plane surface on the edge / of the holograph world / we think we / occupy.&#8221;</p>

Turn

Literature & Fiction

SCHROEDER, Steven

Poetry

Virtual Artists Collective

China is the occasion, not the subject or the object, of the forty-seven poems collected in Steven Schroeder's Fallen Prose - lyrical glimpses of the "new" city in Southern light. Most of the poems in the collection are set in Shenzhen, a few in Zhuhai, Macao, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong - and one or two a bit further west, in Kunming. All attend to "control out of control on every edge" and listen for flashes of music in these places that shed new light on all the elsewheres where we keep on making cities that somehow manage to sing.

Fallen Prose

There is an all at once quality to lyric poetry that makes it akin to mysticism. It knows there is more to vision than meets the eye. It takes the whole world in while knowing the whole of it is always known imperfectly, always here, always now. The here and now of the seventy-one poems in Steven Schroeder's new collection is most often Chicago, the Plains, or West Texas. The poems play on the imperfection of the eye, turning on the voice that can, with care, be heard over the noise at edges where silence slips into the "look!" or "listen!" trailing a flash of insight. These poems take place in time, as all embodied things must do, and place is precisely what the imperfection of the eye sings, celebrating "the sacrament / of a city of solitaries marking time," listening for a rainbow where "fragments fall / on silence broken."

The Imperfection of the Eye

These are lyric poems set in China by a leading American poet, Steven Schroeder, who has lived, studied, and taught for many years in China.

A Dim Sum of the Day Before

Ink Brush Press

Grappling with the challenge of Wallace Stevens' masterpiece, "Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird," Steve Schroeder and Sou Vai Keng combine the poet's craft, philosophical ways of thought and the practice of Sinology to reconfigure and metamorphose Laotse's wisdom book into a poem in totally natural English. The product speaks to our world today with its maddened consumerism, war as national habit, the eternal questions of death and creativity, and the struggle to be rather than just exist. This elegant and beautiful little book helps us understand some of the eternal questions-and some transitory ones as well.

A Guest Giving Way Like Ice Melting

Keng, Debby Sou Vai

Description: This book is an attempt to critically embrace a tradition--a culture--in which the author was formed and against which he has often found himself in resistance, using academic disciplines in which he is well versed but about which he is deeply suspicious. This book began to come together as a book in a series of lectures on the history of Western thought at Shenzhen University in the People's Republic of China, an opportunity to cultivate disciplined criticism that might afford a second look at traditions behind the West which are being embraced all too quickly. In a time of acceleration, this book offers a meditation on the virtue of hesitation.  The book is an invitation to philosophy and the history of ideas, but it is also a sustained critical reflection on the religious dimensions--explicit and implicit--of those ideas, with enough utopian vision left to imagine a city in which violence is not necessary.   Endorsements: ""Combining erudition of a true scholar and insight of a gifted poet, professor Steven Schroeder offers his readers an adventurous 'pilgrimage' of mind into the realms of cultural history, philosophy, and religion. This perfectly structured, consistent, and well-argued book is a good companion to anyone who wishes to transgress the boundaries of supposedly 'Western' ideas and open new vistas to the territories that reflect the legacy of so many vanished civilizations.""  --Almantas Samalavicius Vilnius Gediminas Technical University and Vilnius University  ""This new book by Steven Schroeder contains careful examinations of and insightful reflections on the intellectual history of the West. It not only provides us with guidance when journeying through the labyrinth of Western ideas, but it enables us to see how ideas, almost always intertwined with human desires and fears, are projected into the real world and contribute to transform the place we live in. It is highly illuminating for understanding the human creation of ideas, and therefore, is instructive to anyone who wants to coexist harmoniously with others in the twenty-first century."" --Dongming Zhao Shenzhen University, People's Republic of China.  ""Without ever raising his voice, the author challenges some of our most cherished assumptions--the centrality of 'the West,' the primacy of Greek thought in the development of Western philosophy, and the identification of heroic virtue with aggression and conquest--among others. Here is philosophy restored to its mission of 'passionate engagements in a controversy that matters.' The fact that Schroeder is a poet as well as a scholar makes this book a pleasure to read and of interest to the general reader as well as to scholars and specialists. --A. G. Mojtabai author of Blessed Assurance   ""How to summarize this heady ride from Babel to Thebes to Shenzhen, from the meaning of language to the meaning of meaning . . . Where is God? What is really real? Who is the stranger? This book rockets from the paradox of free will to the paradox of slavery, from redefining Descartes to rediscovering forgotten giants such as Anne Conway. Read this book and rediscover what the work of philosophy and the play of wisdom is all about."" --Rev. David Breeden author of This Is Just To Say: Meditations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams   About the Contributor(s): Steven Schroeder is an instructor in Asian Classics and the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago Graham School and Visiting Professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Shenzhen University in the People's Republic of China. His most recent book is Six Stops South (2009).

On Not Founding Rome: The Virtue of Hesitation

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Cascade Books

<p>Four Truths is not a traditional scholarly work. It consists of three short stories and a verse drama built around the four noble truths of Buddhism--each followed by a prose reflection in the form of a series of theses. The text is complemented by thirteen images from a series of ink brush paintings done by Macao artist Debby Sou Vai Keng in response to the book. It is an invitation to conversation rather than a systematic philosophical or theological argument--though it is an invitation in the scholastic tradition of academic theses that will appeal to students of comparative religion and philosophy and could serve as an entry point for discussion in ethics and moral philosophy as well as philosophy of religion.</p>

Four Truths

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Wipf and Stock

This book takes up the philosophical task described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and F. D. Maurice as digging toward the common humanity that is the ground of value. As an essay in philosophy, this work is defined by time (its focal point is the nineteenth century), space (Britain), and persons (especially Maurice as contributor to social theory).

The Metaphysics of CooperationA Case Study of F.D. Maurice(Value Inquiry Book Series 84)

Brill Academic Pub

This extended essay joins an old conversation at the intersection of freedom and necessity. Though it takes place at the beginning of the twenty-first century by the “Christian” reckoning that has become an integral part of European identity, it will at times read like a conversation between classical Greece and nineteenth-century Europe. The cast consists of characters drawn from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato as well as the authors themselves - Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, and Nussbaum. Some of these writers have been associated with displaced, displacing claims of universality; but each is in place and in time in ways that are instructive for ethics. Myth, the matter of stories, becomes also the matter of critical reflection, which in turn is subjected to critical reflection. Every fragment of philosophy is a contribution to the reflection, and it is nothing if it is separated from the matter - the stories, the myths, and the characters (including us) who both make them and live in them.

BETWEEN FREEDOM AND NECESSITY. An Essay on the Place of Value. (Value Inquiry Book Series 99)

Essays & Correspondence

Brill/Rodopi

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