Perspectives: Educational Poems on the Humanities and Sciences
Ebook
Drawing from an interdisciplinary career based upon sociology, Jim Hanson employs poetry to provide perspectives upon the humanities and sciences established in curricula of high education. He starts with ancient empires of history, then works through theology, Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, philosophy, language, the sciences, and poets such as T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman. His poems sparkle with humanistic insight about the issues of these disciplines and their applications to modern society, such as theological and religious speculation, callings of Buddhism and Taoism, contending philosophies of Sartre and Heidegger, and the environmental crisis. His style varies, from long poems of blank verse narrative to short poems of standard rhyme and meter, in order to use poetry's power to enlighten through figurative language and minimal wordage. Heeding Shelley's proclamation that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he revives the interdisciplinary practices of the ancient poets who speculated about the world through the exclusive use of poetry.
“The poems in Jim Hanson’s Perspectives range far and wide, showing a wild mind at work. Hanson is in contact via poetry with Herodotus, Einstein, Nâgârjuna, Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Dickinson, Plath, and Borges, lingering and pondering, wondering and fretting, always searching for—and often finding—‘one more book to save my soul.’”
—Josh Russell, professor and director of the Creative Writing Program, Georgia State University
- Title: Perspectives: Educational Poems on the Humanities and Sciences
- Author: Jim Hanson
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666777635, 9781666777611, 1666777617, 9781666777628, 1666777625, 1666777633
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666777635
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-06-28T21:24:30Z
Jim Hanson began writing as a journalist, followed by two books and numerous articles as a sociologist and senior researcher at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale. Living now in the St. Louis area, he writes poetry, including Endless Journey: Poems in Search of Meaning, published in 2022, and is active in the St. Louis Poetry Center and Illinois State Poetry Society Southern Chapter.