NEXT GENERATION POET 2014This is Luke Kennard’s fourth collection of poetry and departs from his previous work in its scope and outlook. The prose poems and dramatic monologues run deeper and, the verse more personal. It is unmistakably a Kennard book (the wolf appears here in his sixth outing), but there is also a striving to turn away from the self-referential games and literary in-jokes of Kennard’s previous work and look outward; an attempt to grow something in the personal ground broken by the last two collections, without sacrificing the wit and energy.

This book is about my personal journey throughout life. It tells the story of all the people that have touched me emotionally. Although names will not be used, the people who played an active part in the remaking of my character will know who they are. This book also speaks of many untold feeling that I held inside but never knew how to voice them outwardly. When the pains of life are just too great, when I cannot seem to see the light of day the words of faith, love, hope, and trust seem to explode forward from the very depths of my soul onto paper. The road to becoming a poet has been a long one for me the bizarre part is that I have not come to the end what this means is there is room for me to grow. My life has been full of hardships but I would not change anything that has happened because I have come to see that everyone blow I took to my ego, or anytime I was knocked down and got back up, only pushed me one-step closer to the person I have now become. the prolific penman

Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. Expression and Truth rejects this opposition and proposes fluid new models of expression, truth, and knowledge with broad application to the humanities. These models derive from five theses that connect expression to description, cognition, the presence and absence of speech, and the conjunction of address and reply. The theses are linked by a concentration on musical expression, regarded as the ideal case of expression in general, and by fresh readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s scattered but important remarks about music. The result is a new conception of expression as a primary means of knowing, acting on, and forming the world. "Recent years have seen the return of the claim that music’s power resides in its ineffability. In Expression and Truth, Lawrence Kramer presents his most elaborate response to this claim. Drawing on philosophers such as Wittgenstein and on close analyses of nineteenth-century compositions, Kramer demonstrates how music operates as a medium for articulating cultural meanings and that music matters too profoundly to be cordoned off from the kinds of critical readings typically brought to the other arts. A tour-de-force by one of musicology’s most influential thinkers."—Susan McClary, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music.

Negation is a sine qua non of every human language but is absent from otherwise complex systems of animal communication. In many ways, it is negation that makes us human, imbuing us with the capacity to deny, to contradict, to misrepresent, to lie, and to convey irony. The apparent simplicity of logical negation as a one-place operator that toggles truth and falsity belies the intricate complexity of the expression of negation in natural language. Not only do we find negative adverbs, verbs, copulas, quantifiers, and affixes, but the interaction of negation with other operators (including multiple iterations of negation itself) can be exceedingly complex to describe, extending (as first detailed by Otto Jespersen) to negative concord, negative incorporation, and the widespread occurrence of negative polarity items whose distribution is subject to principles of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters in this book survey the patterning of negative utterances in natural languages, spanning such foundational issues as how negative sentences are realized cross-linguistically and how that realization tends to change over time, how negation is acquired by children, how it is processed by adults, and how its expression changes over time. Specific chapters offer focused empirical studies of negative polarity, pleonastic negation, and negative/quantifier scope interaction, as well as detailed examinations of the form and function of sentential negation in modern Romance languages and Classical Japanese.

How important is expressions in communication? Words are informative, but expressions, both verbal and facial, adds understanding to a conversation. Most importantly, expressions add intimacy. No conversation is complete without revealing expressions. God has and is expressing himself to those who can hear him. Although his words are informative and full of life yet, they are not as clearly communicated and as intimate without his expressions. It is his desire to reveal his expressions through his Holy Spirit, so that believers may know him intimately through his word.