Robert B. Shaw's "Chronometrics"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We will turn the clocks back this weekend–in fact, many clocks will turn themselves back–and there is no better occasion to meditate with Robert B. Shaw on the ways we keep time and are kept by it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi and welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.4	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, November 3rd, 2023.
0:10.5	Today's poem is another one by Robert B. Shaw.
0:14.5	I've been enjoying him quite a bit recently. Hopefully you will too.
0:18.6	This one is called chronometrics.
0:22.2	There's a time change coming up soon, and I thought this would be a fitting meditation
0:27.6	on the event.
0:29.4	This poem is a little longer, so I will offer a few remarks on the front end and then
0:36.9	just read it once.
0:40.9	What is really remarkable about this poem is the way that Shaw works with paradox.
0:51.5	Time itself is the subject of the poem, and time is a very paradoxical thing.
1:02.8	Is it a concept? Is it a reality? Do we make it? Or as he says at one point in the poem, does it make away with us?
1:12.8	Time is something that we both accrue and lose. It passes, but it stores up.
1:21.7	It is the thing that ushers us into eternity, but is also the part of a reality that separates us from eternity.
1:30.9	Time is an oddity.
1:33.5	And there's a great reversal at the end of the poem,
1:38.9	which is also an enjoyable paradox as the speaker works us backward in time, technologically speaking,
1:50.0	from the digital clock all the way back to the hourglass, the klepsidra, which is an early kind of water clock timekeeping device, and finally
2:06.4	the sundial.
2:08.0	But as we have been going backward in time technologically, we find, we discover that we, the reader
2:16.9	or the listener, has been going forward in time biologically.
2:24.6	So, though I don't mean to augment your chronological angst your chronological angst with the upcoming changing of the clocks.
	...

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