Showing posts with label About Poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label About Poetry. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Metaphor for a Poet





A poetic woodworker might carelessly attempt to build a shelf out of jello in order to bring a change  in mind, a sartori to a young child for that is looking on:

A shelf of jello? Only words make such constructions, the phrase is metaphoric imagination.

         An old silent pond...
         A surprised frog jumps in . . . 
         Plop! Then silence.
                           Matsuo Bashō

Haiku are edgy, one can’t deny they pack a wallop. But haiku hasn’t time to dwell on a inner personal voices, or character development or any of that. It has to get right to the point. This famous haiku by Basho has metaphor only in the simple fact that the wallop of ‘plop’ or 'splash' is not an actual frog going in the water. It’s a word going into your brain

Metaphor is probably most misunderstood as a poetic 'device' when it reality metaphor is the stuff of poetry itself. What's not metaphoric, isn't poetry. By definition it's prosaic.

A  poem must be pulled away from stated subject. If anything the subject of a poem is the surface of a river. It is a fiction, yet it is all we see. It is not the water itself, but it's appearance and it's appearance only from one point of view. The river itself that is it's current, flowing eternal, vast deep is filled with fishes and plants and crustaceans and things you cannot see. Or is it the bedrock, the bed of the river that holds the flow, even if the river dries up in the summer before the rains.

A friend wants to write about divorce, and in her poem there is the word 'divorce'. And this part of the poem is like a legal brief. It is purpose driven. But hidden at the end there is this piece about dividing up common property in particular some sculptures, made of wood, one is of a loon, another of a bear.

Did the beautiful living branch want to be carved into a bear?

There’s the metaphor. The wood giving up wood-ness for loon-ness.

        So crazy to take a branch and strip it
        And make it agree to become a loon.

In almost every piece of writing there is the kernel of a metaphor that could fly to unforeseen heights. But in almost every instance that metaphor is buried, imprisoned, caged, a leopard pacing in a zoo.

A thousand Buddhists on a lake whisper in unison. Some grunt, some make clicking noises, others chant the letter 's' others short bits of 'a' or 'o' or 'p' or b. The sounds all fuse into the echo of a human voice speaking from the mountains.

That’s what a poem is. The Greeks defined this in their early theater experiments. They used voices speaking and singing behind masks to set up a reaction in the audience’s mind. It was more vivid than cinema. People had heart attacks, vomited, passed out and committed suicide the day after. It was scary stuff. Dionysus was there with all his terror. He could evoke war, battlefield hell, love, intimate love, ecstacy. . . . and did it all by not being specific, but instead setting up that echo. Behind masks!

Words take off their clothes and leave the imagination behind,  a desired effect once we’ve forgotten . . . 

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Number and Rhyme




Nine years passed, we all grew old,
Tears don't last, and neither will gold.
When all is said and gone and done,
Intent is the only song that won.

Enough of this rhyming poetry,
I'm tired of what I hear.
It's time instead I wrote for my eye,
And not compose for my ear.

Every story in words has a particular smell,
Of a plane in the dirt, or a liar from Hell.

To thee on shores of Lake Ontario,
I'd like to see more of your tail yo!

Ancient sword and white napkin sabrage,
De-corks champagne of a by gone age.

The duty of rhyme is for beauty that shines,
The intent of prose? The rhythm of growth.

Romulus seduced a lupine strumpet
Love induced by divine trumpets.
Supine cantua amused a wench.
Remus confused by bovine French.

The nerve of a vampiric satire, 
Babelicious curves which will not tire.
Fake fangs and fights in mud,
Slake my thirst with flights of blood.

Twins, our shoes live separate lives,
They win and lose as husbands and wives.

If Donald Trump should heed the call,
to lie and pee beside his wall,
I’d hate to miss the sound and fury,
Of the Rio Grande filled up with urine!

If I can't write a rhyme, I'll have to just drop you,
With a name set in time of a gal who out talks you.

Tantric experiments in symmetry,
Make limbic merriment, naturally.

Truth's in fabric of shitty media,
Put some tooth in what Kubrick feeds ya.

Hide the truth in plain sight,
prop it up for all to see.
Let it fly like a child's kite,
then you call it conspiracy.

When poetry of youth is gone,
 . . . adultery hears truth in song.

Icarus fell, on wings of wax,
Gold as well, before April tax.

Mathematics of meter and rhyme,
Makes asthmatic all cheaters of time.
Equations with numbers our deeds are encumbered,
By meanings that feed us yet die.

Yogi Yoshi graced my door,
Feet upraised, hair on floor.

'Tis not a perversion to say kundalini,
Made inversions in Santorini!

Thasos Mykonos Santorini,
Yogi Yoshi in a bikini!

Yogi Yoshi in Mykonos town,
Taking poses upside down.

Octopi are free-floating, an achievement worth noting
     Not jellies for crustaceans in hiding.
Forsaken their shells, for intelligence from hell,
     and mastered the art of beguiling.

A residency in poetry would makes tenancy a dependency.
The menacings of sharks at sea brings harmony to the ocean tree.

She's loaded, lit, pilots retiring,
Weather well-boded, and fit for a firing!

Some night when we're feeling fine
After a rich meal we've taken with wine . .
Tell me some tales of gals with young males,
And afterwards I'll tell you mine.

Natasha got married on a tour of the bay,
To a boy who spoke Russian as well as Anglais.
There were artists and critics and writers of reviews
Salmon and shrimp and fancy hairdo's.

A sentence does time, to restore justice of rhyme,

An equation is persuasion: "Take an eon, on vacation."

When I know all Gnossiennes,
. . . Then I'll go 'homme parisien'.
Just a bloke, with poetry,
. . . who plays the notes of Eric Satie . . . .

The alignment's right for sexy poems,
Sized on sight by respectable tomes,
What's struck down, when once on the town,
Is permission to romp as we roam.

Kerbel Space employs fanatics,
to confuse the pace of mathematics.
Cerebral 'g' is same on Earth,
begins the game of denying birth.

Adjust the day with poetry,
Wait to play some Eric Satie . . . .

The gamble's up, minutes are down
Our fables fucked up, the climate's not sound.

Bitcoins say that Gold is dead,
Goldbugs see a craze ahead.

"Don't fly too close!" old Dedalus said,
"You'll die like most in the cold sea like lead."

A dragon speaks with forked tongue,
Sagan will teach that you've been stung,
Musk was read into what went down,
And now he hides like a Martian clown.

Though Natalie writes some poetry,
She knows she's not seen eternity.

Words fall to earth, seeds push up fruit,
The writer gives birth, or hides like a newt.

What heavenly yearning was sent,
All that poetry on Earth had meant.



Friday, November 6, 2015

Dionysus and the Muse




-=({O})=-

The Muse hears inspirations mouthed, vocalized, words insisted upon by the Goddess of language. Drama begins as her language, uttered to you.

Language forms this way . . . we listen to masks!

Voices erupt, echoes layered from a chorus. The rituals, payment, prayer, blessing, are uniform, effects close and personal.

Was it mysterious because it was new? Are we to believe Johnson, and subsequently Borges who implies that every word at one time was a metaphor?

From drug-induced congresses with Demeter at Eleusis in Greece, to temple burnings of the Agnicayana, the intrusions of a Coryphaeus in productions by Dionysus, drunken orgies with maenads, all appeals to numinous demiurges, appeals for the boon of genius. He verbalizes what we think. We move and act, he utters a summation.

Character emerges, weather from masses of air.

Dionysus, a Spartan born of heroic Greece, and wine-god on Olympus, populated millenniums of myth. He was hunted by Spartan patriarchs, his sin: teaching viticulture to women. Some say he was captured and torn to pieces, others say escaped to India. Beheaded perhaps, Dionysus lives on a herm, on a column, or a dramatic mask. His terror, humorous or violent, is ever present.

He interfaced with the Goddess, his wild thiasus of maenads, a procession of crazed women and satyrs with erect penises maintain him as the drug-induced bad-dream rock star we all know. Outside his vehicle he is a purveyor of horror, grotesque acts, crimes, and confusion.

Dionysus is Charles Manson, Puck, also Charlie Rose. Agreeing with everyone but himself, disagreeing with everyone including himself. He or she, for Dionysus is also Kali and female, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Baba Yaga, the evil demoness of the forests.

One imagines the subcontinent prior to acculturation by modern Hinduism. No wonder Kali followers count highest in geographic regions destroyed by floods or earthquake. We're speaking of Gods playing the role of destroyer on the stage of existence.

The Muse was acknowledged by Homer as the creator of the Gods themselves. She was their mother, and was said also to have raised 9 daughters. Human arts, history and culture were divided between them. When Apollo's priesthood took over the Oracle at Delphi, the feminine tradition remained firmly rooted in the tradition of the Muse. The sole difference after the takeover by Apollo? The fees collected were sent to Athens.

So male dominance spread throughout all the Mediterranean oracular sites. That ancient debate, culture, the history, intellect, and language of all forms was ceded along with all treasures, to the female side of the psyche.

Since that male/female division of territory, communication with the Goddess became a complicated ritual for navigating densities of masculine myth. It involves drunken mediums like Dionysus, accompanied by troubling or unreliable liaisons with Hermes as guide. Meetings with Delphic oracles opine on subconscious riddles, layers of inquiry are crafted by the chorus and speakers on the Greek stage. One might trace elements from these theatrical rituals into the heart of Catholic mass, or to the cult of psychics who aid modern police in locating criminals.

Metaphor always returns its calls.

The sullen God of wine resented the Muse's carping presence - he is happier with woman who are nonsensical, screaming or mute. One wonders whether antics by Dionysus pleased or insulted the Goddesses of poetry and history. Dionysus is a foil for talent, Pancho Sanza, Robert Frost's neighbor, Shakespeare's Puck, Coleridge's wedding guest joins the meeting where finer things are made. He's the life of the party, also the one who goes too far and breaks it up.

Might we engineer a metaphor, similar to the way a doctor provokes an involuntary response with his hammer, and dispense with all this ritual? Mightn't words disturb patterns of the collective and produce statements from its center, poems structured about a narrative live with a heavy burden? If the thread appears organized, the Muse scrambles that semblance. Dionysus performs what fragments survive, makes sure no shreds escapes without destruction. The vanity of wholeness is abandoned to the complication of storytelling.

This thought leads a poet to temptation, the one offered by modernism. Perhaps no greater experiment was ever conducted as the abandonment of story, Mystery was incorporated into the metaphor itself which lived naked and alone, man-made not God-made, and in so doing, stripped numinous content from any larger meaning.

Joyce, Klee, American abstract expressionists, Wallace Stevens, all produced works unburdened by the requirements of ritual and narrative.  Tired myth flows past us, blossoms on the water that must have been tossed in upstream. The numinous mystery is lost. A rose was no longer needed. Neither were creatures in the wild.

So we wander a corpus, rotting, but of human creation. Are we writers also in the degenerate stages of language, when poems arise from composting earlier poets?. Is there no new metaphor to come from the source?

We seek stories from the other side, but behind the curtain the question always floats forward, what story is ours? What tales come home?


-=:[()]:=-


A Call to the Numinous



-=:[()]:=-

Down the dark arm of a lake in the Adirondacks, I listened in rapture as my father yodeled into the shadowy hulk of a mountain. The forest and still water of the lake rang with his notes. Birds, owls, coyotes took up the call. For me it was magical, I did not reason it was my father's voice I heard.

The poem is the key, the yodel into the blackness of night. It brings back with it a chorus of the unexpected.

To the pre-classical ancients, poetry and metaphor were one, married by a dramatic ritual.

The approach to metaphor was dangerous, propitiously made with offerings. The Muse is capricious, gifted, but treacherous. Dionysus the otherworldly assistant to dramatic performances in a modern world, recruited the sane into his callings and made them mad like him.

Religion institutionalizes the ways and means of madness, integrates a bit of healthy madness for all of us, with our dreams, with what we can't understand.

Approaches to the Gods are fraught with danger, summoning Kali or visiting Baba Yaga in the forest, potentially deadly.  Dionysus's maenads tore the living apart in orgiastic frenzies of horror. Baba Yaga and Kali both drank blood. Vampires all, just as authors are vampires of language.

A writer allows himself to be eaten, but drinks the blood of poetic ancestors. For sound, like light, is vibration and in vibration exists the passage of all that passes from one place to another.

Borrow the ritual from someone else? How long did the source of the Nile evade Western explorers?

A murky understanding may be felt more than understood. It doesn't razor past our pupils in bright light. Darkness covets. The abyss holds secrets.

Sometimes meanings seem clear. For instance with Farsi court poetry, there is so much, too much even. All is there, all readable, all logical. Why do some poems, not others, stir the imagination memory, awaken old DNA? Have Heraclitus and the I Ching become poetry?

I'm not really conscious of what forces me to finish my project on the vampire. At best he may be a metaphor, male logos that has stripped language of numinous content. The vampire has lived rather long don't you think? He's a tired trope. He drains language of meaning. I know things will have to change. Yes, my vampire must die but it hasn't happened yet. Perhaps his death is a shift in subject, perhaps the poem is no longer about him at all.

When speaking of metaphor, think source, as in the sources of rivers. Every salmon in the sea knows where that is. It may be easy to grasp, or nigh impossible. But it is sensed. It may be a riddle, has never solved, but left to confound readers with mystery for centuries to come.

-:)/\(:-


Monday, January 26, 2015

The Edge of Abstraction and the Voice of the Muse




In an Ancient Dialogue between Drama and Psyche, or a more modern equivalent, between the Artist and his Muse one wonders if it is dialogue, whose dialogue? Who speaks the poem? What is the source of the poetic voice?

Do not these questions about the essence of poetry, what metaphor is, and who it serves?

If I listen for metaphor behind a narrative or expository composition, will it explain the ancient Greek use of theatrical techniques to ritualize confrontations between the conscious mind, and unconscious psyche?

I hope in this essay to parse dialogues of some modern and Romantic poems into dramatic characters.

Reading re-enacts. Poetry is a voice performance. The voice moves in and out of a dramatic space the ancients correctly attributed to Dionysus. In this manner metaphor inhabits a numinous space - the poets make an approach to what is numinous.

Why the overlap in subject with the nine Muses? Here I'll posit a quick notion, and then get on to the substance of my primary argument.

The numinous implies a divinely infused quantity and needn't arise from an accepted canon. For instance, Modern Hindu mythology amalgamates a historically complex pantheon into a simple trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. This implies that the many other named 'gods' in India are now either phases, or aspects or incarnations of one of the three primary Gods. The divine experience that an approach to one of these 'Gods' can bring about, eventually tires, as it becomes reduced by history, when all the tributaries of all the rivers coalesce into one gigantic stream which spills it's essence into the sea.

So the numinous in poetry may arise without a trace and without explanation. Calling the source of Western poetry the Muse is enough. Study of her brings one no closer to her phenomena. The numinous is indeed found upriver, by a rustling brook, or a vital youthful river plunging down out of the mountains.

In poetry we make an approach to something we have lost touch of. A poem is an appeal for direct contact. The mythos of most divine experience degrades into a tired tract which holds little mystery.

The classic Greek pantheon, being more complex than the one practiced through worship in present day India, leaves the amalgamation of simpler roles less complete. The ritual of this worship is preserved, or rather was preserved, through drama, without explanation. As the universe constantly generates stars, so Gods are born. They rise, as characters in a mythos, and are merged into greater bodies, larger longer stories. Every so often the entire mythos explodes, or there is death, and recycling into the Underworld.

In the modern day, this process continues unabated, due to the shadow effect of science, which purports to have put  stake through the heart of any God-like vestige.

For the Egyptian, whether a pharaoh seeking Osiris, or laborer awaiting judgement in the passage of the soul via the Egyptian Theatre of the Dead the Journey into the Heavens, may be seen as an flow opposite to the return of Demeter as experienced at Eleusis experienced through the ingestion of ergot tainted wine.

The practice, the theatre at Eleusis, was in essence group poetry,  a collective approach to the numinous.

-=](:W:)[=-


Thursday, January 8, 2015

Az Ének un Pennsylvania Vampir






Magyar culture spread itself around Eastern Europe from the first millennium BCE. After the first World War, which cut the Austro-Hungarian Empire into bits, Hungary lost all of Transylvania to the reformed nation of Romania.

The Carpathian mountains are inhabited by a diversity of peoples and tribes. The region known as Transylvania has heard Latin, German, Russian, and hundreds of dialects over the past two thousand years, as well as local tongues, mainly Romanian and Hungarian between which there are almost no similarities. Dialects abound. In some places the lingua franca changes from village to village. In Romania the mother tongue Daco-Romanian or Moldovan is a Romance language and part of the giant Indo-European language family. Hungarian on the other hand, is Finno-Ugrik, and does not derive from the Indo-European root at all. Its only close relatives are in Northern Scandinavia, Finland, and Estonia, though a few patches of Finno-Ugrik are spoken south of this region and inside Russia.

Acquiring language appropriate for a subject is only half of a poet's task. It may take a lifetime to learn Hungarian for a non-native speaker, and even so, would leave the studious foreigner unable to relate to concepts that are social in origin. The great linguists, such as Captain Richard Burton, were able not just to acquire foreign speech, but also pass in behavior, as natives of that land. It is notable that when Burton travelled in disguise to Mecca, his traveling companions were never wiser as to his British origin, except when mistakenly, he peed standing up, rather than squatting which was the Islamic custom.

Is it necessary to be Transylvanian to understand or feel for the vampire myth? I think not. Vampires are a universal suggestion of all mythos, as old as beliefs in aliens from other planets, and one that has roots in almost every culture. From Indonesia to Central South America, tales of blood-drinking beings are firmly embedded in the human imagination worldwide.

My perceived connection between Pennsylvania and Transylvania began when I made a weeklong trip to Philadelphia to visit the fine art museum there. I made day trips, and explored the local Schuylkill River to its source. At that time I wondered why most myths about Vampires posit that these creatures are afraid of water. The rivers in the Eastern US all possess a haunting beauty. The Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, carry a form of self-consciousness that at times can be terrifying. The rivers themselves tell their story. It is violent. They think, they feel, they are not us.

Never is this quite as true as around the upper Schuylkill and Brandywine. These are literally the veins of our history, blood vessels of our land, draining past and present into the sea.

And then of course I wondered, suppose there was a vampire whose modus operandi was to hunt along these rivers, swim in them, and move through their waters with ease. Suppose he used the carnage of the American Civil War to grow strong. Suppose he drank the blood of a desperate nation.

If he were from Transylvania originally, he would understand the situation in which he found himself. Once a man, now a mere form of consciousness, in human terms, dead already, but able to ponder his own fate and the fates of those he lives by. He would live like history lives, dead, yet always alive.

To do this right I'd need something from Transylvania. Not just memories, not just internet research, but something from the structure and sound of the language itself. If I could get the sound pushing inside the mind of my subject. he'll become a metaphor for the predicament of all living things. There are three forms of nutrition, plan, animal, and mineral. Having the latter helps, but one cannot survive without an adequate diet of the first too. We live taking the lives of other beings. Do we think we're exempt? Does nothing eat us?

Since beginning this project I've come to love the sound of Magyar speech, and know that past migrations of warriors to the Transylvania region of Romania suits the progress of my coal-dark tale.




-=:)(:=-

Az Ének un Pennsylvania Vampir

Révén Pennsylvania táplálja, a holló,
Ingyenes, és érezte a régi Erdélyben.
Ő a magyar, cseh származású,
Soha számít, ahol a magyarság ment.
A háború után hagyta el Romániát,
A halálfélelem, a gyűlölet és a vágóhidak.

"Drága feleségem, én itt található magyarázat,
Az élet külföldön, mert én fordult vámpír.
A szomjúság a lelkeket, egy fájdalom a vérben,
Teszi az én átok, sokkal rosszabb, mint a szén.

De egy perc ezekben Egyesült Államok,
Ott álltam a szenátus, győzött aznap versenyt.
Aztán gyertyafényes, vitatkozunk eltörlése,
Én lettem az áldozata egy angyali nő.

A hölgy megragadta a karom,
És préselt olyan közel, mintha a csók,
A kék szeme beszélt. Nem forma ártalmak,
Hozna a halál, de az életnek nincs rendjén.

Ő lecsapolták az én akaratom. M fej gyenge volt.
Összeszorított fogakkal nyakam helyett.
Azt gondoltam, hogy furcsa megcsókolta olyan nehéz,
Halvány, észrevettem, vér részeg volt.

A nő felállt, egy szerető elutasított,
"Most már tudom, ez az, amit keresett,
"A nap alatt rabszolgák minden küszködik,
"De most egy gazfickó, aludni alatt talaj."

Saját út Richmond, amikor fiatal voltam,
Becsapott a az a nő, és az ő csábító nyelvét.
Egy szénfekete éjszaka, vágási készült,
Ivott a lelkem, és elhagyta ezt helyette.

Hagyta, hogy elég oltja rá szomjat,
A legkegyetlenebb leányzó, hogy biztosítsa egy átok.
"Van most már tanulni, te csak egy szolga!
"Mint minden az életben, szenátorok, gazfickók."

Hetek nincs lélegzet, nem egy darab kenyeret.
Utáltam a víz, én majdnem meghalt.
Vágytam sót, húst engem geg,
Hogyan átkozva, hogy parázna banya.

Saját visszatérés az egészségre, amikor végre etettem,
Egy vértócsában egy baleseti halál.
De egy csepp megérintette ajkamat,
Egy sebből felemelte, a keze ügyében.

A rendőrség és a mentősök lökött félre,
És vissza a szervezetben, hogy szegény gyerek.
Rögtön tudtam, hogy mit száguldott az ereimben,
Az én ősi helyén, a magyar nevet.

Amerikai élet rájött,
Milyen bujkált benne mindezen századok.
Milyen gének vágy táplálja a halhatatlanság,
Cserélni átkokat az emberiségtől.

Kezem-lábam nőtt erős, az új hatalom megfogta.
Most már fürdött, az én testem kihűltek.
A szenátus elmentem több alkalommal több.
Nem szóltam, de even'd az állás.

Egy tucat rabszolga találkozott szörnyű véget ér,
A megelőző hetekben, hogy a lázadó kongresszus.
By este tombolt virginiai földön,
Szeletelés nyakára képmutató születés.

Dél-Mason-Dixon kerestem William Preston
Ki fejlett, hogy számlát déli győz.
A Smithfield Mansion, ereiben vért vettünk,
Halvány csuhé ültetett ágyban.

A lámpafényes hajógyári egy borús nautch,
Két Yankee tengerészek állt a végső óra.
A jelenés, hogy lecsapolták a fiatalok,
Volt, sápadt bőr, mint rabolt igazságuk.

Fedélzet alatti összes fogvatartott megjelent,
De megvágta őket először, így hamarosan ők 'táplálkoznak.
A gyáva Dél-átok szétszórt,
Elkapták a mesterek, majd hirtelen a szomjat.

Én rendezik a folyón északra Philadelphia városában.
A emberiség szerelmese voltam minden kerek.
Egy óriás kúria falai négy tégla vastag,
Nem lehet eladni, szellemek lakták.

Én nem vett tudomást a siránkozás lidércek,
Ki felsikoltott éjjel aludtam, mint nap.
A megrémült szomszédok pedig nem lép,
A jól őrzött otthont a távollevő bérlő.

Hogy a nagy barát város a férfiak,
Sokkal jó élet volt ütött, majd,
A nyomorúságos kórházban, tele kétségbeeséssel,
Lelkek, akik több remény, mint ellátást.

Azt kerülni üszkösödés azokban a szörnyű óra,
Mint egy éjféli nővér állatias morgás.
Éjjeli orvosok telt keresztül a korai reggel,
Hogy nem talál impulzusok, a legények voltak ott.

Nem halálos járványt fog dönteni a háború,
Nap eljön nélkül Istenről.
Én pimaszul bedugult a folyók ömlött,
Miután Shiloh a zsákmányt, a föld tönkre só,

Ettől a pillanattól kezdve ittam élni,
És szem előtt tartotta, hogy minden élet egy ajándék.
Egy kisgyerek egy kis labdázni.
Szakadt a gyermekbénulás, arra gondoltam, talán esni.

Örömét forró volt, mint áramok a füst,
Egy kis meccs, hogy az apró fazont.
Gyengéden, hálásan megragadtam, hogy az élet.
És úgy érezte, hogy szaporodnak mélyen.

Valaha zöld levél táplálja a vágy,
A nem kerül felhasználásra, így a virág nagyobb?
Bár minden lény át kell mennie az élelmiszer,
Jellemzők élet, hogy nekünk utódokat.

Csaták, kórházak, utak, iskolák,
Kedves követte vér medencék.
Ne veszítsünk csepp, amikor a ivás,
Nem öntsön lényeg vagy több, mint szüksége.

Kedves szereti a vizet, annak ellenére, hogy a mítosz.
De az élő száraz, mint a viperák megőrizni erőnket.
Mi rejlik a helyeken, ahol halál követhet,
És vágja le az állomány, mint egy farkas, hogy szólója.

Volt egy élet harc valaha nyert?
A győztes vámpír, a Bull Run?
Majd vadászni újra, ezek a versek I kísérteni,
Annyi voltam a boxban, de maradni örökre szikár.

Hol légiók bátor halandók menni,
Mint én most hazugság örökre hideg.
Akiknek a szíve egyszer megverte most már festett lelkek,
Egy vágy a folyadékok, ellopott és üríteni.

Szegény antietami a megszentelt föld,
Egy öreg katona I vérzett a Gettysburg városában.
A legkisebb száma életét I Döfködték,
Varjak mint a rettenetes Civil War.

Neath hulló levelek I follow'd a nyomában.
Öreg tölgyfa áldott lelkek tenni.
A presbiteriánus, hamar lenne ápoló,
Majd elájul rá riverside temetési halottaskocsi.

A háborúk vége erőm nőtt légió
Re életét vesztette az a hírhedt térségben.
Félelmeim a fulladás eloszlik,
Mélyen a folyók, én türelmesen várt.

És a part menti mélyén egy éjszaka
Egy szerencsétlen úszó megfulladt a láthatáron,
Az ő gyáva szeretője verte a partra.
Megtalálták a két testület által már reggel.

Ahol az Erie-tó vizenyős medencében végződik,
Vettem egy kőműves lánya, elemzi Jenn.
A következő éjszaka, hálát adva szórakoztató,
Én esett a rémülettől, majd ivott a fiát.

És végig a gyönyörű Lackwana,
Én Fanged egy hórihorgas gal nevű Joanna.
Egy szerető ma este énekel egy Randy dallamot,
Aztán szörnyethalt, alatta egy Borbuggyan hold.

A vámpírok nem szeretnek énekelni, és barangolni,
Bár este véget ér az agyarak és élénkvörös habot.
A zene egy módja van,
A elcsábítani szerelmeseinek a halála előtt.

Amennyire csak lehetséges, igyekszem megkímélni,
A fitt és egészséges, azoknak a lelkes imádság.
Bénító élmény, a jóga tanultam,
Inni, majd indulnak a nyomorult féreg.

Most túra folyók, patakok, és tavak,
Backyard játszani készletek, és szabadtéri felfújtak.
De sajnos a mi fajunk nem tudja eldönteni,
Milyen élelmiszer táplálják a szennyezett belsejét.

Mennyire hosszú a nedves ágy legtöbb,
Ahol én rég eltemetett régi cseh kísértet,
Hogy a pincéjében sötét és nedves,
Nem megyek oda, legalábbis még nem.
Vágyom aludni ezer évvel,
Hogyan Én már sírtam, mint a mérgező könnyek!

Van bányák meglátogatni, tengelyek szén,
Városok befeketíteni az én átkozva lélek.
Barangolni az esős Allegheny éjszaka,
És mi a sima költészet rémület.
Éhes, szomjas, éhen több,
Azt nem lehet megmenteni, kivéve metafora.

Saját szavai elsápad, amit üríteni őket,
Az én Wolfen üvöltés, és a prérifarkas hívást.
Sajnos én kutatnak ihletett vers,
Oldalak haldoklik az én átok.

Saját esze éles, van foga, mint a kés,
Nem tudom abbahagyni táplálkozó ezeket az életeket.
A tragédia nem tudok inni ahhoz,
Szavakat, mint én, és szeretem szavakat, mint a szerelem.
Keresztül nyugtalan hegyek, a végtelen vándorlás,
Én simogatni a kitöltést, a comb és a nyak.

Sávos pisztráng fut fel Northkill Creek,
A szeplős fiatal elragadtatott csak ezen a héten.
Hol Schuylkill hullámai robbant a Delaware,
Saját erkölcstelen izgalom volt a legrosszabb rémálma.
Amikor a gyors Susquehanna árvíz csúcsán,
Én formálni tolódik a vérem felé Chesapeake.

Amikor éjszakai jön, a szívverésem szárnyal,
Ijesztő Végzet, a hátsó utca üvölt,
Remélem és imádkozom gyógyítja Isten.
Éjszakai fordul nap, de végződik gyep szőnyeg.
Gyere rózsás hajnal, csúszik az én ágya.
Szunnyad és meleg, a büdös föld.

Dobálni, és álmodni bélrendszer fájó,
Vagy üvölteni és kiabálni jövőm kockára.
Az út, hogy vadásznak rám, hogy felajánl egy ünnep,
Szavak kábító én, a remény, a béke.
De az érintés a talaj, a natív sár,
Hozza forrni, én vágy a vér.


-=:)(:=-


Monday, December 8, 2014

'Horny Old Man', or, the 'Unexpurgated Tinder Poems'



One myth about Han Shan, 寒山, the great Tang Dynasty poet, claims he wrote his famous "Cold Mountain Poems" on the bark of trees. Well true but not true. He wrote poems, and left them all over, and were it not for another monk named Lu Ch'iu-yin all would have been lost to time.

"I ordered Tao-ch'iao and the other monks . . . to hunt up the poems written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs - and also to collect those written on the walls of people's houses. There were more than three hundred.  . . It was all brought together and made into a book."

       ['Preface to the Poems of Han-shan by Lu Ch'iu-yin' fr."Cold Mountain Poems", trans. Gary Snyder.]

The internet forest provides plenty of bark, wood and stones, alas as an impermanent medium. There aren't enough trees on a galaxy of Earths to record on paper what's written on our fairly young net. Yet almost all of it will be lost in time.

One assumes everything will last on a server forever.

Try this. The net is an abyss, a black hole, engineered to receive the 'flower of mankind', his 'swan song', everything from the content of his DNA to every last translatable scrap of poetry, every image, every email, every web page, every text. In short, the written and visual of everything human. One might think of it as reams of paper brought by a jailer to an inmate on death row.

Yet the net is more than what we record . .  increasingly it is what we do. The web is an activity unto itself. At the moment it serves as a massive collective memory, and as a cortex it is evolving. The web is beginning to think, and creates new realities, which in turn we may think of. Eventually it begins to think of these things itself.

Some believe once the net begins to create realities it will view humanity as a subservient species unnecessary for its own survival. It will craft robots that last longer than humans to do the work. And so, all will be lost. From our side of things it will appear as a pit, a burial ground for centuries of destructive behavior by a species out of control. Will we terraform planets and take all this with us? Might a silicon-based life form on earth take over from us. then propagate itself?

Where does this leave the living, breathing joke-making, eating, farting and love-making mortal Homo sapiens?

He throws creativity into the web. . .  and watches it float on an event horizon of certain destruction. Comprehend the stars, even they are mortal. Nothing lives forever. At some point the masses of data about human beings will simply cease to exist, and will be obscured by an unsearchable darkness, a compression created by so much information.

It will have other uses, as a kind of informational compost. So why not lob invectives into the vortex of certain destruction? Things beautiful and experiential, heartfelt confessions, that might amuse others as they fall with us into the void. Use the web to seduce and amuse!

Which brings me to the new app called Tinder which I now use as 'bark' for writing rhymes to anonymous women that I'll never meet.

You're reading the journal of a Boswellian who isn't ashamed to admit the current form of debauchery offered by our modern age. In the Victorian era we would have reviewed the opposite sex beneath gas street lamps, today we swipe right or left. Boswell wrote his famous journal between bouts chronicling the life of Samuel Johnson.

" . . . a girl in the Strand; went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size . . . " Note: 'in armour' or 'with armor' refers to the use of a prophylactic sheath. [Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, Frederick A. Pottle ed., Second Edition, Yale University Press, 1950, p. 49]

Indeed the internet today provides one massive prophylactic. Direct experience has been replaced by internet experience. Even so the shock of an internet matchup throws the psyche into a stunned space. It bends time. Instant knowledge without learning, forethought without notice, memory without experience. We're hit by shrapnel; time warps, endorphins kick in. Something unpredictable has happened. Tinder provides this collision between souls on a mutually consensual basis.

Below the cleavage posts the phrase: "The silence is deafening. Someone has to break it."

Many of these gals spend hours creating dummy profiles and going through reams of man-data. Most likely they're just trying to make ends meet for an hourly rate, with a disk full of phony photos, fronting for flowers of the night who are sleeping off their exertions, limbs akimbo, in a limo.

It must take time to make that profile, attach photos, think up a name, and go through databases filled with man-fodder. No wonder they get mega-annoyed if you report them as 'scam' or 'inappropriate'. They have to start all over.

In that silence after the matchup, with that short fuse burning, I saw the greatest opportunity to write witty custom poetry on demand offered by the whole World Wide Web.

In order to be your Tinder lover,
I'll have to win you from under cover!

The objective's to write a just a few lines that win me a "Ha Ha!" A comic poet that wishes for more is delusional. Women love to hear their own name! I'll write poems that celebrate that most precious of sounds! Just a few minutes to charm these ladies before they dump the connection.

So it started:  Success would mean getting any response at all, ranging from "That's very funny Mark, hey come sext with me on talktoher.com" to a whole night of texting with an true innocent seeking true love, nervous about having a Tinder account.

These gals are charmed, and they chat. . . a few love the poems. I mean who is normal doesn't like a poem written with their name?

I wonder about Han Shan's life before he moved to live on Cold Mountain.

In my first thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass
Entered cities of boiling red dust.

         [Cold Mountain Poem #12, translation Gary Snyder]

I've not yet found my Cold Mountain. I've still to write an "Account from my Hut", or summarize the life of a writer-scribbler in the dusk hours of late life. Swiping right, swiping left, I'm covered by 'boiling red dust' of the city.

Here follow my unexpurgated Tinder Poems, written on internet 'bark', grouped by the Muses they were written for.

Ruth:

"Ruth oh Ruth it would so soothe me.
 If Ruth oh Ruth, you could unclothe me!"

"Ruth oh Ruth could I rudely grab you?
 Get uncouth in a booth and nudely have you?"

At this point Ruth responds, a cryptic "Ha ha LOL!" . . and I realize that she's four thousand eight hundred miles away. I ask her where she is and she tells me . . . Rio de Janeiro in Brazil!

Distance that allows the fantasy of a verbal romance! The technique works at breaking ice . . but it seems only to break ice with gals who are far away!

"Ruth, oh Ruth, are you still down in Rio?
 Would it be crude if I asked, "Are you real?"
 Let's go to a show and open the door to a booth,
 Only then will I know, on the floor, that you're Ruth!"

After milking the sound 'uuuth' for all it was worth, Ruth seemed to suffer fatigue. Then, after a long two-week spell of silence, and feeling miffed, hurt, snubbed and refused in spite of my gallant verbal seductions, I 'unmatched' her! Many of the poems were lost forever. Forgive me for my immature reaction Ruth, I still miss you. . . Ruth do you read this. . . I'm sorry, come back to me . . .  ;)

It wasn't long before I got the notification. "You have a new match: Rachayl.

Rachayl was trying to find supporters for her Instagram account. She wasn't particularly talkative, but she did tell me that she had a laugh or two looking west across the Mediterranean from a vacation resort with her parents on the Israeli coast. Israeli coast? See the pattern? 

"Rachayl Rachayl you seem so pale!
  Bake in the sun, while in Israel."

She's a college gal on vacation, doing the home country. 'Gotta run now!' - "Ta ta!"

"Rachayl, Rachayl you play on Tinder,
 Do you tease the boys who'd like to win ya?"

"Rachayl, Rachayl, remember that spelling,
 Rachayl of Tinder, my member is swelling!"

"Rachayl Rachayl if poems impress,
 I'll reach for your tail and hope you undress."

"Rachayl, Rachayl let me give you a facial!"

After this Rachayl responded with a big "Ha ha ha! . . . and a huge  pink smiley! 

Thank God for the smiley. Was that appropriate? Suppose she wasn't the 21 years she claimed? Encouraged I redoubled my efforts to amuse her with decency. The internet allows explicitness between strangers as a way of creating trust. We then spent an hour or so texting normally. Wailing wall, Temple on the Mount. . . all that.

My interest in Rachayl isn't religious or racial!

"Rachayl, Rachayl with the Atlantic between us,
 I see you romantic on the tip of my penis!"

A few more "Ha ha!'s" then Rachayl's vacation schedule must have picked up pace, Her trail went cold. 

"Rachayl Rachayl I'm under your spell!
 Rachayl Rachayl you've left me in hell."

"Rachayl Rachayl come tease out my cudgel,
 Rachayl Rachayl say cheese and then snuggle!"

"Rachayl, Rachayl where did you go?
 Miles away, love's impossible in snow!"

A comment from the moderator on the Rachayl thread. I suspected she felt she had crossed a line and wanted to destroy the damning evidence. I woke up the next morning and found myself un-matched. Terminated. Thrown away. Discarded. Used, abused, and forgotten. :(

"A letter from Jessey would be better than a blessing!"

Ha! I like that!

"Much better dear Jessey, to get wetter and messy!"

:0 !!! 

Then dead in the water the next day. Emboldened, I start over . . . trying a different, non rhyming approach. The images would have to be short, metaphoric . . . dreamy, imaginative, magical . . . 

"You seem as blue as the other side of the clouds."

"Do you weep rivers in the morning when it rains?"

"Do you smile crops into bloom?"

Unattached metaphors, headless horseman, wander the internet, seizing hearts, seeking a brain.

"Do you weep like a Goddess for her God?"

"Beauty, what do you weep for?"

"Do you love the sons you might not birth in this life?"

"Your smile rips a hole in time and sets me there to fight a war."

Back to my rhyming . . . the faster the better. Athena attaches a 'moment', Tinder-speak for a candid selfie. She's posing seductively by her bathroom mirror . . . 

Athena :

"Athena my Goddess don't be modest!"

Athena does not dally with mortals.

Susu:

"Let's get away from the crowds and wrap up in yur shrouds!"

Alexa:

"Alexa Alexa, do you get wet when I text ya?"

LOL!! Perv man I like this!

Bobette:

"Bobette, Bobette  my sweet little pet,
 Get yourself wet then come to my bed!"

Bobette scribbles: "How did you do that so fast?" 

"Bobette Bobette, we're not at the park yet!"
 Not much of a pitch, I'm too shook up to lob it,
 I never thought it a cinch, to hookup with Bobette!"

Remark to self . . the art of the rhyme is completely lost.

Bobette keeps her ears on. The connection's still open. Hope clings eternal.

Arlette 's another Muse with a name ending in -ette. Tinder has birthed an explosion of erotic identities, mostly looted from body parts of living mortals.

Arlette:

I send you these rhymes 'cuz I really can't stop it,
One night I'll spend time with the baby named Arlette!"

Arlette breaks silence to deliver an icy: "What is all this?" I carry on.

"You're a burst of shells in a faraway sky!"

Arlette's MIA . . . Easy does it. Slow down . . . Subtlety!


Siobhan:

"It's Siobhan, Siobhan I'd so like to lie on!"
 Siobhan pardon me but I've got a hard-on for thee!"

Siobhan replies . .. "I'd love to have a Mark on my record!"

"It's never quite dark enough to make love in a parking lot!"

Lo! and Behold, out of the mysterious internet dark, Siobhan replies with an address . . . I google it . . . alas it's the middle of a park.

Winter comes to Cold Mountain.



Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Of Truth and Beauty



There is a persistent modern myth that the beauty of poetry, the mysterium which poetry produces in the listener, is in some way a product of work, talent, or craft.

Explanations for natural phenomena seem existentially bound to material explanations. "What makes a plant grow?", The seed, the code of DNA, a set of reactions inside the cells? What makes a car steer? The wheel. What makes a car run? The motor.

Surrounded by ready answers, depictions of reality gloss over a thick coating of myth, an opaque polymer of material causes. The water soaks the paper. The rain wets the field. That drink quenched my thirst.

What makes the walker walk? His feet? Aristotle's final cause, 'the desire to get somewhere', is not at our lips.

Yet human endeavors in this second millennium are are ubiquitously propelled by understandings that only look to the walker's feet, the car's wheel, or the plant seed.

What makes these things happen? 

What fuels life? What runs the universe? Why does gravity work? What is gravity? What is an electromagnetic field? What causes light appear to bend objects placed partly in water?

Yes we have models that attempt explanation, but even while accurate predicting these behaviors no fundamental understandings are offered. As seekers we are left with our own constructs. Models are human made stuff. Moreover the models in use have changed significantly over time, and over the life of science and are likely to change again.

Our science, our methodology for seeking knowledge, whispers nothing, dry mouthed.

Poetry similar to science, has chewed up the lives of millions of devotees and seen imaginative minds toil under similar rules.

Science proceeds, so we believe, incrementally, towards truth, just as poets often deceive themselves that the object of their progress is beauty. Exceptions to all rules abound, and so with a few hundred years of science and many thousands of years of poetry at our backs, it appears that some progress has been made, though the mysteriums left to uncover seem infinite, and in the case of science, perhaps too costly to ever finally unmask.

Saturday, December 31, 2011

To the Studio



To the studio I make my way,
To write on shards, some poetry.
What is art but stopping time?
My heart's in bottles, plates and rhyme.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Strategy



A strategy for a monumental poem.
Might write down what is known,
And might edit out all sentiment,
Truth will say what you meant.
Finally, are words set free?
If not, don't bother with strategies.

Monday, December 12, 2011

The Door


Reason lights up rafters high,
Instinct sounds the floor,
Poetry's a key that opens wide,
The door to Metaphor.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

04/04/2005 - Battle of the Trees


The idea of letters – I’m seeing these women as letters in an alphabet,  “A” is for A___ P____, “B” is for B____ M____, "M" is for M___ S____, “R” is for R____K____,  "L___ L___" is for L_____ L______, aka R_B_G_, or Rainbow Girl, "P" is is for R_____ P____,  Somehow these women have become entwined in my own archetypal alphabet/tree imagery, something similar to what Graves was talking about in alphabet evolution, the myth of the Battle of Trees, the history of willow, alder, birch and oak, etc., and letters themselves.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Nagar Tiger



'Nagar Tiger' is a Gujerati expression for a young pregnant woman of the Nagar caste of Brahmins in Western India.  Dressed only in her wedding gold, a 'Nagar Tiger' was paraded through her village, usually at midday beneath the high sun. Many of the young women collapsed from these ordeals, suffering heat exhaustion from the weight of jewelry and gems. The custom endured in Gujerat until the early 20th Century. 


That's such a crude poem!

Yes it is crude. But it's also subtle.

Why do you waste your time writing such crude pieces?

I'm happy to answer. Do you have a minute?

No. I don't. Make it short.

If I'm a carpenter and I work in a way that is natural to me, but happens to make cruder work than another carpenter, should I throw my tools down a well?

Of course not. But if you are that carpenter you are supposed to be trying to make the finest work you can.

Suppose I make two pieces, and one happens to be less fine than another. Should I destroy it?

No.

Or if one word happens to be less refined than another, should I not use it?

No.

If you have coarse sea salt in the kitchen do you not use it because it is coarse?

No.

If your thoroughbred horse has short coarse hairs on him compared with your Shetland pony, do you judge the merits of either on coarseness?

We're talking about the poem. It's a crude poem. You write better things than that.

Do I? Let me ask you this, why is it crude? Because it mentions your home state?

No.

Did I mention you by name?

No.

Did I mention anyone by name?

Yes you mentioned Richard Burton. But you made words that sound like my name.

Are you referring to 'Nagar Tiger?'

That too, but, I was referring to Amir and Amiri.

Ah, but isn't this sound resemblance interesting to you? I bet you never noticed it! If Amir and Amiri sound like something else, then so does 'Nagar Tiger'. You remember what a Nagar Tiger is don't you?

Of course. Don't patronize me.

I'm Burton-izing, you not patronizing you. But you missed it. 'Nagar Tiger' sounds like "Nāgá" as "Tiger". You missed that! Nāgá pronounced 'nag', is Sanskrit (and Pali) for snake, specifically the King Cobra, a sacred snake. Kipling in his famous work "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" named his cobra character, Nag. I'm going to Kutch to see a snake or a tiger! It's also a play on 'sea-snake', of which there are plenty along the coasts of that area. In addition you are sometimes a nag, though it's not your fault, but rather mine, as I don't always do as you ask. But I compensated by calling you my number one Muse!

Thanks a hell of a lot!

Would you rather be number two? Should I only be inspired by one person? Hey, I'm playing with the way you want to interpret things. More people will know what a Nag is than a Nagar. And far more will know what a Nagar is than a Nagar Tiger. So you see I was playing with what the words sounded like there too. It was you that chose to interpret them differently, in a cruder way. In fact at the beginning of the poem I warned you it would be crude by your standards. I said in so many words, this is about Richard Burton. It's about 'Kutch and sal'', or 'kitchen salt', or salty-words, which is a euphemism for swear words. But I actually used no swear words. I failed to deliver!

Also consider this. Are these convoluted references legitimate communication? Should I be trying not to embed such things in my poems? Here I'll say this. All communication embeds meaning, poetry simply elevates it to a massive level. To try not to do it, is to defeat language entirely. The poem shows you that you and yours have been made as much by the words that you use. That's why you're so hot about the poem!

I spoke of Richard Burton and said it was where '1001 Nights' was inspired. It did actually have its beginnings in this part of the world, not Arabia, and, Richard Burton was inspired to do his translation of it into English while stationed in Gujerat. This is true. He also had affairs with many local girls and wrote eloquently about their yonis and sexual practices as footnotes to that translation.

I know that!

Yes you know it, but you don't understand it.

      Richard Burton doffed Indian robes,
      He spoke Gujurati perfectly.
      He realized it was true that he should test what he knew,
     And bed some Guju gals in mufti!

Now is that crude?

Yes, a bit. But it's funny.

Why is it funny?

I give up.

It's funny because of the limerick structure, which announces itself at the onset! It's also funny because it's what I did. I doffed Indian clothes. I spoke "to you perfectly"! Now that's crude but beautiful because it's true! Crude and true. Crude is what words become when we lose our center and fall to where they are. I throw them out like pieces of bait. Unfortunately you bit.

That poem is about me and my people!

No it's not! . . It just uses words you are close to. . . and it uses them in a very clever way. You're not Muslim, but your family works very hard on behalf of poor women of every faith. I admire that. If anything this poem is structured more like something written in the 19th Century at an ivy league school in Connecticut, since it uses the rhyming structure of a football song.

     The women of the desert go there to wail,
     I'll buy their used tins of cooking oil,
     And ship my sculptures back home to sell.

Are you with me?

No.

Substitute 'Yale' for 'sell', a much more obvious rhyme, and one that's much like a lot of old college songs where the last words of key stanzas are the name of the school.

I also said I'm a Connecticut Yankee, a peddler, in so many words. That's what artists are, peddlers. They have to peddle. And what does someone from Connecticut do when he's in India, in particular what do artists do often? They ship stuff back home. I ship sculptures home. No fancy luggage for my sculptures. The kind of tins you'd find on a peddler's cart!

That business about the hare and the dog. It's crude.

Yes, it's crude. Limerick's are crude, and the meter says, be warned, 'this is crude!' You are forgetting that Ahmed founded Ahmedabad when he saw a hare chase a dog! He remarked to his aide, "If the rabbits here are so brave they make dogs run, then this is the place we should build our fort."

But you didn't found Ahmedabad.

Found vs. find. Yes, I did, I found it on my first India trip, by train, halfway to Udaipur.  I also "found Amiri in bed!"

You are the worst! You know that 'hare' has another connotation. 

Yes I'm aware of it. and used it. And I'm wondering if Ahmed, or the myth of Ahmed, also knew it too!

The Kama Sutra uses the hare, as a way of describing one size of a male genitalia. That's what you're thinking of my dear! Ahmed was impressed by the bravery of the rabbit he saw, which was chasing a dog and decided this would be a good place to found a city. I was impressed by the women I saw and decided a year before meeting you it would be a good place to found a family! Dogs are not mentioned in the 'Kama Sutra'. So it's funny, particularly, since through the poem and myth, we can imagine that Ahmed was a dog himself! Like me, like Burton, and like all men!

The real reason is you're not comfortable with poetry. Let me ask you this. When you walk across a river and some of the stones are sharp and dig into your feet, do you find yourself thinking that the world should have been made without sharp stones?

You know what I mean.

I do.

Note: This is a real conversation with my Muse. She took the form of my wife, to criticize me, and my work, and in her presence I become very defensive. Do I like this? Yes, she leads me to better things. 

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Are these Poems, Poems?


Often not - they haven't been composed. They're energy, sometimes focused, sometimes not, sometimes coherent, sometimes not.

Did I want to hear the meaning?

There is no 'the meaning'. Yes, I did want to hear what she was saying, but never at the cost of forgetting what else she was saying.

Most of all I wanted to hear her sing.

-:::-

Poems have rules. They're rituals themselves, parts of rituals as offerings, and themselves are ritually composed, and rule driven.

Now let's not get upset by my use of the word 'rules'. Rules are grammar, that must be followed, else 'the thing' won't work. In this sense grammar appears to be result-driven, and to the extent that language-forming needs a grammar, to this degree the very first ritual is result-oriented.

However 'result' only has context within a small subset of something larger. If we are speaking of the Muse, that communicative face of the All, then she doesn't need to be result-oriented. You do. I do. We need a grammar to sort out what she says!

We're having a face to face conference with an emotional, super intelligent, super-knowledgeable foreign leader with an army that can squash us and ours like bugs any moment she wants. We are speaking with this all powerful person/personification, but the problem is we don't understand what she's saying!

We communicate back in a polite way that we're having problems, and, 'Would she supply some assistance?' A grammar would be nice. Indications of how to comprehend what she's saying.

This is exactly what happens. When you don't understand, ask. Simple. She always responds. Today in the car I was thinking, 'Should I go work at the studio?' - it's been awfully cold there. How did I get my answer? At a stoplight I read part of the sign for the old Forest Theater, blacked out by another sign in front. It reads . . . "REST".

She is Kali. Baba Yaga. She is many things. Takes any form. Becomes a fish, then a bird, then hare then a roebuck.

Don't confuse my writings about ritual, or ritual context, with poetry. The ritual doesn't make the poetry. It creates a setting for poetry. If you want storks to land on the roof of your house there are things you must do. The ritual setting for writing these poems, transcribing them, was little more than a 'workplace cleaning', for opening pathways that listen, and honor.

Fleeting poetry's not mine, or yours,
My poet's fee's as . . . a listener.

-:::-


The subtle 'rules' of poetry may not be verbalized with everyday language. What I refer to as 'rules' of poetry, are hidden. Poetry's a mystery, yet as language-formers, we want to understand the grammar of mystery, and so we study, by listening, and by honoring.

That which gave us poetry also makes dogs dream at night. It makes the weather. A universal grammar's at work everywhere, in everything. It may be filtered, you may become 'tuned' to it. It can speak to you, or to a horde or locusts. We're talking about fractal interaction with nature. If we make the right small adjustment any future path may be changed. Any.

Through this sonic medium, the greatest ancient poets were able to directly address the forces of nature, converse with them and influence events. A famous Irish poet killed a rat that was defiling his lunch, with a burst of language.

This is important. Whereas most rules are spelled and taught with language, poetry isn't. Ultimately poetry is an exercise of pre-linguistic rules, rules for making language, taught to us as it were, by a parent.

Again an abstraction. That which teaches us must be as a parent. The Greeks called her the Muse. She's much older than the pagan gods that followed her, or the male God Zeus, who stole the sound of her name. Her cults were taken over in a mad of shift of power, after the invention of metals. She continued to speak, but her messages were blurred.

Honor your parents, . . . Poetry is the Mother of all language.

She sings me the way to sing . . .

There are rules for making steel. Imagine the rituals that were employed for steel making! Serious stuff.

Yes there are rules, particularly if you're working with primitive technology, with iron ore, wood-charcoal, and clay. You need rules, otherwise it won't work. Years of rehearsal. A story to go with every step.

The first rules of metallurgy were not written in copper, or bronze, or steel. They were spoken sequences.

This sounds like an almost stupid statement. Of course they were written or spoken in language. Ah, but metals, and clay, and painting, these are all media as well. Each has its own language. You can't program a computer without language. You can't drive a train. To drive a school bus you need driving language. I'm not speaking of the instruction book in the glove compartment. I'm talking about all the activities, not just verbal or written, but physical, mechanical, economic, associated with driving, from filling up at the pump, to signaling, to using 'car' language instead of 'body' language. All of it is language.

We went for words based on sounds that came from our mouths that are part of our bodies. Our arms and legs have influenced how we write. Letters! We might have developed sparks from our fingernails instead!

Spoken and written language as it turns out are antecedent to every single unique human development. We are the language animal. Writing followed, not to gloss over it. Another massive leap, taking thousands and thousands of years to develop.

Ironically, the prime exception to this was Vedic culture. A primitive system of writing had actually flourished briefly in some parts of Iran and the Middle East at a time before oral ritual culture, i.e. Brahmanism, took root in northern India. Fritz Stahl describes the tradition that entered the subcontinent, a method of teaching the training and harnessing of horses, and construction of lightweight chariot wheels. This was at a time before people knew how to ride. Horses were just being domesticated. Ritually based, this new method of teaching was an oral instruction set, that could be passed on, and so it spread. Written cultures that actually preceded the Rig Veda were not sufficiently advanced to allow for the spread of this advanced method of instruction. Making a spoked wheel is quite a technological feat. Rules must be in place. Writing couldn't handle the job. Wheels up to this point were massively heavy. The engineering of lightweight chariots pulled by horses allowed the Aryans to conquer India. [cf. Fritz Stahl, 'The Vedas']

The rules for baking a cake are not written in flour and eggs.

The rules for coding this blog are not writtent in HTML, rather in something closer to English lol! The blog itself, is coded in HTML.

Rules for language, i.e. grammar, are conveyed in a less evolved language. The new language is a translation, from a larger system into something smaller and more sharply focused. A lot of ore becomes a small amount of sharp steel. With the translation, there is a commensurate increase in expended energy. Entropy decreases, but we're getting off track. My point is that both are intelligent systems, and that language is a translation tool for a realization within a finite system of intelligence.

It is a movement towards consciousness, towards realization. Much is lost.

The closer we move towards consciousness, the less we remember the darker warmer space that consciousness came from.

A poem is a rocket, shot from a black abyss, burning as it goes.

A poem burns in you as you read it. It burns behind you . . . and it burns out. You resume life. Our consciousness is so finite. We forget almost everything.

What if we were to take the journey the other way . . . away from consciousness, towards the dark? Towards total memory, which cannot, by definition be conscious.

At some point you have to turn back. She's Kali. The signs are there. Consciousness is a gift. It is what makes us, defines us. We need it to exist. Go to far, you perish.

So we don't go all the way to her. But we can get close enough to hear her! The survival of annihilation is addictive. Poetry is addictive.

The Muse was the one who inspired language. It was important to make offerings to her, to shoot a rocket back. An offering. A poem! 

Poems are Offerings! Throw your poem down a river in a bottle! Write it on bark on trees. Spell a wish out in pebbles, close to the tides. 

She's inspired by this, and returns gifts. She forgets nothing, knows everything.

Consciousness is the gift of forgetting!

The gift of forgetting encodes many meanings. What you forget determines what you know. Since all matter and all existence is connected, we potentially can fuse with the all, and know what she knows. But we won't have specific consciousness of it.

Krishna said to Arjuna, "Look into my mouth." What did Arjuna see? He saw all existence.

What you are not conscious of determines what you are conscious of. Consciousness is a narrowing of focus that allows for concentration. Forget the right things and you can know anything. The future. Any one's past.

Poetry led to divination. One could lose consciousness, dive down, search about, and come back up  gasping for air, clutching treasure.

Where did you get it?


I got it from Her! 

Good lad. You're learning.

True poets learn to sort the mumblings of a semi-conscious mind, deep in participation with something massive, and form it into sounds, then words, sometimes sentences. These early poems were oracular in nature, as nature.

The 'Muse Poems' are drum beats from nature. Some were poems right away. Others have been difficult to translate. They bump along like wounded genes, even though I've posted them here. I know in the end what seem like the worst poems now, will actually sing the most clearly. For now they're bits of stuff, calling itself poetry, a lot of words in many cases. Some fall back into the subconscious under the sheer weight of their own blundering noise. If only I had the right filter.

While they're above ground . . . I work on them. I read them. I stay true to their sound . . . I try to let them sing.

Cumbersome words have a habit of staying in one place . . . until they break in the current, and float downriver like everything else.

She swims beside me.

-:::-

Are they poems? You decide.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

So, . . . What's going on here?

'We notice that you are looking at a bunch of very random words and seeing this story in them! We even notice that in different versions of the same work the words are not the same.'

In the Muse Poems I am not seeing the words as words but hearing them as sound. I let the sounds run from one to another and let that remake the words that support the sequence.

Though written, they were drawn, literally, and in surrogate, as silhouettes of sound, as written words they were first read and spoken as sounds, never spelled.

The words thus thus taken as suggestions of sound sequence, not sound sense. As we assemble the words we are looking for a 'story', but that story is akin to toys in a doctor's office for the children to play with. The real reason is not to play with the games that we are there.  Well, yes, we are for that reason too!

This is the distraction of conscious mind. The rule, to make a sentence out of five random words, places an almost impossible overload on the conscious mind, which fights at this point to keep its leadership. However the battle's lost, because at this point the Muse takes over.

The original 'story' that we thought we were composing, is actually only one facet of the crystalline structure that's presented. Like any dream, it has other stories she wants to tell.

She's better at it. We let her speak.

I come to many many versions of the same poem, and love starting out again with the same sound sequence and letting it evolve a different way.

In that evolutionary process, I don't keep drafts. Drafts are the death of poetry. It all must be as fluid and surefooted as canoeing down a river. You don't go back. You can haul your boat back up to the top and read it over. But you don't put drafts  up and down the river and paddle back and forth between them.

Often I'lll post one of these works and know it needs resolution. Some tiny changes have to be made so that it can be read in this world.

The grammar 'she' uses is more direct, less complicated than ours. Those tiny differences are what I make up for in the edit.

The editing is based on a set of rules which I hew to totally.

Reading a poem enough times aloud, changes it. Just the reading changes it.

When I'm not happy with a poem, I refer back to the original, which to me is akin to a silhouetted tape recording, something that we took down as we arranged and spoke drawn words. I regard this as sound resulting from ritual activity . . or . . . vibration that is allowed to flow through ritual activity . . . as if the ritual itself creates some kind of lens, or imaging device.

It is very hard to make these poems hang together unless one does that. Sound flows most easily in a discussion. Here the unequivocal assignment of roles, as in dramatic role, is necessary, to give the sounds their sense. There has to be a setting, a stage, and a dramatic ritual to go with it.

The Greek dramas made sound out of sense, i.e. spelled words. that have meaning, but first stripped them, literally, of their their content, so as to place them where they could assume a grammatically correct relationship to each other. This is a kind of acrostic puzzle, impossible for conscious mind to do on its own. Language expurgates itself of sense, becomes a new sequence of sound, and then reassembles itself again towards grammatical sense one more.

Here is my water. It's all water.

Let the sound flow like water over the rocks, and let the content, i.e. meaning, flow  by like fish.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Madness


If I told you what my poetry is,
Will you go stark raving mad?
If I told you what my madness is,
Will you promise to keep it in bed?

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

04/26/2006 - The Sort Poems

Very early in the process before I realized I was on the trail of the Muse, I began experimenting with automatic writing in an effort to generate written content to put into the paintings.


As records of dance, the tracing works were already transcribing content. I wanted a direct connection, language. That meant words, or at very least, sounds that would become words.

At this time, my model was my subject. It was not myself, or the work, or the dialogue between myself, my model, and a third party, nor was it the long diatribes I later would record direct from the Muse herself. Each of these possibilities became a full flesh and blood voice, as on a Greek theater stage.

Here I'll detail an automatic writing experiment I conceived and carried out very early on in the project as a way to try to discover written content without having to compose lines myself.

The theory was simple. Give Mythos a chance to 'steal a bone', from Logos.

Imagine consciousness like a pack of wild dogs. They function as a group, think as a group, and contribute as a group.

Each has a role to play.

The lead male and female, are the leaders. The correct term is 'Alpha male' and 'Alpha female' but I refuse to go further with this mythology. It is out of date and short-sighted. 'A' is the first letter, yes. it also where written consciousness begins, but as I will show, it is not consciousness! Rather it is the beginning of Mythos being brought to consciousness.

Leaders keep everyone else in line, yet alone, they would starve.

Rank and file pack members have their own hierarchy. The so called "Gamma" dogs, male or female, are the lowest ranking. Again, I don't subscribe. Yes, they are ranked, and that ranking is only sociologically important for understanding pack dynamics.

Consciousness is a flame that is fed by unconsciousness. Our fire is stoked by a part of us that does not shine brightly.

Lead dogs have the job of drawing strength in the most effective way, from the pack. Like politicians, they judge pack direction, and pack sentiment. They get their ideas from the pack. And they co-ordinate the contributions made from rank and file, hopefully, to make sure everyone remains fed.

However, as in all places where power accrues, so does ego. So does brittleness. Ego breaks, and also  consciousness.

The only thing that doesn't break is a kind of consciousness that is everywhere, diffused throughout.

This is the objective of Tantric consciousness by the way. But that's another topic.

When ego, or Logos, or leadership, becomes confident, that base from which it drew its strength to begin with begins to steal from it. Logos is constantly undermined by Mythos.

So, following the pack analogy, when the so-called gamma dogs think they can get away with not sharing with the alpha male, they will.

The rank and file, as a group, represent Mythos, dark, and non-conscious, but possessing a massive thought base. Logos does not generate ideas, only processes them. Mythos possesses calculation, (don't confuse with mathematics - that's grammar). Mythos is more intelligent, but doesn't know it, lacks focus, yet (eventually) completes everything it starts.

How does one advertise to Mythos that one is creating an opportunity for it to express itself?

Live. That's the way we all do it. Live. Our Mythos doesn't need our help.

But, if we want to examine a portion of our Mythos, we may.

We provide that opportunity, quite simply, by telling it, through the lead dog. Post an announcement! Design an experiment that is clearly handicapped in favor of your gamma dogs! Here's your opportunity!

One would think that leadership would sense an ensuing revolt, and put an end to the process. Sometimes they do.

But not usually. Heads of companies, states, and the conscious wakeful part of our brains that we rev up with coffee, are famous for appearing to undermine their own leadership, because leadership, i.e. consciousness knows, that it has to face a daily test. And how better to face a test than to administrate a game that can be controlled, where outcome is not crucial!

So just like the CEO, who calls a holiday for company group-therapy, our Logos may be set up in charge of administrating an experiment where the massive abilities of the unconscious pack mind may excel.

I designed one such an experiment that had mixed results. It was done by sorting words, and I'll try to explain it here so you may try it yourself.

Have a subject walk up and down a staircase. It is ideal to use a real staircase. I began with the staircase that went three floors from my apartment to the sidewalk on Houston Street, but we retreated to a set of cardboards ruled off into squares. It was just too disruptive to the building to try and write poetry by climbing stairs. I was working with my ladies, and sometimes we did this after the tracing work, and they were not always properly dressed. Furthermore other tenants in the building would stop puzzled to look at the little magnetic words we were putting out on the staircase. So we retreated back to the apartment. But if you live in a house with a private staircase, trust me, stairs would be best. The exertion will further distract the 'alpha' dog from trying to interfere with his gamma pack.

Have your subject start each pass of the staircase holding a number of words on separate pieces of paper, magnetic fridge words, newspaper words, words written on index cards, it really doesn't matter. What is important is that the 'subject' not be familiar with the 'word pile'!

For beginners at this process I advise selecting at least two, the more the better, articles from the web, reproducing them larger, then cutting out words with a pair of scissors. Eliminate topical words that are too time and space specific. Eliminate extra articles of speech if they seem too numerous. Making the selection of what words to include is a bias that must be tolerated into such a short time-based experiment.

Ask your subject to visualize the staircase as a series of steps, moving from one extreme, through shades of grey, to another. Also ask them to pose a question, (have him or her keep this private), such as 'which word reminds me more of my father?', or, 'which word is more ridiculous?'. Any question at all where the answer may be viewed as relative, or non-categorical. 'Which word is blackest?', 'which word is happiest?' You've got the idea.

Now, it is very important to submit every word to this question when making the sort. In a way we're interviewing the pack of dogs. We're sizing them up, and ranking them.


No matter which words are placed on which steps, they are arrayed according to relative strength when faced with the private question.

If the staircase has sixteen steps, draw 16 words. Sort and relativize them along the stairs. Do this 5 or 7 times.

This part of the 'task' - that's the job for the King of the Pack. Logos, our executive, has a job to do! He's thrilled. He's in power! He gets to pick the teams! He organizes the game.

[Achilles held games during a break from battle during the Trojan War, after he realized that his ego had gotten the better of him, and celebrated a return to his 'karma' as a warrior. In some of the events that were held, he handicapped his clear athletic advantage over the others, but still won. In so doing he subjugated himself to his King, Agamemnon, who was by all rights a nasty and devious man. Nevertheless, Achilles did this with grace. He subsequently went into battle, Troy was conquered, Achilles lost his life. 'Everyone's gotta serve someone', Dylan. ]

To answer questions about each word, the Leader puts feelers out to his pack. Which of the two words, 'disk' or 'pencil' reminds me most of my father? (That's my question) Well, in my case, 'pencil' does. My Dad was an artist. The Leader answers with a quick bark to his nearby lead female. The word is placed on a step.

A distinction between 'tape' and 'keys' is harder. Both were important in my father's life. Instinctively he begins to consult Mythos. He looks around the room, at his pack, for signs of how to answer the question.

The subject, walks the stairs in passes, distributing, on average, one word per step. As words are laid down, they are turned over, so that the 'history' remains hidden. This is the crux of the matter! Make absolutely sure your subject knows this it will be done this way before starting out, else there'll be a conscious rebellion, e.g. 'But I want to compose! why else are we doing this!'

Conscious mind cannot remember which words end up on which step. That's the point. The Unconscious mind, i.e. the whole pack of dogs, can. The total mind is brilliant at speed math, at poetry, at rhyme, at chess. Logos is lousy at all of these things, but understands rules, grammar, process.

Consciousness is but a tiny flame illuminating only a tiny part of a very complex forest.

Invariably the leader will be perplexed by the results. It's not his day. But hey, it's just his touchy-feely off-site conference! So he declares lunch, and generously shares more bones.

This is where the gamma dogs conspire to do an end-run on their alpha leader. They spot an opportunity. Mythos salivates at the prospect of being able to openly express itself, without censorship from Logos!

Each word that came up faces initial categorization from the question, the moment with the Oracle, and then, based on the interpretation, is asked to sit into the array, and prioritize, grouping words together, perhaps two on one step, none on another, without looking at words from previous passes up or down the staircase.

After repeating the process 5 or 7 times, each stair will have on average of five or seven words which then may revealed and 'ordered' to form the lines, of a nascent poem.

Now comes the 'interpretive' part. The Alpha Male has noticed that the Gamma Dogs have been playing with his bones. He gets interested, and tries to influence the outcome.

Here the lead dog is needed. We need grammar. The words emerge from the process, but are unlinked by rules of language. Leadership organizes!

As part of 'interpretation', there needs to be only one grammar. The lead dog's good at grammar, so let him do it!

Nouns may 'flip' to become verbs.
Singular may become plural, and vice-versa.
Articles can 're-generate' themselves, like fingernails.
Suddenly there's language. The pack has spoken.

I conducted the experiment with four gals. AP, MS , RK, and Rainbow. I wrote then wrote a computer program to 'jostle' the words, (replacing the pack leader) so that the word order on each 'step' could be made into a random event, changed by pushing a button. I jostled them, like a gold-miner, panning for gold, late into the evening hours on my Houston Street computer.

Here's a portion of the first poem I wrote with Rainbow using this method:

Yes, know your studio,
come to capture some smoke.
Though they deal death,
Be here.
Weld scale metal
doing looms from mess,
pad to mad.
Was an empty glass so dead?
How mean with junk,
Take our old cigarettes in break.


In a blast I understood the mechanism of the mind, and how devices may be dreamed up at any time, to distract our too-focused executive. It was possible to allow the pack to dream at night.

Ah . . the rub . . .

a tidbit not offered by a playful hand
what's not edible, is left in sand.

My gals didn't like it. I didn't like it. It had a lousy taste.

It was mechanical. It took their input, but ground it up with the process. Yes it brought forth subject, but it was DOA. It lacked leavening, bread that wouldn't rise.

The picture I got was my picture, since I had created the process in the first place. I was flour and water and sugar, but no yeast. It felt I had taken my subjects, and put them in cages.

She didn't like having her words in cages! I was gaining Muse consciousness.

These feel like machine poems - there was no grace in the making. No one else was there, least of all my subject, once she had broken the words down into piles she felt done for the day. My gals were bored to tears. It resembled an industrial grade psychological test. Once I had satisfied my curiosity and saw that 'content' was all over the place, I realized it was time to move on.

After all why should it be difficult to write poetry? Why should a massive effort be engineered to help the process? Yes I had learned one way to distract Logos. But ritual does the same thing!

I learned if a situation is designed for Mythos to rush in and populate with projection and 'content', then it will. 

I learned that if a tidbit is offered, and held there consistently, equidistant from the grasp of the one being so tortured, the creature tires and turns away from it. Who wouldn't.

Poetry is the reason that poetry is written. We all need it. This wasn't it.

In fact this experiment scared the shit out of me, so I stopped.

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