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Chromapoetica

Category: Metamodern

Flotsam of Serenity

Filed under: Metamodern — 7 Comments

February 23, 2022

for Eavan Boland

She was carried away by the sea
drawn to its abyssal depths
fire-soul’d daughter of Brigid
traveling to a lost land outside history

Carrying a sacred well of
inspiration and artistry
prophesying a feminist centering
her loss harkens to that first sorrow
Brigid keening in the surf
Exalted one’s lament invoking

The salt-stained hidden horizons
each poem ‘a figure in which
secret things confide’ – luminescent,
beached, midnight orphans of silence
humming from the cold and
their own desire to manifest,

To leave heartprints of awe
on beleaguered poets’ souls
scrying for a homeland

Shared with dVerse Poets Pub for Open Link Night.

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Inoperable Interface

Filed under: Metamodern — 7 Comments

November 16, 2020

Supercilious impulses flashing
keeps her achieving but alone
paper cut above the company

Operatic arias of accomplishments
form aureate clouds of immateriality
vaporous substances dissipate

Sesquipedalian sentences slinking
across reams of reports written
confound all but their creator

Impossibly immaculate mind
possibly perfect psychosis

Linked to dVerse Poets Pub.

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Virtue in Eternal Nature

Filed under: Allegory, History, Love, Metamodern, Mythology, Personal, Philosophy — 5 Comments

June 23, 2020

Arkansas River Near Leadville, CO. Credit: USFWS

I am the keeper
of limbic cryptoglyphs
of all immensely fragile
and beautiful things
surreptitious traumas
salt-stained sorrows

Locks and mementos
burdened by history
epitaphs written in
blood of my ancestors
incorporeal touchstones
to a fateful past

Singing bowl moans,
bones refracture,
and ashen losses unveil
all these men ever want to
holdfast are fantasies,
embroidered abstractions,
questlines in unfeeling,
lifeless worlds of murder

Strategies deployed
in a game of abuse
lost in an oubliette
of broken promises
each door and
window a deception,
opening to apathy,
with illusory joy
always out of reach

He alters the earth under me
reduces me to a thing, an idea –
angel trapped in a cycle of forgetting
cyborg glitched by programming
a seeker forever searching for a path –
mirror to his vanity that cannot
reflect enough glory to be cherished

Until the day I awoke
petrichor leading me
to the hallowed river –
it was conquered,
torn asunder in war
dam near stole
its roaring fury

My peripatetic soul
nurtures its wilderness,
its forward motion
flowing into a future
heartbeats riverside
snow-packed source
from the Rockies
to its wide-mouth
confluence and,
eventually, to the sea

Linked to dVerse Poet’s Pub.

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Lyra: Orpheus’ Lament

Filed under: Love, Metamodern, Mythology — 12 Comments

April 16, 2020

NASA, ESA, and C. Robert O’Dell (Vanderbilt University) used by permission under CC 4.0

Vows echo hollow in the night sky
my lyre cast into the heavens
paeon twisted lachrymose
music unraveled in star trail fragments
a leitmotif of grief

Was it the uplift of hope
or my fallen eagle of faith
that lost you, my beloved?
our reunion assured
until I could not look away

From my bright star,
my soul’s hearth
doomed to an eternity apart
colliding underworld horrors
in interstellar space

The ring upon your finger
now a beacon and an effigy
shattered nebula of my love’s promise
tainted by the poison of another
constellations of sorrow dismember me

Envelop my sight
cleave my joyous heart
rob my arms of succor
my feet of the path back to you
muses bury my bones

and silence our song

Linked to dVerse Poet’s Pub.

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Rain

Filed under: Art, Metamodern, Personal, Tribute — 5 Comments

May 8, 2019

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Miniature in her picture book
there before her writ large
in the poor light of Tate Britain
as she’d stepped in from the rain
along the Thames

He transformed experience into art
Graham-Dixon led her to expect a transcendence
she was incapable of seeing through Rain
drowned by her own pedestrian concerns
that reclaimed anorexia as a
decadent destruction by control

London had smashed her brother in those
limbo years as it was threatening to crush her
under the weight of PTSD’s shock and awe
campaign of vice gripping horrors
on constant display

Could Hodgkin really remake the world?
Arrogate to himself the powers of divinity
to save her suffocating soul
from the pounding rain
and dark halls of art’s tomb?

The intimacy was unbearable –
all British glower in the half-light
of Turner’s strained, transformative glow
She was pushing against the spring
of a bear trap, his tightly wound
violence of indifference and passivity,
trying to find the romance to transmute
the artist into an avenging demigod

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This is no time for poetry

Filed under: Metamodern — 15 Comments

November 9, 2017

Felipe II offers Prince Fernando to Victory by Titian, c. 1572–1575

ontological paradoxes inscribe visions
Twombly’s cryptographic calligraphy
evoking mythic themes accentuated

by lyric eruptions of color
poetic inquiries that do
not bend to the mind’s

demands for conceptual clarity
anathema to academic dissection
Lepanto battle of induction

and deduction amidst a
conceptual sea of symbols
royal, military, and holy powers

flotsam and jetsam
fragile lives of men
afloat in moral ambiguity

Titian’s angel of victory
a melting wax figure
engulfed in a watery grave

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• Postmodernism

  Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.

• Robert Anton Wilson

  Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

• Witold Gombrowicz

  Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke

• 

  I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.

• Gustav Flaubert

  Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

• Dušan “Charles” Simić

  Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

• Monique Wittig

  Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.

• W.S. Merwin

  All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible

• Thomas Aquinas

  Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.