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Chromapoetica

Category: Mythology

Creation

Filed under: Art, Love, Mythology — 2 Comments

September 1, 2013

Seraphina (Oil, mixed media 2013)

within this country of perpetual surprise
she inhabits the seven storied house

atop the mountain she writes our fates
illuminated pages in her golden notebook

stepping from the root of the cosmic tree
guiding souls into the world

she invested painting with the power
to circumscribe my time

a metronome marking the elaborate
science of observation, the creation
of self, phrasing, without pause,

these excruciating and ecstatic moments
in brushstrokes saturated with the
pathos of a portrait in blue

my transgression from tradition
metalanguage of spontaneity,
inspired inscriptions

perhaps the mother of cradles,
beside this lake of milk,
will open the portal of being

breathe life into another
fulfilling my desire to embody

Ajysyt, birth giver,
cup gently your warm hands,
form an offering bowl

Tags: poetry

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Taiga! Taiga! (In the forest of our night)

Filed under: Mythology — 23 Comments

June 27, 2013

wolverine

I dreamt the animals
brought forth each character
I sang the incantations
brought forth your stories
I tamed the mountain
brought forth every peak
I courted the moon
brought forth her light

solitary trickster
intelligent fool
my antics amuse
my ferocity quickens
my predator’s blood,
front facing eyes echo
your passions and appetites

I contain no remorse
but birth it
I show no mercy
but inspire it
I will nothing . . .
create and destroy
give and negate
in the hidden shrine
of the Taiga

tearing caribou flesh
hunting the weak
hunting the strong
I am the shaman
of the North

carrion feeder
I fight the bear
I fight the wolves
I traverse the cold
immense miles of cold
silent ice worlds
disturbed only by
the terrible cries
of this impulsive creature

Kuekuatsheu
kway-kwah-choo
Carcajou
koo-a-koo-ott-soo
say my name in
my presence
let your tongue
raise your voice to
the northern lights

within the shaking tent
we contact the spirits
my Innu atanukanas
sing songs of a people
sing songs of everything
I brought into being

Note: This poem was written in response to Victoria’s prompt at dVerse Poets Pub on anaphora poems and utilizes anaphora and epiphora. The title and poem refer to a very famous poem, The Tyger!, by William Blake.

It was relinked over a decade later for another dVerse Poets Pub prompt on forests. Please join us!

Tags: poetry

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Floralia: De rerum natura

Filed under: Art, Love, Mythology, Philosophy, Tribute — 19 Comments

April 5, 2013

Flora (detail from Primavera) Botticelli

‘Yea, in the very moment of possessing,
Surges the heat of lovers to and fro,
Restive, uncertain; and they cannot fix
On what to first enjoy with eyes and hands.
The parts they sought for or those they squeeze so tight’*

Gentle western wind enamored of her purity
Caught swirling in a fury of passion
Overtaking the nymph of Elysian fields

Perianths cascading from her lips
Dew of heaven, conceived in the womb of earth
Meadows bloom with myriad colors where there was but one

Ephemeral four petal blue flower of alchemy, mystic rose
Eros embraced in the mandala of calyx and corolla
Only her scent remains

Insufflation of Spring’s promise
Bounty, beauty and union abound
Gifts of the goddess framing our pleasure

Notes: *From Of The Nature of Things, by [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius (written in the 1st Century BC) Translator: William Ellery Leonard

Tags: poetry

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Brush of Destruction: Invisible Eclipse

Filed under: Art, Love, Mythology — 19 Comments

April 3, 2013

Nine Dragons by Chen Rong, 12th Century

for Dave

In a time when words were like magic,
scintilla, igniting the soul’s spark,
when a person could become an animal
and an animal could shape shift into a man

the Self was an ever changing avatar,
evanescent, unfolding in the storm clouds
hidden in the firestick, a manifested paradox,
alchemical fantasy, a secret backbone,

I ruled the underworld, black as void
my blue flamed breath singeing flesh from skulls
ashen harbinger of death, bearer of detritus,
my treasures of regeneration well-guarded

my dragon form forged star glittering,
damp fiery, cold spirit in the heart
of a supermassive black hole, abyssal afrit,

my wisdom grew over millennia until
one drop of my blood
could transmute fragile flesh
into invincible skin

Notes: This piece is now linked to Meeting the Bar: Atmosphere at dVerse Poets Pub. When writing this poem I wanted to create a feeling of awe, fear, psychological tension, and transformation. To accomplish this I used diction that emphasizes these qualities as well as words that may not be as familiar to readers. My intent was for this exotic language to allow the reader to experience the unknown in the process of engaging the poem. In addition, the setting is darker and spans a great deal of time. Obviously, the environment is influenced by myth and displays a fantastical world. Using a first person persona and an authoritative voice adds to the incantatory feeling of the work which I felt would contribute to a sense of awe. Please let me know your thoughts and feelings about atmosphere and the tools that contribute or detract from it within this work.

Tags: poetry

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Monotype

Filed under: Art, Love, Mythology, Philosophy, Science, Tribute — 56 Comments

March 4, 2013

Dave Yust Chromaxiologic Inclusion 27-6 1/1 2006

difficult unity of inclusion
contrasts the easy unity
of exclusion, a priori
philosophical stance

equiluminous color
makes visible the unseen,
unobservable phenomena
between something & nothing

broken catenary curves,
inextensible cable
suspended from two points,
a disbelief, a distraction

interplay of geometric
& biomorphic imagery:
complexity & contradiction
spontaneity & continuity

a process of inclusion
chromaxiologic exploration
quick shift in spacetime
to truncate thought

printmaking exemplification
fruitful liberation gained in
finding purpose through chromaphilia,
establishing relationships

Tags: poetry

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• Denise Levertov

  When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.

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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

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  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.