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Lexical Shangri-La: Soul-vale of star-trail dreamscapes

Filed under: Art, Mythology, Writing — 15 Comments

June 3, 2019

Painting of Shangri-La (somewhere near Gangkhar Puensum) by Anna Montgomery

Orchids imbued with angelic authority
shiver a quantum flux thunder-clap
manifesting the Himalayan goddess

she unfurls, an unbounded poetry,
untamable dragon eyes spark
spiral galaxies of linguistic delight

She sighs her secrets
dancing melodies along a liminal threshold
azure moon-glow midnights of another dimension

This is a Quadrille for a wonderful prompt at dVerse that requires the word dragon and only 44 words total. This poem is a melded and greatly truncated version of two previous poems: Lexical Shangri-La: Here be dragons and Lexical Shangri-La: Prosody of Blue Poppies.

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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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Forming Mortals

Filed under: Art, Mythology, Personal, Philosophy — 14 Comments

June 5, 2016

Prometheus by Nicolas-Sébastien Adam, 1762 (Louvre) – Public Domain

here begins her
soliloquy in a minor key
a complex subtext
contortion of the plot

he shouts defense of natural law
impulses of his sexual proclivities
mistaking law for justice
longstanding psycho-logic trick

incestuous gods revenge
apocalypse of politics
the tragic Titan fallout
of an autoerotic tryst

 

*The title is from Goethe’s Prometheus: ‘Here sit I, forming mortals’

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Polaris Ascent

Filed under: History, Mythology, NaPoWriMo, Tribute — Leave a comment

April 25, 2016

Gryffin stag

Ice maiden descends
Second veil of heaven
Above damp earth
Below ephemeral sky

Land of deer crossing
Threshold of worlds
Mystical sky-horses
Stamp communion

Animal souls devoured
Ink trailed narcotic visions
Nurture strength, she is
Courted by death

At the pinnacle of her
Horsehair mitre, locus
Of regenerative power,
Panther and ram

Preside over quantum paradox
Epicenter of shamanic liberation
Larch kurgan, world tree root
Ecstatic winged snow leopard

Climbs a celestial path
Seductive gracile line
Drawn through the twist
Of antlers and anguish

Ak-Alakha River in Siberia, image by Kobsev at wikimedia commons, used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license

 

 

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  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.