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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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Putrefaction plié

Filed under: Allegory, Art, History, Philosophy, Writing — 20 Comments

June 24, 2013

dancing with death

exabyte choruses of jumbled debris
detritus and hubris, humility and dignity
Mao’s last dancer lifting Pol Pot corpses
in a ballet of ideologies as
art crumbles into propaganda

song lyrics and lyrical nightmares
conspire to create vistas of twisted
surrealist mindscapes, beautiful disease
even Charles and Ray fell prey
in a day/night haze of stalled flight

Isaiah Berlin argues value pluralism
beating a drum in honor of human tragedy
young pioneers of socialist realism dancing
immortalized with graphic clarity
denouncing enemies of the state
of a unified ego / positive freedom
collapses under the weight of oppression

a conscious self-mastery schoolmistress
raps her knuckles in the theater of mind/war
constructing corrective labor camps for the
multiplicity which refuses to comply with
posted slogans knowing the flogging will
continue until morale improves

an undecayable, sainted body
arises in a self-perpetuating
cult of personality,
becomes the god
birthing scribes who

indoctrinate the newly formed history
solidify the moral superiority
of the family of origin
in an attempt to root out the shame
of a peasant, anti-intellectual upbringing

there’s no escape
from the fatherland
cellular memories,
spinning ballerina delusions,
brought about by behavioral epigenetics
while vertigo overwhelms the
perpetually still dancer

Tags: poetry

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Linguistic Indolence (Disconcerting Idioms)

Filed under: Art, Postmodern, Writing — 20 Comments

June 5, 2013

Richard Diebenkorn – Berkeley #57

incendiary convergence, blood-dark magnolia
caught in a wounded harvesting, profound incursion,
an exile – suicide volition in a fading Arcadia

oscillating secrets, pleasure traversal
dreaming plunge on a transparent, violet night
blue smoke ushers a vestigial solemnity

(the text intervenes –
a mutilation which language
supports and denounces*)

cavernous figurations, internal adorations
aesthetic conceptions underscoring
an invented landscape

elegant silence of seclusion’s verdancy
ephemeral horizon, an evasive, mirrored shore-line

inclination, reflection, formidable curiosity
abstraction of Diebenkorn’s expressive,
succulent brush-strokes

dancing exclamations of luminosity
hieroglyphs of absence enabling
an atmosphere of poetic contingency

glistering disquisitions, light echoes – shadow colors
bewitching lexicons, internal archways of lavish resemblances
banished beauty, castles built on unbounded mists

pale branches atop evasive stones, incommensurate
reaching toward scorched estuaries

impenetrable worlds of hearth ash
remains of an intense art

painted mountains, the apparent vanguards,
figurative defacements of a gestating destiny

* from Anne-Marie Albiach’s The Wasting Away “of Chance”
posted for Charles Miller’s dVerse prompt Meeting the Bar: Form for All and was created following a random method of word selection (including allowing another poet to choose words) from multiple texts and then arranging them poetically. The texts include the complete novels of Jane Austen, Women’s Poetry in France 1965-1995 translated by Michael Bishop, Possession by A.S. Byatt, American Hybrid A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, Gerhard Richter Paintings from Private Collections, and Richard Diebenkorn The Berkeley Years 1953-1966. Please join us at dVerse Poets Pub.

Tags: experimental poetry, 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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• 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

• 

  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.