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Tag Archive: sestina

Whistler (Bird Woman)

Filed under: Art, Philosophy, Tribute, Writing — 73 Comments

September 22, 2011

Linked to dVerse Sestina challenge http://dversepoets.com/2011/09/22/formforall-sestina-and-its-variations/

Torn Anna Montgomery 2011 Oil on Board

(Dedicated to A.S. Byatt, all quotes are from her lips or her books, some of the poem comes from an Artist Statement I wrote for a solo show in 2005)

Whistler (click to hear the poem read)

Her ‘greatest terror which is simply domesticity’ with its denial of liberty
Struggling with feminism: ‘their language, like their bodies, was a dreadful hybrid’
Tyranny was a death sentence, via lethal injection, to her volition
For one who’s ‘passionately interested in language’, her display monumentally erudite
An engagement in the broader world, in an expansive psyche
Within her I recognize genius, incandescent purpose, need, here is my encomia

Prizes line up to offer formal encomia
Each reinforcing and elaborating her intellectual liberty
‘I like to write about people who think, to whom thinking is as important and exciting (and painful) as sex or eating’ in full embrace of psyche
Admitting ‘writing is always so dangerous. It’s very destructive.’ a paradoxical hybrid
A concatenation of zoology, myth, dystopia, psychology, art, politics, ethics truly erudite
Displaying all the passions of mind within her volition

‘She would give anything for a child and had duly given birth to a monster’, this volition
A half-hedgehog half-boy, an ugly creature, hardly her desired encomia
Whom she fed just the same, coddled, and loved for his mind, agile and erudite
Suckling on, then weaned, speaking the half-breed language of liberty
Embracing his role as an evolutionary hybrid
Evolving, Eros to Psyche

‘Structures of authority, of persecution, of hierarchy’ excised from the psyche
All these things ‘which led to oppression’ in a great caving of volition
Were cast aside, power a twisted, engineered hybrid
He’s ‘a naturally pessimistic animal’ leery of encomia
Who set out into the world to define his liberty
Circumnavigating, investigating, experiencing all distilled to become more erudite

Encountering Whistlers, bird women, their ‘feather words and skin words grown into each other’ his sight is erudite
Singing and whistling in a cacophony emitting from the dual psyche
They had been banished, pariah, for their desire and seizing of liberty
Each act of will now a strained volition
‘We wanted the speed and danger of the wind’ the Artic Tern sang our encomia
Twinning dualities longing to be whole or at least embrace multiplicity, no vile hybrid

I hear this echo in in my painting language, a hybrid
Where I spin ambiguity and chaos in a sphere of erudite
Possibilities, pluralism, and paradox not garnering encomia
But pain, confusion, a language unclear, but of the psyche
Birthed from my own volition
An unshackled liberty

Encomium is not a purpose for art, it is a bastard hybrid
Liberty oppressed to the sick purpose of an erudite
Psyche that panders to ambition’s deadly volition

Tags: poetry, sestina

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