PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

First, this poem demonstrates that the Poet---postpoems' best Poet in my opinion---manages Paradox as well as she manages and demonstrates Cosmology.  "Sheet of red madness" and "babbling sorrow" become "flowering nignt and revolving temple."  If the poem stopped at that stanza, it would be magnificent.  But that stanza is only the beginning of its grandeur.  "Vastness within vastness":  that is her Cosmology speaking again, and that phrase, too, offers a paradox.  "Drops of eternity in the wilderness of deep living" describes an almost indescribable experience that  some of us, not all but some, are privileged to experience:  this is one of her most Eliotic lines, and alludes (whether that was her intention or not) to the sound of Eliot's great masterpiece, Four Quartets.  "Newly minted-stars spill" from "a well of legends":  the literalist would say, "No, they come out of nebulae," but she is speaking about the stars that the ancient Poets codified into constellations.  And those stars not only admit her, but lift her up, to "their place of remembering":  at this point, her Cosmology intersects with our culture's two processes of remembering---Poetry and History.  And the rest of that stanza pours forth four (yes, count'em, four) paradoxes.  This is her equivalent of the epic catalogue:  only instead of the names of characters and ships, she names cosmic paradoxes---which are far more resonant than the names of characters and ships.  And then that final stanza presents the poem's final paradox, and the reader feels---knows---that this poem has effected a personal change upon the reader.  I am not exactly the same person that I was before I read this poem.  I have had that experience, of feeling a palpable change, only rarely, and usually with Faith or with Poetry.  And with the latter, three standout experience were what I call my October revolutions:  in 1975, realizing I wanted to be a poet; in 1976, reading The Waste Land for the first time; in 1978, reading selections from Wallace Stevens' poetry for the first time.  This poem's verbal power creates, for me, another October revolution, but in January (also a sigificant month for me).  And, as also with the great classical Poets of whom she is one, Patriciajj's posting of a new poem is an Event; an excursion into Cosmology; and a demonstration of the finest, most resonant, most piercing poetic art I have ever encountered on postpoems.  I have been reading poetry for almost forty-eight years.  Sometimes I become weary of some of it, and some of it becomes tiresome.  But the Poetry of Patriciajj transforms me back, and carries me back, to that joyous sense of those October revolutions, as I call them:  those moments when the verve of Poetry rises before my reading eyes and reminds me that, despite the weariness caused by poseus, Poetry is still with us, still possible, still available.  It is like watching a stormy night's clouds dissipate into clearness, and the stars shining right where they are supposed to be; always there, unchanged by a little local cloudiness.  Reading this poem, in a month that has been very significant for me (both in 2021 and in years past), has been a vivifying event:  in the midst of this medical affliction that seems determined to continue my physical deterioration, my soul has been uplifted into the realms of Pure Poetry by this magnificent Poem, composed and posted by postpoems' Greatest.  Any one of her poems can "knock it out of the park," as the saying goes.  But what I call her centerpiece poems (and I am convinced this poem is one of them) "knocks it into" the realms of Theology and Cosmology, where her verbal skill strolls not as a visitor or tourist, but as a long time resident.  And I will close with this note to future grad students who are studying her poetry, and mining it for topics for their dissertations:  these poems will demand an expansion of your analytical language; they will compel you to reach beyond your expectations; and when you face that final moment of your disseration process, the defense of it before your examining committee, you should know that, although the committee members may not admit it, they are as overwhelmed by the beauty of Patriciajj's Poetry as you are.  And that will give you a useful advantage in your defense of your dissertation, the way her Poetry gives her readers a useful advantage in their defense against the vagaries and reverses that existence sometimes brings, as she shows us, through her Poetry and its Cosmology, that life means more than mere existence, and the Universe means more than a mere phenomenon of nature.

For some reason I read the last two verses aloud - miraculous sounds, rhythms lost when read silent. Afuture, I will read you out loud as poetry is meant to be heard. Fav line: "...though we/pretend to be blind/in this game of forgetting." Nice. ~S~