PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

a spiritual basking in words,a city in the sky

where eagles soar and we never die

Not heavy here or near the happenstances of here. Here is natural analog with no mirth; outted intrinsic lists merge human to the ecosystems of enlightenment. These lines are example pointing the purgatoried toward a best lit future. This is the 14th blackbird in owl feathers. A coin with a third side triangulating truth, righteousness, and common sense. God is her shadow, her insurer. Faith is the theme here and in all her work. It is the mirror not the reflection.  It's a kind of in your face sermon with humanity locked between the lines. "...an avalanche of sky and raw truth."
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~S~
 

In her excellent book, Words Chosen Out Of Desire, the great critic and interpreter of Wallace Stevens, Helen Vendler, offers some reading strategies for those who (like me in 1982, when I first read her work) had started with some difficulty deceiphering his poems.  I am going to try to use a couple of them here; not because Patriciajj is difficult, but because her greatness exceeds the usual comment of saying "Great write."  I will not minimize any poem of hers by saying that.

   Like Stevens, her titles do not fully disclose their subjects.  And, like Stevens, the centers of gravity of her poems are never right at the beginning.  The poem expects you to work your way through it.  And what the Poet Dara Weir told me, in October, 1978, about Stevens applies equally to Patriciajj:  The Poet "makes you work, but pays you back for the effort" (Dara's words to me in the quotes).  I have never found that to fail in regard to Pop Stevens; and I have, equally, never found it to fail in regard to Patriciajj.

    Helen Vendler also said that Stevens illustrated his emotion in the largest or broadest possible terms.  Patriciajj does not just write "I am feeling" [this or that] "today."  She sometimes illustrates the poem's emotions on a cosmic scale.

    Another similarity to Stevens, and to Eliot in his early poems, she uses weather tropes, particularly in this poem, to metaphorize the processes that the poem is describing. 

    Like a binary star system, the poem has two centers of gravity, and they orbit each other:  the second stanza, and the last four lines.  When you locate the center(s) of gravity in one of her poems, then you can begin to observe the poem, properly, like an astronomer.  You can catch its light in the barrel of your telescope (whether you are on Mount Palomar or in a suburban backyard, its shimering light is the same), but it will always, ultimately, remain as part of the constellation of her entire collection---a constellation which expands and grows more profound with each poem she adds to it. 

    Part of a Poet's greatness is when poems of that Poet remind readers of other Poets' work:  Stevens reminds some readers of John Keats; Eliot, of Paul Valery; and both remind some readers of Mallarme.  When I read Patriciajj, I think primarily of Stevens, and of Eliot---and they help me to locate the right ascension and declination of the star of her greatness.  Just as Hubble and Humason measured the velocity of galaxies by comparing their Doppler shifts to other galaxies', so the comparison of Patriciajj's poems to other Poets' poems helps us to trace her velocity.  I believe she is postpoems' greatest Poet:  I have believed this for over a year, and I have seen nothing---from her, or from any other commentor on her poems---to dissuade me from that assertion.  To read her is to have an expectation of excellence that she never, ever, has disappointed.  And, to repeat Dara's words from over four decades ago, Patriciajj's Poems make you work, and pay you back for the effort.  And to paraphrase Pound's words about Eliot in 1965:  READ HER.