PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

You hold the answer, and it burns hot in your heart.

Everything you write reinforces what the Stone God,

the Messanger of Origin, compells us to notice, to

grasp with passion, and to accept salvation as part

of the foundation that filters and finds itself again

and again through the beautiful paradox of a magic

so strong, and yet it is oftentimes hidden still, just

begging to belong as the friendly and intimate laws

it stands for ~ All this you communicate flawlessly.

October is by a wide margin, my favourite month… a time when ancient ancestral things creek upon the wind, and return to talk to us – reminding us of our ghosts and the past and the things that liquidate time… but return to us for a month, under moonlit nights – to reawaken and invigorate our sense of connection with all things past… like the secrets that rain down with the falling leaves … or the whispers that rise on the hallow sparks of a bonfire… or the sensation of ancient serpent gods dancing amid the fermented scent of a wet forest floor as the wind rustles… or the drifting scent of a neighbour’s pile of burning leaves, that tingles your brain stem – causing your animal soul to leap out from behind your eyes – fully winged, into an open crisp sky…

all in step with

the immeasurable,

the unknowable,

the ungraspable Light

Recycling that ever eternal question…

who will we be when

the world is done with us?

Ripples – forever going outward – on the original sea… the endless sea of time.

Only to curl back and remind us, come October – that we are home again.

~/~

As I have said elsewhere, the posting of a new poem from Patricia is an event; and I am very grateful to be able to comment on this one.

   Like Wallace Stevens, Patricia is very adroit at placing the poem's center of gravity in unexpected places, and in this poem she puts it in the last eight lines.  That cluster of lines is both the dynamic that empowers the poem's activity, and is the destination toward which that destiny is moving.  Like Stevens' poem, "Chaos In Motion And Not In Motion," Patricia's poem is full of movement---some of it very sweeping, and some of it subtle.  And this is an Autumn poem---but she does not make Autumn a tourist site (like many lesser poets would have done), she makes it a season that reflects the processes with which the soul is concerned.  

   And this is a key to Patricia's entire collection here on postpoems:  she is a Poet of the processes with which the soul is concerned.  Her Poetry explores and explicates these processes, without either disrupting them or dissecting them so that they lay in pieces, like an insect on a lab table.  She is assembling an epic (and, again, I borrow this metaphor from Stevens' poetic career), but not in a specifically sequential narrative like, say, the way Dante and John Milton wrote; but in various areas of the entire sequence as her inspiration moves her.  This method compels the reader who is fully engaged in her work to have to assemble the epic, and to account for what poems should be read in what order or sequence.  Her poetry is an epic of discovery in which the reader, is alert and astute, must participate.  

    They tell me that certain parts of Bach's keyboard literature, and that of his contemporaries', allows the performer some latitude in playing the left hand's part.  While the right hand melody is fixed and invariable, the left hand is free to improvise, provided certain minimum harmonic requirements are met in the performance.  Patricia's poetry functions this way:  the melody is the content of the poems, as she posts them one by one; the improvisation is the reader's in selecting which poems are read in what order.  

    I am embarrassed to admit that---in my adolescence and the first two years of my undergrad experience---I purposefully avoided Wallace Stevens' poetry.  I did not think an upper middle class lawyer, who pursued a long corporate career and was considered, in the last decade or so of that career, to be the nation's foremost expert on the laws regarding surety bonding---which was also the department he supervised at the Hartford.  That was "too" commonplace for me.  But, when persuaded---by a Poet visiting our campus---to look into his work, I was immediately amazed by the titles of his poems, and by the way those poems could be read in any sequence I cared to choose, and still made enormlus sense.  To have been led to Stevens' poem was a fortuitous serendipity in may ways---not least because he prepared me to be able to read and appreciate Patricia's poetry.  She is not an imitator of Stevens' poetry; but she writes the kind of poetry, the species of poetry, that he wrote---poetry at its highest degree of quality, and always, always!, a demonstration, or explication, or examination of those processes that concern the soul.  Reading Patricia's Poetry---always on its own terms, not on mine---is one of the great experiences of reading poetry, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity, and I am looking forward to more.