PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

The last two stanzas stole my heart! Beautifully rendered. Hugss 

Like your other poems, and like all the great poems in literature (whether Eastern or Western) this poem does not disclose all of its perspectives on the first reading.  It evolves on subsequent readings---because it is a living poem, rather than a verbal relic.  This is what separates your work from the fluff and lint that is so prevalent on internet poetry sites.  This sense of the poem---of your poems---as living, vital, and even vivacious.  Earlier today, I read an essay which began with the rhetorical question---why does Wallace Stevens' early poems still engage us, more than a century after he first published them?  The same question will someday be applied to your poetry; and the same answer will be returned:  because, the best of poems achieve a kind of life among us, as yours definitely do.

A theme that strikes me with your poetry

is coming to know, mirrored against what

already knows itself, lost and forgotten,

but a glimmer of hope rises from the stream

sparkling forth from a fountain of truth.

When I first wanted to become a Poet---and that was back in Autumn, 1975---I was fascinated by the way that John Milton (whose poetry I began to study at the time) brought about a merger of poetry's beauty, theology's faith, and cosmology's grandeur.  And since those early days that, to me, has always been the supreme model of what Poetry is.  I was fascinated to find the same aspects in Wallace Stevens and Vergil.  The Cosmos is an always developing process, and a poetic cosmology must take that into account and, in the best cases, major upon it.  

   Having been "spoiled," (so to speak; my parents used that term to describe my childhood and adolescent expectations) by Vergil and Stevens, I am always amazed, delighted, and fascinated---as if I were back in 1975-76 again---by the Poetry of Patriciajj.  As an undergrad, one of my great frustrations was the obvious inability to watch the unfolding, or the construction, of the poetic visions and perspective of Vergil and Stevens, because their work must be approached as a finished accomplishment.  But, forty-two years after I left the undergrad environment, I have been granted the privilege of watching the unfolding and construction of a literary---yes literary---accomplishment:  Patriciajj's.  And I, like any of her present readers, have a privileged position that future scholars of her completed work will not have, and will envy:  to see the development and evolution of her poetic cosmology.  I think of Vergil on his ancestral farm; or of Stevens, at his desk at the Hartford, or in his writing room on the second floor of his home on Westerly Terrace; but I cannot watch the gathering of their words into poems.  But as Patricia consistently posts her poems, I watch with a sense of awe as she expands her vision, and I see in actual real time what Eliot described when he wrote about the way poems enter the literary canon and modify it each and every time.  

   Following Helen Vendler's reading strategies for Stevens' poems, I have constomarily attempted to locate the individual centers of gravity in each of Patricia's poems on which I posted a comment.  I will not do that here, because this poem---according to her design for it---contains what seems to me to be the center of gravity of her entire collection:  the final fourteen lines.  In that lines, like some of Milton's grandest poetry, she defines the Creator (by the brilliant metonomy of a Heart---which, in our culture, is the seat of emotions, especially of Love), and she defines us and our implied paraodoxical as being both never-ending and complete.  

    This poem is too large, in its consistently expanding perspective, to be summarized in a single comment (warning to future scholars of her Poetry:  she is going to make you work at your research, but it wil be worth it).  But because that is what we do in these comments, and because I want to challenge those future grad students, I will suggest that this poem is very much like Milton's invocations to the muse in Paradise Lost (books 1, 7, and 9), and his description of his poem as an "adventurous song."  This poem is Patricia's adventurous song; and all of her poems form, in their expanding totality, her adventurous song.  Lke Vergil working on The Aeneid, she may compose different parts of the song's anatomy at different times, and perhaps even out of the sequential order that will ultimately be known by future readers and scholars.  But her song is adventurous, and, unlike Milton, she invites us to participate in the adventure with her.  We see that in her subtle variations in her use of first and second person address within the poem.  She does this so deftly, with such smoothness, that I (admittedly) did not catch it at first.  One has to watch Patricia's verbal modulations and variations carefully.  

    Moses didn't make it to the Promised Land, but he was given the privilege of seeing its broad contours from Mount Pisgah.  I might compare my perspective to Pisgah (not comparing myself to Moses, but the view at postpoems to Pisgah):  I doubt I will see the completion of Patriciajj's poetic cosmology, but I can already see its contours.  And its contours are mighty impressive.  And, to paraphrase the last line from Stevens' poem, "Final Soliloquy . . .", I can say, about this my Pisgah view of Patricia's poems, " . . . being there . . . is enough."

A clear description of nature and its near twin, art expressed. A living gem, facits growing with each newly created sound as image, color as verse, or voice as mind. Nice concept to contemplate.

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~A~
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