PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

This poem is so important, and so compelling, that I cannot resist placing a third comment.

  Back in 1973, in freshman civics class, the semested project required of each student was a series of maps of one of three countries---Russia, and Germany, and a third I have forgotten---and each map had a particular focus:  historical sites, geographical terrain (like rivers and mountains), natural resources, major cities, major landmarks, etc.  The larger the country, the fewer of each item was required.  So I chose Russia, and though it was very vast, it fit well on my map paper, and the required items were easy to designate, once I learned the shape and outline of it.

   I write this in order to proceed to a metaphor about Patriciajj's work.  Within her vocation to poetry, she is a cosmologist.  Within her cosmology, she is a cartographer of the cosmos.  She tells me where its landmarks---the metaphorical and the metaphysical---happen to be.  Like my ten maps of Russia, but far more sophisticatedly and elegantly, her poems follow the same contours---but present the varieties of landmarks, according to whatever specificity the particular poem presents.

    In my freshman project, each map was required to have, in its lower right corner, a key---a box including one of those scales that shows the proportion of miles to inches, and also a list of what major symbols were used and what they represented.  The First Iris is the key to Patricia's cartography of the cosmos.  This poem acts as a key to her entire collection.  And the key to the key, and therefore to the entire body of her work, is the last four lines.  And, with aid of this key, we are better equipped to appreciate the gift that her poetry bestows on us---a cartographic image of the cosmos, with its most meaningful landmarks noted:  not the right ascention and declination of a nebula or a constellation, and not the best place from which to view the rings of Saturn; but something far more spiritual and therefore more profoundly vital to the existence we live in these earthbound bodies.  

    I believe that, like Stevens' poetry, Patricia's poetry will someday be taught academically, at the collegiate level, and that it will also be examined, interpreted, and debated by scholars and by student dissertations for degree.  And when some enterprising scholar writes the first textbook on her poems, the title is already given in this poem:  The Iris, The Stars, and The Universe.  

I apologize for making a second comment, but this poem certainly justifies it.

   I will call The First Iris a Traffic Circle.  On the Northeast side of the city in which I live, there is a point where several major thoroughfares come very near to each other; and, in the middle of this nearness, the County built a traffic circle, a perfectly circular road, with an unusual amount of entrance/exit ramps, and these connect to each of the major thoroughfares, as well as several local roads lined with small shops and shopping outlets.  And, right in the middle of the Traffic Circle, on a large green lawn like an island in all that asphalt, was a wonderful Pancake House, to which my Father always took us on Easter Mornings, as well as other special days.

   The First Iris is the Traffic Circle of Patricia's entire epic poem---even if that epic is, at yet, unfinished.  Both in its form, and in its subject matter, The First Iris gives us entrance ramps into the major thoroughfares that are her other poems, as well as entrance to various points in the poems at which we may "shop around" to savor the various verbal beauties that her poems provide.  In previous comments, I have referred to a reading strategy that was dependent upon Helen Vendler's analysis of Wallace Stevens' poetry.  I can now add the analogy of the Traffic Circle to that strategy---and my reading of Patricia's poems is now altered and improved, going forward, by The First Iris.  

The Poets, T. S. Eliot and Paul Valery, suggested that the purest poetry aspires to music; and that they derived this observation from the poems of Stephane Mallarme.  This was a very popular reading stratefy in the seventies during my undergrad years, so I was exposed to it quite frequently.  Also, more than one commentator compared John Milton's blank verse, especially in Paradise Lost, to the music of a massive pipe organ.  I was reminded of the musical analogies associated with these four poets while reading this latest entry in Patriciajj's vast, and always forward moving, epic of cosmology.  This paricular poem, The First Iris, is as highly structured and as eminently satisfying as a Fugue.  The theme is stated in the fourth through sixth lines---"a / symphony in one note":  just like a fugue has one theme, around which it weaves all of its variations.  In the fifth and sixth lines, she has given us not only a statement of her theme, but also told us how it will sound.  This poem . . . like a fugue . . . like the iris itself . . . is an unfolding.  This unfolding is demonstrated in subsequent lines:  "the same note / unwrapping the first  / blue iris . . ."  This is also what they call Metapoetry---or poetry about itself, a concept first heralded by Wallace Stevens and given, according to some commentators, its fullest expression by John Ashberry in the Self Portrait In A Convex Mirror.  

    Many classical fugues are allusive to earlier fugues (and, it seems, all of them hearken back to Bach); and this poem, like so many of Patricia's, is allusive to the other poets I have mentioned above.  This is because Poetry is a conversation---not only between the poet and reader, but between the poet and the Great Poets who preceeded her in time.  Patricia's poetic ancestry does not just go back to Vergil---which would certainly be a very respectable lineage; it goes back to the Great Poet of Israel, David himself---David who brought the cosmology of his time into the Psalms.  David would recognize Patricia as a kindred spirit; and, when they meet in Heaven, I do believe he will tell her so.  

     Ok, back to the poem.  It concludes by doubling back to its beginning (echo of T. S. Eliot, in East Coker?), back to the original theme to which it has brought the final variation---where she contains the vast inclusiveness of her cosmological perspective in an epic catalogue, greater even then Homer's and Vergil's because it asserts that "we are the iris, / the stars and / the universe" and that we are in the exciting moment of "just beginning."    When one looks up at the constellated sky, one can be discouraged by the vastness, or one can embrace it.  Patricia's poetry embraces it, claims it as a received gift and a venue, and then invites us to join her there.  I also believe that, whether intentional or not, she has, in this poem, given us a supreme reading strategy for our approach to the entire body of her poetry.  Her epic cosmology is, in its entirety, a vast and perpetually unfolding fugue, as this specific poem is.  Her cosmology is also a meta-poem---as much about itself as it is about her chosen subject matter.  In the sixth book of The Aeneid, Vergil gives us the myth of the Golden Bough, by which Aeneas enters the Underworld (which is, paradoxically, a kind of Overworld in which present meets past and future) to glimpse Glories that are reserved to the view of the Chosen Few.  In The First Iris, Patricia has given us her own Golden Bough and has disclosed to us the strategy for reading her entire epic, for receiving the glimpses it provides of great Cosmic Glories, and this initiates us into that rare company of the Chosen Few who, by reading (and, then, continually reading and remembering) her Poetry enter into its Cosmological perspective---which, through her words, is no longer distant (as in Ed Hubble's view of receding galaxies) but as close as the next breath, and as comforting as a long and dear friendship.

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Nourishment rides from the decay

of the past, old varigated leaves

tumble and crumbling leaves

wither beneath winter. 
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A green fire tip, another. Iris fur.

Anticipated, a miniature rising

from rubbled gold-beige gardens. 
Gone into green, into bloom

observed, often vased as still life.

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Lady A

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wither