PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I do not think I have ever come across you until tonight. Even though you've been a member for 20 years, you are absolutely a breath of fresh air to me!!! This is an amazing write   "Truth...in madness"   I fear us poets are all just a wee bit mad/insane/deeply disturbed. I shall keep checking out your work!

Just breathtakingly gorgeous! Hugss 

One of my personal delights on postpoems is to comment on Patriciajj's poetry.  I compare this to the interpretive work done by a minor poet, Samuel F. Morse, on the poetry of Wallace Stevens.  Some of Morse's conclusions were overturned later on; but so much of the later work was built on his foundations.  Morse had the privilege of watching the Stevens canon expand before his eyes---an experience which, as an undergrad, I envied; and which Patricia's work has given me at this late stage of my life.  That is why I say, repeatedly, that the posting of a poem by Patricia is an event.  She is one of the pillars of postpoems, and she is building---like Stevens and Eliot---a great epic which will be more than the sum of its parts.

  This particular poem is a little different than what I am used to reading from her; and I do not write that pejoratively---because different is not pejorative.  I must borrow---from Mallarme, Valery, and Eliot among others---the comparison of poetry to music.  Keeping in mind that this poem is part of her overall canon, difference is functional---the way that the various movements of the symphonic form, or of a sonata, are different.  They tell me that, while writing his epic poem, The Aeneid, Vergil wrote different parts of it not in chronological order, but as the mood struck or suited him, and then he assembled the various parts into the version we have now (and still it was not completed).  I think this is how Patricia's epic is developing:  she does not start writing at point A, then on to B, then C; she writes as her soul's moods direct, in the way that Vergil did.  This similarity to his method increases my admiration of her.

    The poem begins in Autumn which, in my vicinity, is always a season of dramatic change; a season that has always seemed to me to be more spiritual than Summer, and I presume that she has experienced this effect as well.  As the poem moves through its process, we find two centers of gravity---in the lines "That's the promise / of believing," and then, "all is well."  The first of these two is a promise given only for the act of believing; which is, in the moment of believing, the supreme experience; but the result of that believing is that "all is well."  When we believe, we place faith in something greater than ourselves; and the placement of that faith leads to the final, and most desirable state of being, when and where all becomes well, so that believing is satisfied by the wellness of its existence and the environment in which that existence thrives.  And between the soul's believing, and the bestowal of wellness upon the believing soul, Truth reveals itself always present, in light and darkness, in reason and madness; and its function is to reveal all that Love is.

    The Poet mentions "a vain / blink in the void" and then declares it fine, and that it is acceptible.  But something else, something more glorious, is being transacted bu that vain blink in the void.  I believe---although I am unwilling to engage in a debate over it---that human beings are the sole consciousness of the Cosmos; and, although we are part of it, are supreme calling within it is to explain it to ourselves, and therefore to itself.  And the sum total of our explanation may very well seem like a vain blink in the void.  Just as we occupy a relatively small planet in orbit around a minor star that happens to occupy a remote position at the edge of our galaxy's disk-like shape; like a dust mote on the edge of a frisbee.  Because we, as human beings, are given to the sin of Pride, we have been placed at the edge of things (on the galactic scale); but from that position, which eliminates all pride of place and position, our vain blink in the void continues to assemble the supreme explanation of the Cosmos to ourselves and itself.  What happens when we reach the conclusion of our explaining?  The Cosmos will grant us an even more transcendent vision or version of itself; the spiritual version, perhaps.  Poets---especially those who command the verbal and poetic stature of Vergil and Patriciajj---will be responsible to complete the explanation, and then to guide us into the next level that opens up on the completion of that explanation.  That is why this poem, and the Poet, can say, "that's fine / I'll take it / all is well."

   In Jeremiah 29:11, God declares to the prophet that the nature of God's thoughts toward us are thoughts of peace, to bring us to an expected end.  I think God has built this into the Cosmos that we are explaining to ourselves and itself.  (Proverbs 25:2 tells us that part of God's glory is to conceal things for us to find out; and that is the foundation of the Cosmic explanation that are Poets are putting together.)

    Wat back in 1978---at least, I think it was summer of 1978---I read an essay by the poet Diane Wakoski in which she discussed a poem by Stevens (I think it was "Peter Quince At The Clavier"), in which . . . as I remember . . . she said that one must notice all the nuances, of the poem; not just reading face value, but also in between the lines and around their contours.  This is also a good reading strategy for reading Patricia's Poetry---as she continues her epic, and lifelong, participation in the Poetic explanation of the Cosmos to us, her readers, and to itself as well.