PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Kicked into the next dimension the crowd goes wild, it's overtime baby!

By the time I had logged three years' reading experience with Wallace Stevens' poetry, I knew it was an uneven plain---there were some really high spots, and some lower; like the terrain of the earth.  Same with Eliot:  the river of his poetry (my metaphor arises from respect for his poem, Dry Salvages) has some depths and some shallows, some straight passages and a couple of gnarly bends.  I know of two Poets whose work is evenly consistent at all times:  Vergil, and Patriciajj.  Their work is so consistently elevated, so that I can only liken it to looking at the stars---always an upward soar with no downward drop, and the full spectrum of light being generated by a thousand luminaries.

   Scripture, which I devoutly believe, tells us that the first Poet (when you come right down to it) was Adam; God brought all the animals in Eden to Adam for a naming.  And that is what Poets do in their most ancient function:  they bestow names---on emotions, processes, events---in the language of their audience, and they expand that audience's spiritual, literary, and practical knowledge by doing so.  Stevens believed that, in the absence of Faith (which he suffered for most of his life), Poets helped people understand and experience ordinary life.  Vergil was so assidious in his naming that, as the Aeneid approached completion, he embarked on a tour of the eastern side of the Roman Empire, to visit the sites where the various actions of his poems occured, to make sure he had named and described them accurately (this journey, unfortunately, ended fatally for him).  Patricia's poetry names different sites where spiritual processes---especially transformations---take place.  I want to mention just a couple of examples in this poem; I am not going to cite them all, because the poem does that very well without my assistance and if you have already read the poem before reading this comment, you already know.  And if you, for some insane reason, are reading the comment before the poem, shame on you, and please go back and give the poem your full attention.

    The first two stanzas not only set the poem's function, but they are also splendid examples of the processes that goes on in all of Patricia's poetry.  In nature, sky is only sky, and sea is only sea.  But in this stanza, the sky and sea become one, and that sea is slow curdling (for now) than a clean eternity.  Distant hills are no longer simply features of a local terrain, they become ghosts---not the eerie type like in a mediocre film, but entities capable of flight, and of creating trains of blue (and blue, since time immemorial, has been a highly symbolic color; and God chose it, through the process of Rayleigh's Scattering, to be the color of our daytime sky).  Skies, seas, and hills bear no significance in themselves.  God created them for us to enjoy, and then gave us Poets---Patriciajj and all those who are like her---to interpret them, and to assign meaning to them for us.

     When the poem reaches its conclusion, she springs upon us a most interesting fact, for which she has been preparing us throughout the poem but her subtlety is so precise and so well deployed that we do not see it coming.  The process that this poem has revealed to us is, both simply and spectacularly, prayer; prayer which is communion with God; prayer which need not be the recited pieties of multitudes and generations of ecclesiastical officials, but of the common soul with the God who chose to be common, not distant, by walking among us, and by giving us Words that we can hold in our hands.  I do not disparage formal worship; in fact, I love it.  But it is not the sole means of prayer.  In its widest possible application, prayer is both an awareness of and communion with God; and part of that is an appreciation of God's creation---from the most massive stars to the smallest amoeba in a drop of pond water.  I will here share an experience I had in July of 1974, on a Friday night (I was not then mature enough to know to write down the exact date).  I was asleep, and I heard a voice---a gentle, courteous voice, but not a human voice---tell me, "Come outside."  I rose, walked through the house, and stepped out the front door on to the driveway.  Being July, the pavement was still warm beneath my feet.  I looked up, and saw a vista of stars---the likes of which I have never seen in exactly that way again; and a vision I have never forgotten.  A few moments later, my parents, who had been startled awake by the noise of the door, came to that door and brusquely ordered me to come inside.  The next morning, when asked about the experience, I did not describe it, only admitting that I remembered getting up; I was not about to subject such a beautiful moment to their mockery or their incredible talent to deflate any significance of any experience.  Even though that happened forty-nine years ago, I realize now---from reading Patricia's poem, this very poem that is now in front of you---that experience, given to a sixteen year old nerd, was prayer, in the way that the poem describes and defines it.  Thank you, Patricia, for revealing this to me, now an old man too full of himself and a little too smug about what I think I know.  I did not fully understand this event, from July, 1974, and now you have extended my knowledge and appreciation of it.  This, to circle back to my remarks above, is the most ancient function of Poetry, handed down from Adam in Eden, and extended by so many fine Poets---like the great Vergil, in the time of Augustan Rone, and like Patriciajj---who is one of the great blessings of our own time.  If you are reading her Poetry, you have already been blessed; so read it even more, read it the way you look at the stars, and read it to learn how better to look at those same stars.