PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Another page in the book I never tire of reading. Sculpting and painting words as fine pieces of art, capturing their beauty, and then unleashing your vision to be shared by the soul.  It is always my pleasure to visit here. Thank you for these inspiring  invitations. 

Logged on to find Not 1 but 3 poems to delight in! Thos is the first of the three and what a magnificent rhapsody! The sensitivity of the descriptions and the amazing use of a cutting line "I knew what peace was...I knew what joy might be..." wow! Just so wow! "The mist was holier than sorrow..." that was sincerely the most beautiful line I've read in the last 3 years! From a moon splash to a universe splash sometimes the journey must needs before we can truly understand the nature of existence and ourselves. If only everyone's journey to self discovery was as graceful and elegant as of was hortifyingly beautiful then wed probably ascend a whole lot more especially if we allknew what we really areand then so much more! Gorgeous write! Some astoundingly excellent lines. Much enjoyed. Hugss 

My reading of this poem happened twice:  first, exposing myself to its verbal beauty, and the profound meaning of its content, knocked me off my feet (so to speak), so I had to recover myself sufficiently to be able to comment a little more objectively.  Also, I am going to be using---quoting---some terms to the poem, and because I do not like the disruption of quotation marks in a comment, I will not offset them in that way.  Having read the poem you know which words they are that I am using.

  My first impression of this poem, an impression directed by the title itself, is that it is like what the musicologists call a tone poem---The Moldau by Smetana comes to mind---in which one instrument begins the movement, and then is joined by other individual instruments and then groups, in layers of sound.  Her instruments are the verbs she summons into the poem:  splashing, washing up, drowning, drenching, falling, snarling, finding a way . . . she martials these altogether in an orchestration or, to offer another metaphor, of a choreography of dancing; her words performing as effectively and efficiently as the finest ballet.

   Now let me add the metaphor of a stellar system of many objects---planets, satellites, asteroids, and even a comet or two perhaps:  and all of these orbit a stellar center of gravity---which is when the speaker understands what joy might be, and that joy is being at one with the Maker of the Cosmos.  And because the Cosmos Maker is also declared (most authoritatively by the Apostle John) to be the Word of God, we have been given the ability to make things of words---not on the scale of a cosmos teeming with worlds, but in response to the existence of these creations.  As I have said elsewhere, I believe that the one of the supreme vocations given to humanity, and primarily to humanity's poets, is to explain the Cosmos to itself.  In the great creation Poem with which Genesis begins, humanity is invited to name the animals:  naming is a use of words, and words are what we are summoned to, and---two thousand years ago---God's Word incarnated in Flesh in order to dwell among us as one of us, although without the inherent flaws of which we had become so fond and with which we had already wrecked our corner of the Cosmos.  But we have been shown how are words, as this Poem declares to us, can convert hurt---injury---ache (especially soul-ache, I think)---into petals, rain, or whatever changes everything back to its original glory.  We need no longer skulk beneath stones with the serpents (not for nothing was the Adversary depicted as a snake), nor need we feed the sharks the best parts of ourselves.  And, to draw from a contemporary event, we need not descend into such dark and pressurized depths to see a pile of wreckage and debris, only to have ourselves implode from the pressure to join that wreckage and debris.

    The poem proclaims that a universe has splashed through a kingdom and washed up here, bringing new creations.  This is a metaphor for an increasing appreciation of the Cosmos to which the greatest of Poetry must, by its very nature, direct us, and in which it trains and schools us.  And having revealed to us these processes, with all those strong verbs playing their part in this orchestral score that she has written in conversational words, the Poet discloses the Poem's supreme acquisition of knowledge in the final three lines.

     Wow!  Take a pause to catch the breath after this vigrous, but superlatively beautiful example of how much power of transcendent meaning our ordinary language can convey when used by a Poet with the highest degree of verbal and artistic quality.  This is Poetry operating within the tradition of Vergil and Dante; and I would venture to suggest that this poem exceeds even the best of the late and final work of Wallace Stevens.  And I am amazed that I, myself---having read so much of those Poets and their commentators, and wondering (with the immaturity of a listless undergrad) "what's it all for?"---now understand that, for me, it was all a preparation for the privilege of reading Patricia's poes and watching the assembling of this vast reflection of, and upon, the Cosmos that exists in her words.  In his seminal and ground-breaking essay, "Tradition And The Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot wrote that each Poem not only joins the poems that have preceded it, but also alters the entire perspective (I think of this as being like the starlit skies---that are altered by each successive season as we swing around the sun).  So, say, in Shakespeare, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest create a perspective, along with all the other plays, that would not be possible were a single one of them absent or left unwritten.  The view of the solar system from earth must, necessarily, be different than from, say, Jupiter or Pluto (despite its demotion).  The same solar system; but with such a variety of difference available from all the possible perspectives:  and this is how Patricia's Poems function, individually and as a group, to become her Poetry.  Is this poem a centerpiece?  Absolutely.  But, depending on the perspective that you choose to view, all of her Poems are centerpieces.

    At one of the deepest levels of the ocean, there is a pile of wrought steel that, apparently, is still attracting people to their deaths.  That is a metaphor of humanity that, in my opinion, is innately chilling.  Patricia's Poetry---like Vergil's and Dante's---reminds us, and directs us to realize, that the wreckage and debris in that oceanic trench need not be the sum total of our achievement.  We are meant to look up, not down; that is why there are stars in our skies, and joints in our necks that move our gaze to those stars.