PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Inspiring, search the truth, believe in what you find, for in the truth you will discover your faith, your humanity, and a reason for being.

Another excellent piece, thank you. 

When a Poet writes so consistently at the highest degree of quality, and then posts a poem that expands and extends that degree even more, how can any prose language keep up with that?  But that is what I am going to try to do now, because commenting on Patricia's poems---which began three years ago---has become one of the parts of my membership at PostPoems of which I am the most proud.

Wuth gratitude to Helen Vendler's great explications of Wallace Stevens' poetry, a pattern of explication that seems entirely suited---perhaps even destined or fated---for Patricia's poetry as well, I note first of all the whimsical title:  very American sounding, Audience Of Stars and the Rest Of It.  This is whimsical and coy in the most elegant way, because it prepares us for what she is going to say in the poem, without disclosing its substance.  Vendler also suggested that one should not trust Stevens' beginnings to unlock a poem; its true center of gravity and of vital force is, like a star's, deep down in the core:  in this poem, it is  until we see / far into that / peace / between the stars . . .  This is the poem's center of gravity and the great engine of fusion by which its light and warmth are produced and released to the cosmos around it.  

As an undergrad, I "cut my teeth" on Stevens' poetry, and continued to do so for more than a decade after I graudated.  But in my later years, I have come to realize that his is a poetry of process; and Patricia, a Poet every bit as accomplished as he was (though, definitely, more pleasant in personality) has constellated her entire collection of poems on this site around a process---the process of becoming and remaining not only human but humane.  We call certain people humanitarians and humanist.  Patricia is a humane-ist:  and she sets forth the process of becoming and remaining that in poem after poem.  The exact sequence of that process must be, I suspect, left to each reader---to work through the poems in one sequence or another (I prefer chronological, as they arise; but that is a habit from forty-six years ago).  

And one we get there, to the peace between stars (and you can bet your last dime that the stars are niot going to let our petty human squabbles and prejudices disturb or disrupt their stellar and eternal peace), what are we going to do about it?  We will reach a point of insight that, as she describes it, is utterly / unspeakably / clear.  (This is the point to which the third verse of the nineteenth Psalm alludes; it is probably also the Omega Point of which Father Teilhard wrote so eloquently and hopefully.  The Poet then tells us:  There exists / an imperishable, / flawless love. / Now what? / Anything we can imagine . . .

Although I do not read Genesis as a creationist's scientific text, but as a great metaphor of creation, I accept its assertion that humanity has been made in God's own image.  That was demonstrated by Jesus as well.  But we, who flawed up this world, have now the hope of reaching an unflawed site or venue in which we will have fully entered our humaneness.  When Jesus carried our humanity through death (which shattered at His presence) and into Resurrection, He assured us that we would someday enter our ultimate humaneness.  And one of the functions of the best of Poetry is to tell us what to do about it, and how to appreciate it, when we get there.  That is why Patricia's question, Now what?  can be answered, immediately and without hesitation, Anything we can imagine.  Because at that peace / between stars, which dovetails into Father Teilhard's Omega Point, we enter into our full and best identity.  The anonymous writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews called it a "rest" (4:9-11).  That rest is not idleness, but the peace of mind and the calm activity of those who have escaped this world's noisy chaos and burden of cares.  In his final poem, Samson Agonistes, John Milton called it "calm of mind all passion spent."  We live in this world in a sequence of mounting agonies:  loss of control (of forces, like economic well being, or a good harvest from the garden in the back yard), of thought (minds begin to unravel from the pressure of daily existence), and the ripple effect of even the slightest chaos anywhere in the world.  This is, therefore, the great and grand process that Patricia's collected poetry explicates for us, also advising us what to prepare for, what to leave behind, and what to avoid.  

I am a better person for having closely read Patricia's poetry as she unfolds it at PostPoems.  If I may revert back to Pop Stevens as I approach my conclusion, I will mention that he believed, toward the end of his life, that Poetry was meant to help people live their lives---the Poets who write the poems, and their readers who read and cherish their poems.  Patricia demonstrates, in her words, that she understands this process is a matter of life or death; when followed, the process leads to life; when avoided or refused, it abandons us to be dead in our trespass and sins, as Apostle Paul put it.  God, Who is Love, gave us the Giospel through Jesus---and those who ignore it do so at their own peril.  God, Who is Love, also gave us Poets:  Vergil, Dante, John Milton, H.D., Wallace Stevens, and, amoung us at PostPoems, Patriciajj.  We are expected and equipped to hear their words; those who disregard those words do so at their own peril.    In his poem, "Commission," Ezra Pound (before he succumbed to Fascism) instructed his poem, "Go in a friendly manner, / Go with an open speech . . ."  And this instruction strikes me as being implicitly contained in Patriciajj's entire Poetry.  Like the great Cathedral builders, those master masons who put their masonic marks on the stones they had shaped (but on the side not visible to those who enter their Cathedrals), Patricia has put her instructions on the Poems' backsides, to to speak, the sides that do not face the readers.  But those instructions, like DNA in cells, govern and direct her Poems' messages and processes.  (One cannot read Patricia's poems without starting to think in metaphors and similes.)  Our bodies are full of specialized cells that share one pyrpose:  to maintain and extend life.  Patricia's poems are like that, they share one purpose:  to guide us, and accompany us, toward that peace / between stars.  We are made of their substances, and they expect us to eventusally learn the courtesies that the Cosmos itself expects and promotes.  That is what Poets are for---to teach us how.  That is what Patriciajj's poems are for---and they do a mighty fine job of accomplishing that.