PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

According To Alvin Toffler: In the book, Future Shock, relationships will be shorter in duration. Fast, and fat economy offers many choices and we are conditioned to sample and look until we find the most perfect. We all have flaws, tv romance is not real, movie love is fake news. The quest for wealth and beauty is not out there for everyone. Still that is the prize. Divorce rates are extreme too. Keep trying, be less emotionally attached until it looks more lasting. . Lady A . 

Thank you for the kind reply: Thank you for the kind reply and the compliments.  As I have said, a couple of times before, your Poetry gives me the privilege of watching a great body of work being assembled piece by piece.  I don't know why this has always fascinated me, but it has.  But now, I get to watch the process in real time and real life, rather than only reading reconstructions of its process among the deceased poets I had studied.  Someday in the future, scholars, grad students, and ordinary readers will envy the privileged perspective I have had here, watching the expansion of your cosmology.

Starward Sincere: You leave me loving your elevated compliment!

The poignancy of this poem is: The poignancy of this poem is so powerful that I have to pause to assemble my words about what I want to say.  Frankly, I have two or three poems of my own that I wanted to work on this morning, but this magnificent poem---which, always a day late and a dollar short I approach after unintentional delay---redirects my morning schedule.    The poem has two centers of gravity, and the first of them is the star trail the poet has walked several times.  Let me amend my metaphor to say the star trail is not just a center of gravity, it is also a foundation on which she has raised the great stucture of this poem.  The Argentinian poet, Borges, once wrote that Dante's Divine Comedy was raised up by that poet, with all of its elaborate structure, for one and only one purpose:  not theological, not political, not even literary (in the sense of showing off Dante's considerable verbal skill, and the use to which he put what was then called the "Sweet New Style").  The purpose was simply to present to us the experience of meeting Beatrice, who was so elevated in his emotions that he set her above the earth, the inferno and Purgatory, so that only God's own Heaven is above Beatrice.  This is what Patriciajj has done, metaphorically, for Jupiter.  She has harnassed the brilliant metaphor of outer space and raised a platform, the star trail into it, in order to receive from Jupiter a vision---a perception---a meaning which affects everything (strangely sketched trees, a noble dog, the planets, and creation, for all its glory, reduced to a micropscopic throught in the presence of the overarching macroscopic concept), the holiness of art, of creation, in the expression of human response to the Divine.      I think of two poets here---Lucretius, and his epic poem, De Rerum Natura, and the aforementioned Dante.  Both give us poems about the created world.  But Lucretius' poem has a kind of staleness to it, merely a list of various phenomena which Lucretius attempted to explain scientifically.  Dante gives us similarly elaborate phenomena and explains it in terms of Beatrice; and Dante's poem is not stale, because a relationship thrums at the poem's core, and all of the other literary devices are placed in service of this relationship.     (I have to pause this comment briefly, as I am being overwhelmed by emotion and I need a moment to steady my nerves.)     The second center of gravity is the final stanza (like Stevens, Patricia places her poems' centers in various places).  This final stanza not only summarizes the poem, it may in fact summarize the Poet's entire collection.  (I am going to leave that idea to the grad students who will someday be writing dissertations about her work.  They will have to sort all that out, I can only suggest,)     Juoiter has shown her that everything worth anything has been in that one privileged minute---the way the cosmologists tell us that the entire cosmos, all of the atoms of which everything consists, was one densely packed into a small space the size of a cantelope.  We have all experienced privileged minutes which become more to us than the mere sixty-second intervals that fill our hours in groups of sixty.  We all have felt minutes that are more than minutes---more than mere measurements of time, which is both the movement of the stars, the expansion of the cosmos, and our eventual approach to Heaven.  I believe these special minutes are like Easter Eggs, which the Supreme Creator has placed for us to find, to cherish, and from which we experience a message of love.  I think back to finding gorgeously tinted Easter Eggs cleverly hidden among the various beauties of my grandparents' rural residence, where the egg seemed to emerge from that beauty.  These privileged minutes are symbols of God's love for us, just as the eggs I found in that wonderful place on State Route 4, north of Germantown, had been boiled, dyed, painted, and hidden as expressions of my Grandparents' love for me.  The love is greater than the eggs, but did not disdain to be represented by them.  God's Love is greater than these privileged moments, but does not disdain to be represented by them.  Patricia, being a member of that select group we call the Greatest Poets of our civilization, is very adept at depicted, cataloging, and naming these privileged moments.  That, I believe, is (along with naming the constellations) the first and original purpose of Poetry.  And, at the observation platform on the pinnacle of this metaphoric tower that Patricia has built toward Jupiter, she reveals the true contour and contents of a privileged moment---and, in doing so, fulfills the great effect of Poetry in its original purposes:  to show us---teach us---even compel us---to find, recognize, and cherish those privileged moments in our own lives.  And, in revealing this, she proves herself once more (a proof I have witnessed again and again in her posted poems) to be a Revelatory Poet, not simply a peer of Eliot, Stevens, and Dante, but a spiritual descendent of the Apostle Saint John himself.      

And So: I wrote 2025. Apparently, we have brain fog and no energy due to corporate farmed food with insufficient nutrients. Who knew?  

I like the way certain places: I like the way certain places become associated with Poets, and that association is proof that the Poet has "arrived" so to speak, where even geography reminds a reader of some favorite lines, or a favored poem.  In Camden, one thinks of Whitman; in Pisa, of the greatest of Pound's Cantos; one cannot drive through New Haven without a thought for one of Wallace Stevens' "ordinary evenings."  And no one sees the remote village of East Coker from the window of a train car without thinking that is the point of origin of the Eliot family---a fact made so poetically vivid in the poem of a former bank clerk who had a way with words.     I have said all that to tell you this.  In the film, Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer's character has a magnificent final speech, as he is dying, when he speaks of certain things he has seen in outer space.  He mentions the shoulder of Orion.  Since I first saw the film in 1982, I have loved that speech.  Sometimes, I will fast forward just to get to that point.  They tell me that Hauer himself wrote it, and the director approved it, because it poetically improved that moment in the film.  Much as I loved it then, I love it more now because it never now fails to remind me of this magnificient poem, the first poem of yours that I ever read, the first poem that gave me a glimpse---which has now become a full, shimmering vision---of your literary greatness.    I am not any different than any other of your readers---except perhaps a little more cranky, a little more contrary, and (I know this for a fact) a whole lot more eccentric.  But as much as this poem affects me, and comes into my mind when I hear Hauer speak, or when I see the title card of the Orion production company in one of its many movies, I know---and I say again, I KNOW!---that there are others of your lines and phrases that are summoned into your readers' minds by similar triggers.  I was never able to tell Old Possum what East Coker means to me; I was never able to tell Pop Stevens how the Idea Of Order At Key West has shown me the splendid grandeur of the stars ascent into the night sky over that place where shore and sea meet.  But I can tell you how your lines resonate within me.  I believe that, in Heaven, you will know the complete effect of all your verses upon all of your readers.  The very stars themselves may take you aside and say, "You know, I really liked the way you wrote that combination of words that became my favorite of your phrases . . . "  I thank you for the way your poems have ministered to me in these two years of my physical decline, and I thank you, even more so, for the splendor of the vistas and horizons that your poems have opened ro my reading experience.