PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

 I am having an unwell day,:  I am having an unwell day, but the posting of Patricia's new poem calls for me to pull myself together to comment on this newest superlative that she has shared with us.    As I read through it, my first impression---with which I will begin my comment---is that this is what the combination of Poetry and Astronomoy feels like.  And if someone ever taught an introductory course to the combination of both subjects, Patricia's poem would be the central text.  A person can memorize the various meters of Poetry (iambic, trochaic, dactylic) and the various positional terms of Astronomy (right ascension, declination, and twenty-three degrees of tilt on the ecliptic)---but how that kind of knowledge feels transcends that elementary knowledge and resides in Poetry; and, as we see by reading this one, it resides in this one.  In his great Poem "Peter Quince At The Clavier," Wallace Stevens declared that music was feeling, no sound.  That distinction was considered radical in 1915, and probably still is.  Homer's epic told us how to sack a city, murder its inhabitants, and pillage its goods all to reconcile two people in a failed marriage; but the task fell to Vergil to tell us not only how the sacking, murder and pillaging felt, but also the feeling and effort required to harnass History so that, eventually, seven fishing villages on the Tiber might become the City of Rome.      I have written, in the past, of Patricia's poetic processes, so I want to incorporate that here by reference.  A reader who, like I have, attemps to achieve a working familiarity with Patricia's collection will find that it is vivified, and also presents, a consitent, Cosmic vision.  Consider some of her titles:  "Gates Of Orion," "Council Of Stars," and "Voices From A Choir Of Stars"---to cite just three of them.  Patricia's Poetry reminds me of our two outerspace telescopes, the Hubble and the James Webb.  Both were assembled on Earth of Earthly materials according to the best of our scientific knowledge.  But, both are capable of looking simultaneously to the earth as well as outward to the edge of the Cosmos and of time.  This is how her Poetry functions.  She is aware of autumn leaves, puppy dogs, elections believed to have been stolen, and natural landscapes that take the breath right out of the viewer; she is also aware of distant stars, the vastness of the space that contains those stars, and the spectrum of light and warmth generated by those stars through the fusion of hydrogen and helium.  She is aware of all these aspects of cosmic existence at the same time.       In many of her poems, Patricia gives us a line, or a couple of lines, that function as a summary of what her entire collection is all about.  This is MetaPoetry, and, to me, it is one of the most fascinating aspects of Poetry---when it comments upon itslef (as both Stevens and Vergil demonstrated).  This poem we are considering also provides one of those statements:  "startrail / of the spirit."  These summaries are like the appearances of Alfred Hitchcock in his films---they are a signature or watermark, and remind us who is behind the poem.  Each of these summaries could be a subtitle for the entire collection.  I believe (and will suggest it here, should some enterprising student in the future care to follow the lead) that these summaries, when traced and linked, would give us a scholarly apparatus by which her Poetry can be examined and closely read.  She places them like Easter Eggs:  one has to make an effort to find them.  (Back in 1978, a Poet visiting my college suggested to me that I had studied enough of T. S. Eliot and should begin reading Wallace Stevens; forty-five years later, I still have not finished reading Stevens; and she told me, "He makes you work, but he pays you back for it.")  And this is a key to the full enjoyment of Patricia's poems.  They resist a superficial reading and will not reward it, but they reward---plentifully, generously, abundantly---the effort to understand them; and they provide hidden and subtle devices that assist in the appreciation.       In the stanza that begins . . . "Light years are / the script . . ." Patricia gives us the assurance that long after Polaris has gone out, the script of the relentless Heart will still be functioning:  that is Poetry---hers, yours, anyone's.  I truly believe we are the only sentient beings within the Ciosmos; and part of our function and vocation in that privileged existence is to explain the Cosmos to itself, to be the voice by which it achieves self-aware and consciousness of its function.  Love, Who created the Cosmos and lit the stars, has given us this privilege and responsibility (and, as the great Apostle told us, Love is God).   And the Voice that she describes as "full of centuries / and spheres / and nebulae," the same Voice that, from the shore of Lake Galilee, called out to a handful of knuckleheads to let down their nets in a deep part of the lake for one of the largest catches they had ever seen---that same Voice (of the One Who knows every individual atom, and where it happens to be at any given time) calls us, not as a group, but always individually, to "Come Home" (as she writes that phrase, each word capitalized because of its importance).  As one who is beginning to expect that call anytime for myself, a call I do not fear, I am very grateful that, in this stage of my life, I was able to see the magnificent and  dramatic processes of Patricia's Poetry.  She shows us how it's done; and she does it at the very highest and most exponential degree of literary quality.