PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I can't thank you enough for: I can't thank you enough for taking the time to read my work and leave such an eloquent, vibrant expression. I can certainly say the same about your brilliant poems.   

I failed to acknowledge this: I failed to acknowledge this over a year ago.   Please forgive me.

"almost joy, if only I could: "almost joy, if only I could bear it, "   Speechless, wordless, like being seen

I cherish the thought process: I cherish the thought process that unfolds in this poem, as it's something that, I think, most of us must consciously train ourselves out of. That can be a lifelong process towards anything vaguely resembling perfection, of course, but it seems to be one of the most valuable ways to grow. I might only waiver from your poem's sentiments in terms of "responsibility", as I think we should much more often embrace responsibility and much less often seek fault. We can take o share responsibility for an accident, a mistake, and still acknowledge it's only an accident or mistake that we did not intend and/or do not intend to do again. Otherwise, I think I greatly align with the pathway of your words, and appreciate the reminder, as well, beautifully spun. 

A tragedy in gunpowder. I: A tragedy in gunpowder. I look forward to your poetry, though I don't always comment, and listen to your words with artistic appreciation and somber seriousness

Thank you so very much.  I: Thank you so very much.  I must admit that, for most of my life, I despised Pound.  My first Poetry teacher, during freshman year in high school, crammed Pound's poetry down our throats because he had croaked that same year.  And, in the environment that enclosed my adolescence, Pound's broadcasts for Mussolini's fascist regime disqualified him from being an acceptible poet.  Later, after October, 1976, when I first encountered T. S. Elot and The Waste Land, I came to resent the way Pound had emasculated the manuscript.  But Pound's Pisan Cantos (written after the collapse of Fascism in Italy, during Pound's incarceration in (and yes, this is true) an open air cage, with a single blanket, and only a roll of toilet paper on which to write) were the shining jewels in the massive shipwreck that is The Cantos.  A couple of days ago, I read the 81st Canto as if for the first time:  being able to relate to it, as an old decrepit man in failing health, as I could never relate in my younger years.  The irony, almost a comedy, is that Pound---the first Poet I ever really studied (although compelled to do so)---returned to me just a couple of days ago to remind me that what a Poet loves well becomes the Poet's heritage and shall not be taken away.  Ro learn this from Pound---not Eliot, not Stevens, not even Vergil, but Pound of all writers---is a delicious joke upon me.  And I wanted to share the giggles with postpoems.

While reading this poem, I: While reading this poem, I was trying to find an appropriate word to describe the poetic processes within it.  It reminds me of an elaborate pageant, unfolding its multiple beauties before an audience; or like a symphony when one watches first, say, the strings, then the woodwinds, etc, as they perform their various parts both as ensembles and in solos.    Then I thought about the cosmos itself.  The earth spins about its axis, while the moon orbits the earth, and both are orbiting the sun along with all the other planets, some with multiple moons, and innumerable asteroids.  And the sun is traveling around the edge of the local galaxy, which is, itself, moving away from the point of origin.     Can you imagine one of those Bavarian clocks that have multiple figures that move about with the telling of the time?  That is what this poem is like.  An old friend of mine, a brother Freemason, had been stationed in Germany after the second world war and had acquired an elaborate model railway which, on its platform, made its way through an miniature Bavarian village; in which multiple processes occured after the winding of the key to tighten the spring.  That is what this poem does.  First light brings us ancestors and messengers, and reveals a city of flame and layered worlds (does the city itself contain those worlds? like, say, the city in Sam Delaney's novel, Dahlgren, or Carcosa, in Robert Chamber's collection of stories, The King In Yellow).       The entrance of Divinity occupies the second and part of the third stanza; and then, with both brilliance and very deft subtlety, the Poet gives a moment of meta-poetry (I love such moments, when Poetry reflects back on itself) where the Poem defines its own processes, and also defines a major aspect of her exisrting collection:  at which the Poet is "polished like / river stone by wonder---almost joy."  This phrase is not only central to the poem before us, it is also highly central to her entire collection.  In my opinion, the fullness of joy is in Heaven; but here, we are given---by the Cosmos, which is the elder sibling to all of us here on earth---a sense of wonder which is "almost joy."  And though that joy is unbearably pleasant and salutary, fists become open hands, thirst becomes inner rain, and pain is a road back home.        As the poem concludes, an ordinary pond receives the sky like an offering, a sacrament in a chalice of gold.       This afternoon, I happened to be reading excerpts from the poems of the French Poet and diplomat, Saint-John Perse.  His Poetry also explores and contemplates processes, shown in their titles:  Winds, Snows, Seamarks, etc.  His poetry has such a high perspective that he does not bother to give us specific locations where these processes take place.  The Winds poem is set in the American West, in the time just prior the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki---but that is all of the specificity provided in such a lofty view and outlook within the poem.  Patriciajj's Poetry is like Perse's---a contemplation of cosmic powers and processes.  Perse's fellow Poet and diplomat, Paul Claudel, called Perse a contemplator.  And I will borrow Claudel's phrase to conclude this comment on Patricia's great poem, and her great collection of poems.  She is a cosmic contemplator.  Although she walks on the earth with all of us, her view and her perspective are both cosmic and contemplative.  Claudel and Perse are her peers:  their Poetry presents aspects of the Cosmos to their readers, as she does for hers.  The same could be said for Pindar, Callimachus, and even Vergil.  This peerage, to which Patriciajj belongs. both by nature and by accomplishment, does not depend on quanity of lines but quality of thought and emotion.  With each poem that she posts---and, especially, this one---Patricia demonstrates her right to claim that peerage.  And the effect of her claim upon that peerage  is her continuing disclosure of the cosmos to readers.  When the day of the completion of her total collection has come, we shall see in it a similarity to Wallace Stevens' work, especially during the latter part of his life, when, in poems like To An Old Philosopher In Rome (a poem about his former college professor) he contemplated---as Patricia does in so many of her poems---"the total grandeur at the end . . . total grandeur of a total edifice."  Though Stevens did not much go beyond that point of the total grandeur, his spiritual descendent, Patriciajj, is disclosing that grandeur to us, poem by poem, line by line, as she assembles for us the total edifice.