Belfast

cassia

BELFAST

Jaded, she wears
a soft black coat
over a great ache.

Why do good men
die, or horses
run wild?

The dim light
of a distant star
reaches down.

It's the unluck
of the Irish
to kiss the stone
so much like skull
and know

that green
is the loneliest color
this close to the bone.

cassia

"rise in Druid vapour and make the torches dim"

Being Enlightened

Originally posted by cassia
"rise in Druid vapour and make the torches dim"

Like "the dim light of a distant star"?

FinsburyParkCarrots

"....I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse...
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog..."

phishgod

C-
Green sod,
& lonely no more, now
but the stone keeps
getting turned over with
old sod burying the fallen,
bombs bursting over Belfast,
not unlike
the same we detonate
or others on us
for scourge religion, governments,
the ego of kings,
flags draping on the coffins of the innocents.

Let us carve us up
some new jade rings,
circle the palaces with songs and poems,
let them fall
(as they surely will)
under the weight
of their
own folly.

Come, now,
all of us,
who put Beauty
first, arise,
write poems,
sing songs,
make love,
give them no more credance.

We are the future.
We are now.

P.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Psychological emancipation from the rhetoric of the past demands new metaphors, new images that don't stand as synecdoches, to "put the tank on a race", as Kavanagh said. When Kavanagh said "Clay is the word and clay is the flesh" he was talking about lives dulled and rendered unsentient by the economic dictates of de Valera's romantic-agrarian ideal (stolen from the poetic discourses of Yeats and Gregory). To escape the constrictive power of old symbols (the bog, the rood of stony ground) we have to relocate our Irelands of the mind outside of the landscape of aesthetic-ideological constructions.
I'm still in the laboratory; I might fail....
but I've got to try.


It's always interesting to see Ireland written about from the outside, just as, being second-generation Irish diaspora in England I'm curious about the construction of an ethnocentric literary Irishness: for me, Yeats's best poetry registers his own senses of cultural and social ambivalence (1916, for example); Heaney's strength is in his ability to "code-switch" between sectarian constructions of experience in formulating a poetry that tries to transcend ideological models. many of the old images and symbols turn up again in poetry from Ireland, some of it of the "natural" landscape, much of it steeped in historical connotation and import. TS Eliot used to talk about the "Auditory imagination", but I've been wary of this....CAN poets express a sense of identity without recourse to the same worn tropes?

cassia

new words woven on stories of old, the passion the same, the struggle the same the air no matter how transmuted the same/
not new language but something surpassing language.

cleaving to the field, protecting her. THE REAL THING and not the metaphor of the thing.

come with me to the top of the hill. I Will show you.
the pen at rest, the stars coming out.

yes, the "dangerous myths" irish/catholic--the terms Kavanagh might have avoided as simplicities, coiled in exaggeration.

To name a thing is to kill it, as Rilke told us.

And how is one to unwrap from the glorious tendrilly vines of aestheticism--rooted in beauty/pastoral enchantments?

Ideal Ireland....Plato out from the allegory of the cave, and always a better Tree, a better homeland/ the Ideal of the Mind, yes, at Inniskeen

and clay--well that's a metapoetic substance, itself a pottery-raw essence, as the myth of man was shaped from clay

and what more pure beauty as K found in
"stones, clay, grass, the sunlight coming through the privet hedge"

Alas, we are but green hungry fools, perhaps.
ah, but 'tis good to be green, to feel the belly growl of desire telling you you're still alive.

The mental Emerald, the untouchable courage of dream.

FinsburyParkCarrots

I want that, to say the unsayable.....

cassia

i liked what i read once in emerson about the poet transcribing some "primal warblings" from the air--

as if the poem itself already "existed" and was just waiting for the right bard to discern the notes//

ciao

FinsburyParkCarrots

I'm recalling all those essays I did on Kristevan semiotics.... the chora etc.... now!

Night, all.

cassia

in me blood's aswirling Scot clan MacGregor wed Irish Penney "Red" (me mum's side) and pa's folks hailed from London and the Isle of Man. Manx mut~~meowzers/squiggats
logistical schematics overcome when vast atlantics evaporate and tectonic plates collide: burnsian solution in distantial devotions singing"so deep in luve am i...till all the seas gang dry."
all that red hair no doubt, a bunch of carrots, squigglegiggles.

phishgod

there is, of course, still awesome strength in the power of myth which speaks vibrantly in old symbols or new, the continuity of spirit itself gives it power, and symbols are just that whether new
in form or old, metaphor or exclamation point, and powerful in their own right.

I am all for creating new symbols,
but those old true ones still have their own intrinsic power and can be reshaped, reformed, morphed into the new
by new eyes,
Beauty renewed
(as it were)
over the continous course of Being & Becoming.
so it is not necessarily
a retro view
to return again
to old themes, old symbols
recast them in the new Light of new Days mottled with new experiences
and through the retelling, giving them a new flavor of their own legacy.

Green grow the rushes, ho!
bye for now

cassia

yes, grow, rush, be green///

cassia

and Phishster i was just reading the zen monk saying

(paraphrased)

before, mountains were mountains, trees were trees.

while i studied zen, mountains were no longer mountains,
trees no longer trees.

now, being enlightened, mountains are mountains and
trees are trees.


***
it's as though once we break through the old surface cliches we can have mystic revelation and then go wow OK now I see
like
Everything is everything (one) and illusion , albeit Pretty illusion/no true separation ...all particles beaming One and then
oh
the symbols, the old symbols are just as good.

Perhaps it the Passion the energy we Bring to the word.
A gifted passionate poet can use the SAME WORDS,
but through art skill craft Ikebanetic arrangement and haiku surfeits can draw out birth forth a bright bouquet of stark lushness...................ooh did i say that

GLOWBEAMS

FinsburyParkCarrots

I've just remembered these lines from Derek Walcott's "The Schooner Flight".


"You see them on the low hills of Barbados
bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes,
trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails;
when I was green like them, I used to think
those cypresses, leaning against the sea,
that take the sea noise up into their branches,
are not real cypresses but casuarinas.
Now captain just call them Canadian cedars.
But cedars, cypresses or casuarinas,
whoever called them so had a good cause,
watching their bending bodies wail like women
after a storm, when some schooner came home
with news of one more sailor drowned again.
Once the sound "cypress" used to make more sense
than the green "casuarinas", though, to the wind
whatever grief bent them was all the same,
since they were trees with nothing else in mind
but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave;
but we live like our names and you would have
to be colonial to know the difference,
to know the pain of history words contain,
to love those trees with an inferior love,
and to believe: "Those casuarinas bend
like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain
like sailors' wives. They're classic trees, and we,
if we live like the names our masters please,
by careful mimicry might become men."

cassia

oh my god oh my god oh my god QUINKADELIC

DEREK WALCOTT IS SOOOOOOOOOOOOO MY GUY
oh mygod ohmygod ohmygod
SMILES ERRATICALLY SPILLING GLADNESS EVERYWHERE
OVER THE TABLE
breathlessly regaining a modicum of composure
ohmyfrickin god
he is SO my guy. goodgod ilovehim. and his yummy watercolors and his luscious caribbean accent and the fact that he lives sometimes in boston and that he is quintessentially
elegant formal gentle rhythmic king of my stlucia heartman!
(so that = thanks for making mah day)

i just reread OMEROS (his work on homeresque Seven Seas/)
and ohmygod
He is so drippingly redundantly beautifull
oh
beauty-full, my bluegreen angel canoeing in the mango groves...
he is so "in the mix."

and, isn't the Best Beauty ...Redundant
the lush cliches
LOVE SUNSETS LETTUCE
things
that quickly Perish
quickly, faithfully come again...like Rainbows redundant
after a softly falling hawaiian rain..........ahhh Bliss

and oh ilovehim and he uses pretties over and over

like

lemon
rose
wood
blue

tea
kettle

and those wonderful symbols infused with fragrance and eye-delight and he is a word-painter

and that's what i striveglide to do ohmygod he is mint and mentor to my soul and so apropos you select him/quink

utterly wow. and how i like to "paint" and in
ORANGES where frank o'hara says he is not a painter he is a poet and like his friend the artist who paints Sardines without sardine sign in it anymore...frank and i write ORANGES only we know it's the essence
of Oranges
orange is the thing implicit in the poem, the painting, the poem about painting and oranges and ohmy im dizzy and Schooning

imagine an octagonal candy apple red STOP sign here...

cassia

"Green is the Night"
one of DW firsts

and from Wallace Stevens, "The Candle as Saint"

"Green is the night and out of madness woven,
The self-same madness of the astronomers...

...the image at its source,

The abstract, the archaic queen. Green is the night."

****

cassia

CASUARINA

Green think rain
cypress
leaning
into the sea

real branches
of cedar’s
imaginary kin

sound & sense
leafing through
the wind

into a
mind made of trees

***

yes, “we live like our names”
as Derek Walcott wrote,

cedars, cypresses or casuarinas...

A sea rose is sea rose
by any other....

and I see walcott saying
“to know the pain of history words contain”
and etymologically, I’m feeling his exile
& his frustration re:colonialization
and the re-conquest of Words
in the victor’s tongue,

I am frequently haunted by one of Dws
lines “all day hemorrhaging poems”

he bled his poems. Some of the
beautiful pieces I adore in Midsummer
collection, such gorgeous gentle sorrow.

I was listening to Incubus, once, while
reading him.

So I turn to Brandon Boyd and see-hear
a symphony of HAPPY and starsparks
and magical wordchoices and think
Poet/and so multitalented with artwork
and his book White Fluffy Clouds.

And musical QUINK the first season I was
obsessed with Oranges
I go into this record shoppe, and find
a used Porno for Pyros cd...and on the cover
WOW, a girl dressed, uh undressed
like east indian goddess chick
COVERED WITH SLICED ORANGES/way
the lyrics on goodgod’s urge are spectacular
tiny magics./ so im a rambling sea rose....L

Yellow

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots
....CAN poets express a sense of identity without recourse to the same worn tropes?

i think so, no, in fact i know so...


and the C- phishgod posted is beautiful...


and, ok... so... just so you know... cassia, phishgod and fins...

reading this thread makes me feel like a little leaguer at the world series

and so i want to know what y'all's favorite PJ song is

Yellow

"To name a thing is to kill it, as Rilke told us."

i see this

poetry pins something down, a tangent of thought though it might be, and sometimes a reader connects with it, though it doesn't always make the reader see the same thing...

and so...

we may kill "it" for ourselves
but it's death might cause the birth of all kinds of little thought-babies ...

and well, you can't pick your kin

what's interesting is in how often reading makes me want to write it my way... to paraphrase from my own palette


ya know?

FinsburyParkCarrots

Originally posted by Yellow
i think so, no, in fact i know so...


and the C- phishgod posted is beautiful...


and, ok... so... just so you know... cassia, phishgod and fins...

reading this thread makes me feel like a little leaguer at the world series

and so i want to know what y'all's favorite PJ song is

Those Righties over on A Moving Train might not like this, but I've been listening to Bu$hleaguer a lot recently.
It'd be really good if PJ could find the time to play England at some point: the Bush mask routine would be must less controversial here!

I also like the song "Off he Goes." There's that line "It seems my preconceptions all should have been burned", which implies the alternative "It seems my preconceptive texts all should have been burned" and "It seems my preconceptions all should be unlearned" in one phrase. Mr Ved is major league by anyone's reckoning.