Prelude
The days now written out in gray grim letters, pre-arranged, beginning always
with the inward Eye bulging from the scroll, stripped of the veins of impediment, that being
the burdensome Soul, and always neatly predetermined,
firmly decided.
1.
Do away with the flattened out evening hours
when the sun ladders down,
its Midas-filled luggage thumping the skyblue rungs –
Do away with the silver wind gulling and pulling
pink clouds into various striations,
the children on their backs in the greenest grass who look
up to see hippos with Jimmy Durante noses, dragons and giant keys slide
east to west
what a terrible, terrible waste. Erase, erase, erase.
fini
Jack's beans have been boiled into a canned mash,
and we'll have absolutely none of this:
Alice's encounters with the talking flowers;
no more eyes twinkling with mossy secrets,
the fauns have all fled Rosalind's forest.
1.1 Encounters climbing the hills of each day
"And life slips by like a field mouse
not shaking the grass"
Ezra Pound
She comes barefoot from the Cyclades
in stunned light,
hushed,
her legs wet with dew brushed
from the fur of rabbits. Past sunless cliffs she walks
through a pierced skysong of seabirds wheeling,
her hair cutting black ribbons across the blue. The ageless blue
becoming white with her heat ---
but what a remote plum she carries
in those eyes -
how she remains immune yet casts
furtive glances that blink with all Endings.
I call you, Corona
and I wish for snow
to cool myself from this encounter. A cold whiteness --
no, not your sensual milkness -- and ice
you will only embrace, for it holds inside itself
your Fire. Bring the bite of pyracantha
to my ankles,
your pain more devastating.
All History burns in the Infinite Point,
distance has no power,
I hear her heels echoing mine in the shallow water.
1.2 Chasing Rafu
Gauze Veil, orange silk slippers
and baskets woven from Katsura
when you stand on the Bridge to toss petals
the Koi know your willow-bent smile.
The stork's wing mimics
the swish of your kimono
look how the bearded poets follow,
like silkworms to white-mulberry;
I call you.
1.3 A correspondence with Cumae
Through one thousand braids of mist
the jar falls
hits a gnarled pine knot and cracks
open. Sibylline flutters out the small rift,
a pink moth.
a gray mouse. a spotted spider.
the changeling.
The Capitol poet writes back
on white birch in his blackest ink;
the spring wind undulates the gold dragon
on his tattered canopy. Once his carriage was cut
from perfumed wood, his coffin carved
in magnolia. Now he wipes thick wine
from his lips to wide sleeves and waits
outside the jade gates.
Sibylline, soundless, makes note.
1.4 Hare Moon
In eddies curled the color of May's helpless sun
So-shu washes with bergamot soap unpacked
from his thread-bare satchel.
The river's icy fingers
pinch his cheeks into a pair of apple blossoms.
Long ago he left home folded
in the butterfly's wingflap. His heart a stranger
to the luxury of familiar.
All day So-shu pounds the cassia tree
in service to the Genii --
all night he dreams
under the gallop of Chandra's ten white antelopes.
1.5 Signs Sho-shu was to become a poet
The visiting brahmin came to my village chanting
"om mani padme hum" and counting japa mala beads,
the same year the house cats had 10 kittens. I remember
their small heads like heavy buckets, fallen on tiny paws,
the blue thread butterfly on mah mah's robe and the fishwife,
monkey-faced, a basket of fish on her sparrow shoulders;
the open curtain of my window
the peep of sun.
1.6 Sho-shu to Li-Po in a Letter, Undated
It was the Greek who gave Magician
the lodestone
one day in Choan on the road cut wide
into the mountain;
on a day tree petals snowed
into drifts, their sandals kicked in rhythm,
a pink smoke.
I was small, practicing my stilts but I spied
and saw how they laughed, their heads close,
despite different tongues.
It was later that night the gold saddled men
brought the Princess
in the jewel-crusted carriage -- I remember
the hillside trapped in silver mist;
when the dark man put the rock into Magician's palm
the stars rushed from the sky like pins
and we became fastened as One
under a mysterious cloak.
My most trusted friend,
I am eager for your reply even your admonishment
for saying too much but
have you not heard?
The people in town no longer Believe.
1.7 The people in town no longer Believe
Magician has gone missing , the lodestone locked
in Mr. To-Em-Mei's Curiosity Shoppe. The village children
pound rocks,
sell wet dust in truckloads to the highest bidder. Apricot carts lean
empty
on broken gates. Once amber, sap now veins black
through the maples. The cords to the mist severed.
It is the Year of The Immediate Elixir.
Sho-shu steeps
his blistered feet in the rushing Kiang, swabs sweat on his sleeve
stain added to stain
On a hook
outside the Shoppe
a caged king-fisher beats its wings against gilded bars
its heaving chest Choan's New metronome.
Author notes
( Written in 7 days for a 7/7 challenge. I posted one part of this in the regular poem forum but thought I'd give it a shot here in total).
For the sake of revisioning, this is a comment I got on this series of poems at another site and would love to get more insight like this if anyone is willing. It is such a gift to receive such detailed feedback but I know it takes time...
Posted on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 - 08:41 am:
Lisa, I’m surprised this hasn’t inspired more comments. Perhaps poets are like other people, a bit daunted by extended meditations. I also wonder if it hasn’t been revised since its initial posting in early June. Nonetheless I’d like to offer some commentary on this fascinating poem as it stands.
The epigraph from Pound is apt, since the entire poem seems a cross between his translations from the Chinese and his “Near Perigord.” It combines the delicate watercolor vignettes of the former with the bold fresco strokes of the latter. The exotic historical references and the stylized diction may be off-putting to some, but personally I’m a sucker for these things if done well. I see nothing wrong with excursions into historical otherness and the use of language that diverges from the everyday colloquial. It’s refreshing to come across what Yeats called “heightened speech” once in a while. The crucial thing, apart from demonstrating technical skill, is to convey excitement and genuine emotional involvement in your subject. Pound’s breathless narrative in “Near Perigord,” his evocation of Bertran de Born and the creative turmoil of medieval Provence, carries the reader along and saves it from the charge of mere antiquarianism.
I think your poem shares some of these qualities and shows great promise. I like the way it ranges between Western and European settings. The evocations of Sho-Shu, the quotations from letters, the descriptions of village life in China: these border on the exquisite. Even the obscurity of some of these references (obscure to me, at least, in my ignorance of Chinese history) enhances the sense of mystery, which I’m sure you wanted to evoke in a poem with “mystic” in the title. It as if we’re looking through a mist that clears here and there to reveal vivid flashes of life.
I do have some criticisms, though.
I have trouble, first of all, with the title. Whose proclamation? Where, precisely, is the mysticism you refer to there? (I’m quite possibly just being obtuse about this.)
What are “veins of impediment”?
Some of the stanzas seem to trail off into inconsequence, for example the first stanza of the first section. It might help if you sharpened the focus here. I would also recommend taking out the highly inappropriate reference to Jimmy Durante; it steers the poem wildly into light verse territory.
The poem suffers here and there from a piling on of attributive adjectives. “Gray grim letters” tries to stuff too much meaning into a couple of qualifiers. Likewise “the sun ladders down, / its Midas-filled luggage thumping the skyblue rungs.” How about “The sun ladders down the blue [or simply “the sky”], its Midas-filled luggage thumping the rungs”?
The ending seems abrupt and a bit weak, considering the grandeur of what precedes it. It seems like a placeholder in a rough draft (which perhaps it is).
There are other infelicities in other places, but I grow prolix.
I hasten to re-emphasize my enthusiasm for the poem, overall. I hope you’ve continued to polish, and if so, that you’ll post the latest version.
Again, a fascinating read.
What did you think
Comments
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Eastern poetry and Li Po came to mind once I came to the section of "Chasing Rafu". Such poetry has always left me a bit (to say the least) in awe. I certainly don't feel as though you fell short in the style over all. Then again, with such a way with bringing any of this together in a form and with concepts that kept me curious to follow it through, I can't say I feel as though I'd be an adequate person to critique this one at all. (especially after the example of the former critique above and my lack of focus of late).
On that note, I really do feel as though this is a tremendous piece that is an excellent start to a chapbook.
All the best.
Kim
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The critique you posted is daunting, especially for someone like me who barely knows the language of poetic criticism.
I read it twice in toto but that is not enough. I'm reading now the parts in isolation and each it seems is a continent in itself, I'm trying to find the currents that hold this world together.
It has the quality of dreams, yet with solid tangible details.
i'm in awe and may have to be satisfied with the impressions and not seek to deeply for the reality.
A Magnus Opus Lisa
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Beauty, wonder and magic is always available to those who open their eyes....tear the tattered rags from those orbs...to gaze upon grace. In all things. In the babble of a brook..or blade of grass or soft whisper of wings flitting within the brush.
This is quite a narrative -- I applaud your willingness to post this where it seems....a short attention span readily rules with an iron fist. Perhaps some, shall, take a breath and read for a bit instead of socializing....what ho, eh?
I am no critic, so I have nothing to offer but my enthusiasm for this art. May you continue to let it spill out from the secret places.
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I actually like the prelude..... but want it to precede
1.1 rather than 1. as it does..
because I like the connection between..
"the burdensome Soul, and always neatly predetermined,
firmly decided."
and "And life slips by like a field mouse
not shaking the grass"
maybe I'd put 1. on the end, where this seems the weakest..
especially because it seems to speak of death for me.. maybe not actual death, but the death of innocence? relations? ...even death itself..
for me the veins of impediment image says the body, the corporeal, not sure if that's what you were after, but that's what I get out of it..
I recognize bits of this from earlier postings of yours..
I love the imagery, but there's so much here it's almost daunting.. and at times I felt a bit lost as if the sequences didn't quite connect..
still ..even so I'm left with a mystical feel, as well as the sense of having read something grand.... that touches on the basic universals of existence, or perhaps our questions of it?..
Always good to read you....and I'll be back to read this, ..if of course you keep it here....
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AHHHHH
She speaks.
Thanks for your careful read.. much to consider from all these in depth comments. I am really very thankful.
I am sort of attempting to see if a thread runs through certain pieces I've written over the years -- enough to connect a cohesive chapbook theme. My problem is, I often don't have a clue what it is I am writing about...
Anyway, thanks SO much.
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not having a clue is a part of the mist
probably (or most likely) what generates the entire movement
bearable attraction to mystery
an attempt individual to metempsychosis – probably more effective than prayer since it uses personal frequency
finding self assurance in verbal abuse of phrase – wow! this sounds like love
or you could write for the sake of style
or you could write expecting stellar comments and reviews
or you could agree with Molliere
p.s.
like it or not you turned this space into board
but I think you like it
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I have read these before and loved them then. It seems some things have been lost, or it is that I have embelished them in my memory. Maybe? the prelude is the weakest part, imo. It may be that it is trying to say something important without the necessary imagery, or that there are simply too many modifiers crammed together and tied to the balloon that refuses to rise. When I read, "Neatly predetermined, firmly decided" I think that one or the other should be chosen, as, let's face it, what is meant by the two phrases is not that different, and even especially after the "pre-arranged" days just above. Trust the reader with just one incidence.
These stories have a fable-like quality to them. There is something quite Eastern about them, and I love how you are able to pull that off so seamlessly. I could never do it. There are some that come to mind, some of these Eastern-feeling poems of yours that are not in here, and they are some of my favorites. They were just not part of the 7 days? The one with the dead father and the young boy and the stilts? Something like that. Also there were others of whcih i was reminded when reading this, and perhaps this served as seed for some others? or my memory is just bad.
I think the Hare Moon is my favorite of these, but I seem to remember that after he extracts the soap from the threadbare satchel, didn't he get into one of the dormitory rooms and cornhole a maiden or something? Did you change it?
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I totally agree the opening is weak link. Thanks for that. Oh I have written so many of these Eastern inspired pieces in the last 4 years I'm wondering if I could string them together ...this was just one series.
Are you making dinner tomorrow? What are you having?
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I make dinner saturday. I have made pierogi to take to my mother's tomorrow, which, of course, is today, today. We made pies too. My contribution to the Turkey is, as always, stuffing it with White Castles. Ever had stuffing with pickles in it? YUM.
I know you're probably preparing quite an elaborate spread, or is that for x-mas, I can't recall. or both?
Is obama the fucking president yet, or what? He's from Chicago, you know. Must be corrupt. Has to be.
True story. ONly time I ever voted in my life was when I lived in Cicero, which is a near-west suburb famous for its political corruption dating back to the days of Al Capone. I voted for the same guy every time because he made sure I never had to pay a parking ticket.
Anyway. Our meal will be traditional and simple, because it will be the 3rd day in a row of this bloody holiday. I can't believe Philadelphia won that fucking game last night. Ruined my week to a small degree. -
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every football game yesterday sucked
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oh totally love that you stuff your turkey with white castles.........
i must share that with my brothers immediately. we always call them"rat burgers"
why so many holidays? -
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so many divorces
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oh that comment you shared from someone else above was stellar. I cannnot come close to that. But as I sit at my computer with jazz station on from Pandora free radio, full of meat and wine from a slapped together dinner, my husband off painting, my son in another city...I read poetry for dessert, for my second glass of wine, for my soul. And there you are doing ART again in the strange world poets in cyber space....how can rabbit fur reach me so in this techno medium but it does through you. This mysterious mystical romp of
mythical imaginal beings is your forte lisa.
truly. I know there is craft and a gazillion details and depth one could comment with, but truly, I am too lazy and full, and
can only admit in this moment,
YES
keep this wildness of your imagination going. You dare go to places that I need, i long to see and read and taste.
I remember your fragment poems I first saw ....when and where was that?
But I knew then, that you could defy some staid confines of form and find a form that was loosened up,
that could include dew-wet legs and caged (sigh) kingfishers
and ALice and Jack, ezra, and 10 kittens. So you.
How can I not love the stork and the kimono.
It is a dreamscape.
ANd I encourage you to dare even more. more.
not less.
why not?
happy thanksgiving. kat
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Kat,
Happy Thanksgiving....
It is always a boost to the battered down self-esteem to receive a comment such as yours. Not sure I deserve it but I will certainly take it none-the-less!
To be able to provide some dessert to your dinner is an honor.
I hope the son in another city makes it home for the holiday?
Love,
Lisa
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OI YOU oh writer of mythpoeics. I've read 1. and was full of shivers (uh, most amazing description of sky EVER). I have to go out and drink stupid, non-lisapoemid drinks, which means I shall do my utmost to comment on this at a later day. By-the-by, stunning so far. Look at my CAPITALISING things I REALLY MEAN.
You know I love my richcness and this was full of richness. Up to part 1. You know. -
we've been talking about it and you know my take on mysticism
otherwise what can I say
I like
as a taste prefference I'd say the richness of detail is a bit blinding but that's only my taste and absolutelly not worth to take in count - I don't eat sweets either and not because I'm fat
maybe they add some fog to the verb or underline it close to bliss and that is a bit forced
maybe to obscure a trace of insecurity you need to get rid of and replace it with a willful awareness for dynamism - but that means still facing the unknown and dominating or enjoying fear
maybe thats what everybody is here for
who knows
I don't have any suggestions other than stay away as much as possible from naming things as substitutes for perfection
including over use of mythical symbolism
it's not a baptism of matter but a dive in the river
to find wether or not there is space between the rocks
after you jump it matters not if the people on the bridge applaud or mock
you have to swim to the shore of sink to the bottom
a spec of sand waiting to grow a shell and then be proclaimed pearl
and of course no one searches for pearls in the river
they'd hurt their precious heads
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I think I like parts of 1.1 but need it needs to be honed some more. I like 1.2 & 1.3 enough. 1.4 I think could use an adjective knife. Not sure about 1.5 -- 1.6 is important to the story but again, sweetner removal is in order. 1.7 just some general tweaking I think.
One of the things I always have in mind when in a revision is not trying to suck too much life out if it -- realizing that the poem needs energy to sustain it through Time if it is going to have a chance at a life at all. I think I need to cut down some modifiers without sacrificing the image. Sometimes I wonder if what is read today may seem OTT but stretching out over Time if that OTT is needed to in order for the poem to remain viable 100 years from now. After all, I'll say it, that is what I'm searching for -- a poem pearl that survives erosion.
Thanks for reading it and commenting honestly, Alex.
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you just need a few accents I think not many
it's a subtle knife or gesture
take your time -
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yeah it is the time that is necessary which is why pulling these out 7 months from when they were created is really cool. and not knee-jerk reacting but really examining them for their essence.
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they're more close to a willing gesture, expression than those posted before (in the witness serie) except maybe the first
i think you're still having a heavy time trying to match and mix what you liked so much in other consacrated poets
you have to decide at some point if it's just an intervention and go that way or an inspiration and use the genre pattern for the editor cut, master accents etc. -
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I am inspired by other poets and definitely use their work to forge a path (hopefully forward). But I don't feel impeded by them (anymore) -- rather an Influence of Anxiety -- how to break away to my own Voice but not the Universal themes that I find worthy of attempting to explore in poems.
BUT, I've always believed a Reader better decides the authenticity of Voice and so your comment really hits home. Revisiting them has been a sort of reckoning for me -- do they deserve to see the light of day? Or do they just need to be buried away and remain simply failed experiments.
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don't be libra with a libra
you must learn to appreciate and decide by yourself
anyways
if I were an editor and get them by mail I'd post them as sketches on basho or on pond etc.
and that because you mentioned it in the title
a personal style is what's left after a period of these sketching these experiments
every poet steals or gets inspired
but all it counts is what they add
look at shakespeare - all his work is popular myth portaged to victorian age vice and politics; fit in or against christian morals
where he couldn't or wouldn't get into capital questions he assumed or hid behind myth - and that veiling, mysticism is exactly what made you post the series
the impulse that they need to become universal, transcend time and taste is space; for breathing, for interaction, for interpretation
raw exposure is for reality shows and porn
and stiff ladies not getting their popcorn in time
p.s.
what is a failed experiment? did the golden chicken failed to pop out the egg?
we're not talking science
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you should know Libra's would rather succumb to torture than make a decision.
i just need to be more dedicated to doing what i said i'm going to do -- which is revision this as opposed to be sitting here waiting on the next poem.
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yeah I know
i've learned to succumb very fast
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mmm. will print and read today. seven course poems corsen if rushed. don't need to digest, need to let it germinate. time. -s
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