 |
| Apotheosis of Homer by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (Pindar is holding the lyre up to Homer - left) |
Pindar’s Pythian Ode VIII, lines 92-97
In the introduction, to this Gutenberg Project, edition, first printed in 1874, the first paragraph reads:
I feel in resonance with this statement, besides the self-proclamation of my being a "poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar", but in his evaluation of his difficulty, i.e. dense language, obscure thought and allusive and abrupt transitions. I wonder if this is not a symptom of authentic new literature in general. For example, a crucial voice in this realm is Charles Bernstein and his "Attack of the Difficult Poems", read one of the first essays from this book, "Against National Poetry Month As Such" to understand the pertinence.
Truthfully, in dream, as well as in verse, there is a pop culture stagnation on the mind. Should we all sing and listen and read easy lyrics and welcoming verse, while the lucidity of literary interpretation and nightly dreams remain ever so evasive in their pantomime mimesis of psychological form? A lucid awakening plays out over the genera of new and renewed creative seeds blooming as it were infinitely maddening, as the apex of the mind's delicate host.
In an instantaneous recognition at Earth’s bare wonderment,
The stir of our breath
In the wind and pulse of sweat from the face
At true love’s rhyme
Under clouds, glowing with the luster of sky and an atmospheric rain
Bellowing in the blown heat
A thunderous moisture in the kiss from a Columbian Goddess
excerpt from "Bare Wonderment"
In the introduction, to this Gutenberg Project, edition, first printed in 1874, the first paragraph reads:
Probably no poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar finds so few and so infrequent readers. The causes are not far to seek: in the first and most obvious place comes the great difficulty of his language, in the second the frequent obscurity of his thought, resulting mainly from his exceeding allusiveness and his abrupt transitions...The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Extant Odes of Pindar, by Pindar
I feel in resonance with this statement, besides the self-proclamation of my being a "poet of importance equal or approaching to that of Pindar", but in his evaluation of his difficulty, i.e. dense language, obscure thought and allusive and abrupt transitions. I wonder if this is not a symptom of authentic new literature in general. For example, a crucial voice in this realm is Charles Bernstein and his "Attack of the Difficult Poems", read one of the first essays from this book, "Against National Poetry Month As Such" to understand the pertinence.
Truthfully, in dream, as well as in verse, there is a pop culture stagnation on the mind. Should we all sing and listen and read easy lyrics and welcoming verse, while the lucidity of literary interpretation and nightly dreams remain ever so evasive in their pantomime mimesis of psychological form? A lucid awakening plays out over the genera of new and renewed creative seeds blooming as it were infinitely maddening, as the apex of the mind's delicate host.
_________
The haunting seeds of lost friendship and the weak figment
of their passing is numb unfeeling silence, unheard. My heart clamors for
reconciliation in noetic visions beyond reason, where the rational mind bursts
open into a field of images, a broken and pent up rage to a cinder of memory.
 |
| Halemaumau, Lake of Fire by David Howard Hitchcock |
Their eyes, and the pulsating muscles of my playful cousins,
in mid-wrestle at the masculine chest of brotherly camaraderie in this family
of blue-eyed men send me past the workman’s vine to a host of health-inscribed
thoughts of expatriate exile exhumed from a life brought up to resume the
business of American sign language, the ignorant who of excellence in academic
abstraction, in social chutes and ladders of wily self-prophecy, and to look
upon the face of a sterling-minded mage, whose throat cast a bitter respite
onto the quickening of youth into age. I looked for temptation, to tempt me
away in rooms of stolen face.
 |
| Detail of Lucan Portrait (Scar Eye) by Leonardo da Vinci |
There, in the banquet hall, an uppity boast of townsmen
saved of our irreligious in-sight, the movers of the day quell the footstep
rebellion with damaging drink and superlative plates. I eye a mash-up of
delectable fine-tipped cuisine, and sit, as one of them, unseen, inside.
Unnoticed, I wade in the cool waters of the riche divide. The veil of misty
superstition lifts at my seamless intervention in the realm of immortal fruits,
and I finish my serving with a drool.
 |
| Dessert by Willem Claeszoon Heda |
I see more. As I reach for a dessert at a nearby table, my
conspicuity is urged into the fore, and my hand is re-directed, to return to
the shale heart of my incising friendship with the embittering death at hand in
the nook of an isolated city, dry with meager helpings from the nostalgic bread
of a million savage thoughts of implacably naïve blood.
_________
In an instantaneous recognition at Earth’s bare wonderment,
The stir of our breath
In the wind and pulse of sweat from the face
At true love’s rhyme
Under clouds, glowing with the luster of sky and an atmospheric rain
Bellowing in the blown heat
A thunderous moisture in the kiss from a Columbian Goddess
excerpt from "Bare Wonderment"
You are not like Pindar holding on to the safe Gods. You are finding something beyond the cultural prison of the real.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the Bernstein reference -- he's a good example of an intelligent warrior trying to be funny about the whole mad thing.
Your dream has an admirably rich energy of adverbs and especially adjectives. The incessant modifying around the central abyss of the word.
Those Columbian goddesses sure know how to clear out the room, don't they?