Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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Woman with Flowers 7.1
(7th sketch in series, first iteration of this one) Woman with Flowers Flowers, props upholding the woman. The flowers, fragrant, imaginar...
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The Buddha says: “ You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself .” The path is uncertain. Uncertainty is the guiding for...
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What if relationships are the primary ordering principle? What if the way relationships are ordered clarify, explain, and instruct us on th...
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direct link: Tones of Noir music: Alex Bailey, ' Piano Improvisation No 7 .' Do poems wait to be born? A poem whittled out of t...
You use language beautifully, Brenda. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI will need to come back again - several times - to absorb this. It goes deep.
Mary, glad you liked it... if that's the word for the intensity here. xo
ReplyDeleteI'm still trying to plumb the depths of this. Read it several times. It's rich.
ReplyDeleteMB, I hope it's not too opague. :)
ReplyDeletenot opaque at all. More a very thick tapestry that will look slightly different with each reading, as the light, the mood, the globe, shifts. I love the balance and way each part feeds the next.
ReplyDeletenarrator, thank you, but really it is seeming too difuse, as if the meaning is obscured by the plethora of images? My daughter and I were talking last night about how it's the opposite of minimalism... :)
ReplyDeletei enjoyed listening to your reading, hearing your voice. thanks for offering that opportunity.
ReplyDeletei find the frequent appearance of the word "furrow" interesting. as a total piece it will never open itself to full understanding for me, but it is most intriguing.
i am sorry for the recent loss of your daughter's grandmother.
Sky, That it's somewhat impenetrable is of help to me. I had thought of it as being part of a longer prose poem, where some of the references could be made clearer. That, or it's one of those surreal things that never quite... an experiment that didn't- you know :)
ReplyDeleteThank you for your condolences.
Comment at Gather.
ReplyDeleteshadow caster Jul 19, 2006, 2:12pm EDT
You know before we got to the name, "Vincent" I hadn't realized we were reading ekphrastic poetry -- this is just full of astoundingly original, vivid imagery but, more than that, it's not just poetic description but conveys a sense of identity through emotions. I was stumbling over someone being in love with time (which doesn't exist, people are saying) but then I realized how important that sense is, here, when I am at the age where CHANGE might get really painful and irritating. "The furrow whorls" interesting to use it as a verb but stronger still is the end of the line ... "darkness" and "speeding" ... is a powerful combination. Something I once noticed about Van Gogh is definitely here, too: He paints things so that you realize you are not in the scene, not looking out, but whatever it is, it is "in" you. He did that with bedroom at Arles and with those expensive sunflowers. For a moment you're looking at the scene, into the room, and then you realize that everything, being an impression, depends on how you feel about it, that the "room is in you."
Maybe if I really broke this down line by line some editor would find a thing or two that he/she couldn't visualize ... and it's kind of strong and strange, like Van Gogh, and kinda dark, which is not currently the most popular style ... but this one ... there's a first-rate poem in here somewhere. Maybe (this is just me) I would START it here: "When you burnt the fields of furrows, pillars of smoke out of the mountain wilderness, I didn't forgive you." And put the descriptive opening down into the body of the poem ... to challenge readers with a mystery in the first line. Just a suggestion. And make sure there are absolutely no cliches anywhere, and that every line can be visualized, firmly grasped by the reader (just because I love to make suggestions). "Slipstream" bothers me because when I look it up in the dictionary I see it has a lot to do with airplanes but not much else. At least in my lexicon (although Van Morrison used it nicely, though unconventionally).
I really love this line, too: "Turn away, hungry ghost, turn away." This is time ... or is it desire? Desire ... entraps us in time. Without desire ... time IS an illusion. Hah. At least I know where I'm at now. Does the speaker have mixed feelings about time and change? Am I clear on that? My only other question would be, would the poem be better with a paring-down. Is there too much? It's a bit daunting (intimidating?) in that respect. There's a lot here. Stuff the writer must decide but the poem is publishable as-is, no mistake. I'm talking about it like I'd talk about a poem published in a literary magazine, after all.
I briefly answered 'shadow caster':
ReplyDeleteBrenda Clews Jul 22, 2006, 9:44am EDT
Shadow Caster, I am most impressed by your reading, and agree with much of what you have said. Vincent wasn't my central image, but perhaps I should work with that as a style, as you so astutely point out. The overall imagery more, I think, the harshness of a Hebraic Biblical world, or a Beowulf world, or at least referring to the waves of warriors, battles through history, along with the 'hungry ghosts' of Tibetan Buddhism (or even in Macbeth or Hamlet). I am more Buddhist than anything I suppose. Whenever I get time, I will print it out and try the first line you suggest and see how I can reorder the poem; if that works for me.