NaPoWriMo Day 4: Alicia Ostriker's 'Birth of Venus'

Venus, or really Aphrodite, for Aphrodite seems more sensitive, more of a fragile beauty, has been on my mind all day. I have taken out my unfinished manuscript, along with a pile of papers three times larger of research, and the poem which originally inspired me.

Alicia Ostriker's 'The Birth of Venus' (only a few lines I found on-line due to copyright restrictions):

I

Huge shell the remnant of my great-grandmother dragon,

Split open to form the world,

They have made a boat of it

And set me here.

The effect is of scarcely tolerable pleasure.

II

If I am anything I am young, so young.

As I arrive on this shallow scalloped sea

Zephyr huffs flowers at me, frowning.

The effect is to deepen my reverie.

My face emerges from another world

Behind the picture plane, a world

Of light and clouds, volumes of clouds.

The artist has set it at an impossible angle

Upon my impossibly swanlike

Neck, my impossibly sloping shoulders.

If I am anything I am un...

I will offer excuses and not give you a critique of the poem which inspired me to begin a series of poems in 2008 that I am now trying to finish.

In 2006, I met Alicia Ostriker at a conference, and as I was watching the book table, and she was spreading her books over a section, we chatted a little about how to arrange poetry books for sale. She was quite old, slender, in matte black, her hair, her clothes, her bags, a bit fussy with the books she'd brought to add to those of a local bookseller and whatnot, but very nice. It's not her personality that I remember. It was the darkness in her that surprised me, I guess. The density of energy around her. I don't think I've ever been in a room with someone who's energy was like that. I felt there was something raw about her connection with life. Alicia Ostriker had an emptiness to her that was yet full of intensity, poetic passion, a fury of living that I can't describe but that was remarkable. Later I bought the book with the Venus poem in it, No Heaven, but she'd already caught her flight home and so I didn't get an autograph.

Alicia Ostiker's poem about Venus, and my sheaf of research, is pulling me back to this project, but, still, no poetry. With apologies, for what is happening here at Rubies in Crystal during NaPoWriMo, the month designated to writing a poem every day.

Who knows, but I may write a long poem and so catch  up. Yah. Who knows. (Chews sugary gum and blows a real big bubble.)


Today I worked on a video, an unplanned exercise, sigh. I called it, 'The Dinosaur’s Book is Green Fury.' It is another 'learning' video, which is currently rendering, and I'm fairly exhausted with the work it's been, videoing, editing the footage, editing the writing, reading it a few times, editing the reading, and the music, and creating text for the video and title and credits, and the layers of tracks in audio and video have taken hours and hours, and I offer this by way of excuse.

The video should be up by tomorrow at YouTube or Picasa. I'll embed it here.

Botticelli's Venus, as I understood her, is figuring dimly and slowing in the back of my consciousness again.

                                          

Veils To Clothe Botticelli's Venus - a poetry recording (2:37min)

Veils To Clothe Botticelli's Venus by Brenda Clews


Music by Buz Hendricks: Somewhere Off Jazz Street.
Buz created beautiful ethereal, jazz-influenced, sensual music for a poem I composed out of my Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems. The original track is at Jamendo. I reworked a portion of that track of music with a new reading of the central poem of the Suite tonight:

Veils to clothe Botticelli's Venus

A poem arises catching the energy, imparting meaning, hesitant, faltering for words, images, rhythms.

My love for you.

Slowly, through endless revisions,
shaping this love.

Disparate layers emerge, an undercurrent infiltered with strands, approaches, understandings, memories, hopes, desires,
the way the sensual mind composes.

We create ourselves through each other. It's more complete,
who I am with you.

Not a version of reality but a veil of being,
the poem of love that is
a transparent garment we clothe ourselves with,
our metaphors and concepts of a world

which resists
our gaze.

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

                                          

'from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems': a collaboration

Free music for professional licensing

direct link: from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems

a love story...

...where Botticelli's Venus, ideal of beauty, the goddess who ushered in the Renaissance, bucks her scallop shell and in pursuit of erotic passion, experiences love in the world with its betrayals, deceptions, rejections... how our hearts of purity suffer like Venus pursuing the intrigues of passion, its tempests, for the love in her life...

...how the poetry of our life is our love...

...this love story interweaves the purity of Botticelli's Venus, and Venus Pandemos of myth, her lover Mars, the story of Psyche and Eros, a personal story, and how we clothe ourselves with shimmering presence,  'translucent robes' of poetry:

beauty, fragile, on the lip of, edges, knowing loss's inevitability, a flower blossoms, scented, fragrant and soft vivid colour of petal drifting away, it can't remain, you knew, Botticelli, and

yet, she is, borne by the Zephyr on the scallop-shell and wrapped in veils of flowers by the Horae

washes of colour, seaspray of roses,

translucent robes

poetry we weave ourselves with

...

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

__

This recording is a collaboration.

I recorded a poem drawn from my manuscript-in-progress, The Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems, and sent it to Buz Hendricks (whose track, 'Because' I had paired with my prosepoem, 'Light Catches Diamonds').

Buz composed a beautiful jazz/orchestral score. I listened in wonder- he is very gifted. He writes: "I started with a piano and just improvised while listening to the poem. The same for all the other tracks, just played to your voice. That's why it was able to ebb and flow with your voice."

I have a videopoem planned for this piece, too.

Buz Hendricks' website: www.somewhereoffjazzstreet.com

Buz on Jamendo: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Somewhere_off_Jazz_Street

The cover is a detail of a painting of mine.

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

                                                        

Video: 'Venus Enroute' from "The Botticelli Venus Suite of Poems"

Venus Enroute uploaded by Brenda Clews to YouTube.

The poetry is an excerpt from my "Botticelli Suite of Venus Poems":

She stopped to rest. Momentarily, in the field of pure possibility, her position unfixed, indeterminate.

Without hovering, or insecurity.

It was an image of being in the vast field of life.

Without knowing. In a position of unknowing, positionless, I suppose. Existing without location or momentum. Vibrating with possibility. It wasn't exciting or fearful, just what is.

Nothing is fixed or certain, though there are always solutions to problems.

Then she continued on.

She didn't doubt her certainties.

The music clip is from Lena Selyanina's 'Sarah's Dance,' from her album, "Piano Poetry," which carries a Creative Commons license and may be found here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/45056.

The chair sequence and the poem added to it had no original connection. I cut the clip from two hours of footage as perhaps 'workable.' Then I searched for a poem. It's amazing how the poem 'fits' the movement, huh? Creatively perhaps we are a gesture, a gesture where here poetry and dance are an aligned fusion.

Albeit, the resulting video is a bit comic. The tag on the back of my dress? As soon as I saw the footage I grabbed the dress and cut it off. The other camera? Ahh, I'm still just learning how to make videos and don't have a clone plugin to remove these elements. Enjoy the humor!

(Or perhaps, in context of the poem, since Venus has swung her scallop shell around to enter the world of experience, we could say the tag on her dress reads: 'If this Vintage Venus is found wandering, send her back to "Mount Olympus"!)