The Little Clock

The Little Clock
by Elinor Wylie

Half-past-four and the first bird waking,
Falling on my heart like a thin green leaf.
If you are alive, your heart is breaking,
If you are dead, you are done with grief.

Half-past-five and the birds singing sweetly,
World washed silver with the rain and the wind.
If you are a saint, you have lived discreetly,
If you are a sinner, you have surely sinned.

Half-past-seven and the birds singing madly;
Sun flames up in the sky like a lark,
If there are things to remember sadly,
Wait and remember them after dark.

Pretty Words

Poem by Elinor Wylie: Pretty Words

Poets make pets of pretty, docile words: I love smooth words, like gold-enamelled fish Which circle slowly with a silken swish, And tender ones, like downy-feathered birds Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds, Come to my hand, and playful if I wish, Or purring softly at a silver dish, Blue Persian kittens fed on cream and curds.

I love bright words, words up and singing early; Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing; Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees; I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly, Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees, Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

Elinor Wylie

An Inscription

by Oscar Wilde:

Go, little book,
To him who, on a lute with horns of
pearl,
Sang of the white feet of the Golden
Girl:
And bid him look
Into thy pages: it may hap that he
May find that golden maidens dance
through thee.

A good book

We don't believe in relaxing with a
good book. You can only relax with
a mediocre book; a good book can make
you so happy you want to scream or so
mad you want to kill.
Literary Kicks

Memory

"Time makes fiction out of our memories. We all have to have a self we can live with and the operation of memory is artistic -- selecting, suppressing, bending, touching up, turning our actions inside out so that we can have not necessarily a likable, merely a plausible identity." --Allan Seager

Spiritually dwarfed

Theodore Roethke wrote in a paper for one of his Rhetoric classes at college:

"I am influenced too much, perhaps, by natural objects. I seem bound by the very room I'm in. I've associated so long with prosaic people that I've dwarfed myself spiritually. When I get alone under an open sky where man isn't too evident--then I'm tremendously exalted and a thousand vivid ideas and sweet visions flood my consciousness." (This excerpt is from The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke, by his friend and colleague, Allan Seager).

Seeds not Twigs

It was Ezra Pound who advised Merwin to "read the seeds, not the twigs of poetry."

Pilgrimage

O you who have set out on the pilgrimage
Where are you going? --Rumi

Where is the Angel?

By Denise Levertov:

...Where is the angel

to wrestle with me and wound
not my thigh but my throat,
so curses and blessings flow storming out

and the glass shatters, and the iron sunders?

Doorway of Devotion

Our culture has forgotten and buried the doorway of devotion, and the lover is often left stranded, not ever knowing the real nature and purpose of the longing that tugs at the heart. --Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

This Water

This water is but a spoonful mid many; it goes forth an in its deep eddies that you can in no wise fathom there be terapin and great turtles, monsters, crocodiles, dragons, fish and crustaceans to make rich whomso will seek with a bold eye into their perils. --Ezra Pound, Tsze Sze's Third Thesis

Kingdoms and families

...kingdoms and families about to decay will give forth signs of ill augury. --Ezra Pound. Tsze Sze's Third Thesis

The Cat in the Kitchen

The Cat in the Kitchen
(For Donald Hall)

Have you heard about the boy who walked by
The black water? I won't say much more.
Let's wait a few years. It wanted to be entered.
Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand
Reaches out and pulls him in.

There was no
Intention, exactly. The pond was lonely, or needed
Calcium, bones would do. What happened then?

It was a little like the night wind, which is soft,
And moves slowly, sighing like an old woman
In her kitchen late at night, moving pans
About, lighting a fire, making some food for the cat.

© Robert Bly.

Shape of the mind

Writing= your inward states being reflected.
Learn to trust the innate shapeliness of your mind.

Spiritual

Spiritual=recognition that everything is interrelated. Everything is spiritual

Inner speech

Writing requires one to distill, filter, and edit inner speech...

Early Shamans

...primitive cave paintings depict shamans in meditative trances as they embark on ritualistic journeys to the spiritual realms from which they bring back sacred wisdom and powers to mankind.

Beauty should never be presented explained...

Beauty should never be presented explained. It is Marvel and Wonder and in art we should find first these doors--Marvel and Wonder--and, coming through them, a slow understanding (slow even through it be a succession of lightening understandings and perceptions) as of a figure in mist, that still and ever gives to each one his own right of believing, each after his own creed and fashion.

Always the desire to know and to understand more deeply must precede any reception of beauty. Without holy curiosity and awe none find her and woe to that artist whose work wears its "heart on its sleeve."

--Weston St. Llewmys

Weston St. Llewmys is a playful pseudonym based on two of Ezra Pound's ancestral family names.

Not the finished product

Anything can be elevated to the level of meditation when the goal is not the finished product.

What writing is

An articulation, an encouragement to enter into life.

Real vs. Official Poetry

The real tension, I think, is between official poetry, the kind that we're taught in school and is kept in libraries, and the kind we really believe in...--Philip Whalen

Emptiness

The emptiness is the thing we're full of, and everything that you're seeing here is empty. Literally the word is shunya, something that's swollen up; it's not, as often translated, "void." It's packed, it's full of everything. --Philip Whalen

Stevens said...

"The anima of animals"

To Encounter the Self

Mark Doty: "To travel either outward or inward is to encounter the self, and the voyage in either direction is fraught with the possibilities of transcendence, dissolution, or both."

Theodore Roethke:
In a dark wood I saw—
I saw my several selves
Come running from the leaves,
Lewd, tiny careless lives
That scuttled under stones,
Or broke, but would not go.

Die--then live

Die -- then live
Day and night within the world

--Bankei

Bankei

If you make an attempt
to stop the second thoughts which arise,
then the mind which does the stopping and mind which is stopped become divided,
and there is no occasion for peace of mind.


Bankei 1622 - 1693

Dark time = see

Theodore Roethke's poem "In a Dark Time" has some comparisons to Nick Drake's song "Fruit Tree." Drake:

Safe in the womb
Of an everlasting night
You find the darkness can
Give the brightest light.


In a Dark Time by Roethke:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Meditative tradition

I understand what is meant by "an interior drama of the mind." The drama is created by "some form of self-address, in which the mind grasps firmly a problem or situation deliberately evoked by the memory, brings it forward toward the full light of consciousness, and conclues with a moment of illumination, where the speaker's self has, for a time found an answer to its condition." (Louis L. Martz, qtd. in Foster 24)

Perpetual Beginner

Writing = creation of the self, a life task.
Self = one. With itself, other human beings, created nature, the supernatural. (Foster 24)