the primrose path

I woke early this morning to the sight of the moon with a bite out of it. The sun rising on one hand, the moon eclipsing on the other. I thought I'd missed it under yesterdays cloud cover. Instead, it came as a surprise, an unexpected reward for (an undesired) early rising.

Heart worries about the sound of his own heartbeat.
If it must be percussive, why cant if be musical like
a steel drum or kettle? Or if not orchestral, at least
more aggressive like a dragon's bellow in a dark tunnel.
No one has yet critiqued the sound of his heartbeat.
Were they being polite? Did they discuss it with one another
the puny patter of his inferior ticker? In Heart's
newfound chagrin, he wants us to buy a megaphone
so his heart can boom, or a synthesizer so it can sing
like a Back chorale. Timpanies, trumpets, tom-toms--
shouldn't his heart blare like a quartet of trombones
to declare his arrival? How lavish have been his loves--
shouldn't his heartbeat reflect his ardent complexity?
Instead it beats out a dull monotone: thump, thump.
But perhaps, thinks Heart, I delude myself. Perhaps
my passions are quite insignificant and my sensitivity
no greater than anothers. Heart chuckles at the folly
of such a thought. Over the horizon lie the Himalayas
and within him rise the emotions, while the disparity
in elevation is slight. Heart decides that his sedate beat
is only camouflage. If it bespoke his feelings exactly
it would mean constant earthquake with people leaping
from sky scraper windows and babies yowling all night.
If it truly reflected the cataract within him, gladhanders
would nag him for favors. He'd waste his passion on trifles.
Once again Heart is struck by nature's immense cunning:
the complexity of the butterfly's wing, the salamander's
artful coloration, and his own heartbeat: constant and sly.

--- Stephen Dobyns, from Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides

Today is the anniversary of women winning the right to vote in the United States. Even though I knew about women's suffrage, it surprised me to learn that this right was only 90 years old. My grandmother was older than the right to vote! When I consider the relatively short period it's been with us, I feel a little more forgiving about the progress that's been made.

( Tangentially related, Deborah Tannen's 'He Said, She Said' and, of course, poetry and Puritans! )

From a post by the BP:



In Ecology without Nature I talk about the Aeolian as an effect of ambient poetics—the illusion that sound, imagery etc. is emanating from an unseen source, like wind in sympathetic strings.

I like to joke that the power lines outside my home are a very large scale Aoolian harp, but the cables give off extremely low hums, almost imperceptible, but definitely unsettling. Click the info button on the left hand corner to release more examples of ambient wind instruments.

I just got news that Ai, the poet in residence while I was at CU, passed away this weekend. I didn't know her personally, but she wrote amazing 'monologue' driven poetry and kind of cracked open my ideas about how poetry should be written and read. (The BP now teaches Blake as 'monologues,' no sense of whether it might be due to Ai's influence.) Her poetry is frequently disturbing, violent, but strangely humorous, especially as she expanded into 'monologues' by public figures later in her career. Her collection Vice won the National Book Award in 1999, just after she left CU.

Here is an excellent overview of her work @ Poetry Foundation, which includes links to some of her poems:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=80637

http://comics.com/get_fuzzy/2010-01-14/

Not only is the comic funny on its own, but because of the conversation I had @ Secret Stan this week and a heavy dose of the Beloved Professor (a big fan of both Kant & Keats) earlier today I couldn't help but see its relation to Kant's objectivism vs Rand's Objectivism.

Kant's objectivism tells us that all we can really know is the contents of our own mind because we are limited by the very means through which we sense the world. Rand mocks Kant reinterpreting his thought to mean, "man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others; therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind because he has eyes—deaf because he has ears—deluded because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist because he perceives them."

I think that Bucky the Cat shows us the fallacies of Rand's Objectivism daily by the twisted approach he has to the world. He acts on his sensory input with invested self-interest but he is almost and always categorically wrong.

Anyway, I'm probably not using the words correctly (since I lack a proper vocabulary for philosophy), but I think you get my drift.

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry---it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

These past few months, I keep returning to a book frostmorn sent to me, a collection of essays by Roger Housden titled Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again. There were a couple of things that have stood out at me, but none more so than the following poem. I've returned to it several times trying to decide if it said what I thought it was saying:

EACH MOMENT A WHITE BULL STEPS SHINING INTO THE WORLD
by Jane Hirschfield

If the gods bring to you
a strange and frightening creature,
accept the gift
as if it were one you had chosen.

Say the accustomed prayers,
oil the hooves well,
caress the small ears with praise.

Have the new halter of woven silver
embedded with jewels.
Spare no expense, pay what is asked,
when a gift arrives from the sea.

Treat it as you yourself
would be treated, brought speechless and naked
into the court of a king.

And when the request finally comes,
do not hesitate even an instant –

stroke the white throat,
the heavy, trembling dewlaps
you’d come to believe were yours,
and plunge in the knife.

Not once
did you enter the pasture
without pause,
without yourself trembling,
that you came to love it, that was the gift.

Let the envious gods take back what they can.

( Read more... )

This website/review via RB's horoscope totally made my day yesterday. It is a collection of aphorisms from and relating to Chinese poets.

( Read more... )