Where does inspiration lie? Everywhere! Blessings, too, can arrive in Light and shadow and darkness. We give and we receive. What is the blessing here?
12 July 2012
10 July 2012
Tell all the truth, but cook it first*
Today a
poetic blog buddy wrote in a comment on one of my poems that he thinks "truth
plays out best in the tales we tell each other....as opposed to raw
truth..." which made me want to chart my poems and commentaries
on a scale of truth. However, I can't conceive the dimensions
of such a chart and therefore, instead, place all my poems at one point: the
point of "how the truth appears to me now in a moment after
time." I wrote
a poem about this "moment after" in the lines of Shakespeare's sonnet #18:
Shall I compare my Truth to that of a summer day?
Mine is much more lovely and more temperate.
Rough truths shake us, the limbs of raw truth sway,
And summer's truth hath all too harsh a gait.
Sometimes too bright the truth of heaven shines,
And often is its too solid purpose dimmed;
And every truth with Truth sometimes rhymes
By chance, or Nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But Truth's eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of the greatest Light it caught
Nor shall life brag Truth is of a grey shade,
When in eternal lines to Time Truth is wrought.
So long as humans can
breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives my
Truth, and this Truth shines on thee.
06 July 2012
Truth and Poetry Part Three: Commenting on others' best efforts
perhaps truth is even more varied than I have asserted before
when it comes to comments
Which comments do we find the most useful?
Which comments do we want from everyone?
Which do we want from only a few?
I don't know. I have been basking in encouragement lately, although I get little detailed information from the very short comments. I like when people give me back a detail and interpret it. That gives me part of them too. Sometimes I can tell that way whether I need to do more to get my ideas across.
Which comments can we most easily make?
(Most readily and truthfully make without guilt that is)
Are we commenting to encourage?
Are we commenting to improve?
Are we commenting to give back parts of ourselves?
I find that I can always give back a detail whether or not I love a poem or see its structure. I can say when I don't understand--but I cannot say outright if I dislike or see major errors in facts or see overused . . . Indeed, I find that I do not trust others to tell me the truth in these areas either. There is more going on here than insecurity. When I obscure part of my response, I assume others do too.
And what if we are wrong?
And what if we disagree?
We have a lot to talk about here.
I am not afraid to learn I am wrong, and I have a limited amount of tolerance for disagreement.
I don't like either feeling, but so what?
What can I do to be braver and more helpful than I am with all these thoughts about what I and others need and like as inhibitors?
when it comes to comments
let's think about this together
Which comments do we find the most useful?
Which comments do we want from everyone?
Which do we want from only a few?
I don't know. I have been basking in encouragement lately, although I get little detailed information from the very short comments. I like when people give me back a detail and interpret it. That gives me part of them too. Sometimes I can tell that way whether I need to do more to get my ideas across.
Which comments can we most easily make?
(Most readily and truthfully make without guilt that is)
Are we commenting to encourage?
Are we commenting to improve?
Are we commenting to give back parts of ourselves?
I find that I can always give back a detail whether or not I love a poem or see its structure. I can say when I don't understand--but I cannot say outright if I dislike or see major errors in facts or see overused . . . Indeed, I find that I do not trust others to tell me the truth in these areas either. There is more going on here than insecurity. When I obscure part of my response, I assume others do too.
And what if we are wrong?
And what if we disagree?
We have a lot to talk about here.
I am not afraid to learn I am wrong, and I have a limited amount of tolerance for disagreement.
I don't like either feeling, but so what?
What can I do to be braver and more helpful than I am with all these thoughts about what I and others need and like as inhibitors?
Bring on the theories about stages in creativity.
Bring on the truth about human nature!
29 June 2012
On my 61st birthday
I should be vacuuming and completing the little things I do when my
parents are coming to visit, but here I am instead capturing these
thoughts while they are ripe. Just an
instant ago, I wrote this poem on a theme that has been with me these past few
months:
Hitting
the top
I
am at the ceiling, I shall want
the
days when sky was the limit--
nor
is the ceiling made of glass.
I
rub my eyes as if clearer vision
will
assist me to rise above
like
eyeglasses help me to hear.
I have
roof tiles in my hands
tar
between my teeth, and grit
in
my hair as I bat my head up.
Is
the sky still blue? And clouds?
Are
they puffy? sketchy? still?
When
did I become color blind?
When
bound? What eagle eats
my
bloody heart as I relish—
or
try to—gifts I once gave?
I
resist plucking feathers as past
you
zoom and I try again to rise
in
the tail of your gravity.
I am exaggerating, of course, but I feel this occasionally
in the Halls of the Poets I have been visiting who have not even yet reached
the peak of their knowledge or abilities in science, music, mathematics,
probability, statistics, philosophy and chance. I want to crack codes to hear the truths
poets share. Conversely, I want to stand
in my own truths and admire the parade as it goes on by, proud that I used to
be part of it.
Amazingly (or not), I find many of them enjoy
reading me, too—not as a relic but as a participant in their emerging
culture. It is a daily joy to walk with
them as we nudge each other toward our bests. Something true is happening here
and the poem above is part of it. I have tears in my eyes, which I now know is a sign of more to come.
18 June 2012
Truth and Poetry, Part Two
In my poetry and fiction I fabricate stories, narrate from perspectives I could not possibly experience directly, and even--when using my exact experience--distance it from myself in some way so that the reader can not assume that I am the "I" that is the voice in the poem. I seem to use these devices at random--and though there is always a purpose to my strategy--I am not sure I can always articulate the reasons behind my choices. Are my poems untruths, then?
This question came to me because of new experience I am having workshopping my poems in two on-line groups. The posted poems are exceedingly good, and the comments range from helpful to outright praise. But those who comment often speak to the writers as if they were the voice and as if they experienced the emotions and actions they present in their poems. And the writers' responses often second that impression. Except in the allegorical types of poetry, then, I feel out of step. Should I change my ways, or frame my poetry in a fictional contest?
I think, if I am not telling the truth, I am also not lying. I write what I know, following the advice Audre Lorde gave me long ago. But I remember also what Aristotle insisted was the difference between poetry and history: They are two different kinds of truth. He even implied that poetry's truth was superior. Here are his words--and yes, I am trusting the translation:
. . . . [I]t is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen.Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.
Aristotle is one dead white male that I don't mind referring to because I believe that he was trying to save education and literature and art back in his day just as many are trying to do now. His teacher, Plato, and his time were trying to banish art and poetry and theatrical expression from political authority. The evidence of this is in Plato's Republic, which preceded a new stress on military and local authority and seemed necessary for the obedience required in a more fascist state. In The Poetics, to which I refer above, Aristotle is trying to establish the necessity of poetry by showing that it too has formal rules that could be quantified and then obeyed. The Classical Age and its Ideals, according to Aristotle, had to embrace poetry as well as what actually was more controllable.
Two types of truth exist: poetry and history--maybe even more. And many kinds of lying exist. Adrienne Rich describes two in her essay "On Lying." One is lying directly and the other is lying by omission. Plato (and my contemporary faith) show another kind of lying: saying words and taking perspectives that are not our own, IE acting and "playing at" as one does on the stage or when quoting another's truth. And that is another subject for another time. In the meantime, I console myself that my poetry fulfills some kind of ministry, even if as yet I do not know what that is.
(I'll be back to provide the links.)
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