It is words that bind us words that shape our lives words that capture our gestures words that guide our minds out of the darkness The rose for all its beauty is inarticulate and carries no inherent message its wordless script is but a summer long its status springs entirely from the words of our imagination in love or sorrow it assumes the mantle that our emotions assign Without the rain there is the sadness of the rain that haunted the verse of Verlaine the sobbing sound of notes from the violin falling upon the silent city a city that is perhaps no more than a congregation of words a text of intelligence a single multi-tongued voice and so it goes—words words watery words awash with meaning words in which reality is pinned to the ground words with the aid of which our dreams reach for the stars
Poetry is a way of looking at the world of scrutinising the world in all its facets the world and its shadow its black clouds and its bleached bones as well as the flowers and the trees and their shadows
a man a woman and a blackbird and their shadows a verbal cross-examination of what is seen and felt and thought and touched the pursuit of truth and beauty
momentary beauty immortalized in the mind of mortal flesh So much depends upon this unique art a red wheelbarrow or a Grecian urn so much depends on the energies harnessed
the bird a nest the spider a web man poetry one crystal-cut word in relation to another the fraternal art that brings daffodils and roses and a blackbird whistling that throws off the cowl of winter and ushers in love
Beauty is dangerous as it is troublesome the embodiment of truth in the memory it defies all oppression defies all oppressors and refuses to take no for an answer
the energy that binds one thing with another the energy that moves in me and through me and all around me the energy that I carry forward into new enterprises new manifestations of myself and my interaction with all the other energies that surround me
The pulse in all things in Attic shapes in the rose in her lips and in my song
When was it Wallace asks that the particles became the whole man ?
Whose hand shaped the clay into what became the Grecian urn ? Clay working upon clay Whose hand hardened it in the fire so that it would be there for all time ?
A breathing human passion The energy to create and so direct those energies to a precise purpose earth to earthenware clay to Keats poet to poetry truth to beauty
To say that we live in prehistoric times is no joke : what is history if not dead time a past buried in a chromatic wilderness in which nothing may be reversed nothing achieved ?
A burnt match floating in a greasy pool of rainwater a hair on a pillow case now lost beyond extinction a lost lover who may be held in the memory for only so long before the breath fades before the shifting sands envelop every recollection
Be minimum with your words economic in your actions resolve to move forward to emerge from the tunnel into the hurly-burly of the present write a new text of the world full of warmth and affection : the past is a scribble of fret and fear and fate that cannot be absolved
Make your world personal exercise the courage of your convictions and adulterate nothing Hers was a beauty that time could not slay an angel of reality on the edge of night my Morning Star
Often when I am faced with the challenge of writing a poem in the moment, I will turn for inspiration to the poetry of the great American poet, Wallace Stevens, whom I featured in an earlier post on this blog, (see, “A study of two pears”).
This morning has been no different. Initially I considered writing a few lines on the painting, “Studies for a portrait of T.S. Eliot,” by Patrick Heron, which I saw recently in the National Portrait Gallery, but I decided against this as it would require further re-reading of Eliot’s poetry and would therefore take too much time. Instead I turned to the Collected Poetry of Wallace Stevens and read two short poems. The first, “Adult Epigram,” is copied below: the second, “Men Made Out of Words,” is available on the internet.
What one learns from the work of Stevens is that poetry is many things and that no single definition can do it justice. Today he reminds me that poetry is often human revery, propositions which come to us as we meditate on our experiences, propositions torn by our dreams amid the clash of sparring realities: nevertheless he concludes that the whole human race is a poet, the whole race being made out of words, adding that poetry may not always make immediate sense but that this is not the fault of poetry and it is a strength rather than a weakness.
ADULT EPIGRAM
The romance of the precise is not the elision Of the tired romance of imprecision. It is the ever-never-changing same, An appearance of Again, the diva-dame.
Wallace Stevens
What Lies Beneath
What lies beneath the veneer of words what thoughts what feelings what expectations ? I read myself I have become my own book my own text my autumn and my winter months my future and my past all wrapped into this present These are mere words and yet I feel them at times as caresses at times as mortal wounds the casket of my body wracked with discomforts : and yet hope flowers still desire and love well up within me
Life and its propositions all in the mind I hear the wood-doves sing against the backdrop of waters
that rushover the weir I hear the howl of the wind lashing against my skin
If there is justice in the world where is it concealed ? If there is peace who has purloined it ? If there is love who will reveal it and live it to the hilt untainted by niggard judgments and petty jealousies ?
Poetry is the sensethat the world does not always make : it cuts
to the quickand is of the essence I once glimpsed in the shallow book of her affections the facsimile of a smile the feigned beauty of a gesture sensed the sullen softness of a kissnever meant to be given beheld a bed of perfumed lace and Egyptian linen made ready for the maze of love
only for that love to be denied
John Lyons
Note: this poem is slightly revised from the text posted earlier this morning.
johnjosephlyons 