www.luminouswork.org/podcast.

what on earth was I thinking?

“Rowing in Eden” from the anthology A Convergence of Birds, feels like a Cornell box. It plays childishly on a strange ledge over a vista of time, longing, and lyricism.

There are two french words in the text which I pronounce very badly: lilas and pensée: lilacs and pansies. Memory and thought are the rooms on the either side of ours on the eighth floor. Outside our window we’ll watch ballet on the tip of an obelisk. Cornell loved ballet, particularly Swan Lake. He made a box for his favorite ballerina in honor of her performance as the Swan which included feathers from her costume. I imagine Reece knows a lot about Cornell’s pleasures and influences. They surely determine the sights and inhabitants of this Hotel Eden. A 2003 New Yorker article says of Cornell: “…it was the larksome Cubist poet Apollinaire…whom he placed high among modern poets,” explaining why Apollinaire is the name of the bellhop who takes us to our room. “Frighteningly well read…he [Cornell] had a particular affection for Emily Dickinson and Rimbaud…and wanted to emulate them.” Who is the well-dressed American poet sitting in the French Garden? Emily could be the woman in white rowing to the Hotel de l’Etoile. Or is that one of Cornell’s fées, the enchanting wan “fairy” girls he would momentarily fall for as he flâneured New York City? Like this woman in white, Cornell might have preferred the Hotel de l’Etoile to the Hotel Eden, too. He made multiple boxes with that label, boxes spare (here or here), and celestial (here, here, here, here). Orpheus sings there from the place in his heart where Eurydice is lost. Cornell knew love as mostly fantasy, too. And his art was better for it.

Link to the The New Yorker article is below. It very much gives a sense of New York in the 40’s and 50’s and how it engaged Cornell’s imagination— a magical place of pie shops, poetry books, diners, and ballet which became the little mystery reliquaries that are his boxes. “Rowing in Eden” encapsulates Cornell’s imaginative imagery in a box that is a sheet of paper (or the three and a half minutes you will spend listening to me read it to you). It is not made from cut-outs and trinkets, but with words.

related links

Read the poem on this blog.

Here’s the book I read from.

New Yorker article on Joseph Cornell.

www.luminouswork.org/podcast.

If you are alone at cliff’s edge, beaten by a harsh salt wind, the ruins of the 11th century behind you, a steep rocky drop to the sea before you—I can think of no better company than Rilke, who, in just such a position, heard:

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels? ”

That’s the first line of his first elegy written at Duino Castle in Italy in 1910.

All ten elegies were published in 1923.

Today I will read for you the ninth one.

read my entire essay here

The book I’m reading from.

www.luminouswork.org/podcast.

I like this poem. Usually, I dislike or am bored with the products of my creativity soon after completing them. Very few things become stand-alone worlds even I enter breathlessly because they speak beyond what I can intend.

This poem is like that for me. It was a love poem. "I do not want to move you like the sun: but like the moon" I wrote, imagining the lover a planet I would alter but not drive. I imagine walking around a whole continent. I want to be old calling birds home. In this poem I am at an edge and avoid it I triangulate: a bird, the ocean, the moon.

essay continued here.

Learn more at www.luminouswork.org/podcast.

What a weekend. Piles of logs from two fallen trees piled up behind the house, a broken well line, a boiler on the fritz, grass knee high, and bugs everywhere. The bugs are bad because of the rain. There's been a lot of rain. The basement floor is wet.

Why do I have such trouble with Adrienne Rich? In college they told me she was the great contemporary poet (this was in the 90's) and I wanted to care because I aspired to be a poet and I am a woman and I wanted that territory charted. But I only marked a few things as resonant. Her potted plants make an escape for the wild. "Song" with its first-line refrain: "You're wondering if I'm lonely..." which I should do but hadn't the energy to do justice to this one night I had alone in my upstairs room.

So I randomly thumbed through and read things into a mike, trying to get used to my new auditing software (Cubase, in case you care). "Corpse-Plant". Something about desire. Delete them both. I felt too tired. Flip again. This one starts with driving and mutilated deer. I've tried to write about that, too, these wild, meek creatures, invasive and vulnerable to our gas-powered speed machines. Deer symbolizing something gentle, feminine that wreaks destructiveness without violence toward us. Deer are nature's perverse revenge. Softly invading from the wilderness-unbalanced. Destroying wilderness and gardens, carrying disease.

Rich's poem is not about that. Focus. Read. Without much energy. But the poem catches. It doesn't need my effort it's its own lightbeam traveling steadily ahead, powered by one of those etudes by Franz Lizst.

I lose it a bit in the middle (my fault, not the poems) and don't do justice the last stanza. But since we're mistrusting theatricality, this is utterly devoid of it. It's read by a tired woman who wants very much a connection with an ancestress (there are not many in the written record) and with these non-self-selected words does the best she can do.

A new poem by me literally recorded beneath the boughs of a giant oak that fell right over my study.  Learn more at www.luminouswork.org/podcast.

Alain Bosquet's 7 part poem translated from the French by Jean Malaquais.  Bosquet was born in Odessa.  In this poem he returns to his homeland to find his poetic voice.   I'm trying to do that, too.   Learn more at www.luminouswork.org/podcast.

A new poem read normally.  Because it's cataclysmic all on its own.

Trees that depend on cold to seed and fruit are "migrating" to more northern climes: with our help and on their own.  If that isn't mythology, what is?  Let's go there: into a lyric, liturgical mythology of polar bears, forests, and blistering-hot Christmas Eves.

The intro discusses a few of the true stories from this poem's genesis.
 

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I'm very proud of this poem.  It is one of the rare ones: ones I can only hope for 3 times or something in my whole life.

I grew up Christian in Georgia: In this poem my roots are showing.

Speaking of roots showing: it's almost my birthday!  Christmas Trees in the summer: my present to you.

Have you listened to first podcast?  It's about climate change, too.  I keep striking the subject from different directions...  Link below...

Message to M13: My adolescent-stuck-in-a-small-town-with-a-ham-radio take on climate change

Listen to or download the poem without the intro on soundcloud:

www.luminouswork.org/podcast

for Valentine's Day, a bit of Orpheus & Eurydice by American poet Gregory Orr.

Gregory Orr's lyric sequence follows Orpheus from his passionate attachment to Eurydice, through her death, his descent into the underworld and fatal failure to rescue her, and ends with his head floating off after he is dismembered by a band of drunken wild women.  Some lyrics are spoken by Orpheus, but many are addressed to us by others: a third-person narrator, Eurydice, Persephone, Hades, Ghosts in Hades, and the drunken Maenads.

Two things I particularly like about Orr's take on the myth: love is a consuming passion both Orpheus & Eurydice are somewhat relieved to be free of, and this Orpheus is aware of how he uses his muse. Orpheus can sing her body in its absence she is an emptiness he can fill with song.  He knows that when he turns to lose her forever he turns, as he always does, because he needs her between hisself and the abyss. Eurydice speaks but her voice is thin--she is compared to a bird, wind, waterfall.  She sees her body as a ruin-to-come.  She is glad to be liberated from life, from the soiled dress of her skin.  When she says "life" I read "life as passionate muse to Orpheus." 

Real people don't like to be screens we project ourselves all over.

Artists do that, right?  Use lovers as empty vessels to contain their creative juice?  Then the vessel smashes and what matter?  The juice spills into a river.  Orpheus' dismembered head floats off, still singing.

Sometimes I think the Maenads are avenging every real woman (person?) who ever had to be some musician/painter/poet's muse.  The band of bacchic women dismember him in rage over centuries of artificial existence as pseudo-beloved fodder for his truly-beloved art.

My next big thing will deal with this myth, too (a snipbit is here).  I picked up Orr's book to study another poet's choices in an extended treatment of the myth.

Fun fact: one of the first poems I copied out of a literary magazine was by Orr.  It was in the Georgia Review in 1990 something.  It was about water, as I recall, and I probably wrote for a year pretending I was him.  I did that a lot in college. 

The great day comes when we first write something that doesn't sound like anyone else.

Buy Orpheus & Eurydice by Gregory Orr.

Orpheus in the greek myth index.

Gregory Orr on the Academy of American Poet's site.

Download the poem without the intro for your playlists --------->

sing, woman, sing. deer crash through windows. hell hounds want to play. this crappy bar? you've been here before. nothing's changed. let's turn this basement into a club. everyone's looking for someplace to go.

www.luminouswork.org/podcast

three of swords from the Golden Rider-Waite tarot deck

The three of swords is a song that I believe will be cut (slashed? sliced?) from my impending (as in doom) record, these fountains rare here.

But I really like it.  Here it is.  Replete with hart hearts, night-riding knights, pens that pin, and clouds.

This card fell out of the deck during a reading.  I thought it was beautiful and it made me cry.  Mind and heart in relation: the mind penetrating the heart, making of it a jewel.

Image from the Rider-Waite Golden Tarot

Download or share the song "three swords" from soundcloud:

www.luminouswork.org/podcast

"When love is in excess, it brings a woman no honor, nor any worthiness."  Three demi-gods, now based in Brooklyn, share their personal experiences with men and failed relationship.

I've loved Greek mythology since I was a tween.  It included a winged horse and a goddess, Athena, who was valued not for beauty but for wisdom.  She made things.  I also really liked the architecture.  Doric, Ionic, Corinthian...it was important to me to choose a favorite style of column.  It said something about you, just like your earrings or your favorite band.

If you've ever been dumped by, exhausted with, or enraged by love, these poems are for you.

If you, too, are a mythology nerd, Circe and Andromeda may amuse you.

Circe "Men here are all pigs.  It's not my fault, exactly?"

Ariadne "He sailed off holding the loose end of my ball of string."

Medea "What is the fire pit without a fire, but a pile of ash?"

Jingles are translations of Euripides.  Medea's monologue contains lines paraphrased from Seneca as well as from Apollonius' Argonautica.  Maybe Ovid, too.  I forget what came from where.

Image collages a Gainsborough painting with a 1976 Serendipity Trench--both from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

sing, woman, sing. deer crash through windows. hell hounds want to play. this crappy bar? you've been here before. nothing's changed.  let's turn this basement into a club. everyone's looking for someplace to go.

www.luminouswork.org/podcast