Words written over / Pleading with my voice / Floating toward bursting stars / Comes running from the garden

::::::::

Read slowly to the accompaniment of Brian Eno's "Compact Forest Proposal" .youtube.com/watch?v=ElFraEXb7Q0 start at 12.15


The river falls steeply
Hammered it out
Straight from the shoulder


Nothing but dead weeds
Inscribed upon this plum pit
For years to come


No place for you
No mood for celebration
Words written over


Pleading with my voice
Floating toward bursting stars
Comes running from the garden


It became a game
Nobody would tell me
Hurried down the hallway


Then the parade
Oranges under the bed
Drawn to old graveyards


Things ancient to me
From candle to grave
Between the white peaks


North of the village
Pursuing other-wordly theorems
I smelled it, touched it


It was like this
Woven into the fabric
The corrosive threat


The imperiled swimmer
Lost long ago
The crest of a mountain


Between place and child
See the daily suffering
We are somehow separated


Humiliated, abandoned
We can raise ourselves
The revolution of the age


There is a story
Shouting at the sky
Recording their experience


We wasted so much
In the time remaining
And forget about others


We can then view the guilty
The target was softened
To bring to life


A meditation class is held
Is not really optional
Impulses stronger than


The childish question
Although I had no map
From night to night


Sources of truth
Virtually a torrent
Free of the defect


Damage to our future
Well, well, well
Episodes of near disaster


The tinkling hoofs and
Such as electricity
What's in the wind?


But he knows better
Last hallucinatory second
Poison of the serpent


With the waning moon
Into the black hole
I'm nearly five years old


Suddenly got loose
The lovely measures
Science has explained nothing


Hide away the corpses
Gravitational lens
Washed out in the corona


I will close my eyes
Enclosed in shells
A new kind of static


A wiser intelligence might
Half the town was there
And forget about others


Wind is going to blow
One million times fainter
White against a stone

...........

Books used:

Ill Fares the Land Judt

The Astronomer's Universe Friedman

A Spirituality of Resistance Gottlieb

Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril Kathleen Dean Moore

Trace Savoy

Ask the Dust Fante

The Snow Leopard Matthiessen

Ulysses Joyce

The Book of Beasts T.H White

comments:

The technique I use to write these more experimental poems has awakened my sleeping . . . I am tempted to say my dormant . . . how about comatose muse. In this technique I pull a handful of books out, select a bunch of non sequitur phrases, randomly reorder them and, with virtually 0-tweaking, accept the results as an oracle that has very little of my hand in it. What is exciting for me is that this technique seems to open a way for me to unleash my intuition which, in most of my poems, despite my best intentions, defers to (defaults to) my ego and to a more conventional (and linear) poetic blueprint. So, with this new kind of poetry (which is not stream of consciousness but something else), I get a mix of worldly and otherworldly images and hybrid, completely unpredictable, metaphors. The music provides an atmospheric element that slows down the read.

When I get lines like these (below) it excites me the way it excited me back when I was just starting to write precocious poetry as a teen, following TS Eliot's lead, I would trust the language to take me places that were outside of my adolescent boy-man mindset, expanding my consciousness (without drugs!). (TS Eliot taught that language has its own intelligence.) What I am doing is mining the intelligence of pre-existing sentence fragments and grouping them in chance-constellations or stanzas, so the intelligence of each phrase is synchronistically linked to the intelligence of other chance phrases to create a brand-new narrative. So, I think what this foray into "oracular" poetry is doing for me now is expanding my frame beyond any conventional points of reference . I don't know where this experiment is leading, but I trust it.

I consider these stanzas to be the core of the poem, "Between place and child". When I first read them I experienced a little of the excitement of reading someone else's work while knowing that it is original to me. I don't know how else to explain it, but, as I say, it evokes the ecstatic rush I experienced when I first started writing poetry that was more about the language than any other factor.

"Things ancient to me
From candle to grave
Between the white peaks

North of the village
Pursuing other-wordly theorems
I smelled it, touched it

It was like this
Woven into the fabric
The corrosive threat

The imperiled swimmer
Lost long ago
The crest of a mountain

Between place and child
See the daily suffering
We are somehow separated

Humiliated, abandoned
We can raise ourselves
The revolution of the age"

"""""

In these six stanzas, just to mention two serendipitous consistencies in the accidental metaphorical landscape, mountains come up twice, but in the fifth stanza, the "crest" of the mountain suggests the crest of a wave that is threatening the "imperiled swimmer", and in the first stanza, the graveyard and death is graphically conjured, but so is the whole cycle of a lived life from "candle to grave". Normally the phrase would be "cradle" to grave but the phrase that I lifted from the book was "candle" to grave, which, for me, underscore the ephemerality of life, or how much any life is imperiled, so the image is of a person swimming through stormy waters where the waves are mountainous. But the last stanza is hopeful: "Between place and child" there is a lot of potential for suffering, humiliation and abandonment but "we can raise ourselves" and the implication is, we can "raise ourselves" by joining or identifying with, not just any revolution but with "The revolution of the age". I had none of this is mind when I put this poem together. "Raise" can mean raise ourselves up as in lift ourselves up, or it can mean raise ourselves right, compensating for our original upbringing which did not prepare us to live an imperiled life.

(Article changed on February 24, 2021 at 18:05)

(Article changed on February 24, 2021 at 21:15)

(Article changed on February 25, 2021 at 03:00)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.