Showing posts with label poems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poems. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Who She Be?


As the world peers upon those who write poems, messages are being transmitted through time and space for personal and public sharing.  It is the reason a poet sits in some corner of the world while building framework to invoke thinking, feeling and perceptions.  So, this poet without formal training in poems or works of the great poets has created a method solely her own.  I hadn’t known myself before picking up the pen, so I find that I am writing to the past, present and future and with this scope my freedom ranges beyond traditions.  I tend to reverberate the sounds of the beat poets from the sixties and while my voice began in rhyme schemes, I quickly understood it was looked upon in distaste, for the simplistic style of a juvenile.  True, in a sense, the rhyme is childish but it also must not be dismissed for that childlike quality, as Dr. Seuss, in my opinion changed a generations collective thinking with the rhythmic flow of tightly structured rhymes.  He gave us tons of fun.  In essence, it ignited my ignition and cognition that was lost to me as a youth.

Upon trolling the internet for interesting answers and validations of my personal history, I had run across the visual world I forgot.  In many ways, the visual always translated into the poetical because I lacked vocals in speech and language.  I selected my thoughts into unknown corners and they remained there in the dark, waiting for reemergence.  I held my tongue over the years as my brain only processed pain.  I didn’t want it to slipped out pass my lips and overwhelm others.  So, instead of ignoring my anguish, I set it down to rest in the form of poetry.  Little pieces of my identity began to proceed.  The little chips or I should say clips of my creative endeavors have helped redefine what was mine to begin with, a persona or personality wanted by an unwarranted intruder.  Instead, I was brought back to great artists, who had chipped away at their toils, like Michelangelo, when he said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it” and “The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone.”  Finally, “A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.”

As each flip of the virtual page, another idea builds upon the last and so I push forward to return the favor.  In short, quotes have been the dots of my connections to years gone by.  The stars aligned like constellations in my dark delusions, floating between points of light.  “It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture,” Paul Cezanne is quoted.  While I live by the motto of another great as Rembrandt van Rijn stated, “Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.”  It is the visions of these luminous visionaries that I find inspiration and make what I can of what they have shown the world.  I am arrested by the fabulous words of many great thinkers and must leave this repose with quotes.  The site I favor has been Quote Garden.  


This has been a brief introduction of the person behind the words, a builder within strings of theories, where particles amass multitudes of ideas and compositions.  We are not wandering souls, for the moment a poet finds a pen or keyboard the thoughts of years gone meet the present and the spirit gathers them together for construction to last into the future.  Thirty seconds or thirty years, it took me forty years to begin.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.  ~William Faulkner

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.  ~Leonardo da Vinci

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.  ~Amy Lowell

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.  ~T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space: everything else is opinion. ~ Democritius 460-370 B.C.

Our sins are more easily remembered than our good deeds. ~ Democritius 460-370 B.C.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

DiScO BalL


The glimpse in a glance, we walked, talked and danced.
The shiny tiny mirrored ball rang and sang our song.


I love you for the one thing you do.
Be it smiling or sadness, laughter or tears,
joy or devastation, tireless happy thoughts
or dark empty voids, I still love you
because I saw an authentic version
of my human being in you. 


The two of us in one move, one groove,
swinging to and fro, back and forth
like a disco ball glowing with rays of light
reaching and stretching out to four walls
and the beloved aren’t constrained to any at all.  




Our disturbed souls wander like flashing
strobe lights echoing in the mind
slow and fast displays of night and day.
Its an illusionary absence of gray
a pleasant substitution of a flash freeze
mingling minds meet in sweet melee.


A dull bulb lays underground, in sound coming back around.
Glitter  in daylight rests in a giggle, grin, or delicate grace.
Heartbeats go beyond range, smiling, waving bodies move like mixing beacons of sight readily gaining momentum for flight in obscure delight.  
It’s the torch in a tunnel of blithe.



The one of sum is the add one for some.
Conscious streaming in video dreaming.
Black light in incandescent chromatography
with ultraviolet sonic scenes illuminating and directing
sensations of unseen creations.
Noir macrocosms breathe life. 


Visual maps of mental mass in mind
virtual visions of vivid encrypted
messaging and massaging of our existence
the glade galaxies move to guide
gifts gathering for global gratitude of good-nights.
The evening turns to an aurora of sunshine.



Melodious harmony of 
Moving beats in bravo, alpha, delta sonnets
the signs of signature in single minutes.  
Swim in showering senses of centered stages
of destiny and epiphanies of earthly times.  
Drum the key another song.

Slowly build the verse and vibrations
of exquisite emotions in three, two, one.  
I Love You is One Four Three
building numbers is not significantly
like the verve in the pheromone of emotions
conducts warm attachment to the blaze of discs.

The heart raves waves of trace particles
familiar matters of dust, rising and falling in
the softness of touch, flow and motility
in the sparkle of collision and continence
reliance rests in the return of desired sight
beginning with one like.





Monday, September 20, 2010

The Mind’s Own Place by George Oppen : Poetics Essay : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation


PERSONAL COMMENT:

Understanding the news that a movie version of John Milton's Paradise Lost will be made into a movie, not to mention a 3D movie, I have to shake my head. The consideration for this tremendous piece of literature in its raw form should not be reinterpreted for the sake of high graphics, a storyline surrounded by action or glossy actors or actresses but should be handled with sincerity for the precept of poetic story telling.

I have yet to read this but heard of it while in high school. In what I understand so far of the artist and the written piece, it is an allegorical look at the temptation of Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man. There are paradigms in perceptions that a true poetry piece can unravel before the reader as the story is often intertwined and in-between the lines. In essence, the depiction of humanity in the earliest of stories about creation, there is turmoil and raging war for the victor and that being ourselves. For God is the forbearer and omnipresent as the internal and external struggles wage and battle in Milton's arena.

Question: How would Hollywood depict that in a two hour session of enlightenment? It could be the king of cinema bringing this to life but it would lack any true form or credential if its audience has not even sampled a piece of Milton's original Paradise Lost. The other question being the revival of the ancients with the new EA game, Dante's Inferno as the storyline has revived the notion of Dante Alighieri's epic poem, Divine Comedy. The success of the video game has inspired a movie in animation format, which gives some respect for the other formal visuals that had been passed on since the poem. Artists like William Blake, Gustave Dore and Salvador Dali drew their visuals from the poets realm to bring it into a form to be seen by the naked eye. If a movie viewer goes to see the movie without reading the poem, then it will be a naked eye yet to be seen. If it draws a larger audience, to the written expressionist interpretation of the Bible, than all the more power to Hollywood. If on the other hand, it is mere fascination for Hollywood's power in technical graphics and action than it should be, as the poem depicts, the Fall of Man.

The director in charge is Alex Proyas, who's made I, Robot, The Crow, Dark City and Knowing. It makes me wonder though as film shooting of The Crow took the life of the would have been (not would be) rising international star, Brandon Lee. The unexpected death of Brandon Lee was during the making of the film, The Crow and the world lost the son of famed martial arts legend, Bruce Lee. The story line of The Crow was less than expected for this viewer. If the movie is anything like Dark City, I would not be viewing it as anything other than some dark story of humans and fate.

Therefore, the utmost respect must be taken into consideration for the adaptation of Milton's Paradise Lost. As a consumer, I have realized the importance of reading the tales and lives of the stories that are pushed out of Hollywood. It shall make interesting feed to find material concerning this project. In my own rediscovery of Paradise Lost, it is possible that a simple introduction of the literary work of Milton will to come to light in the not so far future. John Milton was as equally fascinating as a person and a movie should have been done about the man before his intricate literary poem. Actually, we might very well have with another apocalyptic tale, Albert and Allen Hughes' Book of Eli. The storyboard and crafting of it was handled with respect and elegance in the cinematography of the film.  The beautiful and viable ending to the tale was all too similar to Milton's life. 

Question: To read or not to read, that is the question.

Regarding Paradise Lost: review yet to be made or determined as fate holds the key of this poetic piece of man's humanity.

Regarding the article, The Mind's Own Place by George Oppen a quote by musician Bob Marley:
"My home is in my head."  

The Mind’s Own Place by George Oppen : Poetics Essay : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation