A Poet's Alphabet <continued>
G is for garden, but which garden I don't know. Maybe the corner
of a particular garden; maybe a garden in which there is a chair that waits for
someone to sit. It is not an ideal garden, bot a garden of Eden, nor a hellish
garden like Bomarzo, nor ordered like the Doria Pamphily in Rome, nor diseveled
like the Boboli gardens in Florence. It is not a backyard. It must be what I
think when I say "garden" to myself: a green space that is contained and that
will contain some of the poem's action, or none of it. Maybe there are trees,
maybe the leaves have fallen. There could be snow, and some juncos maybe have
gathered around the base of the mountain ash, which grows there. I don't know.
It will be a while before I do.
H is for Hades, which I like to think of as an influence because
of all places it strikes me as the most poetic. A last resort, a high-walled
kingdom, it has one major disadvantage - the weather, which is windy, dark, and
cold. Its major advantage is the great amount of leisure time it offers. It is
straight down, under the world, and is the immortal resting place of souls.
More important: it is where the dead wait for a new life, a second chance,
where they wait to be remembered, reborn in the minds of the living. It is a
hopeful place. And Thanatos, or what we think of as the Greek personification
of death, is not really a personification, but a mist or veil or cloud that
separates the still living person from life. For the Greeks, who had no word
for irreversible death, one did not die; one darkened.
I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary and
believable form of compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will
be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about
the quality of that rememberance - what it will be like to crouch in the dim
hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be
lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know
better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are
better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of
again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more
current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases
slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, its constant themes, are less
liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate
, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence
other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it.
Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging
revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this
immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?
<To be continued....>
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☆╭╮ ╭╮■
∫╰╰﹏╯╯■ Sometimes...
﹡︱ ︱■
﹡╭˙。˙╮■ the goodness descends
＊╰ ﹍﹎ ╯■ without a name.
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