Sunday Round Table #3 Waxing Poetic

"How does the ordinary person come to an experience of the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. - Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That, p. 92 "My own work, though it may seem at times to be a system of ideas, is basically an attempt to describe mystical experience not of formal visions and supernatural beings, but of reality as seen and felt directly in a silence of words and mindings. In this I set myself the same impossible task as the poet: to say what cannot be said. Indeed, much of my work is poetry described as prose (with margins adjusted) so that people will read it. As poets value the sounds of words above their meanings, and images above arguments, I am trying to get thinking people to be aware of the actual vibrations of life as they would listen to music." -Alan Watts, In My Own Way "When [British poet] A.E. Housman writes that 'poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it,' and when he states again 'that the intellect is not the fount of poetry, that it may actually hinder its production, and that it cannot even be trusted to recognize poetry when it is produced,' he is no more than reaffirming and lucidly formulating the first axiom of all creative art whether it be in poetry, music, dance, architecture, painting, or sculpture which is, namely, that art is not, like science, a logic of references but a release from reference and rendition of immediate experience; a presentation of forms, images, or ideas in such a way that they will communicate, not primarily a thought or even a feeling, but an impact." -Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 1, p.41-42 No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. We dont read and write poetry because its cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. -Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give names to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of it feels right to me. -Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. -Leonard Cohen

Part 2 Its a Celebration, Bitches

"Our love is like a well in the wilderness where time watches over the wandering lightning. Our sleep is a secret tunnel that leads to the scent of apples carried on the wind. When I hold you, I hold everything that is -- the swans, volcanoes, river rocks, maples trees drinking the fragrance of the moon, bread the fire adores. In your life I see everything that lives." Pablo Neruda

I ran away, hands stuck in pockets that seemed All holes; my jacket was a holey ghost as well. I followed you, Muse! Beneath your spell, Oh, la, la ,what glorious loves I dreamed! I tore my shirt; I threw away my tie. Dreamy Hop o' my Thumb, I made rhymes As I ran. I slept out most of the time. The stars above me rustled through the sky. I heard them on the roadsides where I stopped Those fine September nights, when the dew dropped On my face and licked it to get drunk. I made up rhymes in dark and scary places, And like a lyre I plucked the tired laces Of my worn-out shoes, one foot beneath my heart. Arthur Rimbaud, Wandering

Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet. W.B. Yeats

O, day, arise! The atoms are dancing. Thanks to Him, the universe is dancing. The souls are dancing, overcome with ecstasy. Ill whisper in your ear where their dance is leading them. All the atoms in the air and in the desert know well, they seem insane. Every single atom, happy or miserable, Becomes enamored of the sun,

Of which nothing can be said. Rumi

Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am. Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus

He keeps me quiet, I think, because he sees creation in my eyes. Maybe a man can build, maybe a God can destroy, but someday the rain will stop and doves will come and I will make a world. That is not a power he can take from me. For all your talk of revolution there is truth in this: I was saved by being secondary. If you have been made to love and nurture, do. It does not make you weak. Clementine von Radics, Letter From the Wife of Noah to the Mothers Who Follow

Once upon a time, When women were birds, There was the simple understanding That to sing at dawn And to sing at dusk Was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, That the world is meant to be celebrated. Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds

The river is famous to the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so. The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse. The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek. The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom. Naoimi Shihab Nye

May a good vision catch me May a benevolent vision take hold of me, and move me May a deep and full vision come over me, and burst open around me May a luminous vision inform me, enfold me. May I awaken into the story that surrounds, May I awaken into the beautiful story. May the wondrous story find me; May the wildness that makes beauty arise between two lovers arise beautifully between my body and the body of this land, between my flesh and the flesh of this earth, here and now, on this day, May I taste something sacred. David Abram

Yesterday, blue tasted like licorice. Even wind chimes caused dizziness; an ache of paper lanterns rotting from the acacias. Perhaps the L in my name makes you sad, evokes a film where a woman waves from a train. Or how this horizon wants to be a hymn. If you listen, you can

hear the holes in the alphabet, sounds lit by the lamps of our bones. Perhaps with this page I could fashion a boat or a very convincing window. A dress made entirely of vowels. Kristy Bowen, The Synaesthetes Love Poem

May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words. May you smell food cooking you have not eaten. May the spring of a foreign river be your navel. May your soul be at home where there are no houses. Walk carefully, well loved one, walk mindfully, well loved one, walk fearlessly, well loved one. Return with us, return to us, be always coming home. Ursula K. Le Guin

I am leaving soon, slipping to where language will no longer find me, my days a passage of blue shadows smudging the linoleum with wings. Christina Hutchins, from The Physicist to His Daughter

I caught the happy virus last night When I was out singing beneath the stars. It is remarkably contagious So kiss me. Hafiz

I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act. We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin." Luke Davies, In the Yellow Time of Pollen

the two took off their clothes and kissed because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time, they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source. There is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of two in a single body, a single soul, oh total being Octavio Paz, Sunstone

The warm bodies shine together in the darkness, the hand moves to the center of the flesh, the skin trembles in happiness and the soul comes joyful to the eye-yes, yes, that's what I wanted, I always wanted, I always wanted, to return to the body where I was born. Allen Ginsberg, Song

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this:

where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. Pablo Neruda, Sonnet 17

All of Time began when you first answered to the names your mother and father gave you. Soon, those names will travel with the leaves. Then, you can trade places with the wind. Then you'll remember your life as a book of candles, each page read by the light of its own burning. Li-Young Lee, Become Becoming

Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes Loving me in secret. It is here. At a touch of my hand, The air fills with delicate creatures From the other world. James Arlington Wright

We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech. William Carlos Williams Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding