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POEMS
TIM J. MYERS
BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
p ublisher
BlazeVOX [ books ]
blazevox.org
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INTRODUCTION
But when I return, I find an equal longing for some kind of bridge
between visible and invisible, between the story and my actual life. The
paradox of powerful narratives, even the fantastic kind, is that they're
usually so utterly practical, so mysteriously relevant to the world they
sometimes seem blithely to ignore. "If the world were clear, art would
not exist," Camus says; "Art helps us pierce the opacity of the world."
Powerful stories act in exactly this way. Barry Lopez praises the
Inuktitut word for "storyteller," isumataq: "the person who creates the
atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself."
So I always find myself hunting for connections between real and
unreal. Talking animal characters, for example, make me wonder
about animal linguistics; a character who can fly must, to my mind, still
follow certain rules pertaining to the magic of flight. Part of this rather
strange and sometimes silly tendency, I'm sure, is the simple and
overwhelming pleasure it gives my story-making heart. But it's also
related, I think, to our modern spiritual crisis, resembling the problem
Keats faced in writing Endymion as he tried to combine myth and
psychology in the character of Apollo. The question can be stated
simply enough: How can we effectively blend our mythic and spiritual
traditions with our powerful modern sense of realism?
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Leaf wrote words I've come back to again and again: "Fairy [s]tories,"
he says, deny "...(in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal
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final defeat...giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the
world, poignant as grief."
A final note: These forms of the stories, on leftside facing pages,
are of course unsatisfying to me, given that they're only tight, hard
seeds--not the flowering trees I try to make them when I stand before a
group to tell. The "stories" in this book are really only departure
points, not to be confused with the wild, unpredictable, and charged
utterances that emerge when we're "beckon[ed] out of the visible"--that
is, when a good storyteller and a good audience come together for this
most spontaneous and social of rituals.
Tim J. Myers
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NECTAR OF STORY
POEMS
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I will not say the prophet was a coarse or venal man-but when the elders had threatened that virtuous woman-whose body even in clothing
awoke their lust, made them
sick with love-longing-when they threatened her unless she submit to them,
she refused, accused them in turn,
all was brought to the prophet Daniel,
on whose judgment Susannah was depending-and standing before him she recounted
how the old men, peeking hot-eyed through swaying ferns,
had watched from green shadows as she bathed,
white form in womanly fullness,
breasts, hips, eyes dark and beckoning
(though she thought she was alone),
and Daniel in his wisdom saw through the elders' lies,
rebuked them, confined them, restored to her
the esteem of the people. I will not say
he did less, nor
accuse him of hypocrisy or baser motive.
Only I find it worthwhile to mention
that as he turned to go,
he found himself suddenly possessed
by a vision of water streaming over
her shoulders, her nipples, water
dripping from the arch of a perfect lifted white foot-and for many days this shadowed him
with a sweet and continuous trouble.
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At Night
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