MorpheusSandman
11-30-2012, 04:59 AM
It's a bit hard to answer that, because some poems I've had fragments/pieces written down for years before I finished it. If I think about the longest it took to write one working on it every day it was probably about six months. I wrote the piece as a lengthy prose piece first, which took a few weeks of writing and then a few more editing. Then I began breaking it up into a kind of variable blank verse (not strictly iambic or pentameter, but not really free-verse either). After I started that process I began to think about a more detailed outline, and settled on a 12-stanza piece, loosely modeled on the form of Paradise Lost. So by the time I finished organizing what prose I'd written I went back and filled in the parts I was lacking. Also, as the outline started to gel in my mind I discovered that it was a kind of pastoral elegy, so I decided to include several allusions to the famous examples, so I spent a few weeks rereading Milton's Lycidas, Arnold's Thyrsis, Shelly's Adonais, and Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Around that time I also read the sections on the elegy and pastoral in the book Radiant Lyre, which helped shaped what I wanted to do with the piece. Then I spent a few more months editing and rewriting, trying to develop and accentuate the various motifs/themes I had in mind. I still feel like I have more work to do, but I've decide to put it down for a while since I, frankly, just got tired of it.
For anyone interested (I still don't have a title, and sorry for the sucky formatting; it looks fine on Word, but not on LitNet):
I
She wakes into the midnight, pitch
As voids where seconds cease, and particles,
Potential matter, pop at random in
And out of existence.
She sits up on the edge of the bed;
The clock has closed its crimson eyes, merging
Into the blanket darkness, forgetting
Its raison d'être; the wooden lamp has joined it,
Forsook its own hybridity, of being
A body hewn from nature,
A head of blown glass in a cage of steel;
And somewhere, tangled, lost in jasmine dreams,
A part of me awakes beside her, still.
No light, and all I feel are sheets
Around this nakedness, a swaddled infant
Drifting near twilit reeds inside a bark.
II
Where had we been before this moment?
As the God that sleeps for ages
Floating on a lotus,
Have we awoken to create
Our own world,
Burst the bubble,
Then relapse
To bliss? Is this the sphere encircling us,
And rising to the atmosphere, but paused,
If for a moment, on the fingertips
Of children, laughing, playing in the park?
A swell of cheeks, a puff, and we will float
Back up towards the clouded dark.
Perhaps we’re still asleep?
There's too much logic for a dream,
With chaos kept at bay by mists around
The margins, draping objects in a sense
Of life. We sense the self apart,
Intuiting the order that was there
Before the sentries closed reconnaissance.
III
She drifts as silence, softer near the void,
Her naked toes are touching the cold ground—
And barely by the moonlight, peeking through
The window, where the frost has kissed,
And prayed its silent ministries,
I see her form: cymophanous crystal,
A prism catching light and stitching shades
On flaxen stepping stones in water.
Against the frame, her silhouette
Is Atlas holding up the frame
Of all the world;
Her arms are crossed beneath her breasts,
An alabaster Venus, but I see
The goose bumps rise upon the skin,
Too human, yet still closer than this night
In perfectness, and closer than the light
To all I see,
And all I ever need to see
IV
Her feet are feathers
Lighting on the floor,
And yet I feel the weight release,
Impressing on another surface.
It's not the weight itself, it's not
The gravity of physics, but
The matter on a mind,
Impressing as it does;
Our footprints disappear from dirt before
They leave the spaces they have only walked
On in reflections and imaginations,
Clefts left
As the river carves its bed
To carry on its being.
V
She moves
Through night as clouds across a moon,
As beauty in a starless stretch of space,
A liquifaction of the light that drapes
Her body, sways and swoons like branches
Tickled by wind into an ecstasy
Of circummortal purity and grace.
I’ll measure time by watching her hips,
A ticking pendulum, her face
Where shadows divide a dial, her hair
Is falling sand through her back, an hourglass,
And all this synchronized as lathing swans,
Treading in lightness, white beneath the moon.
So many times I’ve seen her lie
Asleep, when night has closed her eyes, a song
Was sung by nightingales outside.
She seemed enwrapped in jasmine labyrinths,
And I had wished to tread, soundless as
The moon, to watch her breathe, to watch her rising
And falling breasts, like swans on swelling lakes.
VI
Don't leave,
My Mary, savior--Jesus walking on
The waves, and me your scared and doubting Joseph,
Stranded in his bark.
Oh, I stake a step
And sink, and I've already drowned what seems
A thousand times before, reborn
Into the night, this recreated bliss.
Yet she can walk these waters like a thing
Of life, a halo in the whirlpool clouds,
As if she dared the elements to strife;
But it's not in the storm or in the strife
We’re beaten, numbed, and wish to be no more,
But in the deadened after-calm when washed
Ashore, and all is lost,
But just a little life.
We've clung on by the thinnest threads before,
We've walked on words suspended over cliffs,
We've made a home inside our silent hearse;
And this was all it took.
VII
The lamp sprouts roots, and grows into an oak,
Its limbs shoot through the ceiling and the walls,
As vines and ivy twine through every nook.
Flowers erupt from soil beneath our feet,
As roses, daisies, violets, hyacinth
Bloom into spiraling kaleidoscopes.
The bed itself becomes a cradle made
Of bark, within the hollowed, hallowed tree.
The wind is strumming on the strings of grass;
The scents of sweet weeds are the melody,
And distant choirs of honeysuckle sing.
The table near us bears the fruits of harvest,
With swollen apples, moistened grapes and berries.
The corn is lying nearby in its sheaves,
Swaddled as the infant in the arbor.
A crimson gold of autumn light is seeping
Through midnight darkness as a godly specter
Stalking ravines and valleys with a love
That never knew a shade beyond the noon.
All, all is here and now; "This was Eden,"
VIII
And so the thought comes
As a raindrop through a surface
Moving outwards to admit
The newborn element,
That then becomes the womb, and not the thing
It was alone, inching towards tongue-tips
Of leaves, peering over infinity.
The raptures in the night are memories
That built this, silencing into a choir,
Acquired in a moment stillness, still
Stretching onwards for hours, days, an age.
It’s forged in friction, waves that lapped
Our body's shore and bend of bay. We lay
Exhausted, drenched, and quenched inside a fire;
We didn't know we'd played the part of Vulcan,
A stand-in god for Morpheus
Who left on business, passing through
The restless dreams this city weaves.
IX
A river wends itself along our way
And leaves no bridge for us to cross;
It separates us on two stranded halves.
Before we’ve even tasted harvest fruits,
Or slept as babies in the hollow tree,
Or stretched on silken, perfumed floors,
The bodies find their way into the flow.
At first it’s just the head of Orpheus,
A dirge still on his bloody lips,
And Maenads raving, frothing at the mouth.
He’s followed by a bier upon a bed
Of mourning flowers—Lycidas is dead!
He’s not yet sunk beneath the whelming tide,
And who is there to wipe the tears away?
Thyrsis comes next, his Corydon’s at home,
While Thyrsis strayed outside these glens alone;
But time did not suspend his scythe for him.
So was his journey outside worth the cost?
His body’s wrapped in frost, decaying in
The place it once found every love and joy.
His soul is left to haunt here, always lost.
Then Adonais comes, a leprous corpse;
His spirit bark is driven far from the shore,
Far from the trembling throng. A light and song
Calls from the riven sky and earth, he’s borne
Darkly afar, but burning through the veil,
Becoming like a star,
Where, maybe, things eternal are.
We never would have ate the fruit of that
Forbidden tree if answers followed this.
X
This riddle twists us both in Gordian knots,
And time comes flooding back at once;
A reddened sickle sunburnt glimmers in
The eye of day, a venom seeps through every
Veined thing that light defines
As separate, and memories
Of what becomes of moments
Like this assemble—animated winds
Hackle through scorching deserts, shaping sand
In towering columns, pillars holding up
A grainy golden coliseum.
They should be easily blown down,
No Sampson needed.
Wind-forged holds are stronger than you think,
And storms that we create
Are stronger far than those that nature makes.
I knew there’s something there,
Outside this heaven, yet it’s easily
Forgotten when we trace our ways back home,
Home to the dreams we had that opened up
A second in our mind into the spaces of
Eternity.
Although we never held it in the palm
Of our own hands, or found it in a grain
Of sand, we’ve sensed it in a change
Of seasons, when the sloth of summer met
A winter kiss in marriage beds of autumn;
When strands of winter grey were colored in
By blooming spring; when we were sacrificed
To life like gossamers to wind.
XI
The star is withered to the ocean bed,
Like ripened fruit that’s rotting on the vine.
A bite, we know, and all this falls away,
But no one dies of hunger in a day,
So stay, as long as possible, right here
With me… No, Eve, don’t listen to the snake!
Too late, too late, the evening light begins
To fade. All fruit and flowers turn to ash,
The tree shrinks up and back, its sap is sunk,
Back to the bed’s feet, dead, and there interred.
XII
But damn these thoughts, as I'll not make my mind
As weightless grains inside a granary,
Not insubstantial as those particles,
Not things that are and are not till observed.
You’re here, my star to every wandering bark.
I gravitate to you within this ark,
An orbit searching in this darkened space,
Solid as dreams around a sleeping brain,
Predictable as rain.
Our world, each has one, and is one.
It only lapses in ourselves,
A lucid feeling grown
Staccato, stutters in
Syllabic thought, that fails to maintain what
We build inside these nights. If time returns,
Invades, and if decay creeps into every
Stream of life, it’s by our invitation.
Watch, see: our pasts are lopped off,
Simply as sprigs from off the vine; and, see,
Our futures dwell in bowers built in time,
And with no time they find us, they release
As butterflies that fall from their cocoons.
So all we need is night, the moon, this bed,
Our naked feet, and everything that meets
Inside these liquid gardens we create
By flesh, and union, and a mind content
In where it is,
And what it has,
And what it will
Become.
MorpheusSandman
12-04-2012, 09:16 AM
Do you worry that by studying poetry you might end up the same as another poet?No. In fact, the opposite is true; those who haven't studied poetry tend to write in endless cliches, regurgitating themes, metaphors, and imagery of other poets precisely because they are unaware that other poets have already written it. Most all of the greatest poets from any century were both well-read and well-studied in poetry. They crafted their own voice not out of an ignorance of other poets, but by the engagement of other poets. TS Eliot and Ezra Pound may have been the first poets to show how true originality could be created out of the blatant theft of the past. The Waste Land and The Cantos are awash in allusions and quotes from other poets, but does either work sound the same as other poets? No. The irony is that both, despite their clear thefts, were so original that they gave birth to all of modern poetry.
Knowledge and study does not, in any way, impinge or limit the personal voice of any poet. Those that think it does simply have a naive and empirically false view of what both originality and creativity is. Really, both creativity and originality come more from the unique rearrangement of material that already exists as opposed to the invention of new material all together. Look at the greatest geniuses in any of the arts; most of them did not completely invent anything, but rather found new and unique combinations of old material. Shakespeare? Most all of his plays were "remakes" of others. Milton? His greatest masterpiece is a reworking of the first book of The Bible. Mozart? Spent his whole life working in forms innovated by Haydn. Honestly, name me any great poet who lost their sense of identity and unique voice by reading/studying other poetry. The romantic myth that poetry is born out the uniqueness of each individual is really nothing more than that, a myth, and a particular nasty one because it inspires laziness and likely the primary source for mediocre and bad poetry.
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