Jotting Down A Life
  • Home
  • Poetry
    • Special Poems
  • Stories
  • Pictures
  • Memoirs
  • Blog
  • Other Worthy Places

The Spirit of the Thing

1/5/2013

0 Comments

 
     What is writing?  What is in it?  What is the spirit of the thing?  Sometimes it is fun.  An escape that we need.  Sometimes it is serious, an exploration of an issue that we must face.  The genius of the best writing is when it is both.
     Denise Levertov talks of the poets in the Northwest, who write with a dimension that takes in not just "the appearance of phenomena, but the presence of spirit WITHIN the phenomena."  ("Some Affinities of Content", 1991)  To give an example of this, she quotes a poem by Sam Hamill, Black Marth Eclogue.  Part of this poem, about a heron, I will quote here:
       "He stands in the black marsh
        more monument than bird, a wizened prophet
        returned from a vanished mythology.
        He watches the hearts of things."
     This is such an outstanding poem, and displays perfectly the spirit of the bird, as well as the bird itself - an ephemeral meaning behind eye and feather - without interposing the viewer.  The scene has a spiritualism all of its own, a proto-spiritualism.  The heron, a large bird, is presented as a prophet of old, and all sorts of imagery and meaning is brought to bear.  With that meaning, confronting a prophet of the past, we move in our minds.  We get an escape from the city life we face, an escape from the stresses of honking cars, work deadlines, and bills due, into a scene of peace, of myth, of something older and wiser than us.  Through that, we can inject our issues.  That issue may strike each of us differently.  The art has drawn us in.  For some it could be, "Where should we be?  What should we be seeking?"
     An example not from nature, but still of this phenomenon and the spirit within, is in a poem by Barbara Alfaro, The Rocking Chair, from First Kiss (2012).   Here, the literal spirit of a boy is present, but it's the deeper spirit of loss, of hanging on, that moves this.  The opening is quoted here:
       "In the nursery the ghost of a boy stands
        on a rocking chair, holding its back.
        A miniature prisoner of wood,
        he is looking through its slats."
     We look through the slats of such good poems and writing, and find our own spirits, our own issues, and our escapes.  We may or may not have suffered the loss of a child,  but all of us have lost, and hung on.   Who has not been a miniature prisoner at some point in their lives?  Or looked through our own slats?  Hopefully, we read and write ourselves to go on, to be better, to find the spirit of an event, a place, a bird, or a rocking chair not yet thrown away.  Then, we find the spirit of a thing, and perhaps, maybe, of ourselves.


    
0 Comments

    Author

    I have been writing for a long time...but recently became serious about it due to Scribd, where I have over 1,200 followers and over 170,000 readings of over 100 pieces.  Links to some of those on the relevant pages on this site.

    Picture

    Archives

    October 2015
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011

    Categories

    All
    Alaa
    Announcement
    Artists
    Authors
    Books
    Book Stores
    Charles Olson
    Cigars With Dog
    Creation
    Creativity
    Denise Levertov
    Discovery
    Dog
    Duncan
    Ebook
    Egypt
    E Readers
    E-readers
    Fenelosa
    Genesis
    Ground Of Being
    Haiku
    Holidays
    Humor
    Insipiration
    Inspiration
    Interview
    Kings
    Knowing
    Levertov
    Lew Welch
    Library
    Memory
    Monday
    Myth
    Neighbors
    New Authors
    New Books
    New Poem
    Night
    Olson
    On Writing
    Origins
    Permission
    Philosophy
    Poetry
    Present
    Published In
    Quail Bell
    Reading
    Robert Duncan
    Searching For Meaning
    Seasons
    Short Story
    The Field
    The Word
    Time
    Wind
    Winter
    Writing
    Youth

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.