“As regards the Lost Word, it is explained that the sun at autumn has lost its power and Nature is rendered mute...” - A.E. Waite, The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross

Robert Duncan prefaced a work he composed (The HD Book) about poetics and the poet HD (and really life) with that quote. He talks early in the book about how students are taught to read and learn as a way to get to the middle class. Which has its advantages, to my creature-comfort disposition: a stable paycheck and some level of pleasure and acceptance. As he relates in the first pages, the schools teach us “signs and passwords” to the universities and our life in a job in a formed society. It will be our life to be, earning and spending and supporting a society. However, as I reflect on this and his words, the reading for grades is a reading which seems to pull us away from the small sacred things we had, from finding our own life in that continuum we are in. So we get a happy-enough life in sterile buildings which display caged pieces of nature as potted plants and glass aquariums to help us, but which keep us there from sun-up to sun-down, away from the real thing.

There is a reading, a choice, however, which does take us inside to the sacred life, to things which were valued in some romantically imagined (and perhaps never really existed) other life. A life which we can now, maybe some of us, have when we don't have to worry about fetching water and marauding bandits. From a middle-class comfort we can have the sacred I suppose, if we rediscover those Lost Words and what they represent and do. The sacred things were in those special books which we read for our own purposes, not for a grade, not for a “password” to a life in the middle. Things we read because they grabbed us full on, by the head, by the heart. The books which compelled us to read under the blanket with a flashlight past our bedtime. They took us to the very places we read, and back to “old orders overthrown by the middle class (but which) lived on in the beginnings of an inner life...” finding and making “what is not actual real.” (The HD Book)

An inner life which for some formed in books but also when we marveled at the flight of an owl in the evening, silent, daring, alluring on its wings spread before it disappeared into a line of old trees which themselves hid a secret life and history of earth. An inner life formed when we watched our young child with a cache of jelly beans and a smile wider than life itself. An inner life formed in books about muses, sacred fire, and intrusions of god into life. A time when there there was mystery, interaction, community. We marveled at heroes of giant stature, bravery from halflings, free will, love gained and lost, secrets on forgotten maps, all of those things that must be kept, and kept true as we march to orders in an ordered society. Things which caused, and cause, some to write. The following is my own small attempt at it:

   “As regards the Lost Word”
   a dropped white feather from silent flight,
   seen while holding a guitar, silent without chord.
   The word is sought in lost books, pages separating with dust,
   of half-remembered stories told around a pale fire,
   the teller in ash-white sigils, and when he sings his words
   with piercing dark look into our eyes, we both see
   memories from lost journeys in other care-worn lives, perhaps
   chasing the king's stag between rising sun and quieting moon.
   It was an arrow true across meadow blue with extinct flowers
   that struck down the sacred animal, a profit before
   rain showers that wash mud from our eyes.
   There it is we can now see the giant on bent knee, giving a flower
   to the traveling queen in silver robes and singing with gilded voice.
   She will take us back on a free-will path through the forest,
   to place our feet inside the prints of hero's steps
   on the way to mountains, battles, a lover's cabin, or quests
   heavy with choice, until the misted clock tower
   strikes us awake from dream, and in that first ashy moment of half-morning
   we hold emerald perception into the light and dark
   within the hearts of our race, seeing the watchtowers alight again
   with poets to sing, and artists to paint those beauties and horrors,
   both our found passwords to the life we live in the found word.

Recovering the word for myself, I read the poets and authors and songwriters I loved, in addition to the ones in a reading list for a grade. It was these others which made me want to write myself. The breakthrough in motivation for writing and imagination was the reading of a poet like Duncan, not on that required list. It was through Duncan I discovered the made places of imagination, the recovered word, and so I end with that most compelling poem,

“OFTEN I AM PERMITTED TO RETURN TO A MEADOW
 
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
...”

(from, Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field)

  “I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it.”
- Lew Welch, "I Saw Myself"

The poet, in the struggle for clarity, sees himself. At some point they must do this, or must struggle to do so, at the least. So truthful is the vision it goes to the very bones of the poet. Alternately, the bone seen is one, hollowed out and placed as in a stream, with life rushing through. One with the stream, not obstructing the stream, for the waters rush through the poet.

The identification is nothing if we don't do something with it, however, and that, as the poem goes on to say, is to “ring is what / a bell does”, to make the voice heard. That and to achieve a moment of zen.  The poems are but a reporting out, and an epiphany. Sometimes a personal epiphany, sometimes an epiphany about the world and time.  Many of us try at this. Some succeed. Some succeed but can't cope with the stream. In a sense, they are suffocated by the rush of the stream.

It is unfortunate that Lew Welch's ending was so tragic.

In my youth I came to embrace poetry – which was to embrace life and the rush of the stream and the ringing of a bell. I attempted to learn from the likes of Lew Welch and others who wrote in the 50's, 60's and 70's. They were muses of a different sort. They had a commitment to the poem. Perhaps that is another meaning from the poem. The whole thing can also be a commitment, for the ring is always symbolic of that, as well.
Here is a small tribute to Lew, and the others, a small poem to them, their work, and their impact on my youthful days and desire to write. At the time, my life was not so far from theirs in time, at least.  Is it now so different, however, in substance? What is the life of a poet today?

  A favorite line, a favorite phrase, to start the week with.

“Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought...”

- Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field, © 1960

This poem is a poem I often return to. For reasons perhaps not what the great poet intended. Or perhaps they are. It speaks to me, however, as a creed about art, creation, and creativity.

It is as if there is a place where we can go to find our voice, our meaning, our myths, and our art. It is, however, not wholly our own. We are permitted to find our voice, and we are permitted to make our meanings. But this is a sacred place, a place where we can't go whenever we want. Perhaps this is writer's block, but this meaning I attach to it is itself the mythology we can make of small things. And in this way, become connected to something greater.

It is, of course, a made place. Does that mean it is not natural? Or is nature made, too? Either way, it is part of eternity, “an eternal pasture folded in all thought”, our thought, our muses' thoughts, the thoughts of the field itself, perhaps, the ground of being.

It is ours, it is dear to us. It underlies everything. I use language to make it mine, to show it, to fold it in thought – all thought – which means it becomes part of other's thought as well. They have the final act of creation, of linking it to their own experience and interpretation. The reader, given permission by the author putting out this section of the field, now is part of the field. The field is much greater, of course. We explore it bit by bit, poem by poem, story by story. We then fold ourselves into the greater part of the world.

A great poem to come back to, when time permits, when need arises. It is eternally there for us.

“Most verse is something being made to communicate what is already present in the mind.” - Robert Duncan.

“The process of poetry...is to reveal the potential of what is 'present in the mind' so that writer and reader come to know what it is they know, explore it and realize, real-ize it.” - Denise Levertov

Simply put...write what you know, but more elegantly stated. The fruition of which, of followed, is that we know more, more about the world, our selves, and the relationships. The simple things that make up the real world, and the simple responses that are overlooked by others, are the things we know. Observe, participate, know, stew, write. Re-write and realize.

By doing this, the poet can become an unwitting explorer, which, if others are able to follow the journey, might also learn along with the poet.  For sometimes the things we know are deep in the mind, buried, our histories and myths forgotten, disconnected.  We can, however, find them and reconnect.

  Thought for the day.

“One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.” - Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”, from Selected Writings.

Olson's declaration is a good lesson to keep in mind when writing, especially as a poet. Keep the poem moving, and move it to a purpose, the writing made of perceptions. Actually, the rule could apply to any writing. Keep the thing moving.  But that is what we add...we take the language we find, we add the perception, and the reader then adds their own experiences and reactions.  The poem then becomes a vortex, drawing in the reader's world.  So to evoke the additions, move the poem from perception to perception, “Move, instanter, on another!” as Olson said.  Hard to do, certainly.

A Calling to Jot
 
"The path you tread is narrow and the trumpets sheer and very high
the ravens all are watching from a vantage point nearby ”
- Cymbaline, Pink Floyd

There is a bridge we cannot see
a traveler’s bridge, a bridge
for those who walk for many miles
with staff for defense and for leaning,
with cheese and bread and water for feeding.

It has been there since before the race,
at one time a mere log across the span,
then mortared stone, and underneath
runs the bad blood and running time
of the stars in the sky and the
shadowed passages not chosen.

A bridge to a world in our mind,
a bridge to the myths left behind.
But beware the one beneath the bridge
who's job it is to grab the random crosser
who are called by the King beneath the mountain.