Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Ice speckles the lawn,
That rug of brown,
A welcome mat for spring
That is expected to make
A fluttering, colorful entrance
With a song on its lips,
A dance in its fashionable bloom.

The sun will mine the sharp, hard world,
Drip melted ore into the eye,
Which, in turn, will glow,
A marble rolling,
The air bubbles,
The cloudy striations,
The glint of being one
With that far away wonder,
The sun.

Fire, light,
How much reality, how much its shadow,
Thought?

This poem is a revision of an earlier poem. It is tighter, less wordy, and though, I think, it has some interesting images, it ends with no real insight. The insight or unifying principle is a cliché. If I were an academic I'd use a reference to Aztec culture or to the Druids or some Christian metaphor, though that too would be a cliché and not very interesting.

I just added a third stanza, a coda, which may or not work.

Why do we write poems? Why do I write poems? Probably to capture or discover an experience. The rational mind is always looking for meaning. If you are drunk on emotion or some substance, you don't give a damn but if you are sober, you want an Apollonian orgasm. Poems are Dionysian or Apollonian orgasms transmitted by language.

Even the protest and the grieving poems are one of those. We escape ourselves by binding to our words and those thought/emotions become a subjective objective reality. We are no longer fingering our psyches but examining an object, a poem, that is before our eyes, in our hands, in our ears in the words.

Sometimes I despair of writing. I do enjoy reading poems that strike a chord but so much that gets published, even in the reputable, ballyhooed journals, seems so flat and often esoteric. However, the other day I came across an Adrienne Rich poem that was a pleasure to read. My own writing? Often interesting, arresting imagery, some good turns of thought, but no symphonic structure, no world-shattering insights. I am a man with an odd but mundane mind, hopefully a good heart, and, though making a lot of noise, some sophisticated, some not, just one of the powerless and forgettable in the big picture of this life, though my education always inspires me to achieve the unachievable. You have to be humble, but not like Uriah Heep.