Litany by Billy Collins

Even the jaded and ineffectual person that is currently me, had to smile at this one. 

Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife, The crystal goblet and the wine... -Jacques Crickillon You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker, and the marsh birds suddenly in flight. However, you are not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter, or the house of cards. And you are certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air. It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general's head, but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk. And a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse. It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table. I am also the moon in the trees and the blind woman's tea cup. But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife. You are still the bread and the knife. You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.

Joni Mitchell Meets William Butler Yeats

Note: I revised and corrected (so many embarrassing mistakes!) this post from 2008 a bit and I'm republishing it for National Poetry Month.

sketch by John Singer Sargent

 I'm a huge Joni Mitchell fan. Being a teen in the mid-seventies, my favorite of Joni's music is not what was once categorized as folk, but her recordings since the mid-70's beginning with Hejira. From there I worked my way back to her folk beginnings. Even early on, Joni created a genre all of her own and remains to date an influence on countless songwriters, singers and musicians.

In this song, Mitchell takes the classic Yeats poem The Second Coming, slightly alters the words and writes a musical composition to it. My only complaint about Joni's version is that although she stayed fairly true to the original, she should have left it entirely as it was written. Others believe she shouldn't have touched it all. I'll let you decide.

(On a side note: Am I the only poetry nerd who thinks that Yeats was hot?  ;-)

 Slouching Toward Bethlehem from the CD Night Ride Home, 1991

Joni Mitchell

based on the poem by W.B. Yeats

 The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre*

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming!

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

*gyre -Yeats called each cycle of history a "gyre"--literally a circular or spiral turn. (He pronounced it with a hard "g.") He had a complicated system detailed in his book A Vision that proposed history as a series of 2,000 year eras, each of which begins and ends with some apocalyptic event in which the divine (in a Christian or some other form) inserts itself into human history resulting in cataclysmic historical and mythological consequences.

Sunday Snipppet

It's National Poetry Month in the United States. I try throughout the year to post a few poems on The Pagan Sphinx. And when April rolls around, I kick it up a notch. I'm experimenting with posting poems  (or snippets of) by poets that I'm not familiar with. Previously I've gone with trusted favorites such as Emily Dickinson, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings and Anne Sexton.

The poem for this Sunday is by Charles Bukowski. I've read him in quick spurts in the past. Usually while dusting my bookshelves! It always takes me all day to dust because I pull out a book and start reading. Before I'm aware of it, I've picked up and leafed through a dozen. Reading, dreaming, reminiscing...and sneezing from the dust!

When I went to dust the stacks this time, though, I was missing my one collection of Bukowski so I took myself over to Raven Books in Greenfield (electric kool-aid moment) and browsed the poetry and fiction sections. I came home with Charles Bukowski's Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way and Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

Perhaps in another installment of Sunday Snippet, I will take a passage from the latter. I've been on a Vonnegut kick recently, when I was really never a huge fan of his in the past. I did meet Kurt Vonnegut once and shook his hand but it was so uneventful in terms of actual details, that I won't get into it.  Well, I did get into it. That was it!

And now without further gibber, is the Charles Bukowski poem:

about competition

the higher you climb

     the greater the pressure

those who manage to

                                                                  endure

                                                                  learn

                                                                  that the distance

                                                                  between the

                                                                  top and the

                                                                  bottom

                                                                  is

                                                                  obscenely

                                                                  great.

                                                                 and those who

                                                                 succeed

                                                                 know

                                                                 this secret:

                                                                 there isn't

                                                                 one.

~Charles Bukowski

Sunday Snippet

I write like

Gertrude Stein

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

 Gertrude Stein

(1874-1946)

I found the link for this thingy at my friend Dianne's blog Forks Off the Moment. Just for fun, I thought I'd include a snippet of the oetry of Gertrude Stein. Incidentally, she is one of my favorite literary "celebrities" who happens to be one of my least favorite poets. Perhaps I have not given her fiction a real chance but there is very little compelling me to do so.  Still, what a time she had in Europe with Alice B. Tokeless and all those intellectual and artistic types like Picasso and Hemingway!

This is a Stein poem in its entirety:

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

~Gertrude Stein

Music for Sunday

 This is one goes out to Ginger, who recently referred to the T.S. Eliot poem.
With love.  

For I have known them all already, known them all:— Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,         50 I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room.   So how should I presume?

For the entire T.S. Eliot poem The Love Song of J.A. Prufrock, click here

What is it that makes me just a little bit queasy?

Theres a breeze that makes my breathing not so easy
Ive had my lungs checked out with X rays
Ive smelled the hospital hallways

Someday Ill have a disappearing hairline
Someday Ill wear pyjamas in the daytime

Times when the day is like a play by Sartre
When it seems a bookburnings in perfect order
I gave the doctor my description
Ive tried to stick my prescriptions

Someday Ill have a disappearing hairline
Someday Ill wear pyjamas in the daytime

Afternoons will be measured out
Measured out, measured with
Coffeespoons and T.S. Eliot

Maybe if I could do a play-by playback
I could change the test results that I will get back
Ive watched the summer evenings pass by
Ive heard the rattle in my bronchi...

Someday Ill have a disappearing hairline
Someday Ill wear pyjamas in the daytime

Afternoons will be measured out
Measured out, measured with
Coffeespoons and T.S. Eliot (2x)

Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson

 

December 10, 1830-May 15, 1886

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts at the Homestead on December 10, 1830. Her quiet life was infused with a creative energy that produced almost 1800 poems and a profusion of vibrant letters.
Her lively Childhood and Youth were filled with schooling, reading, explorations of nature, religious activities, significant friendships, and several key encounters with poetry. Her most intense Writing Years consumed the decade of her late 20s and early 30s; during that time she composed almost 1100 poems. She made few attempts to publish her work, choosing instead to share them privately with family and friends. In her Later Years Dickinson increasingly withdrew from public life. Her garden, her family (especially her brother’s family at The Evergreens) and close friends, and health concerns occupied her.
With a few exceptions, her poetry remained virtually unpublished until after she died on May 15, 1886. After her death, her poems and life story were brought to the attention of the wider world through the competing efforts of family members and intimates.

To learn more about this iconic American poet, visit the website of The Emily Dickinson Museum. I live very close to Amherst and stop in to visit the garden in spring and summer every year. Here is a photo I took of the summer garden this year. It is pretty much kept the way Emily once kept it.

As an aside, I once read an article about Emily Dickinson entitled Emily Dickinson:  The Pagan Sphinx and borrowed the name (with credit to the writer which can be found just below the blog header, under Pages About the Pagan Sphinx Blog.) which is my blog and blog moniker.  TPS will be three years old in February and it has never regretted its name.  :-)

Happy Friday,

Pagan Sphinx

Pagan Sphinx Photo 2010 © All Rights Reserved

Artist of the Week: Charles Demuth

American Modernist

Charles Demuth

 (1883-1935)

As a leader of the American Modernist movement, Charles Demuth is best known as a pioneer of the Precisionist style and a master watercolorist. Demuth's Lancaster, Pennsylvania home, now the museum, provided both inspiration and sustenance, and functioned as Demuth's permanent studio location throughout his lifetime. Heralded as a leading light among early American modernist painters, Demuth distinguished himself from his contemporaries in his profoundly-felt renderings of his native Lancaster's factories, grain elevators and churches.

 Self-portrait

1907 

 The Jazz Singer

1916

The Circus

1917

 Turkish Bath with Self-portrait

1918

1919

Essence of a New Church 

 1921

 1924

The Figure 5 in Gold (1928)
Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Metropolitan Museum of Art

The painting above was inspired by this poem by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) 

The Great Figure Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city

 1931

Resources:

Charles Demuth Museum

GBLT Arts

ARTCYCLOPEDIA 

The Art History Archive

Wikipedia 

Art Knowledge News

National Poetry Month - e.e. cummings

"Poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality."    
~ e.e. cummings

e.e. cummings biography

Self-portrait by e.e. cummings

The Paintings of e.e. cummings

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn. 

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the merry deer ran before. 

Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer. 

Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle sang before. 

Horn at hip went my love riding
riding the echo down
into the silver dawn. 

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the level meadows ran before. 

Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer. 

Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrow sang before. 

Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down
into the silver dawn. 

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the sheer peaks ran before. 

Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer. 

Four tell stags at a green mountain
the lucky hunter sang before. 

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn. 

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.

National Poetry Month - Mary Oliver

 Lilies

I have been thinking

about living

like the lilies 

that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall

in the wedge of the wind,

and have no shelter

from the tongues of the cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards,

and have no legs.

Still I would like to be

as wonderful

as that old idea.

But if I were a lily

I think I would wait all day

for the green face

of the hummingbird

to touch me.

What I mean is,

could I forget myself

even in those feathery fields?

When van Gogh

preached to the poor

of course he wanted to save someone -

most of all himself.

He wasn't a lily,

and wandering through the bright fields

only gave him more ideas

it would take his life to solve.

I think I will always be lonely

in this world, where the cattle

graze like a black and white river -

where the ravishing lilies 

melt, without protest, on their tongues -

where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,

just rises and floats away.

~ Mary Oliver

Shadow Shot Sunday and Today's Flowers

Poetic Shadows in Honor of National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month in the United States. An appreciator of poetry from a young age, I'm weaving the theme through several of my posts all month.

For the last couple of years, I've been making a pilgrimage to The Emily Dickinson Museum. The Homestead and The Evergreens is made up of two historic houses and their three-acre landscape on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. Here, the small sphere of existence is preserved  of one of America's most significant poets. The Homestead was the birthplace, in 1830, and home of the Emily Dickinson. The Evergreens, next door, was home to her beloved brother and sister-in-law, Austin and Susan Dickinson, and their three children.

Here are a few photos I took of The Dickinson Homestead and The Evergreens. 

The yellow brick house front door faces south.

If I'm not mistaken the window farthest to the right and the one around the corner are those of the poet's bedroom.

"Where thou art, that is home."

 ~ Emily Dickinson
 

 The sideyard

"My friends are my estate."

~ Emily Dickinson

 The stone path that leads East to Emily's Garden

"How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!"
Emily Dickinson

"The lovely flowers
embarrass me.
They make me regret
I am not a bee..."

"Forever is composed of now."

"Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough"

A path described by Emily Dickinson as “just wide enough for two who love” linked the two Dickinson houses, crossing the lawn from the back door of the Homestead to the east piazza of The Evergreens.
which lies west of the main house.

"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience." 

side porch of The Evergreens

I'll be back in May or June to see how things are growing then, in Emily's garden.

Shadow Shot Sunday

Today's Flowers

National Poetry Month - Emily Dickinson

Pagan Sphinx Photo

WILL there really be a morning? Is there such a thing as day? Could I see it from the mountains If I were as tall as they?    Has it feet like water-lilies?         5 Has it feathers like a bird? Is it brought from famous countries Of which I have never heard?    Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor! Oh, some wise man from the skies!         10 Please to tell a little pilgrim Where the place called morning lies!

-Emily Dickinson

Art Trigger

A reaction to Linda's (and she is indeed, linda) comment about A Modern Olympia, featured in this week's Friday Evening Nudes. I don't especially love the painting but I found it interesting that a painting with such a title would be painted. Sort of like a popular song remake, rarely as good as the original. Who knows? Well, someone must know, but I don't.    ;-)  I don't think Olympia looks herself at all in Cezanne's version.

 A Modern Olympia

Paul Cezanne

Anyway, that triggered the image of the Olympia by Manet. My favorite nude of all time.

 

And because it's been too long since I posted any poetry, a repeat of the poem by Margaret Atwood, my favorite writer and thinker

Manet’s Olympia

By Margaret Atwood

She reclines, more or less,

Try that posture, it’s hardly languor.
Her right arm sharp angles.
With her left she conceals her ambush.
Shoes but not stockings,
how sinister.  the flower
behind her ear is naturally
not real, of a piece
with the sofa’s drapery.
The windows (if any) are shut.
This is indoor sin.
Above the head of the (clothed) maid
is an invisible voice balloon:   Slut.

But.  Consider the body,

unfragile, defiant, the pale nipples
staring you right in the bull’s eye.
Consider also the black ribbon
around the neck.  What’s under it?
A fine red threadline, where the head
was taken off and glued back on.
The body’s on offer,
but the neck’s as afar as it goes.

 This is no morsel.

Put clothes on her and you’d have a schoolteacher,
the kind with the brittle whiphand.

 There’s someone else in this room.

You, Monsieur Voyeur.
As for that object of yours
she’s seen those before, and better.

 I, the head, am the only subject
of this picture.
You, Sir, are furniture.
Get stuffed

   

 

American Writer

Joyce Carol Oates

Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Homepage

The most recent of Joyce Carol Oates' books I've read is Wild Nights: Stories about the last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. The title was borrowed by Oates from the famous Emily Dicksinson poem of desire:

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—
To a Heart in port—
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!

Emily Dickinson (1861)

Joyce Carol Oates in full Emily Dickinson regalia. She's a bit of a character.

I read it in one sitting on a rainy but romantic Nova Scotia evening, perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. After the dark, that was the only sound - the waves - and the occasional turning of book pages as WP and I devoured our respective book.

I read each of the short stories except the one about Henry James. The "last days" of the great American writers is fictionalized, of course, from the fertile imagination of Joyce Carol Oates and in that style that makes her arguably one of the best America writers of our time.

I inhaled the Poe story, the one I chose to read first; entitled Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House.

Following is an excerpt from it:

1 March 1850. Cyclophagus, I have named it. A most original & striking creature, that would have astonished Homer, as my gothic forebears to a man. Initially, I did not comprehend that Cyclophagus was an amphibian, & have now discovered that this species dwells, by day at least, in watery burrows at the edge of the pebbled beach: to emerge, in the way of the Trojan invaders, at nightfall, & clamber about devouring what flesh its claws, snout, & tearing teeth can locate. & in this way, Mercury died.

This story is a slow, terrifying account of a descent into madness and hell. Very Poe yet with a distinctive Oates flavor. Which is to say that she can really go over the top at times; either sometimes on the brim of something very shocking and at other times directly and distinctly vulgar, as in a story of hers I read in The New Yorker called Zombie (not in this collection). It is with great imagination that Oates delves into the mind of one of our history's most iconic writers.

But nowhere is her hallmark genius more evident than in the story depicting the last days of the life of Emily Dickinson. EDickinsonRepliLuxe is a fantastical tale set in a future where robots are purchased for the home from a selection ranging from sports figures to, well, poets. In this suburban setting, the wife convinces her husband to buy the latest entertainment for the home in the form of Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson. Emily comes into the home, creating a profound impact on the middle-class couple. Here, Oates does what she is best at: the underlying social themes, rape implications and female independence. It's an incredible story. The story draws heavily, of course, on Dickinson's poems and letters (since virtually everything that is known about her, can be found in those) and from photographs by Jerome Leibling in The Dickinsons of Amherst (2001).

The stories of Mark Twain and Hemingway didn't thrill me much. Having read my share of Hemingway, I can't argue his importance in the world of American fiction but I'm not a fan. I like Mark Twain as an American icon but honestly, I slept through the teaching of several of his novels in school.

The worthwhile reads for me in this collection were the Poe and Dickinson stories. Well worth a read, if you like American short fiction.

Don't Burn the Flag, Wash it!

George, when you smile your confident smirk remember this; it is the sneer of a failed monarch in a country of presidents.

~ The Poetry Man

available at Poems & Noble

That's the title of Mark Prime's compilation of poems, with cover artwork by the equally talented artist, Ben Heine.

Wash The Flag, Don't Burn it is a collection of 165 poems about peace, war, justice and liberty. Mark Prime is known to a lot of us in the blogosphere simply as Poetryman. He is the author of A Poetic Justice and started the Peace Tree, a blog that features the writing of several people including my own occasional contributions.

Every time I open the book, I do so randomly. Here is the first poem I turned to today.

TOM

They grow closer together each passing day
You know the vine I mean
The knitting of nature, green
Canopy aloft with life
Even when it's not
They tussle together like schoolchildren
Holding tight the other's hand
Moving 'cross the ground, trees
Weaving a needlepoint of intricacy
Tapping into new little worlds
Breathing time into tiny planets
The labor is far from over
Heavens hold lips in wait

And the less subtle, more powerful voice of this poem:

The War on Peace

When men squander their waking lives
God-jawing 'bout peace intent on war
The world's roads will soon be ruined
In man's self-strewn ambush
And our cities will crouch like snipers
Shelling their own decayed manifestation
Humanity then becomes the blinded child
Searching recklessly for its original eyes

It was hard to pick which poems to feature in this post; there are so many good ones. That is why it became necessary for me to choose them randomly. There is power, love, passion, anger without bitterness, clarity and real talent in this collection.

I'm pleased and proud to count Mark among my blog friends. I admire him not only for his talent as a poet but for his ability to live the life of a peaceful human being. It shows in his every word. Thanks Mark, for what you bring tirelessly to the blogosphere on a daily basis.

The Pagan Bookshelves

Steve at Color Sweet Tooth photographed his bookshelves for a recent post and invited others to do the same. DCup has since followed suit and I, a bit late as usual, have a sampling of my shelves.

When I go to someone's home for the first time and the situation calls for it, I love to browse through their bookshelves, don't you? So here are mine for your perusal. And as Steve stated in his bookshelves post: I challenge readers to show your bookshelves.

(click on photos to enlarge)

Art Bookshelf
(above)
Please meet Cesar le Lizard but please don't ask me to translate!

Random Bookshelf
some rock music biographies, a cookbook that I haven's looked at twice and some novels
Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi is one of the best books I've read in the last ten years

Mostly novels and some Yeats
I Spy Books shoved on top
I love this series for children and I don't like to leave my personal copies in the classroom
I'm a Yeats fan...

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeates

from the collection Crossways (1889)
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

A stack of mostly novels, a couple of which I've yet to read, and behind it, some parenting books I've kept in anticipation of grand kids one day.

Poetry and novels

I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb and The Diaries of Jane Somers by Doris Lesing are two other favorite novels.

The little dish with ashes is where I burn incense and the little you can see of the cloth doll in the corner is Amelia Earhart - a flea market find of many years ago and one of those things I just can't get rid of.

There at least four more bookcases in my house that are not represented here. While I've diligently gotten rid of a lot of excess junk (mine and that of other family members), I admit to having a hard time getting rid of books. A couple of years ago, after filling four boxes full of books and taking them to a used book store, I felt as if I was dropping off a litter of kittens. But it had to be done.

I rarely buy new books anymore unless it's something I know I will refer to often. I find the cost of books exorbitant, so I use the library and buy used books. I am much more at home in a good used book store or a locally owned one than in a Borders or Barnes & Noble. We're lucky in the Happy Valley and the north in Brattleboro, Vermont to have so many independent book stores to choose from; some with unique personalities such as Beyond Words, which boasts a great collection of books on mysticism, religion and spirituality and Food for Thought, which is a workers collective bookstore, carries an incredible selection of books on political themes and issues; including books by local authors with limited exposure and books printed by small, independent book makers.

I admit that I don't read nearly as much as I once did. In this phase of my life, it appears I need long stretches of uninterrupted reading time in order to stay focused. The vacation in Nova Scotia proved to be just what I needed to rapidly devour several books; five, in fact. More on that in another post, I hope.