The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
Musings on Being and Becoming Human
ISSUE 24
READY TO READ
SOLITUDE, NATURE, POETRY AND SOUL
Welcome to The Grapevine!
Given our struggles of recent months in which most of us have experienced more time alone or in touch with a limited number of people while we wait out a pandemic and a tense and tedious political situation here in the United States, we are interested to find out how many of our readers, near and far, have discovered new values to explore and express. Therefore, we are announcing a fall festival of poetry here on The Grapevine, in which we hope all of you will participate and will invite others to do so. Knowing that many of you do not (yet) think of yourselves as poets, we begin by offering some of the best comments we have found on the relation of art and soul (in this case, specifically on poetry and soul) and on how each of us is capable of sensory awareness that may, with attentive cultivation through words, lead into poetry.
For this issue we have collected poems celebrating, through the language of life, a theme I picked up way back in 1993, where I wrote in my journal a line that I can only imagine came from Joseph Campbell, whose work I have been reading all of my adult life. He discusses this motif, but I can't locate the exact source:
Soul is not a whereness. It's a different kind of awareness.
I believe now that our awareness of soul comes not from nowhere but from everywhere in nature and art, two overlapping realms that we internalize through sensory exploration as we recognize our kinship with all life. The poetic sensibility present in each of us is attracted to the language of sensory experience and to the vision of harmony with ourselves, with others, and with the world we live in, including all the elements as well as all animal and vegetable and mineral forms.
One of the best writers on poetry and soul that I have come across is Alain Bosquet. Here is a piece from No Matter, No Fact: Poems by Alain Bosquet. A New Directions Book: New York, 1988, p. ix. Adjust the outdated habits of speech related to gender according to your own preference.
My wild notions can be summed up in a sort of doctrine: the poem is totally useless, but it offers the reader a secular prayer, through which he can imagine new rapports between man and the universe, man and the void, man and himself. When I am displeased with myself, when I am displeased with you, I appeal to poetry. It is therapy, too. Art is the useless but radiant promise of a life beyond life. I write not to communicate what is known to me, but rather to become someone else, after the writing. The poem is guarantee of a metamorphosis. As she wrote, Emily Dickinson cured herself of being poor little Emily Dickinson. In order to travel great distances and take leave of himself, Arthur Rimbaud composed tropical poems. I take poetry very seriously. It justifies me. But I have no clear message. I would like for you to become me, thanks to my poem. If poetry is not carnivorous, it serves no purpose. Velasquez and Van Eyck are carnivorous too; you cannot see them without feeling exhausted or overwhelmed, just as you are left drained after Beethoven or Bach. I require from the poem a psychic or physical transformation.
You don't need to follow Bosquet into carnivorousness lest your readers feel the bite and drop the reading, but you can try to take from the quotation some of what he says that may be useful to you. With these stimulating comments behind us now, lingering however long our souls' awareness will let them, let us turn to a couple of evocative comments from D. H. Lawrence to send us into our own reveries and expressions. Lawrence asks Evil, what is evil? and answers, There is only one evil, to deny life (p. 163). Similarly, he declares that there is only one commandment: Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder! (p. xii). (Dolores LaChapelle, D. H. Lawrence: Future Primitive, University of North Texas Press, 1996.)
In Bill Moyers' wonderful book The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, based on a PBS series of conversations with 34 American poets, there is an interesting challenge described by Robert Bly (to himself) of writing a poem a day. He tells of his friend, poet Bill Stafford (p. 61):
His feeling was that you take the first thing that's happened to you during the day--whether it is someone jogging past the house or something you think of--and that's the thread you start with, then you try to follow that thread. He had this wonderful quatrain from William Blake:
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall.
Stafford believed that a thread well-followed, gently, will lead you to the center of the universe.
And this, from Michael Meade's The World Behind the World: Living at the End of Time, Greenfire Press: Seattle, Washington, 2008 (p. 7):
Once a person begins to see with the poetic eye and feel with the sense of stories, the world reveals itself to be an endless tapestry woven of woe and wonder.
Issue 24 contains other writing on Michael Meade's work, by Charles Knott in Entertaining Ideas and by Barbara Knott in Views and Reviews. The Presentations column includes poetry from our regular staff of writers as well as readers who have joined us. In Reflections, Charles Knott lovingly covers his affection for certain dogs that happily have claimed his time and attention over the past several years. Nancy Law, in Why We Love Atlanta, offers her poem about Leonard Cohen's concert some time ago at the Fox Theater to complement our ongoing attention to Cohen in Museum. Her Around Town with Nancy Rose column gives a pre-pandemic response to her enforced solitude by taking us with her (from a previous issue) on a Viking cruise to Northern Europe. Jonathan Knott tracks history and celebrates Dublin in two poems brought back for our festival. Many of the writers in our Praise Poems chamber contribute other poetry to Presentations, and we continue to collect submissions for both columns.
We invite you to read and consider the invitations to join us in the fall festival to be mounted fully throughout the season. To get started, read this page and a tantalizing first poem composed by Charles Knott in our Presentations column where we will be presenting many more poems as they come in, along with our regular features in other columns. Reading tip: as you explore the chambers listed in the left panel of this page, always return Home (at the top) after each visit. For instance, if you click on Entertaining Ideas, when you finish, click on Home to choose the next place you want to read. We have found that moving from place to place without going Home sometimes gets us off into a previous issue. The path forward is always through Home.
You are also invited to join the poetry festival by posting poems, with a photo of yourself or any picture that pleases you to have with the poem, throughout the fall months on your own Facebook page and tagging The Grapevine Art and Soul Salon page, thereby expanding your readership. Keep in mind that our preference is for praise poems that follow Lawrence's commandment to acknowledge the wonder. Of course, we welcome poems dealing with grief and woe and suffering, as well as joy and laughter. Notice I have not included politics. We have had quite enough of that, along with the pandemic, for nearly a year now.
We are hoping you've found in solitude ways to refresh your life and that our issue and these invitations may give you even more art and soul time.
Click here to enjoy Charles' poem as a way into the festival:
All the best,
Barbara
Copyright 2020, Barbara Knott. All Rights Reserved