Category Archives: poetry

Here is where you’ll categorize poetry posts during your field study. A minimum goal is one poem per week, 4 total, posted by Monday PM midnight. One of your four poems must be posted in a “Poetry Observed” video format (www.poetryobserved.com/). The goal is to perform your poetry in situ—within the context of your passionate immersion.

E – Week 3 Poetry Collection

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Life

Life is a journey of seeking.

We look for what we want to do

When we grow up.

We look for items, family

Schools, careers, friends, books

Better days, food, bathrooms, language.

A college, a love, a spouse.

We look for purpose, for meaning.

For lost children’s shoes, baby toys,

Glasses, teeth, soft food, a bed.

Whatever it is we look and search,

Finding things that define our life

Even as we dont’ know why

We are are here or if anyone

Made us, if we are alone.

Life is a search and a joy,

A noble quest for something we

Never can quite idntify

Curiosity at its best,

Resilience and drive of the

Indomitable human spirit.

We will go mad trying

To define ourselves with language,

And from that madness

There is poetry.

Away

Who am I when

I am you

Away, away, I fly

Fleeing inside

My inner eye

 

Dance, dance little puppet

For the master demands

Wake up, wake up

The puppeteer’s hands.

 

Raise oh raise

The curtain high

Come one, come all

A show is nigh

 

The boy who is

But somehow isn’t

A magic act so unresilient

 

Stuff here, tuck there

Now bind it all down

No boy here just

A girl all worn down.

 

E – Week 2 Poetry Collection

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Ironies in Insults

Calling someone a pansy

Is a bit ironic.

Pansies are tough flowers.

Scouts of spring peeping

Up through snow and freeze.

They don’t need much water

Thrive with very little attention.

Not the kind of flower that coloquially

Means someone weaker, someone

Who is gentle, afraid of conflict,

Possibly a mama’s boy.

Pansies thrive in Colorado weather

One of the few flowers to make it

Entirely untended (the other being

tulips) No small feat

With March blizzards, May flurries.

Tougher than we give them credit.

Nature

Trying to define nature is like

Trying to define art. Because

Nature itself like human nature

Is the essence, the whole,

The soul of it.

But humans are nature

We are fruit of this

Evolutionary tree, born of nature.

Nature is a part of our essence

Of our history because those trees

Out live us. They become something

Beyond what we live to see.

Self

Perhaps we find ourselves in nature

Because in nature

There               is               space to

B                                   E

R                          H

E               T

A

Away from everyone telling us that

Our lives will be better, more complete

If we act this way or

Buy those products

Fill ourselves with other people

Other things

Here there is none of that

Thoughts, bird songs, wind and river.

Beautiful sights and air.

Time for talk, quiet focus, hard work.

Hard beds.

Here you exist, eat, sleep.

Are.

This is nature, with room for

Your nature

As much as you exist

Without anyone else.

E – Week 1 Poetry Collections

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I Graph Relationships

Novelists are actually mathematicians.

We graph the interplay of conversation

Show the probabilities of human interaction

Write equations for the human heart

Breaking down the large and infinite into

Personal chunks of people

 

There is gravity in relationships

The come hither/go away in love

Mapped out with the words of an author

Factoring out a person from

The role they play in their lives

 

The orbit of people around God

Whomever they believe a deity to be

Sucked in by faith and an idea

So much bigger than who they are.

Other people spin around, drawn close

But somehow never touching.

 

Mathematics is poetry is people

We echo the patterns of the people before us

Who echo the patterns of the world.

What patterns, what poems, what dreams.

And this is why I write.

 

Bead Poem

Twelve year olds aren’t good at fundraising.

But I did it anyway.

I sold about ten dollar’s worth

Of beaded animals for my sister’s

Mission trip.

I wanted to help.

So I did.

I have bead critters somewhere

Or I did before the moves.

All with names in different sizes,

Skunks and a lochness and a duck

Snow man, mice. Lots of mice.

One rabbit.

Not stuffed animals, not cuddly.

But I made something.

Spheres and stories of my childhood,

Audio books and colors, patterns.

So much loss in growing up, dicvorce.

Where my spheres, but perhaps

Time to let them go.

I mourn them more than my father (they were

there far more than he) Relics of a simpler time.

Soft and rounded memories, taken over

By quilts and cloth and love.

More practical, more fun, more involved.

I still miss the quiet rhythm,

Reminder of my nimble fingers.

Language my new beads, new craft.

Less messy, cheaper. More portable.

Somehow less tangible.

Nuro Reverie #2

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The anatomists and pathologists wage an interdisciplinary battle,
Their argument: Nuropsycology.
Integrated studies,
a brain surgery into Vogts, Lenin, Forel, and Ferdinand.
The analysis; positive eugenics.

The Vogts!
The Vogts themselves turned,
successor of the institute:
sterilization,
incarceration,
and murder
of habitual “criminal”
the feeble minded,
and the mentally ill.

——–

I wish to be free
unconfined by the limitations set before me,
Imposed upon me.

I am no romantic, but my heart
bleeds all the same, and the multitude
of grievous thoughts that circle
round this head of mine
would make hades blush.

I’m only a “product of my time”
like I’m some “limited edition”
peice of mass produced bull-shit
rather then that of a human being.

The flavor of such notation,
the countless labels:
Feeble minded,
Crazy,
ADD,
Depression,
the list,
the list goes on!
and still “mad”
am I, the one who
takes on the labels
the one who deals with
the stigmata,
I am the crazy one?

April 29th

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Doom is the house without the door.

 

Insanity is the house

in which all doors lead to doors

leading to doors and doors

and doors.

Now and then

we come across the Only Mirror,

a lotus in that howling jungle

that is too wide and too narrow.

 

We tend to stumble past this.

 

Now and then

we stop and look and see reflections glimpse ourselves

eye to eye

pupil into pupil

and something in us mutters,

murmurs,

 

“I’m looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you

looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at me looking at you”

 

On the edge of the jungle there is a remedy for sadness

that wanders like the Elk of the temperate rainforest

with a key to the asylum around his neck.

 

And he often stops to wonder

at his reflection in still waters.

His eyes black with passion,

a golden key around his neck

dangling.

A tattered lab coat hanging from his antlers,

blowing in the wind like a white flag of surrender.

 

 

 

Pi Calculated Poetics week 5

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This poem ended up being a conversation between the Sphere reading and The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit Mandelbrot that I’m reading for my field study.  Mandelbrot’s observations and theories were ignored for a long time by the hosh-posh intellectual elites of his time due to the irrational number sets he was working with.  Later, his work on fundamentals of fractal geometry in nature layed the ground work for computer graphics programming and the solutions to theoretical physics problems.  Stanzas 42 – 67 from Sphere influence my poem with its nod to anonymity in the dream world, infinite forms of nature, and the author’s mention of overcoming adversity.

Bumble Fumble

Bumble, fumble

Mandelbrot was humbled

The fractal folds again

And we feel the rumble

Stumble across the infinite spill of the cosmos

Crumbles of bread sweets facilitate our osmosis

is…is…is…is

Moving round round round round

Making ripples in the air like

Sound sound sound sound

Moving forwards, round it, backwards and through

A sphere of influence hovering all around you

Freckled, speckled

Rocks and eggs

Like the freckles on your face

Arms

And legs

Infinite spheres spinning round and round

Bubbling, troubling

Wow. Wow.

S – Week 6: Notes from a Surgeon

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Dedicated to anyone whose feminism gets in the way of their ability to leave the house.

Notes from a Surgeon 


1.
My education has trained me to be if not distrustful, then at least neglectful of beauty. When the bulk of credits earned are split between ‘critical theory’ and ‘social psychology of disgust’, you know that your dictionary of aesthetics has a few revisions. My peers titter away in literature departments, clutching ugly reprints of Women in Love, hunting for any viscous droplet of beauty clinging to skeuomorphic serifs. They’re waiting for that linguistic chocolate on their pillow—quotable redemption. For them, beauty is meaning. For them, beauty means feeling.


Meanwhile, I’ve taken glances at beauty and noticed some alarming features. From my vantage point, beauty serves to condition desire and discipline how we experience bliss. There’s something pernicious about beauty, especially because it’s so hard to critique. Beauty is sacred. Beauty is qualitative. Claims of beauty place ideas, places, and objects outside the realm of analysis—to deconstruct them would be blasphemous and defiling. To deconstruct beauty would break meaning-making structures and leave us with all the wrong feelings.

I’ve learned that you do not cut open an angel’s torso in order to study her anatomy. I never wanted to get blood on anyone’s parade, and so I kept quiet: it’s simply easier to ignore beauty than to ruin someone’s fun. I’ve tuned it out, made it the non-subject of my non-studies. But now I’m here, and I need to convince this angel—the one I’ve been threatening to cut up for so long—I need to convince her to fly.

2.
You do not cut open an angel’s torso in order to study her anatomy.
You know why we don’t do these things?
We don’t do these things because when you cut open an angel, then she no longer is one. Because once you see how things work, they suddenly don’t.

I’ve been holding the scalpel. I’ve been cutting open your angels.
I’ve seen their insidious insides:
Full of cogs and grease, organs of plasticine and steel.
When I say mechanisms, I mean it: their blood is oil,
Petrol pumped from war-torn nations, alchemically rearranged
To make your fake silk and lemongrass scented candles.

God, your angels are filthy on the inside.

But: I do this for a reason.
I splice and separate because I don’t think ugliness should find sanctuary in how things work.
Because I’d rather have a broken angel than an angel whose belly aches
from eating the discontents of many.

3.
Months go by.
I accumulate more dead angels.
I shoot them out of the air and take the fraudulent psalms from their mouths.
I pile their corpses in my apartment,
Floor-bound in leaden stacks, draped over armchairs,
Or most perversely,
Scattered among my bed sheets, with a few wedged between mattress and plaster.
And although I haven’t opened all of them,
I can tell you how many cuts are needed to make an angel monstrous:
With a good appendix, it can take under 65 pages.

Sure, sometimes I wish I knew how to sew:
Before I sutured her wounds,
I would wipe off her cogs, degrease her joints, and give her different organs.
I would say, I’m sorry I tinker. You can’t help that you work.
But I don’t know how to sew and I don’t know what to do with these angels.
All they do is remind me of how much easier it is to expose ugliness than to create beauty.

4.
I direct the reader to my torso,
Acknowledging that–
Although I claim to be nobody’s angel–
My insides go unseen,
My flesh unscarred.
And my ankles fettered to this ground.

V – Poppy Pod inspired Vessel

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Cedar imprint on vessel – inspired by a poppy pod.

The women gifted them to the other

allowing displacement of face

motionless animals and grief stricken men were humbled by her earthen beauty once upon a time.

and yet we know when we hear those words

that those times have passed and are not to return.

V – Reading Response Week 5

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Each goddess comes to serve a different purpose, this week i followed goddess’s that use their own, and others sexuality as a gate to light hearted healing, Pinkola Estes in “women who run with the wolves” refers to these goddesses as ‘dirty goddesses’.  Deep healing can come from belly laughter, and one way women reach the deepest belly laughter is sometimes related to laughing at things only women would find funny, this usually relates to sexuality, to read more on this topic see Estes chapter titled “Heat” and read the story which goes by the name of ….

I found common themes throughout my readings this week. One being of the snake.  the snake representing feminine sexuality in most places around the world.  Reading this in “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” made my mind connect to the themes presented in “Women Who Run With the Wolves”  The snake is a form of cyclical and ever-changing and ever-morphing energy, like the snake, women move with a twist of the hips, slipping along the land with ever-changing ways of constant motion.  In these times it is the vulva talking, putting voice to the feminine.

the ouroboros is from Shlain, representing the ever metamorphosizing feminine body, the snake that continues to be reborn, this relates to the theme from “The Vegetative Soul” which represents the feminine by the metamorphosis of a plant. no cycle in this process is an end, it is a continuation of the process that rolls and rolls forever.  A rememberance that when everything is good, it is bound to die, from one process to the next.