Brother Damien's Poetic Progress

Well, both Camilla and Brother Damien stopped by yesterday.

Camilla came by in the morning. She has been enjoying Rilke, though she said she wasn't quite ready to articulate why yet. (An odd way of putting it, but honest I think.) She left after lunch to take the foothill trail.

Brother Damien showed up mid-afternoon. It was pretty hot by then. It must have been 85 or 90 degrees. Not particularly good poetry weather to my mind, but we did find some shade down by the stream and I got the Speedway Stout that Damien had left the other day. It was chilling in the stream, supported by roots of one of the cottonwoods.

It is very nice stout. Wow. And it took the edge off of the heat enough for us to get down to business.

First we tackled the prose account that Damien had left on the doorpost nail:

Sucking on a skinned almond I taste its slick ridges, the point addresses the tip of my tongue with yielding persistence. Between molars, split in two, I lap at its smooth interior planes. Even before I clench around it's silky flesh I can feel the sticky mach embedded in my bicuspids. It is sour. It is untamed and therefore not bred for ingestion. It is laced throughout with arsenic, a natural component of the undomesticated almond. Never mind my house burning across the seat. Taste the bitter on the back of the tongue, almost in the throat. Swallow the urge to heave out the poison. Stretch out my hands to warm them in the glow of red and yellow. Lie back in the snow, smell the cold, hear the stars prick my eardrums.

His chief question was, "Is this poetry?"

Hmmm ...

I don't think so. But it's not unrelated to poetry.

__________

I cut an nice straight branch from a mulberry tree last time I was down at St. Godric's. It's sitting in the corner of my cottage by my bed. My intention is to make a simple hunting bow.

__________

The tree is not the bow.

The branch is not the bow.

The image of the bow in my mind is not the bow.

It will be a bow when I craft it and shape it into a bow.

__________

Life is not poetry.

An observation is not poetry.

The thought I have for a poem in my mind is not poetry.

But when I craft and shape language to account for an observation I have made about deep-rooted life, that is poetry.

__________

Broadly speaking, the poetic vision incorporates tree, branch, and bow - even soil and sap. And certainly the poem must conform to the artist's vision. But the poem proper is a finished work of art, an artifact of the imaginative vision.

I encouraged Brother Damien to work it over. Write it as a sonnet. Write it as a series of three haiku. Write it as blank verse. Revise it. Fall in love with craft and perhaps a form will suggest itself. Even if one doesn't, the appropriate free verse form might suggest itself to him through experimentation.

__________

The second item let on the doorpost nail was more promising as a finished poem:

I Scream!

Crunchysticky sweet,t,t
Circled fingers in that megaphone shape
The corrugated cake cone
The smooth silk soft serve
Chinlick by lipbite shaping cream to peak
-ed mountain
The inside ribs poke at the gums
Cold freezes teeth to their roots
Throat and stomach spread
The coolwarmth out to tacky fingers
Flipflop toes

Here we have something that is leaning must more towards a poem. A branch already shaped somewhat by the knife. But a little more work is required. More choice. More selection. More rigid coherence of sound and sense.

All that aside, this is well on its way to firing arrows and already represents a significant stage two in the process from vision to poem.

For one, it bears the marks of poetic efficiency. For another, it speaks of ice cream, but of more than ice cream. It speaks of eddieandbill and betyandisbel. And it speaks well through 'tacky fingers' and 'flipflop toes'. It marks sacred time chinlick by lipbite, and I like that.

I like that a lot.