poetry | freethoughtandmetaphor

Juxtaposition and more of Levi Romero

April 25, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized God, metaphor, nature, New Mexico, poetry, society, theology, White Sands 2 Comments

I have a long-enduring fondness for the word “Juxtaposition.” In an early poem using that title, now justifiably forgotten, I wrote “things touch at their edges.” Where things touch, they affect each other; that’s juxtaposition, whether in nature or in art. In this entry I juxtapose a piece of my work with a little more of Levi Romero’s work

Levi Romero’s book, Poetry of Remembrance, focuses, as I discussed previously, on stories and the past, but he includes other more current facets of his life: as teacher and leader of workshops and as an architect – an architect who cannot expect to be welcomed into a home he has designed. In a poem he titles “Juxtaposition” he describes a visit to one such building as it was being built:

may I help you?
I am asked by the realtor
standing at the door,
thinking that I may be the guy
who mixed the mud and pushed the wheelbarrow . . .

I once was asked by a home magazine journalist
if I felt insulted by such incidents
well, no, I said, my mind mixing for an answer
a good batch of cement is never accidental

Romero has learned to live with kindness but close attention on the edge of a culture where others assert that he does not belong.

This “outtake” from my own recent writing uses the term to describe juxtaposition in nature:

Chance
juxtaposing gypsum
deposits, playa, crystals, wind,
forms rolling dunes of white
sand in a brown desert.

in the Tularosa Basin of New Mexico, gypsum washed down from bands in the mountain collects in Lucero Lake, then crystallizes as the lake goes dry, is worn away by wind, and blows into the dunes of White Sands National Monument.

When I think anthropomorphically about God (and sometimes I do, knowing that all language about God is metaphoric) I picture an artist putting different elements of nature together to see what will happen. The result may be wild or wonderful―and totally impractical.

What a powerful word! “Juxtaposition” has taken me from society through poetry to nature and theology. This may explain why I can’t seem to categorize my posts.

One New Mexico Poet

April 21, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized centennial, cultures, history, language, metaphor, New Mexico, poetry, Spanish, story Leave a comment

Levi Romero is the New Mexico Centennial Poet. This means he is making a lot of presentations. One of them was at NMSU in Las Cruces recently. He read from his collection, A Poetry of Remembrance: New and Rejected Works.

A poet who is willing to subtitle a collection “New and Rejected Works” certainly gets my attention. It turns out this subtitle is also the title for a poem, which is placed as part of a section on lowriding, the passion of the young men Romero grew up with in Northern New Mexico. Many of the poems describe the world of Romero’s youth, others focus on family and on community that hasn’t disappeared but is at risk. The second and last poems in the book describe Romero’s visits to his mother in a nursing home; both are about telling stories, listening to stories and passing them on.

Some of the poems are in Spanish, and some mingle Spanish and English. My bit of Spanish could get many of the pieces, but not the whole poems. In his presentation Romero explained that he uses the mixed dialect of his northern New Mexico region.

August and fall seem to predominate in these poems, suggesting all that is passing or has passed as Romero moves into his own elder years. He is well aware of the unreliability of stories also, as indicated in this section from “Most Skin Hits Road”:

our own histories
who we are
where we come from

could be reinvented
in the next sentence uttered
the next clever line spoken
the next interjection of humor and
sincere display of pleasantries
masking over the face of a new persona

and further answers to all possible questions
made more believable
than the reality of our own true selves
our leaking faucets, ragged lawns
oil stained driveways, two nights of dinner dishes . . .

Romero makes the reader welcome in his story-filled, ambiguous and basically cheerful world. I recommend this book as an introduction both to an unusual subculture and to a writer who accepts and honors the layers of complexity in contemporary life.

Poems describing more of the many cultures and landscapes of New Mexico can be found at http://200newmexicopoems.wordpress.com/

And the Greeks . . .

April 14, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized Euclid, geometry, Greeks, metaphor, poetry, school, Thomas Lynch Leave a comment

I was introduced to Thomas Lynch through an interview in Writers Chronicle. He writes essays and fiction but says, “I wouldn’t write sentences or paragraphs that were worthy if I weren’t also writing poetry.” That led me to find his book, Walking Papers, and I was hooked by the opening lines of the opening poem:

What sort of morning was Euclid having
when he first considered parallel lines?
(“Euclid”)

I have always been partial to Greeks because of my studies in Greek and Archaeology, but I have been fond of Euclid since I was in the equivalent of seventh grade in an English School. There geometry was taught as a series of theorems and their proofs. One of the first was “When two straight lines cross, the opposite angles are equal.”

It was rote learning, but I loved it. I believed this was the way Euclid himself had presented his ideas. I remember the small paperback book clearly, while I’ve forgotten entirely the geometry text I used when I came to the subject again as a sophomore in high school.

Lynch says little more about Greeks, but in this first poem, Euclid takes a place along with Lynch’s contemporaries, each working out their understanding of the world, and they go together well.

Ascent Goes Public

April 10, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized Ascent, metaphor, photo, poetry, poetry reading, self-published, southwest, yucca Leave a comment

Let this bold blooming yucca in my neighbor’s yard stand for the achievement of the five southwestern women poets as we presented our work in our book Ascent to the public today at our local library.

Some of us have been writing for decades, others only recently, but for all of us this is work of our maturity. Three years of critiquing each others’ work had not blurred the difference in the way we see our world.

I shared this observation on the environment where I now live:

A jackrabbit feeds on
freeze-dried prickly pear,
bolts a my approach,
happy in his speed, doing
what he’s made for.

Susan Gomez describes a dust storm in “Fury”:

Our small car listed
as we navigated the wind
with its airborne sediment. . . .

Air and silt, violent, howled into the night.

Teral Katahara closely observes another part of our landscape:

I stop to see Sandia and pungent Jalapeno
chile plants
sitting in the neighbor’s field. . . . .

Sun shines through
translucent red skins
splotched with warm gold.

The other poets chose to share pieces about their past. Lucille Tully recalls Chicago in “State Street 1957”:

Now in the quiet of the late night
I walk alone except for the one

staggering drunk who does his dance
while I smile, do mine, to stay clear of his

Still, as strange, silent companions
we share this concrete way.

Polly Evans, eldest and in many ways wisest of the group, encompasses a lifetime in “Hide and Seek,” beginning with basement and closet. Then

The apple tree was easy . . .
I hid in the foliage.
The big dog knew I was there;
I watched the cats,
and the kids coming home.

After a stanza about hiding in early marriage, the poem concludes:

The night you died
there was no place to hide.

Ascent is a truly self-published book, available only from the authors. See the Books page and use the Contact page for more information.

Mystery and Courage

April 6, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized courage, Good Friday, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), metaphor, poetry Leave a comment

H.D.’s Trilogy, a book of three long poems written in the 1940s, begins with a vivid portrayal of the stress of the bombing of London and the longing for respite. Woven in with this world are Greek and Egyptian deities and an awareness of those who distrust poets (herself and her companions) because of their lack of “usefulness.”

In the second section what the rest of us think of as “real” takes second place to angels and a Lady who is both Astarte and Mary and who also appears with a book, as if she were patroness of poets. She is goddess portrayed in many ways through the ages:

We see her hand in her lap,
smoothing the apple-green

or the apple-russet silk;
we see her hand at her throat,

fingering a talisman
brought by a crusader from Jerusalem;

In part III the focus shifts again, for here two Biblical stories dominate, the woman with the alabaster jar, and Kaspar, the Wise Man who brought myrrh to the Christ Child. H.D. intertwines them so that the two figures are contemporary. In this, H.D. shows the courage to follow where the poem leads her, though it could well be offensive to those detractors she mentions earlier. She describes the encounter of the woman and Kaspar.

As he stooped for the scarf, he saw this,
and as he straightened, in that half-second,

he saw the fleck of light
like a flaw in the third jewel

to his right, in the second circlet,
a grain, a flaw, or a speck of light

and in that point or shadow,
was the whole secret of the mystery;

The final sections bring conclusion to the whole series, yet leave mystery intact: the mystery of deities and creativity, of courage and hope, of Good Friday and Easter.

Are Poets Freethinkers?

March 9, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized dogma, freethought, metaphor, poetry, rules Leave a comment

You already know the answer: every creative artist has to keep an open mind about the “rules” of his craft. Some of the rules for poets that come to mind are these:

Avoid gerunds (-ing words)

Don’t use question marks in poems

Haiku must have seventeen syllables. (There are in fact two camps on this one. It depends on which website you go to.)

Poetry is supposed to rhyme. (This one only comes from the audience these days.)

Nobody uses metaphor any more. Of course I consider this one a minority opinion, but it was spoken by a teacher of poetry.

All these I consider optional. There is only one doctrine to which I still cling:

There is always another way to say it

Write What You Know?

February 27, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized California, poetry, prunes, rules Leave a comment

If you are an orchardist whose money crop is prunes, what should you write about? Here is a poem by Joseph Bohnett, written back in an era (before radio) when people wrote their own poems just as they played their own music.

AT A PRUNE CAKE BANQUET

Oh! Ye monarchs of all Europe

And our beloved Roosevelt,

Drink your wines, and eat your gruels.

Let us eat our prunes for health.

Oh! Ye rich of all this world,

Harrimans, Goulds, and Vanderbilts,

Ye dyspeptic railroad lords,

why will you not eat prunes for health?

Oh! Ye poor of all this world,

With no money in the bank,

Yet on wines and beer with gorge

Instead of eating purnes for health.

Oh! Ye Sisters of this Grange

Who near this town of Campbell dwell,

In baking prune cake for this Grange,

I want to say that you did well.

How many” rules” of poetry does this poem violate? Does it matter?

I grew up in the same area where Joseph Bohnett lived, but I never had a prune cake. Joseph makes me think I’ve missed something.

There’s much more to be said on “rules” and poetry – for another day.

What Is Metaphor?

February 22, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized definitions, Greek, metaphor, poetry 1 Comment

Metaphor is a good Greek word which means “a carrying from one place to another.” It is, originally, an action, not a thing. It is the operation which changes a word by a new association. The Greeks thought of it as “transferring to one word the meaning of another.”

The Greeks were better at abstractions than the English, apparently, since the current usage of “metaphor” usually refers to the thing to which the original word is compared.

According to this research in my old, patched together on both sides of the spine, Greek Dictionary, then, metaphor is not something you can choose, as from a list (“Shall I call this state a ship? Shall I call this life a hard road?”)

Shall I say that research may upset the apple cart? My poetry may be in for metamorphosis – a change of form.

Why Freethought and Metaphor?

February 8, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized freethought, metaphor, poetry Leave a comment

To begin with, these are the focus of my two kinds of publications: a freethought biography and books of poetry.

Beyond that, they are two ways the creative mind should address the world: always looking beyond dogma and ever on the lookout for unexpected parallels.

freethoughtandmetaphor