From the Upanishads

[jisbell00]

From the Upanishads


“Lead me from the unreal to the real.”
The web of dream and waking fills my mind,
as daylight fills a glass. My weary path
does not fork but leads back to where I’m from.
A lamp, a chair, a window – now my old
familiar room is speaking. It is not
speaking English. In the woods outside,
behold the trees I climbed. How tall they were!

As the mountaineer reaches the summit,
the mountain disappears from under him.
The stopped clock tells the time; the blue
ocean parts neatly, like a loaf of bread.
This is not the journey never made;
this is not the futility of achievement.
This is the painted crab scuttling off the wall,
the long years unwinding and the glory they reveal.


To know the light, we learn to know the dark.
To smile, we learn the many ways to weep.
We hear the nightingale to hear the lark,
and only wake when we have been asleep.

[jisbell00]

Hi folks,

I'm bumping this up to see if it gets itself a comment.

Cheers,
John

[CalebPerry]

Sorry, John. I kept meaning to comment.

But then you told me that you sometimes find me annoying (though not offensive), and I decided that maybe I should cut my losses and not comment on your poems that I don't fully understand. That used to be my standard rule: Comment only on the poems I understand. But with the number of forum members at such a low level, that doesn't always work. Phil too is a person who write poems I don't always understand. If I don't comment on your poems and Phil's poems, then there are not many people left.

These poems about religion feel like Rubic's Cubes that I must figure out, and I have never had the patience for puzzles.

I literally understand everything you wrote in the poem, but don't necessarily understand what you are getting at ... like "We hear the nightingale to hear the lark". So even though your syntax is always clear, your meaning isn't always clear. (From that line alone I can extrapolate my own meaning, but that doesn't tell me what YOU are trying to say as the author.)

I also don't know anything about the Upanishads. I do admire your worldly knowledge, but for me, fully understanding Western culture was always enough for me.

[jisbell00]

Hi Caleb,

I think my lede is that you have yet to offend me in anything you've posted on my poems. Count me not offended! As for occasinoal annoyance, well, I am old and get irritable easily (I'm also I hope just being honest - I enjoy your comments and am glad to have you posting!). ANd that annoyance is my problem, not anyone else's, just as folks not understanding my poem is my problem. For instance, who in their right mind reads the Upanishads? Besides TS Eliot, that is - it's where he got Shantih at the end of the Waste Land.

But I was hoping this little msytical number would explain itself better for readers. For instance, "we hear the nightingale to hear the lark" is meant (by me) to suggest we must go through the night to arrive at day. The nightingale sings only at night, the lark at dawn. That stanza is arguing that we can go through adversity and come out the other end. Or at least, it's trying to argue that.

Cheers,
John

[CalebPerry]

we must go through the night to arrive at day. The nightingale sings only at night, the lark at dawn.

Now that's gorgeous, John, totally gorgeous. Once again, my lack of knowledge about the world is tripping me up. If I had known that nightingale's sing at night, and larks sing during the day, I could have figured it out. I wrote an article once in which I said that a good poet must be able to subtly direct the reader on how to read the poem, but a good reader must have enough knowledge to allow himself to be directed. My overall lack of knowledge about the world is tripping me up.

I may have already said this somewhere on this board (and probably recently), but I've been thinking about the difference between me and the best poets. The best poets have more life experience than I do. I spent my childhood withdrawn and protecting myself. I escaped by watching TV and reading comics. But a person like, say, Alicia Stallings, who escaped by reading mythology and the classics, is in a much better position to write great poetry. Great poetry takes knowledge of the world. In your case, despite the psychological problems you have had, you have a broader interest in the world than I ever had -- not only that, but you are well travelled. Actually, I do have a lot of interest in the world, but it is a political interest, not a cultural interest. To be a good poet, one must be educated culturally. Having watched a lot of sit-coms and read a lot of super-hero comics is not enough.

The only things I can write about with confidence are my own personal experiences.

[jisbell00]

Hi Caleb,

There's an old argument that everyone knows the same amount of stuff. It's just that people know different things - like baseball stats, for instance. And I think we all build our art out of what we know. SO I know larks and nightingales - in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet, who doesnt' want Romeo to leave, says "It is the inghtingale and not the lark," which I had in mind as I wrote. I think, like you, that there is value to some shared cultural references, they work well in the fabric of a poem. But then, I was just rereading my MS. and got to poem #2, on Ancient Greece, and realized that I had excluded a whole swathe of readers with that choice. So I put my Egypt poem back in first to be not so Eurocentric. Modern American poetry to me has put a lot of work into ditching or shedding what they migth call baggage: I disagree with that premsie, but it's hard to see what to call universal these days, if anything is. Nevertheless, our different lives I think have b een equally inquisitive about the world, and you've been here longer than I have. Some stuff has a lot of backstory or hoe-work making it poetry-ready, and that's the stuff I traffic in. Other stuff, like shit for instance, lacks that back story i nliterature and thus takes more work. Or baseball stats.

Cheers,
John