Away from My Mythic-Fictional Family

I.

Lawrence read the epigraph last,
Heard my accent,
Remembered his youth,
Went back to his wine.

Not for any other man
To own up to --
My poem
‘Ezra Pound’ said.

And I had told Neeli’s friend
Earlier, we are all
Children of Emily

When he said he’d also written
About finding a packet
Of poems...

A line Neeli
Acknowledged
Using himself.

II.

The documents erase their history
As we read our selves into their transcription.

Let someone else’s vision falter;
Today desires our touch.

We are let out of our rooms
One by one
To make room for --

Mythos, logos, ethos and
The other Greeks slipping in
Between wine flasks
And borrowed vowels --

Making up for:
History can’t make way for itself,
Needs us in our daily turmoil
Or regardless infatuations
With our progress, heritage,
Vistas...open, closed!
Tasting of sea salt and goodbye.

Fertile earth, fertile sea --
The desert gave us a shift
From Natufian Catalhoyuk
To Homer’s clearwater verse.

When he told me the name
The owners of his grandfather
Gave him, Bumpus,
I told the old Black man
On the bus: my grandfathers
Had no names. He said
He understood.

And the women
Were sworn to silence.

This gathering of experience is an old poet showing his work to older poets to begin an acknowledgment that the woman poet gave birth to all of us modern poets, but it goes on through an archeology before the west was western to the hiding of our fertile beginnings in Anatolian fertility worship and the American loss of memory with loss of heritage a couple generations ago.

Western culture began with Homer covering over the matriarchal Hittite heritage of the Persians as modern American culture exists as a culture that silences women’s knowledge. That, at least is the scholarly premise of this/these poem(s).

Cheers,

Peter

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/27/2009 07:29PM by petersz.

It's often when I'm meditating of the complexities of Ezra Pound's brilliant work in the Cantos that I find myself venturing beyond the other simply lyric meditations I work on. I think both modes of poetry are as legitimate, even if they are not always for all audiences.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/27/2009 07:30PM by petersz.

Peter, a couple of thoughts regarding your entry above:

The Scandanavians pass names along from son to father, no tree, but a lineage from generation to generation. Hence, to me this seems to make them more progressive and tuned into the now. The Chinese and many other Far Eastern cultures tend to revere old things simply because they have lasted through the generations. I recall visiting a girl of Chinese heritage in my teen years and was blown away by the artifacts I saw in her house. She told me that what I thought was a coffee table, a beautifully carved dark teak piece, was actually a table that had been passed on from her mother's family for 500 years.

Which leads me to conclude that most of us Americans are very naive in the arts no matter how well studied or sophisticated we may believe ourselves to be.

As a corollary of that, there is much to be appreciated in all art, even that with which we are not familiar.


Les

I agree with that, Les. I am overwhelmed day in and day out as my researches and my contacts with people from other cultures, including sub-cultures here in the U.S., reveal how fragile and tentative my own understanding of ways is.

I very nearly offend someone or other quite often, even with the 'sophistication' of a well-educated 64 year old white straight male from Boston.

Thanks for responding thoughtfully to this,

Peter