This Poem was Submitted By: James C. Horak On Date: 2006-01-05 14:37:21 . . . Click Here To Mail this Poem to a Friend!

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Upon Assemblage of Facts and Its Only Slight ....

            Upon Assemblage of Facts and Its Only Faint Resemblance to Knowledge         (Nothing can bring about the instance of Knowing like the touch of poetry.       Reaffirming wonders: dew upon flowers, darting black eyes of Castilian                         Beauty, the sometimes sweetness of a beloved's pout, a child's                      Bursting exuberance to a pile of gifts beneath a tottering cedar.)       Not ever told at all by "facts", not breathed a single breath of living extolled                                           By selling media and what has just bridged the topic                              Of death and mayhem one short minute before story change.       The completeness of experience is knowledge. The poet is the only gift to its               Delivery not hide-bound to the requirement of the experience itself.      Through adept compassion, through the almost obsessed caring to.       For the love of tasting what the eyes can yield, smelling the subtle little cues                    Dropped hintfully upon one lover by another.       We have not found ourselves anymore sublime, removed from beasts of                                                                      the forest.           Denying how edified our senses make consciousness. Religions making       Every effort to make us ashamed to know fullness of pleasure while creating                   Psychic monstrosities whose pleasures hence become murder.             While we, made humble before our craft by those whose wishes of what                                 We might be, are not satisfied by what we are.               Not tasted well by the connoisseurs of our art.                       Not hidden well by any intensity of our intent.                    Suffering art for only art and but chancing on splendor.                   When we could bridge the gap and wrest the prize by seizing                        Power in the only grasp Right ever offers Authority                                By never being faint with the Truth.     
Copyright © January 2006 James C. Horak

Additional Notes:
If given a sensitive reading this piece delivers every hope and every expectation I could have of a poet. I do not think the Times make the man, poet, or Caesar. But they must influence them. The poet must be true to his Times. There is no significant atmosphere of dissent developed enough to produce the anti-war poetry for which our Times has created a most pressing need. Between the fear of expressing anything courageously (effectively in this case)due to Political Correctness and the poor moral influence of a media warped by its own commercialism carried to God-like proportions, poets must not just simply "step up to the plate", they must climb. JCH

This Poem was Critiqued By: Mark Andrew Hislop On Date: 2006-01-23 00:22:29
Critiquer Rating During Critique: 10.00000
JCH It has taken me two weeks to venture this close to this poem. I've been watching it out of the corner of my eye, stalking it. It's time now to come out of the shadows. While this exemplifies your usual depth and range of thought, it is undermined by its very purpose: it is didactic; it is too didactic. It has more the tone of imposition than invitation not only in its (in this context) almost too-erudite word choice but in its terse lecture-hall metre. A good example is "Denying how edified our senses make consciousness." This sentence fragment is a leap and a bound away from the thought that precedes it, and while "edified" conjures up the spirituality that is the birth-right of the human, the delivery is perilously close to the almost "scientific" assemblage of facts that the poem sets out to repudiate as possible of equation with knowledge. And then, "Religions making/Every effort to make us ashamed to know fullness of pleasure while creating/Psychic monstrosities whose pleasures hence become murder" is just plain laboured. And again, if I am not myself straying into the overly didactic, "Nothing can bring about the instance of Knowing like the touch of poetry./Reaffirming wonders: dew upon flowers, darting black eyes of Castilian/Beauty, the sometimes sweetness of a beloved's pout, a child's/Bursting exuberance to a pile of gifts beneath a tottering cedar" with its apparently random selection of "wonders" reads more like advertising copy than it does an image that has really grasped you. I need to make it clear that I have no argument with the thoughts, but only with their delivery. The high point for me--"those whose wishes of what/We might be, are not satisfied by what we are"--is a solitary peak. While there is here a distinctly JCH tone of voice and point of view, it is lacking the grace and poise of a poem like "Trapping down," which has become for me something of a yardstick for what your poems are capable of achieving. MAH

This Poem was Critiqued By: Thomas Edward Wright On Date: 2006-01-15 19:17:32
Critiquer Rating During Critique: 10.00000
Take your keyboard by the shoulders. Tip it upside down. Shake it. Look at all the poems that fell out of it. tom
This Poem was Critiqued By: Mark Steven Scheffer On Date: 2006-01-12 10:49:54
Critiquer Rating During Critique: 1.00000
JCH, I approach this poem with some ambivalence. For me it has all the sparks of a poetic legacy I cherish: I can almost hear Wordsworth and Coleridge in the initial inspiration of The Lyrical Ballads here, both of them with the later Shelley and Keats fired up by the promise of poetry and rethinking the world. There are many fine lines, and the "substance" is wonderful. To point out one: " We have not found ourselves anymore sublime, removed from beasts of the forest." This very poignantly identifies the main problem with our current age, and I think what Owen Barfield has pointed out as our loss of our primitive ancestors' sense of the nouminous behind the physical, the various gods and goddesses that gave their spirit to nature, to the phenomenological. I often wonder whether my biases that keep asserting themselves against current styles and poetic conventions are just reactionary, having some source in my own psychological dysfunction or "need," or whether the reaction is legitmate, and born from something deeper, something legitimately "outside" to be observed. In any event, I agree with your line, and believe it to be legitimate. We, again, need a radical transformation, a dissent. From a poetry that is all style, manner, and bogged down into the phenomenolgical, and with what dispenses with the benefits and privileges of the phenomenological, the political, toward a more spiritual awakening. This poem is grand in the sense of talking about what is needed. My ambivalence toward the poem has to do with the "style" of it. I am hesitant with this criticism, and conscious of a need to be hestitant in that respect, because of preceding paragraph. But the poem doesn't speak enough in images, in the poetic indirection which produces the best, most lasting and meaningful art. Though, of course, I recognize that there are such images here, particularly in the fine first stanza. But finally the poem does win me over. I say "yes" to it. It is a revolutionary statement in times calling for such statement, as you indicate. There is a place and function for such poems, for such a "style." Knowing your other work, I know you are capable of the poetic indirection that breeds wonderful, resonant meanings that the imagination can rest in as with a lover. I do, however, see a tendency in your work to this more discursive type of statement poem. As I said, this poem has won me over. And I promise you, that had it not won me over, I would have told you - I forswear the bullshit of empty, meaningless approbation. But I point out something that I think you should keep in mind for your further development. MSS
This Poem was Critiqued By: Thomas H. Smihula On Date: 2006-01-08 16:14:17
Critiquer Rating During Critique: 1.00000
You have much truth in this poem and your selection of wording is well chosen. The only thing that distracted this reader was the presentation that slowed down the flow. I like the Old Style Gothic and the thought presented for it is time that influences the writer, it could be war, it could be love, it could be nature but it is when it occurs that makes one write. Excellent thought process here. Just some thoughts and thanks for sharing.
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