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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. |
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