It has been a little over five months since I began this blog, which has given me so much more satisfaction than the website it replaced, calling me forth on as many mornings possible to add a thought or two about poetry and the creative process. Is it time for a taking stock, a what-have-I-learned moment? If it is, I have no easy response, feeling that, if I have learned anything, I have surely forgotten it. Every day seems new, in a perverted way, in these dark times; every day a wonder at the degradation of the human mind feeding on its own capacity for stupidity. It's a wonder that artists persist. And that may be the lesson, after all.
"Such sumptuous—Despair—" mused Emily Dickinson, as she pondered why we need art, why we are drawn to its "bright impossibility." What an oxymoron, "bright impossibility"—what a perfect description for these times of hope-bred-from-despair, of why some of us keep getting out of bed every morning, to teach, to read, to think, to create something that may outlast this current incarnation of Ozymandias.
Onward we go.
(The above quotes are from Emily Dickinson's poem that begins, "I would not paint—a picture—" which is poem #505 in the Johnson anthology.)
__ Jean, I'm sure you know the visual similarity 'twixt a ladder and a railroad track, each a metaphoric pathway to the goals of perhaps, the "Bright Impossibility" of imagination.
ReplyDelete__ Rung to rung, tie to tie, each marker along that creative trail gives measure toward a goal; mind travel so often opens a different, unexpected prize. Imagination creates the unseen.
-Rungs and ties, markers of each day filled with imagination.-
this ladder
into the mind's wandered track
a new bloom
_m