Journey In Satchidananda

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Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Journey In Satchidananda

#1 Post by Bernie01 » 03 Jan 2018, 23:35

I

The evening dusk is burned plum
and the mottled toucan snores.
Two cats jump from chair to chair,
the green plastic radio plays Ja-Da
and the room turns to listen.

A silver bowl of paraffin fruit
fills the room with mute color,
The man and woman
utter a languid kiss with open eyes,
speak with closed lips.



II

The overloaded ferry lurches
on a broken keel; black water
laps the main deck now and then.

Monsoon floods the river,
burned corpses from funeral pyres
float in the current with crocodiles.

On shore, red cook fires are veiled
in charcoal smoke;
a Tamil song on the radio.

Your bitter letters written in blue ink
darken in my hands. Tonight
the Ganges fills with sobs as I pass.



Album Cover:

*After her husband's death, Alice Coltrane continued the spiritual journey she started with John a few years before his untimely end. Indian spirituality and mysticism had played a very important role on the couple's life. On the musical side, it reflects a new type of music. Where indian ragas, harp and chants seamlessly blend with the most avant garde jazz tradition. I have infinite respect for a woman that managed to find her own unique voice and style among the legendary jazz figures of her time.

Alice Coltrane - Journey In Satchidananda
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxPMKgY_8qk


Alice Coltrane - Turiya And Ramakrishna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUMuDWDVd20

FranktheFrank
Posts: 1983
Joined: 02 Mar 2016, 18:07
Location: Between the mountains and the sea

Re: Journey In Satchidananda

#2 Post by FranktheFrank » 04 Jan 2018, 11:57

II S3 L1

do you mean coke, the residue after tar and chemicals have been burned off out of coal

or do you mean cooking fires.

I have not heard of paraffin fruit per se, but prunes and currants can be preserved in cans
using liquid paraffin.

I like the burned plumb sky very much, original.

It's funny how you pick a bird like a toucan and insinuate they snore, really funny
and why wouldn't they snore, we all do.

Another strange line is: 'a room turns to listen', but somehow
you make it seem all right.

How a bowl of fruit could turn a room to colour is interesting
I find nothing wrong in it and I am with you, rooms when filled
with sunshine reflect colours, of course they do.

So I is when the swami was married
and II after he became a widower

You list the shortcoming of a religion
the partly burned corpses that seed the river for crocs that like bar-b-qued
human flesh, their version of a Macdonald's hamburger.

You seem to find comfort in this eastern religion with it's strange practices
that fall short of the Christian ideal. But is it your true religion
or a fantasised idea that might come in handy in time.

The poem is a fascinating study and word play
of random thoughts and scenes, they flit through
like the mind of an drunken ex-cinematographic director
soused in brandy.

At the end I have to say with conviction that I enjoyed the journey
and the travel log of India, very much. Great poem.

Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Re: Journey In Satchidananda

#3 Post by Bernie01 » 04 Jan 2018, 22:10

F---

great feed back.


paraffin fruit---like flowers people arrange, plastic but comforting to some for both color and shape---if not touch and smell.

not the religion, but the feelings of folks like myself when in love, illness and aging.

secretly---i love the snoring toucan.

maybe i can find the movie scene where a beautiful lacquered bird chirps at bedside...

here, for adults only, warned of strong content---death in India. (i refrain from quoting Jessica Mittford on the American way of death.)

bernie

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... rvana.html

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: Journey In Satchidananda

#4 Post by BobBradshaw » 05 Jan 2018, 00:28

I like the way you work in Ja-Da this time....the sweet opening stanzas create a romantic mood without straining, almost offhandedly...very, very nice. The second section's dark mood is handled beautifully, closing with that superb closing:

Your bitter letters written in blue ink
darken in my hands. Tonight
the Ganges fills with sobs as I pass.

Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Re: Journey In Satchidananda

#5 Post by Bernie01 » 09 Jan 2018, 00:57

Bob---


thanks for the comment. i keep trying to find the right home for my favorite---Ja Da.

first used here by a big favorite of mine, Weldon Kees----


1926

by Weldon Kees :

The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.



here is one story, tragic, heartbreaking to me about his disappearance:


Claremont Review of Bpoks:

Weldon Kees, a troubled polymath who seemed on his way to becoming America’s T.S. Eliot, disappeared near the Golden Gate Bridge on July 18, 1955 at the age of 41. Save for tenacious advocacy by poets Donald Justice and Dana Gioia, no one would remember him today.

Kees was a superb jazz musician and lyricist. He wrote stories, plays, and, for Time magazine, reviews of movies, literature, and art. At the time of his disappearance, critics were increasingly describing him as one of the world’s top abstract painters. A careful student of history, religion, and philosophy, he co-authored a book on nonverbal communication with psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch.

John Irwin, professor of English at Johns Hopkins, starts The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence by analyzing Kees's mythology rather than his poetry. In the years before he disappeared, Kees often talked about committing suicide or starting a new life in Mexico. Not long before his disappearance, Kees stopped just short of jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. On the day of his disappearance, he left his car parked near the bridge with some neatly folded clothes—but no note. Police officers found little in his rented room except two books and his cat, Lonesome.

Kees was born the same year that Ambrose Bierce disappeared during a quixotic visit to Mexico—a coincidence that nourished Kees’s fixation with disappearing and establishing a new identity south of the border. He greatly admired the poetry of Hart Crane, who killed himself in 1932 by leaping over the railing of a cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico. According to biographer James Reidel, Kees's decision to live in Brooklyn Heights in the late 1940’s was a tribute to Crane.

Irwin skillfully builds on these facts to demonstrate that Kees was a self-conscious architect of his own mythology. He notes that Kees amassed notes about suicide while working at a psychiatric clinic, and that the poet often talked about writing a book on famous suicides.

Irwin argues that Kees did, in fact, leave an inventive suicide note, in the form of the books he left in his room: Dostoyevsky’s The Devils and Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Both share similar positive assessments of suicide: a Dostoyevsky character calls it “the ultimate freedom,” and Unamuno says it's “the supreme longing for life.”

Irwin fights the tide of contemporary criticism in arguing that understanding Kees’s life is essential to understanding his often obscurely allusive poetry. If Kees:

staged his death as his final aesthetic act, then that act provides a lens through which to detect and interpret the structures, motifs, and images that accumulate with an obsessive force in his poems. And certainly obsessive compulsion is the right notion here, for as Kees’s poetry progressed over the years the depressing sense of meaningless repetition, of a quotidian predictability and soul-killing boredom, seemed more and more to be either his poems’ explicit subject or their pervasive background.
Irwin's analysis of Kees's poetry, as seen through his life, begins with the opening lines of 1949's “Round”:

“Wondrous life!” cried Marvell at Appleton House.
Renan admired Jesus Christ “Wholeheartedly.”
But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor,
And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortissoz is dead.
A blow to the Herald-Tribune. A closet mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ “wholeheartedly.”
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Cézanne
Would break out in the quiet streets of Aix
And shout, “Le monde, c’est terrible!” Royal
Cortissoz is dead. And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind.

The opening line alludes to Andrew Marvell’s 776-line poem, “Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax,” in which Marvell celebrates man’s ability to create transcendence in a world overseen by God. Kees immediately undercuts the line’s second-hand exultation with an allusion to Ernest Renan’s controversial book, Vie de Jésu (1863), which denied the divinity of Christ.

Both books Kees left in his car discuss Renan, Irwin notes. Renan also clearly influenced Kees’s poem “A Distance from the Sea,” which speaks in a disciple's voice:

There on the shore
The crowd’s response was instantaneous. He
Handled it well, I thought—the gait, the tilt of the head, just right.
Long streaks of light were blinding on the waves:
And then we knew our work well worth the time:
The days of sawing, fitting, all those nails,
The tiresome rehearsals, consideration of execution.
But if you want a miracle, you have to work for it,
Lay your plans carefully, and keep one jump
Ahead of the crowd. To report a miracle
Is a pleasure unalloyed…

Irwin skillfully analyzes the echoes of Eliot in these lines and the attention paid to “staging,” an apt description for the details of Kees’s own suicide. Note also the brutality of the “execution” pun and the chilling foreshadowing of “jump.”

The tension between the opening and second lines of “Round” forms a template for most Kees poems. As Irwin puts it, “Kees’s subject is the meaninglessness of repetition in a world devoid of transcendence….” Irwin meticulously unpacks the allusions within both the repeating phrase and the repeating sentence of “Round.”

Kees was a master of repeating forms, such as the villanelle. His powerful “Five Villanelles” appeared in The Fall of The Magicians (1947) shortly before Theodore Roethke and Dylan Thomas popularized the form. Kees used the villanelle’s relentlessness to create the same kind of claustrophobic aura and restless obsession infused into “Round.”

Irwin traces the influence on Kees of Wallace Stevens and, especially, Hart Crane. Vanishing as Presence focuses on Kees’s “Robinson” sequence (“Robinson” “Aspects of Robinson” “Robinson at Home” and “Relating to Robinson”), one of Kees’s claims to greatness. Irwin argues that “the fate of…Hart Crane hovers over the first of the Robinson poems”:

The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall
Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black.
Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.

Irwin's masterful description of Kees’s fixation with Crane leaves little doubt that the “Mexico” of “Robinson” is the Mexican port from which Crane departed on his final journey.

Irwin’s analyses often extend beyond current academic opinion, as when he makes the case for the furtive character “Robinson” being a tip of the hat to the undeservedly forgotten poet, E.A. Robinson—and more specifically to Robinson’s brutal poem on suicide, “Richard Cory.” Irwin also assists future scholarship in his chapter, “Kees, A Learned Poet,” by relentlessly explaining scores of obscure references from a broad range of disciplines. The only reference that thwarts Irwin’s tenacity is the identity of “Andrea” in “Abstracts of Dissertations” (by luck I know that the reference is to Andrea Navagero, a humanist in Pietro Bembo’s circle).

I have two reservations about The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence. One is more of a compliment—at 100 pages it is too short (an opinion I am not sure I have expressed about a book before). I would have loved to see Irwin analyze the crushing sonnet “For My Daughter” with a view to the poet’s family relationships. The preface explains that the author suffered a serious stroke early in 2014; it seems likely that he struggled heroically just to finish this book, so we should be grateful for what we have.

My more critical reservation relates to Irwin’s assessment of the value of Kees’s work. His final paragraph states:

At its best, Kees’s poetry is bleak and exhilarating. It is the poetry of reality—of simian-related beings abandoned on a relatively small, highly-favored rock, absolutely alone, as far as we can tell, in a vast uninhabited universe, beings whose relative size is so out of proportion to their cosmic surroundings and to their temporal ambitions as to be almost laughable. What can one do in a case like that except make poems, Kees seems to think.
Bleak? No argument. But “exhilarating”? Hardly. Irwin himself suggests that the suicides of Kees and Crane contributed to John Berryman’s suicide. This credible claim puts the burden on Kees’s admirers to distinguish between his masterful, innovative technique, rivaled only by Auden in the twentieth century, and his relentlessly destructive messaging.


Despite my differing assessment of the value of Kees’s poetry, I have no doubt that John Irwin’s book is essential. Its conversational prose avoids jargon, and it offers both thoughtful analysis and new insights derived from difficult research. The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence will thoughtfully guide future scholars. I recommend it highly.





another poem of W. Kees:

Colloquy

n the broken light, in owl weather,
Webs on the lawn where the leaves end,
I took the thin moon and the sky for cover
To pick the cat's brains and descend
A weedy hill. I found him groveling
Inside the summerhouse, a shadowed bulge,
Furred and somnolent.—"I bring,"
I said, "besides this dish of liver, and an edge
Of cheese, the customary torments,
And the usual wonder why we live
At all, and why the world thins out and perishes
As it has done for me, sieved
As I am toward silences. Where
Are we now? Do we know anything?"
—Now, on another night, his look endures.
"Give me the dish," he said.
I had his answer, wise as yours.



bernie

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