.deux. {NaPoWriMo 2015 Day 30}

.bury the illusion.

text in sub verse and

complete is oxidation

covertly offered diatribes

deep-space precipices

overlooking once angels lyrical

on spent time gained

illusion in professed confession

manufacture deeds masked in divinity

intoxicating dervish spins

until here and now diminish

songs of nowhere from

geometries sacred to lineage intact spiritually

to light of life given

deny not

do

♦♦

do not deny given life

of light to spiritually intact

lineage to sacred geometries

from nowhere of songs

diminish now and here until

spins dervish intoxicating divinity

in masked deeds manufacture confession

professed in illusion

gained time spent

on lyrical angels once overlooking

precipices

space-deep diatribes

offered covertly

oxidation is complete

and verse sub in text

©jcs

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It’s the 30th and final day of NaPoWrimo. How do you all feel? I don’t know about you guys but I’m staying away from all things literary for a week or so, at the very least!  It’s been a great experience and a difficult one, at times. I’ve stretched myself a good bit this month and have learned much about improvements and changes I need to make in my writing and in my life. I’m nowhere near where I can and should be and have a ways to go, which brings me to the point of my poem.

As  I wrote this piece I started to ask myself what the true substance of it was. What was it really saying? Within all of the embellishment was maybe one or two points but they were lost within the whole of the piece.

” I give in scattered portions, never a whole…” click image to visit site

It caused for some reflection upon my life and how i separate myself from my writing quite severely. I may be critical of my work but don’t usually apply that same criticism to myself. I realized a need to be the opposite If  I do give of myself, I give in scattered portions, never a whole. Never.

The words are a bit distant and I don’t let the reader in to who I am, which in turn could be who the reader is. The cryptic and internal  nature of what and how I write is a way of not allowing access to me. What we search for in reading poetry or a book, or listening to music is to find a piece of ourselves in that work. To know that we aren’t alone in who we are and what we feel. My feeling is that I’ve been detached from all of that from the very beginning. My writing has revealed itself to be selfish. I guess that’s an indicator of who I am if I dig deep…or if I simply pull away the thin top layer.

“I don’t let the reader in to who I am…” click image to visit site

I find that I have been writing from a place that doesn’t help the reader. I make no room for consolation. I offer no help for your ills, offer no advise. My poems have been speaking to speak and that’s all. It’s time to evolve.

 

 

 

ghosts like me elude whispers, sometimes/

sometimes, whispers elude ghosts like me

©jcs

 

 

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Robert Laurence Binyon had a long and successful career in English arts and letters, managing to produce almost a book a year in the span between 1894 and 1944. His father, Frederick Binyon, was a clergyman, and his mother, Mary, was the daughter of Robert Benson Dockray, resident engineer of the London and Birmingham Railroad. Binyon showed an early interest in art and poetry. After attending St. Paul’s School, he attended Trinity College at Oxford, where his poem “Persephone” was awarded the Newdigate Prize. In 1890 he took a first-class degree in classical moderations, and in 1892, a second-class degree in litterae humainoires. In 1890 he also published four poems in a volume called Primavera: Poems by Four Authors, which included the work of three other young Oxford undergraduates, one of whom was his cousin, Stephen Phillips, who would also achieve a measure of fame as a poet.
 

He published his first book of poetry in 1894 calledLyric Poems, and he followed this publication quickly with two books on painting,Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century in 1895 and John Crone and John Sell Cotman in 1897. These two interests would govern his career, as he alternated between poetry and essays on the visual arts. He was also interested in Oriental art and culture: books such as Painting in the Far East (1908) and the book of poems The Flight of the Dragon (1911) reflect this interest. Ezra Pound was highly complimentary of the later work, and thought of Binyon as a pioneer in the Western appreciation of Chinese and Japanese art.

Binyon married Cicely Margaret Powell in 1904, and they had three daughters together. When World War I broke out, he became an orderly in the Red Cross, and managed to visit the front in 1916. He turned this experience into numerous books of verse that took the war as a subject. The Winnowing Fan, The Anvil, The Cause, andThe New World, published from 1914 to 1918, all dealt with the war as a noble cause, though his work became progressively less sentimental.

During his career, Binyon became interested in experimental versification. He had been influenced by John Masefield, who argued that verse should be spoken aloud, and, at Oxford, Robert Bridges had shared with him the complex rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung verse, whose poetry could not yet be found in print. His experiments were not as radical, however. Mainly, he was skillful at manipulating verse within narrowly defined limits. Read more here.

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Ypres

BY LAURENCE BINYON

She was a city of patience; of proud name,

Dimmed by neglecting Time; of beauty and loss;

Of acquiescence in the creeping moss.

But on a sudden fierce destruction came

Tigerishly pouncing: thunderbolt and flame

Showered on her streets, to shatter them and toss

Her ancient towers to ashes. Riven across,

She rose, dead, into never-dying fame.

White against heavens of storm, a ghost, she is known

To the world’s ends. The myriads of the brave

Sleep round her. Desolately glorified,

She, moon-like, draws her own far-moving tide

Of sorrow and memory; toward her, each alone,

Glide the dark dreams that seek an English grave.

Source: The New World (1918)