The Winged Oak, Chthonie

RITING MYTH, MYTHIC WRITING

Every couple years I go after a writer's workshop or gathering around explorations into poetics, depth perspectives or something related to my discipline as a cultural mythologer. This year's event brings together my interest in all three. This year's event is a writing retreat with Professor (and poet) Dennis Slattery held this August in Santa Barbara and sponsored by PacificA Graduate Institute. There are two sessions in August. I'm attending the second session held August 19-22, 2010.

There are a number of blogs on line you can access to read more about this year's retreat for poetic kinds at heart. Here are a couple and the link to the PGI website.


If you are up for some writing (not to mention riting!) this August, JOIN ME!

Cultural Mythology: American Notions of Self & Country

Greening Predicates

Pacifica Graduate Institute Public Programs

Watermark

The poem marks
a watery realm
a tri via, shaken and disturbed
the poem marks
a de termini for the poet.

The poem is a kind of boundary
marker; the poem is where the
gods came and went
The poem is what the gods left

The poem is where
aesthetic mythoi
in form, an image
dissolves back and in
a transpersonal past
dimension of experience
transcendant ground
soil of Ge
the poem
re
livens the story
of itself
in the gods

The poem is where
images reform
themselves
forward
into personality
and person

a poem changes
the matter
in the
matter

The poem
is a story
a legein
like the one
imbedded in
the peplos of
Athene

The poem is
golden and gold
is the tool
in the skin
and hide of
Hephaistos

The poem
returns gold

The poem is
a woman
changing her cloth
her peplos
her closure

changing woman
herself

the poem reforms beauty
where beauty herself passes
between aesthetic expression
and transpersonal arrest; since

not all beauty is beautiful
in the aegis

the poem marks
this de termini
for the poet;
beauty in being

nothing
be-ing the one property
of all things; the poem

weaves and
what is not beautiful
that disturbs identity
is reunited and
reabsorbed back
into what is

—beautiful!


© 2009 mythopoetry.com Watermark stephanie pope

You've Got To See It!

If you only buy one poetry book this year, mythopoetry.com recommends you buy this one: A Hudson View Poetry Digest Summer, 2010 Volume 5 Number 2. It is a stellar issue!
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I’ve not seen a collection of poems work so well together in a single poetry volume for a long time.
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Congratulations to Skyline Publishing and its very fine poets, book reviewer and illustrator for this collective achievement.

The Mead of Inspiration