Tuesday, January 29, 2013

DAILY POEM Creatures of a Day*




Sandover River, painting, 1989, Australia
Kngwarreye, Lily (Sandover). 1947-2004, The Artist Dreaming
"The vision of life from the point of view of life's dreaming soul, a fons vitae is carried by night. The (Greek) goddess, Night (Nyx) as kanephoroi, both weaver and web. Night as basket bearer (under cover of darkness) a light-bearer, has spun a web and caught in it, like insects, light and delivers to the artist's dream-time, the wisdom of the dream stretching out from the partly hidden past down into the far-reaching future. The light of eons past descends from the stars, the light-mist of the future rises from the muddied banks of the ephemeral Sandoval. These waters of life―light by extension,are released from the ephemeral river-bed in vapor and comingle in a coninunctio, stardust to stardust, no obstruction. Joseph Campbell depicted once in storytelling such a river with the head of the poet, Orpheus floating down it still singing. To which he also notes: we should all receive our poetic inspiration this easily."
  ~stephanie pope
creation
caught in webs of light
insect-like

light to air to earth, water
flowering stars, dust to dust

©2013 A Tanka To Creatures of a Day In Conspectu Mortis
stephanie pope mythopoetry.com monsters and bugs poetry series



_______________________notes


*Creatures of a Day, is a description from Greek culture of men as ephemeroi. The central ideation in the poetic image as metaphor focuses on transitory nature and highlights the loose hold holding life.

By the same token, in conspectu mortis footnotes another way of seeing and telling the story through this hold while keeping the same ending open or enjambed. 

Saturday, January 26, 2013

SATURDAY POETRY: Enjambed Body


"End of the Trail"  20th C American Sculpture artist, James Earle Fraser with his 1894 plaster sculpture / "In 1894, when James Earle Fraser completed his model of The End of the Trail, American civilization stretched from shore to shore. Most Euramericans believed the frontier period was over and that such progress was inevitable. Many viewed Native Americans as part of the past, a vanishing race with no place in twentieth century. Popular literature portrayed Indian people as "savages," noble or otherwise. Fraser's The End of the Trail reflects this legacy: a nineteenth century Indian warrior defeated and bound for oblivion -- frozen in time." -R. David Edmunds, Ph.D.



in that word
under lasting light
in that way

he said "mould"
but i heard "mold" and
instantly "decay"

and instantly the shadow
moved as instantly away

©2013 In Conspectu Mortis Enjambed, stephanie pope mythopoetry.com matter and beauty poetry series
 

_________________notes

CG Jung and "in conspectu mortis"  [quote] The vision of the world in conspectu mortis is in truth a curious experience: the sense of the present stretches out beyond today, looking back into centuries gone by, and forward into futures yet unborn. [unquote]  see CG Jung: Letters. Volume 2: 1951-1961 Selected and edited by Gerhard Adler in collaboration with Aniela Jaff
é.  Translated from the German by RFC Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975 p.10, Letter 21, Mar. 1951.

CG Jung calls this a way of seeing the world. "One must look to the past so that life is not frozen in the past."  -stephanie pope,
"The Individuation Process".

in conspectu mortis see also stephanie pope "When Truth Is A Dark Light Walking The Land"

R. David Edmunds, Ph.D., Cherokee,The End Of The Trail: A Native American
View

Friday, January 18, 2013

POETRY SHORTS Saturday Poetry

burning fat
Aesclepian lamp
no income

first or solely: nursing―yours
ensouls impossible things



©2013 stephanie pope mythopoetry.com

Thursday, January 17, 2013

IN THE CAVE OF HYPNOS


"Hypnos"  (Dream) 1920 oil on canvas, Gyula Benczúr (1844–1920)
drinking dream
we die thirsting for
poetry



©2013 stephanie pope monsters & bugs series mythopoetry.com


notes

Around the cave of Hypnos in the underworld flows the river, Lethe―Lethe waters  the forgetful of being; Lethe, a water of concealment is also a drink of unconcealment. That is what may be meant by "dying" here. Becoming "forgetful of being" as if one is as a figure in a dream, is the giving up or giving over of the images of one's concealments and not a literal dying―Thanatos (Death) & Hypnos (Dream). It is an activating of a life-making instinct in the depths and also marks the pattern of making what makes a making-life "poetic"... the role the psyche plays in dream is that of a poet shaping "shades".

This depth duo of both Thanatos & Hypnos gives to the river Lethe another hue, a hue casting a reflection a-Lethe (a "Truth" that is an "unconcealment", something reflecting in the waters a revelation of a lively truth or the truth of one's own having lived through something.) And so, one thinks of another painting, Hypnos and Thanatos and also the dynamic duality  "myth" and "poetry" at play in psyche-making.  Is remembering soul's poetic basis of mind the recollection of a forgotten narrative in one's soul-making journey to the underworld and back? Is the "bigger other" story being told the story of a necessary sacrifice of the woman one loves but also loses  to form the woman one is and must live in living without? Is a poetry-in-itself a psyche's "poetry"? Here is one such story. You decide. Orpheus and Eurydice.


Friday, January 11, 2013

SUPERHEROES IN THE SOUL


a nude year
nakedly jaded
in a tree

open to its poverty
relinquishes poverty


 Jay-Bird Dragon monsters and bugs poetry series
©2013 stephanie pope mythopoetry,com  

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

DAILY POEM

January Moon 

Female & Feminine


chthonic twin
femininity
an old moon

great trees live heavy-snowed
great trees live broken-limbed


great longing
bony and hunting
my soul lives

a great season of years
a great wilderness life



©2013 January Moon stephanie pope mythopoetry.com

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

AN INTERSTICE: NEW YEARS & "END" TIMES Mirthology 101

http://www.lillyarts.com/html/happynewyear.html
Happy 2013! Did you make your New Year's resolution yet? This year I promised myself I would continue my explorations into women and humor. As a poet-mythologer that means a mythopoetic exploration where psyche-making seems to open space between mirth and myth.

The idea came to me last evening during participation in a microblogging event, "Toast Pacifica" held for alumni of Pacifica Graduate Institute (see Pacifica Alumni) home to the collected works of Joseph Campbell, Marija Gimbutas, James Hillman, Christine Downing, and others. You can visit a full listing of names and collected works by visiting OPUS Archives on line.


 2013: Why Mirth
What is it about mythic imagination and the need for mirth? Could it be somehow that myth's birth and mirth's birth coincide in the same monadic space in imaginal mind? I've already started looking at this early mental matrix.

Mirth's name accorded western psyche in mythic imagination is Euphrosyne. She is one of three Graces or Charites. According to Timothy Ganz she forms, along with her sisters, Aglaia and Thalia, the diaphanous robe surrounding the goddess Aphrodite. (Early Greek Myth, vol. 1 p. 54)

Sure sounds like something archetypally in-formed to me. Perhaps 2013 has all the makings of a "nude" year after all!  If so, the imaginal term coined last night by @Pacifica Alumni, "arsechetypal" has left a just-right imprint to further explore―traces of the old "end-times" along with specular, simulated "spectacular" simulacra, images like the simultaneously unfolding, eleventh hour "fiscal cliff" negotiations. These are left "behind" as the new year begins. These seemings seam traces in poetic psyche's myth-making, fun-loving, festival animal as the old year vanishes into late night, New Year, Toast Pacifica tweets. 

In a salute to 2013 now, here's to naked Beauty and the gracefully mythopoetic, circle dancer, Mirth who traced the dancing imprint last night in PJ's EROS and the knowing and loving underneath the blue boy's timely trinitarian invocation. Here's to the winged "makers", mythoplokon, weavers of soul-making everywhere!

Furthermore, here's to beginnings in endings; here's to simulacra, simulation and fictionalizing arsechetypes.

Out with the old, in with the nude!

Happy Nude Year, Everybody!
©2013 stephanie pope, mythopoetry.com