THREE SPIRITS FATHERING CHRISTMAS

THREE SPIRITS

[e]M Body, what she dreams of living
EROS points where

   **********


With each touch
Maggie's name dissolved

in blood where
"blood is good."

Between us,
"the blood is good," she said.

Yet, in language where it flowed "good"
she and I were parted.

O, the untouchable, nascent body, how it bled
how our virgin body fell between us

shade--spaced as if not enough mattered,
an expanding verse lay between us.

   **********


In embodied body
when blood is good

O
shapes presence still & O

namelessly placed, does matter.

©2014 Old Long Since (But Should Old Acquaintance Be forgot?) stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#mythopoetics #AuldLangSyne #ChristmasSpirit


notes

from Myth & Culture Blog, Maggie Macary,”Telling My Story”, an excerpt from the blog, BloodInk, see  The Internet Archives

 http://web.archive.org/web/20020907171119/http://www.tellingmystory.com/OurStories/mmacary_bloodink.htm

[quote]
“Is my life created gunk? I wonder how much of what I remember is an artificial creamer used to delude me into thinking I’ve got something good here. I sip again on the ginger tea, and realize as it begins to heat the passage of my di-stressed digestive system, that all the memories of my life, all the bits and fragments and pieces that I think I’ve lost or forgotten or put away in the box with my old poems and old diaries, faded pictures and tattered greeting cards, are actually right here. They are present in the cells and the structure, the wounds and the scars of my exhausted body. All memory for me begins with my body, ends with my body, and circles around my body. There is no other story in my life except what is written in the structure of my body. I take another sip begin to wonder if I’m truly ready to speak. For so many years of my life, my voice was stilled and I felt strangulated. But those moments of strangulation felt somehow comforting and safe. No need for me to speak. No need for me to risk anything. There have been moments in my life when I lost my voice for days on end, unable to whisper a word, safe in a silence that held all the blood pounding inside me; a tight hold with no release. I recall other moments of my life getting comforted by a scarf tied tightly around my neck; the scarf somehow holding in a voice that I thought was too powerful, too destructive, too intense.

I held my intensity and my voice and my blood inside my body, and sat on the rocks of my own fevered imagination, gazing out at a barren ocean and mourning for a home that seemed lost forever. Until one day, I risked it all and dove in dark waters, determined to find my way home. For years, I swam and swam in that barren sea in desperate search for some little bit of truth about the tragedies of my life. At times, I thought I would give up, allowing the pieces of my life to fall like wreckage upon the waves. But some goddess always seemed to come through to save me. Some ancient female voice would whisper to me from the deep water, “The blood is good.” ~ Maggie Macary

[unquote]

FROM THE CUPBOARD OF HESTIA, THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

YESTERDAY I SPENT IN THE KITCHEN BAKING FOR
CHRISTMAS. PICTURED ARE THREE VARIATIONS ON
KIFLE, AN HEIRLOOM COOKIE RECIPE TAUGHT ME.
THE RECIPE, LIKE THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS ITSELF,
HANDED ON AND LEARNED BY HEART. AS I PULLED
TRAY AFTER TRAY OF COOKIES FROM THE OVEN, I
BEGAN TO THINK ABOUT THE FIRE OF HESTIA...

LAST NIGHT I BAKED ANCESTRAL KIFLE

a feast, King Wenceslas pulled in titular
reach, oven door breached
gathering winter's fuel

©2014 Heirloom Poetics stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohj #ohjDailWords #3lines #micropoetry #mythopoetics


notes

DECEMBER MICROPOETRY #POETHEME 61

AND THEN, WINTER

Wilmot, Ohio 2014

DECEMBER GOBLET

HE TALKED ABOUT ARCHETYPAL ENCOUNTERS
To My Father

Poetic imagination
a fathering spirit &
son to himself,

but in likeness
unborn; what comes
to material existences

forms a kingdom
of spirit moving over the face
of that deep but bodiless

poet, poetry
where the slaying
of deity happens.

Nonsense matters dema
(dema)teria material, the distant closeness
of bodiless things

spreads throughout all materiality.
A dema spirit of depths works
where not-language matters.

Divine pregnancies (& deaths)
open gates of heaven
using extraordin



airy pause
(for nonsense matters to poetizing form)
and it makes us human.

**********

That matters to the poet
first and most
for his life―de

ep
ends on it. (Just as life
here depends on it.)

***********

Boats are we
but our sail is red & sea-parted
are we


rowing towards
a proper burial 
what we will have lived.

Yes, empty your life overboard
so it remains here
when you sail away

(and you will, won’t you?)
Our want is ever faithful
to this unborn, poetizing  

dema
teria
material;

the proper burial
of one’s immaterial material
left behind; left here.

In the end
[he said]
the most we can do

is tell stories
and of that want
he said

[he rubbed his belly then]

“I keep it here.”
                          [She said,]
“Go about the world now

& gather yourself
into an immanent immortality
an autobiography in red

©2014 What He Said stephanie pope mythopoetry.com


notes
1.  "Even now I can do no more than tell stories--"mythologize." Carl Jung p. 299, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  For Jung's mythopoetic image  regarding the interplay between the "here" and the "here after" see Chapter XI, "On Life After Death" pp.299-302.  It is on p. 300 he suggests we lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come.  Soul-making carries itself in the belly of the story going on between the "here" and the "here after"  like the biblical whale carried Jonah.

2.  For the labors of  heroic man see the 12 labors of Hercules
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/labors.html

3.   “Dema”  have been imagined as the Earth Mother, guardian spirits, ancestors, ancestral soul and that in part which helps formulate the image of the high-god (aka the limits of the human situation)  in monotheistic imagination. For the latter see The Master of Animals: A Study in the Symbolism of Ultimacy in Primitive Religion, Ralph L. Slotten  Oxford University Press, Journal of Bible and Religion Vol. 33, No. 4 (Oct., 1965), pp. 293-302

POSEIDON'S LITTLEST HORSE

THE OLD FARRIER BLESSING

                ~for Ric Scow Williams


bent nails fathering Christmas
night words, breach and reach

their sky
remade where each

forms a winter pearl
in-formed by lack
in late November meter

angels nail
a foot of winter
air to herds on high

breach
breach
  reach

―brr

lack in love(d) remains
pomegranate seed

unit & measure
inform foot care

or night language
sol-making

& in care, something generous
taken inward, reworks


©2014 The Farrier kNOT stephanie pope mythopoetry.com

DESCENT AND SOLAR HEROES

WE WERE ALWAYS TWIN

I.  Both clown

one with a cob for a horn
one as a hob with a corn cob habit
like my wimpled nun in November’s
driveway shoveling tweets of gold
into piles of mythic language, both
work in nonsense with the nonliteral
body in social media to embody
the immaterial body, what’s a meta
phor?

II. The jesters know each their gesture
    both are true

A.  One points past himself with his horn;
      avoid myth-matching & sense-making

B.  One points out his appetite for type;
      follow not-language to where it leads

C.  Where the hero is ―lost at C!

And lost at sea is how one myth of social media
suggests journeys of solar heroes begin…as if C
as port of entry & point of departure, The Call


©2014 Corn Hob & Horn Cob Harvest stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#mythopoetics, #vss @TinoBeth

THE MISSING BODY AND SOCIAL MEDIA

MISSING LETTERS
For Tino Beth

lost at C; words, too, comedian
play gaps with loss
myth-matching

(corn on the hob)


©2014 Hobgoblin Of Letters stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#vss #mythopoetics



notes
November, 2014 tweets response poetry for Tino Beth and The Myth Of Social Media

http://tinobeth.com/heros-journey/myth-of-social-media/?utm_content=bufferb7cc3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

ODDLY HOSPITABLE NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER TWEETS

Oddly, hospitable
these junk food transients
rowdy, rained upon chilled words;
driveway friendship, a wimpled nun
shoveling sunshine

©2014 November Tweets stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords, wimple, junk food
#micropoetry #mythopoetics #vss
@TinoBeth @ellejay51 

NIGHT LANGUAGE, THE ANUNNAKI [THE FEMININE PRINCIPLE] AND THE MYTHOS OF THE DESCENT OF THE SUN GUIDED BY THE HOST OF HEAVEN

IN THE ANATOMY PERSONIFIED

the middle
one affair, sits atop
a model blemish on the middle class/ic


© 2014 Solar Hero stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords middle class and blemish #3lines #vss #mythopoetics #micropoetry


notes

1. ANUNNAKI AS A PERSONIFIED NOTION BELONGING TO A MYTHOS AND STANDING FOR AN IDEA, A NOTION THAT PLANETARY, TUTELARY CHTHONIC SPIRIT GUIDES GUIDE THE CHARIOT OF THE SUN AS IT MAKES ITS ANNUAL, DAILY AND SEASONAL ROUNDS, I.E. “A SOLAR CIRCUIT”.   THE MYTH OF THE SOLAR HERO IN THE SOUL-MAKING OF THE SUN [OF GOD and GODS] SUGGESTS THE SUN PASSES THROUGH  SEVEN GATES BY WAY SEVEN TUTELARY GUIDES, THE ANUNNAKI. THE ANUNNAKI GUARD THESE GATES LEADING TO AN UNDERWORLD BUT AN UNDERWORLD IMAGINED AS “NIGHT” AND “SPACE”—BOTH. SPACE SUCH AS THAT FROM WHICH DREAMS ARE MADE ARE THE [MIND]STUFF OF MYTH-DREAMS AND BELONG TO “NIGHT LANGUAGE”, IMAGES WITH EARTHLY APPEARANCES BUT REPRESENTATIVE OF THIS OTHER SIDE OF SOMEWHERE, THE NOWHERE OF NONLOCALITY TO WHICH THE WORD, “CHTHONIC” REFERS. FOR MORE ON THIS IMAGE IN SOUL-MAKING AND TO SEE AN AESTHETIC REPRESENTATION OF THE ANUNNAKI VISIT http://www.truthbeknown.com/anunnaki.htm

2. FOR PHOTO SEE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism

WEIGHING "SOUL" ; TENDING AN INDIVIDUATED LIFE : MY FAVORITE SOUL TWEET FOR THE MONTH OF OCTOBER 2014

GRAVE SOUL


It's true a literal turn for those theological representations of soul image or images (what are image representations in nonlocality having no physical properties, taking up no material space) is bound to occur historically and did occur historically literalized and forever more the folly is remembered in the symbol, 21 grams.

Interestingly, there is a new twist, a poetizing one adding weight to the value of soul-tending the body of images that inform one's anatomy of that personifiying notion "soul-making", what Jung called individuation. It begins with an awareness I first caught reading Thomas Moore's "The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire", a compilation of key ideas from the writings of James Hillman edited by Moore. The idea appears under the subtitled section, "Polytheism". It states that a fantasy image already governs and guides our view of  soul-making, that thing we call "the individuation process". Hillman was always fond of saying "stick to the image" itself and not anything that can be said about the image that presents itself.  Tend the image itself.  Feel the weight, the gravity inward. Take seriously what image grabs hold of you here in your own deep life as it pulls you toward the discovery of what life is waiting for you here. That life knew you well before you ever had a material face.

My fav tweet on twitter for the month of October, 2014 comes from Thomas Moore.

You get more from your spiritual practice when you take life seriously and feel the weight of your individuality.  — Thomas Moore (@thomasmooreSoul) October 29, 2014

And, say! Come join mythopoetry on twitter  or catch my hashtag #mythopoetics to catch more good stuff like this.

SOUNDS OF THE WATER FESTIVAL HERO

IN THE FESTIVAL OF WATER'S SOUND

WATER...BLESSING
CREATE RIPPLE
GET FEET WET


2014 Where Water Maidens Dance stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#7words #3lines #mythopoetics #poetry #micropoetry

THAT TWIN THING : Beautiful Appearances In The World Of Dreams

THE MASTERSINGER SINGS ESTATIC SUNSHINE

All poetic art and poeticizing is nothing but interpreting true dreams.
                                   ~Hans Sachs, Die Meistersinger

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate/abandon all hope, you who enter here
                                   ~Dante, Canto III, line 9

A certain sadness, sunshine
whose aesthetic world intoxicated, dreams
night language sunshine shed.

Intoxication thus benighted
ecstatic is the head
struck by Apollon.

©2014 Delighted Anatomy stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords #ohj #mythopoetic estatic, sunshine

notes

The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, in whose creation each man is a complete artist, is the condition of all plastic art, indeed, as we shall see, an important half of poetry. We enjoy the form with an immediate understanding, all shapes speak to us, nothing is indifferent and unnecessary.

For all the very intense life of these dream realities, we nevertheless have the thoroughly disagreeable sense of their illusory quality. At least that is my experience. For their frequency, even normality, I can point to many witnesses and the utterances of poets. Even the philosophical man has the presentiment that this reality in which we live and have our being is an illusion, that under it lies hidden a second quite different reality. And Schopenhauer specifically designates as the trademark of philosophical talent the ability to recognize at certain times that human beings and all things are mere phantoms or dream pictures.

Now, just as the philosopher behaves in relation to the reality of existence, so the artistically excitable man behaves in relation to the reality of dreams. He looks at them precisely and with pleasure, for from these pictures he fashions his interpretation of life; from these events he rehearses his life. This is not merely a case of agreeable and friendly images which he experiences with a complete understanding. They also include what is serious, cloudy, sad, dark, sudden scruples, teasing accidents, nervous expectations, in short, the entire “divine comedy” of life, including the Inferno — all this moves past him, not just like a shadow play, for he lives and suffers in the midst of these scenes, yet not without that fleeting sensation of illusion. And perhaps several people remember, like me, amid the dangers and terrors of a dream, successfully cheering themselves up by shouting: “It is a dream! I want to dream it some more!” I have also heard accounts of some people who had the ability to set out the causal connection of one and the same dream over three or more consecutive nights. These facts are clear evidence showing that our innermost beings, the secret underground in all of us, experiences its dreams with deep enjoyment, as a delightful necessity.

~ Frederick Nietzsche, The Birth Of Tragedy (1871), Ian Johnston translator
excerpt taken from section 1-14
see http://denisdutton.com/nietzsche.htm

APOLLO AND RAVEN SOUL

IN THY SOUL, RAVEN

“Such then is the condition of us mortals: to these and to like vicissitude of fortune are we born; so much so, that we cannot be sure of anything, no, not even that a person is dead…the soul of Aristeas was seen to fly out of his mouth, under the form of a raven.” Pliny The Elder, Ch 53, “Persons Who Have Come To Live Again”, pp. 210-11

Traversing sacred space
near the beginning
near the end
sepulcher empty

a battle and a throne―
in medial space soul wanders!
your raven spirit, Koronis
oracles unfaithful parentage.

In a nymph of healing forces
where water flows everlasting
life not drowned, still glows, for knowing love
and loving knowing give birth differently.

Given in birth differently, thy soul, raven
ash heap near the beginning, red and hairy
near the end, oh, spring up, spring up
sepulcher empty

©2014 Spring Up, Spring Up A Bastard Sun stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords, #ohj, #mythopoetics

FACING AN EYE CUP Symposium Of Mug and Jug

OF CAVE FACES VINES GROW

GROTESQUE YOUR MUG
MY JUG TOO, COFFIN

©2014 IN CONSPECTU MORTIS stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords, #7words #2lines #vss #mythopoetics

NOTES

1. SEE   http://emajartjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/andrew.pdf ON EYE CUPS AND FOR  NOTIONS OF SYMPOSIUM, CONVIVIALITY AMONG MEN AND EMERGENCE OF "THE OTHER" IN  GREECE, LATE ARCHAIC PERIOD, ANDREW PRENTICE

2. The jug in the picture is by Mitchell Grafton, Demon Inside and is found on pinterest http://www.pinterest.com/pin/268316090271564266/

A STORY FOR THE SEASON

THE HOBGOBLIN'S HAT
Marc Potts
http://www.marcpotts.co.uk/

THE HOBGOBLIN'S HAT

Up late at night they sat
and carelessly at that, a book of words
in haste, slipped from table & from chair into the waste.

Moreover that
which seemed a can was more (or less)
or other than, an out of date but magical Hobgoblin’s hat.

Round about or
later on that dire night, words came alive
slipped down halls & pillows into dreams & words climbed out.

That said
under cover overhead & quite aflame
to work that is a work of words ignoring life outside they came.

Then how
upright they sat and how immensely and intensely
under cover overhead where they were read by words they fed.

Oh how
night language differs and persists and
in the morning where a trace remains a story grows from that.

©2014 The Hobgoblin’s Hat stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords #mythopoetics





notes

1. Allysen Gallery song, “Hobgoblin’s Hat”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGYIq3vcTBg
2. Marc Potts, artwork, “Hobgoblin’s hat” http://www.marcpotts.co.uk/
3.  Scholar, Ari Berk on hobgoblins http://www.ariberk.com/hobgoblins.html
4. hobgoblin- from "hob" meaning "elf". A hob is a clown or prankster and hence word play in "playing the hob" in soul-making tells another kind of story. see http://www.etymonline.com

THE CELLAR DWELLER AS FRIEND BELOW

IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING

“I love your heart more than your crown…I will come, and I will sing to you!—But you must promise me one thing!—Tell no one that you have a little bird who tells you everything!” 
                                ~The Nightengale, Hans Christian Andersen

VOIR DIRE hobgoblin
rings in the iron bell
singing low-living

©2014 IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING
stephanie pope mythopoetry.com

#ohjDailyWords, #micropoetry, #mythopoetics, #vss, #10words #3lines

************************
NOTES

For more on hobgoblins see Ari Berk http://www.ariberk.com/hobgoblins.html 

ROSALIA

OR WHEN NOTHING IS SHOWING

something gentler & wilder than you
(and always faithful)
sits with ancestral soul underneath
in a dream where she shows her
convivial purse to the celebration
inside and outside
something to dis
plays itself and does...
will,,,has already, the content
like an opening of new wine
in blush, one/half sweet
one/half libation vessel,
empty

and promising fulfillment
the woman in the dream 
like a secret in a sarcophagus
the soul of the place
is already risen in the purse
already a primary face
ascending where god vanishes
in the dream...the way
Theseus did in the myth.

A woman in the dream 
alone with her favorite purse,
the old blue opening, opening―
how dream images
don't exist yet show their force!

How the purse, a half-sweet vessel
dreaming of wine
deep down
causes inside and outside
never to exist apart.




©2014 THE PURSE stephanie pope mythopoetry.com

ENgraveMENT

"The ceiling up there corresponds with the richness of the human imagination"
- James Hillman

UP THERE

"...renewal of spirit occurs within an enclosed space
with some sort of ceiling"   ~James Hillman

spiteful spinster
drafty rafters
groan sinister

©2014 FIRST DRAFT stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
THE ODDLY HAIR-RAISING JOURNEY (#ohj OCTOBER POETRY)
#ohj, #vss #mythopoetics, #6words, #3lines #micropoetry



notes

1. See the section on ceilings 79-82, 84. "The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire" ed Thomas Moore Great Britain: Routledge, 1989

WAKING ECHOES

The whole earth is the tomb of heroic men and their story is not given only on stone over their clay but abides everywhere without visible symbol woven into the stuff of other mens lives. -Pericles

AN ODDLY HAIR-RAISING JOURNEY

in mausoleum, sole
one's bottom chatter


©2014 The Wonder of Mausolos stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohj chatter, mausoleum #micropoetry, #mythopoetics, #vss
#sixwords, #twolines


notes

1.  Etmyology of mausoleum
mausoleum (n.)  “magnificent tomb” [1540’s] from Latin mausoleum, from Greek Mausoleion, name of the massive marble tomb built 353 B.C.E. at Halicarnassus (Greek city in Asia Minor) for Mausolos, Persian satrap [governors of  large, Persian provinces or satrapies are called satraps] who made himself king of Caria. It was built by his wife (and sister), Artemisia. Counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, it was destroyed by an earthquake in the Middle Ages. General sense of "any stately burial-place" is from c.1600.  [See etmonline.com]

2. The Mausoleum was approximately 45 m (148 ft) in height, and the four sides were adorned with sculptural reliefs, each created by one of four Greek sculptors—Leochares, Bryaxis, Scopas of Paros and Timotheus. The finished structure of the mausoleum was considered to be such an aesthetic triumph that Antipater of Sidon identified it as one of his Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was destroyed by successive earthquakes from the 12th to the 15th century. [See wiki]


3. Pausanias adds that the Romans considered the Mausoleum one of the great wonders of the world and it was for that reason that they called all their magnificent tombs mausolea, after it.[see  Fergusson, James (1862) Mausoleum at Halicarnassus: Recently Discovered Remains London: John Murray p. 10.

4. List of “The Seven Wonders of the World” of which the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus is one.

DEMETER OF THE HARVEST: Searching For Returns Within Feminine Consciousness

FOR VIRGO VIRIDITAS

Demeter, search
Return in common meter


©2014 UNSEEN GRAIN stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#poetheme #search #mpy #vss #sixwords #mythopoetics


notes

For the Homeric Hymn To Demeter and translation and also for a compilation of various perspectives see http://earlywomenmasters.net/demeter/myth_033.html

SENSING DESCENSUS

Etruscan vase ca. 525 B.C. depicts Hercules
presenting Cerberus to Eurysteus hiding in a winejar.

ROOT SENSE

a thought's heart
an impossible appearance

©2014 Making Faces stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#poetheme #mpy #vss #funnyface #sixwords

RIP : : PIR

CALYPSO'S ISLE, 1897 Herbert Draper

NOT FAR FROM CALYPSO'S EPIC ISLE

LAY WRETCHED ROCKS & WRATHFUL WAVES
AE CALYPSO, AE EEEE I A

SING CALYPSO, OF ROBIN IN PASSING
PASSING IN ROBIN'S AEAEA BREEZE

MUSE, CALYPSO, OF WE, THE PEOPLE
SPARED BY OUR WARS AND THE WAILING SEA

GIFTED THAT GRIN IN A STEM OF HE'S
A BREAST-BURNT STEM ON A ROBIN TREE

SING CALYPSO PASSING IN ROBIN
SING OF THE MANY-TURNED MAN


©2014 CALYPSO REQVIESCAT stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohj for July 1, 2014 epic, calypso



notes

1.  AEAEA is the Greek name for Circe's Isle. Circe's Isle lay along the way to Persephone's gate leading to the underworld. AEAEA is also another name for Calypso, which means "hider" or
"hide-away".

2.  Regarding the mythic imagination and image of the robin in folklore, you will find a bit of interesting ideas that cluster around the image in the blog, "From Bedroom To Study" see Monday, 10 December, 2012, http://from-bedroom-to-study.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-fabled-folklore-of-robin-redbreast.html 

3. Wiki also provides the following cultural depictions of the European robin with christic gloss, Robin Redbreast and the iconic, Norse image of robin as a storm-cloud bird:

The robin features prominently in British folklore, and that of northwestern France, but much less so in other parts of Europe.^[30] It was held to be a storm-cloud bird and sacred to Thor, the god of thunder, in Norse mythology.^[31] Robins also feature in the traditional children's tale, Babes in the Wood; the birds cover the dead bodies of the children.^[32] More recently, the robin has become strongly associated with Christmas, taking a starring role on many Christmas cards since the mid 19th century.^[32] The robin has also appeared on many Christmas postage stamps. An old British folk taleseeks to explain the robin's distinctive breast. Legend has it that when Jesus was dying on the cross, the robin, then simply brown in colour, flew to his side and sang into his ear in order to comfort him in his pain. The blood from his wounds stained the robin's breast, and thereafter all robins got the mark of Christ's blood upon them.^[31][33] An alternative legend has it that its breast was scorched fetching water for souls in Purgatory.^[32] The association with Christmas, however, more probably arises from the fact that postmen in Victorian Britain wore red jackets and were nicknamed "Robins"; the robin featured on the Christmas card is an emblem of the postman delivering the card.^[34]

In the 1960s, in a vote publicised by The Times newspaper, the robin was adopted as the unofficial national bird of the UK.^[35] The robin was then used as a symbol of a Bird Protection Society.<sup>[36]


4. For the literary archetypal image of the hanged man see W. H. Auden's lines

We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
& let our illusions die.</sup>

THE DEFORMATIONAL IMAGE

THE SELF ABUZZ

One of my fav words is "bespeak". Bespeak means to indicate "as if". Bespeaking is an as-if language that chalks or marks out boundaries of things long before "things" ever actually appear. The image to keep upper most in mind in the word, "bespeak"  is that of a finger pointing for in its Greek root is deik, meaning digit, like the forefinger. There is a Greek god in the word, "bespeak" too. You can read more about that divinity, the holy action of language and fantasy's humor shaping poetic mind in the presence of horror and dread by clicking here.


notes


Poetic mind may express and does express a fantasy image representing interiority without the image having to have interiority or exteriority to express and/or give notice to its reality.

ORIGINAL HIDE ~NICE? ABSOLUTELY!

SCIENCE MAKES A NICE DISTINCTION

a nice distinction undoes it
nicely absolute is absolutely nice

©2014 ABSOLUTE VALUE stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohj nice, absolutely #mythopoetics #tenwords #distich


notes

the collage is made from images taken from the following learning-math sites: http://tedfelix.com/TedChain/avalue.htm

http://www.mathfunny.com/absolute-value-positive-negative-8-bars/

http://www.onlinemath4all.com/absolute_value_function.html

http://www.linkstolearning.com/links/integers_opposites_absolute_value.htm

WRITING TOWARD THE BLOOM IN THE GENOME

photo credit House of Doves

FACING THE UNRESTRAINED

Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground
                     ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies/First Elegy


Pretty Pretender, thy artisan, soul-making
neither fails nor achieves in the same way
as this world of facts

©2014 IMAGINAL EGOS stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohj artisan, fact #mythopoetics #tristich #micropoetry

notes 

We conceptualize self in terms of dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous I positions in an imaginal landscape.  The I has the possibility to move, as in a space, from one position to another in accordance with changes in situation and time.  The I fluctuates among different and even opposed positions.  The I has the capacity to imaginatively endow each position with a voice so that dialogical relations between positions can be established.  The voices function like interacting characters in a story.  --Hermans, Kempen & van Loon, "The Dialogical Self"   

THE UNIFIED POETIC TRADITION OF EPIC

image credit: Muse Kalliope (Calliope) Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston; 5^th C. Attic Red Figure Pyxis,
Hesiod Painter ca 460 - 450 BC 

EPOS

…the conspicuous differences between the poems of Hesiod and between Hesiod and Homer existed in tension with the unified poetic tradition of epos… ~Ralph Rosen, University of Pennsylvania 

odyssey driven by wrath and weaves
Hesiod Homer and nepenthes

©2014 Calliope's Lyre stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohj wrath, odyssey #mythopoetics #distich #tenwords #micropoetry

THE ODDLY HOMERIC JOURNEY

photo credit:  Mt Parnassus, Raphael,  A fresco from the interior
walls of the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Palace.
For more on the fresco see U of Michigan on line

BEYOND PARNASSUS

shapes oddly Homeric journey & battle;
like a shipwreck in human shadows in a
cast of sunlight; how yonder a
banquet of mythic residue echoes still


©2014 DELPHIC SPACE stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohj shipwreck, banquet #mythopoetics #4lines #micropoetry

SONORAN STORM

photo credit: Pete Gregoire National Geographic

"STEAL YOUR FACE"*1

           ~for Brian Landis


a boomer hits a bloomer
the giant, monster saguaro
lit aflame
late, late
bloomer

and when a boomer
boomerangs a bloomer
glimpse the face
giving face to "I's"
that steal the face

below water.
Remember
when you look, steel your face
and not the heart killing you
in toward death by fantasy*

©2014 Euterpe's Magic stephanie pope mythopoetry.com


notes

*for the dual role images play in psyche-making see Brian Landis, "The Morning Sun Is More Precious Than Gold Even If The Spaniards Don't See It That Way"  line 36 in Feathered Ladder: Selected Poems Dennis Patrick Slattery, Brian Landis, Fisher King Press il piccolo edition 2014.


*1. "Euterpe is carrier of the striking and electrifying attribute of her father Zeus: the lightning bolt. We find this euterpian magic at work in the electronic age of music; we find it as well in the digital speed with which iTunes informs the world. Looking back to one of America’s iconic musical groups, The Grateful Dead, we find the memorable emblematic image for their 1974 Steal Your Face album cover: the lightning bolt—diagonally etched blue and red across the top of a skeleton skull. Whether or not this was a deliberate homage to Euterpe, she is nonetheless implicitly

represented, as is of course, stormy Zeus, her father." (see FIG. 2) For this quote  see L. Martina Young

FIG. 2 The Grateful Dead album cover, Steal Your Face
                                                                                                 

OF STONES, WOMB AND TOMB

AJAX CARRYING THE DEAD BODY OF ACHILLES

PRAY DEATH HAS A MOUTH AND TALKS

for fig-high Odysseus
underneath a small rock
lay a big mouth

between oak and rock
for Achilles
lay none


©2014 Thanátou and Tou Thanátou stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohj rock, Achilles

CHARYBDIS

Ulysses hanging from the branch of a fig tree, looking
down in terror at the whirlpool Charybdis, Scylla as a
sea monster writhing around rocks at left; after a watercolour
by Fuseli (Schiff 1362), illustration to Pope's translation of
 Homer's 'Odyssey'; proof before letters. 1806 Engraving and
 etching © The Trustees of the British Museum no.1853,1210.557

photocredit: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_
online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.
aspx?assetId=164619&objectId=1652214&partId=1

SHE TAKES ONE GULP

her horrible whirlpool gulping the sea-surge down, down
but when she spewed it up—like a cauldron over a raging fire—
all her churning depths would seethe 
               ~Charybdis, Odyssey Book 12, Robert Fagels trans.

thirsting eros tempts soul
a whirlpool near grabs &
pulls with more force, aflame
like a cauldron seethes
pushing toward art

©2014 HER SWALLOW BELCHES FROM A GROUNDLESS STATE
stephaniepope mythopoetry.com #ohj whirlpool, tempts

SIREN & HUBRIS IN HOMER

Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891
John William Waterhouse
[image file in public domain]

AT FIRST WHEN APPLYING SIREN ABILITY 

know thyself
nothing else

the hybrid monster
the hybris narrative

©2014 What Does A Siren Say stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohj siren, hubris  #10words #mythopoetics #4lines


notes

1. In myth, sirens are feminine hybrid monsters (aka psychic facts) and like the outdoor sirens that sound out natural woes now, when a siren sounds you better hunker down and listen up.
2. In myth, siren abilities are the unconscious abilities able to take over and control narratives.
3. Hybris is a variant spelling for the word hubris, pride or ego inflation.

THE RHYTHM OF EPIC

Homeric Musing  /Flaxman Design, 1899
see Homer, Iliad, Samuel Butler translation
http://www.ganino.com/the_iliad_by_homer_6

HIS WYRD

strict yet
flexible fate
Homer's dactyl

©2014 Holy Daughters stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohj dactyl, fate



notes

1. see Rodney Merrill, Translating The Odyssey
http://home.earthlink.net/~merrill_odyssey/id5.html