Sunday, May 25, 2014

SOLDIER AS POET

photo credit: Natanis Davidsen For permission to use
photo freely see
http://www.creationswap.com/media/5995 



















SANGRIA REVERIE


The love in the blood of our
(m)other tongue
knows how we walk the talk *in*.

Although swollen with blood the ground
below the foot, swollen with blood
the poetizing meter

right there what matters in matters
bound in
bound through the blood

an
immanent
immortality.

Throughout our other, soldier-as-poet word
our mothering metaphor repeats "Dear Mom"
to us, poetics soft, envelopingwinedark.

Enliven us, spirit of deep alterity; pour
libation and sing: sang (masc.) in French
sangre (fem.) in Spanish red. *These*

pour back through black to us the blood
of our _other, feminizing word
poetizing being.



©2014 Sangria Reverie stephanie pope, mythopoetry.com

notes

1. Blood in French, “sang”, and blood in Spanish, “sangre”, carry gender distinction, something Bachelard, in his “Reverie on Reveries” intimates will color reveries. Bachelard says the following, “The difference of gender overturns all my reveries. It is really the entire reverie which changes gender.” (see ch 1, “The Word Dreamer” in The Poetics of Reverie (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, Daniel Russell, trans.) Concerning the reversals of masculine and feminine values in passing from one language to another Bachelard turns to Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex to talk about the femininity of words saying “The woman is the ideal of human nature and ‘the ideal which man posits opposite himself as the essential other; he feminizes it (italics mine) because the woman is the palpable figure of otherness. (altérité) See p.35. Bachelard is pointing out the internal oneirism in language and the importance of being faithful to the “in”-sight/site/and cite operating between imagination and consciousness, something Vered Lev Kenaan’s introduction to Pandora’s Senses also notes by saying “…the ‘I’ cannot be understood without a ‘you’, and the masculine is dependent on the feminine.  This suggests to me that perhaps it is that the poetizing of being is dependent on this poetic time and poetic space in its feminizing “in” site/cite insight operating between imagination and individuating consciousness.

2. “Sangria” in Spanish literally means “bleeding”.

3. In Pandora’s Senses (Wisconsin: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 2008) Vered Lev Kenaan notes “Feminine repetition transposes the said into a new order,” p. 4. Pandora’s Senses gathers some sense using the myth of Echo and Narcissus saying “The said meets itself (italics mine) in the form of that which is heard. Echo allows the speaker to identify the utterance as his own but in objectifying the act of expression, (recall  de Beauvoir’s “it” under Bachelard’s notice in footnote 1) she (Echo) makes it clear the utterance no longer belongs to its original owner. Hence… the repetition scene constitutes a locus of self-enlightenment. 

4. For “immanent immortality” and the soldier metaphor see Alan Badiou, The Contemporary Figure of the Soldier In Politics and Poetry, UCLA, 2007.

5. poetry credit: James Burden’s untitled poem,

The ground below your feet is full of blood
Indian blood
English blood
African blood
Spaniard blood
French blood
And more...
The ground below your feet is full of blood
And while the beings whose blood poured forth into the dirt may have waged
wars against the other
Now
They are together
All one blood
One blood
Bound together
By the love
Of our Mother      ~James Burden, untitled

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152404092265991&set=a.10150098479130991.304278.624555990&type=1&theater&notif_t=like

6. photo credit: Natanis Davidsen has photographed new life emerging out of burnt, or scorched earth. Sangria soil sparked blood and inner light lit up the soldier as poet living underneath my own imagination.
For permission to use photo freely see
http://www.creationswap.com/media/5995