2017: MONSTERS & BUGS POETRY SERIES #BOOKS #AMWRITING #POETRY

SOME LINES WHICH DO NOT EXIST

Yes, it's true!  I #amwriting!   This poetry series has been in the works for more than ten years.  Why?  Because soul work is slow work. You know that encounter in the kitchen?  "Is it soup yet?  Not yet, but soon!

As the book is throwing itself together, I thought you might like a taste.  Got your spoon ready?

  Here goes...

behind the thrust
of cutting money, cutting female flesh
cutting family planning
the cost of such a program not as costly
as the insistence upon reproduction
not because people respect life
but to ensure that sheer life literally will have been
while those living must earn a living
enslaved to sustain the appetites
of the corpse law of the greedy for power
and it is the greed that hides the national hole
in the ground calling itself zero


~excerpted from "CRIPpled POETICS" ©2017 stephanie pope  Monsters & Bugs poetry series

BACK TO BLACK #poetrymonth #napomo #napowrimo #mythopo

Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, The Souls of Acheron (1898)

TO BE OF USE (Ignorance Is Real)

Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle? 
~Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1 Scene 4

I tell you
find your way to black
and you have found your way

between.
Languages of the real
uphold the painful

difference.
This no longer a term
distinct relaying

relation.
Black holds apart
the middle in

and through.
Disappearing into
the design de

sign.
Go with it
a sense of being

no thing.


©2016 What Kastalia Saw (the divine spring)
stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

“THE FALL” & “THE MARGINALIZED” : “THE LIMBO OF PATRIARCHS” (or) REVISITING THE UNDERWORLD OF THE TA KATÔTATA #poetrymonth

LIVE LIKE A WOMAN FALLING BUT…

“The ultimate state of love is freedom, absolute freedom, and any relationship that destroys freedom is not worthwhile. Love is a sacred art. To be in love is to be in a holy relationship.”  ~osho  
  

when falling, let fall at least twice
letting things fall apart and then
fall between their interstice;

in descensus
harrow the realm of the dead
not the damned and thus

shall you go
raising the bar
ever low

©2016 Undoing Limbo stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

#poetrymonth #amwriting #vss

notes

limbo
lim·bo [ lim-boh]
NOUN [PLURAL LIM·BOS.]

HISTORY
Limbo came into usuage between 1300-50 a.d.; Middle English, from Medieval Latin phrase in limbō on hell's border ( Latin: on the edge), equivalent to in on + limbō, ablative
of limbus edge, border (L), place bordering on hell (ML)

1.

(often initial capital letter) Roman Catholic Theology. a region on the border of hell or heaven, serving as the abode after death of unbaptized infants (limbo of infants) and of the righteous who died before the coming of Christ (limbo of the fathers or limbo of the patriarchs)

2.

a place or state of oblivion to which persons or things are regarded as being relegated when cast aside, forgotten, past, or out of date: My youthful hopes are in the limbo of lost dreams.

3.

an intermediate, transitional, or midway state or place.

4.

a place or state of imprisonment or confinement.  http://www.dictionary.com/browse/limbo

MYTHOLOGY
            For the Christian descensus ad inferos, myth of limbo see “the harrowing of hell”.


DANCE

            “The limbo is a dance in which participants have to cross under a stick by bending backward at the waist. The stick is lowered a notch each time every one passes under it, and those who touch the stick are eliminated from the dance. … The version of the limbo performed in nineteenth century Trinidad was meant to symbolize slaves entering the galleys of a slave ship, or a spirit crossing over into the afterworld, or “limbo.” See West Indian Julia Edwards

“Traditionally, the limbo dance began at the lowest possible bar height and the bar was gradually raised, signifying an emergence from death into life.”  WIKI

                                                                  ***********


1. The Ta Katôtata, the lowest (spirits of the dead) marginalized or cast aside but who nonetheless bring their liveliness to our mythic imagination. The Ta Katôtata are located along a threshold (to the underworld) in an imaginal space designated limbo. Limbo might simply reference a “yod” or “three way crossing.”

#BENEATH : A Poetheme

BENEATH A POETHEME
"The logics that create the surface of the story
          are never the story." -Maggie Macary

I.

A root formation
you

Old Moon, and I
beneath you

Being of the one dream
a creature of creation, too


II

Old Moon
a hidden thrust in core and crust

Beneath you
freezing and thawing

Has begun
in trees to run


III.

Old Moon
dreaming in that language,

Piñon 
pine

Beneath you,
something new


IV.

Sore
piñon pine

Sings
crow

Your deep stone rhythm
pocks my breast

Repeats
beneath my rest Old Moon                  

  ©2016 Root Formation stephaniepope mythopoetry.com



notes
1. The introduction to "March Moon" ( to read the full essay see http://www.mythopoetry.com/mythopoetics/essay_moon_mar.html )

For The Love of a Woman

by stephanie pope published 03/13/09 Pt 3 March Moon A Cite For Sore Eyes After a while, one starts thinking in that language, dreaming in that language, as well as speaking in that language, and the behavior becomes different.  --J. J. Jameson

These essays around the full moon are inspired by a thought whose soul wonders what it is to reflect the mind of winter. Seeing the moon one gentle evening, this thinking began to imagine the moon had seen a good portion of the ghost world of what came and went many times over throughout countless eons long past. Thereupon perhaps something might remain in these ‘other world’ remains winter minds still and this might be of value and import to us now in our own life resolve. Whereupon our world, too, in the way it remains predisposed to reflect such mythic thoughts always and once more and imaginally so, we might then begin again to share the soul of this world with each other, being of the one dream and begun from within creative life’s image and likeness creatures of creation too. So this now is the imaginal route retraced that brings to me in contemplation likenesses for the ‘mind of winter’ and bears these through the first to this last of the winter-moon essays for this series.

2. "The logics that create the surface of the story are never the story." -Maggie Macary, "Cultural Mythology, A Methodology

WORKING AGAINST NATURE #IndiePubThurs #amwriting #blog #poetry #mythopoetics

UNWILLING TO BECOME A BODY WILLING TO BLEED

“A turning tearing from its emptiness; how fast this spin, the rooted thoughts of a conservative nature, radical nature unsettling things”

–Richard Lance Scow Williams, Raptor and Wren

something s[p®]ang or sp®outed
tearing― up↑. I

cannot see that salty word
and not see the watering

whole, the
transparency or

selfing soul
making an

in-stance
of that the

ab sensed
W   ord

image
fiery  wheeled feminine
unwillingness to become

spoken hitched broken or
rehearsed

no body has
what it takes

©2015 Her Embodied Shade stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#IndiePubThurs #amwriting #blog#poetry #mythopoetics

POETIC AUTHORS / In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about becoming an author.

AUTHORING THE SONG OF LIFE

ΕἰςτέττιγαΜακαρίζομένσε, τέττιξ,
ὅτιδενδρέωνἐπ΄ἄκρωνὀλίγηνδρόσονπεπωκώς,
βασιλεὺςὅπως, ἀείδειs (Ανακρέων)[i]

victory symbol this
cicada's chirping song

©2015 Forever Young stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

---

[i] “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.” WEST, M. (1986). Carmina Anacreonta. Leipzig: Teubner.#6words #amwriting #writers #blog #poetry #mpy #2lines #mythopoetics #vss

Writer’s Prompt: In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about becoming an author. #6words #amwriting #writers
Prompt Source: @kelsye

notes

1. Cicada. Order, hemipteran and suborder, Auchenorrhyncha, in the superfamily, Cicadoidea. In Latin, “cicada” means “tree cricket”. When they start buzzing in late July and August there is about 6 more weeks till frost legend has it.  In Greek, “cicada” is called “tettix” with modern Greek calling it “tzitzikas”. Both words are fun metrics in writing.

2. In a scholar’s paper Anastasia Georgaki provides a number of interesting research ideas such as 

a) “The earliest explicit reference on the cicada singing, comes from Homer in the Illiad with the adjective leirios (like the flower 'lily') where Homer describes the 'shrilling voices' of the elder men, likened to Cicada song 'lily-like', after their city has been besieged. Hesiod's reference underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ) and Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine).”

~see Anastasia Georgaki Listening to the Cicada Chorus in the Plato Academy: soundscape research

b)  Hesiod’s reference (Hesiod Works 582 ff. : “τέττιξδενδρέῳἐφεζόμενοςλιγυρὴνκαταχεύετ̓ἀοιδὴνιπυκνὸνὑπὸπτερύγων, θέρεος” “καματώδεοςὥρῃ) underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ)

c) Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine); “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.”

d) Georgaki mentions two important myths with regards the cicada. One is the myth of Eunomos. Eunomos is a citharode, a poet who composes his poetry upon the stringed instrument, the cithara, a kind of lyre. The myth says there is a contest between Ariston of Rhegion and Eunomos of Lokri, which takes place in Delphi. During the contest a string breaks on the lyre of Eunomos and a cicada jumps up to fill the role and supply the missing note. The poet-singer adapts his music to that of his accomplice’s missing note and this move(ment) wins the contest. This odd thing happens along the Halex River marking the boundary between two regions, Rhegion and Lokri. The river passes through a deep ravine. The cicadas on the Lokri side of the bank sing, the cicadas on the Rhegion side do not. This tale is taken up again by a Christian revisionist, Clement of Alexandria, who retells the story another way, one, Roger Lipsey in Have You Been to Delphi? in a section called ‘A Chapter of Tales” says  Clement works with at great length to alter in accent the miraculous kinship bond the poet has with nature through cicadian rhythm. For more about this turn in the Christian theological imagination see Have You Been to Delphi?: Tales of the Ancient Oracle for Modern Minds, New York: Suny Series New York Press, 2001 pp116-117.

The second cicada myth Georgaki mentions is the myth of Tithonos and Eos, Dawn. One of my poetic achievements around this story conflates it with the Endymion/Selene tale (a blissful form of the pair in the tale) and the rose of the Aurora-princely tale of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. Endymion would be a sleeping beauty, Selene supplying “the kiss of 100 years” in a fresh way.  The poem I reference comparing the three is published here two days before today’s poem.

Tithonos is granted immortality but not youth, by Zeus when Eos, the goddess, Dawn asks for immortality for Tithonos. When Tithonos grows old he begins to babble on and on about all the things he’s lived and knows about life and this is that to which he is forever riven as a result of his unnatural longevity. Eos is dutiful as a lover and shuts him away from the world to live forever in this manner…

…when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.  (see Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)

3. Other Greek variations in telling the myth of Tithonos say Eos turns him into the first cicada. And here it strikes me this renders something visible. A Delphi of the mind is perhaps suggested here. So when the word Delphi is invoked, it invites both the historical imagination and the soul of this other, earlier Pythian form. Like the twin banks of the river Halex, cicadas sing only one side of Delphi. That side can be likened to the Delphi of the mind in which a patterned potential capable of archetypal activism evermore and particularly now activates in aging psyche. And in the story of Tithonos, Eos can be likened to the likes of the thirteenth fairy who is really the twelfth; she is changing the way Tithonos is fated by Zeus.  (In the painting of Endymion on Mount Latmos, 1879, Grimshaw has painted Selene in the form of such a fairy!)

The river place has become likened to the riven place place of the split, crack, boundary, gap, place for turning outcomes another way; it marks the spot in the temporized zone of the mind’s space―that deep ravine, just where revisioning in poetic seeing is possible. Yet, like that landscape along either side the bank of the Halex River in the story of Eunomos and the cicada, not every kind of poet hears it.

4.  In the same scholarly paper, Georgaki also notes how Thucydides wrote that Athenians wore gold Cicadas in their hair in order to show their "autochthony".

5. There appears to be a comparison in Homer between lily-skinned voices (old age) and the missing note cicada supplies Eunomos…

λειρ-ιόεις, εσσα, εν, prop.

A  like a lily, but in Hom. only metaph., χρόα λειριόεντα lily skin, Il.13.830; of the cicadae, ὄπα λειριόεσσαν their delicate voice, 3.152; of the Muses' voice, Hes.Th.41; Ἑσπερίδες Q.S.2.418.  2 of  the lily, κάρη Nic.Al.406.    see Liddel and Scott  http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?p.43:4.LSJ

6. The application of this missing note, the poetic life’s lilyskin, psyche’s deep voice in the age’s aging seems to be that similar solution Eos supplies Tithonian existence. At first light the goddess puts a Dionysian sweet on Tithonos’ tongue which is drunk with dew; it supplies the missing note giving way to metamorphosis.

Noticing this I note how it is these days. To outlive one’s beautiful youth and still be too young and healthy to die seems to be the lot of a good many retirees.  The spiritual task individuating a long life, what will it have been like? Into what image and likeness will it have been reborn?  How will it show its autochthony?

Having grown up under the sign of the hippie, perhaps wearing the lily skin in our hair is the role of the 60’s generation who are now in their 60’s literally.

THROUGH THE SEEING POOL H-GEEKY

Endymion on Mount Latmos (1879) (John) Atkinson Grimshaw

SEEING THROUGH FAIRIES SEEING THROUGH

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. - John Steinbeck


Sleep's nocturnal algorithm
Endymion's element

©2015 First Nocturne stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords #mpy #writeprompt #5words #2lines #mythopoetics #vss #amwriting #blog #poetry


notes

 For more on JA Grimshaw see http://www.grimshaworigin.org/AtkinsonTheodosia.htm

1. Mythic tales carry image remains and are themselves remainders, burial mounds inscribed with such remains still remaining.

2. Hypnos, God of Sleep, resides in Erebos, the land of eternal darkness, beyond the gates of the rising sun. From here he rises into the sky each night in the train of his goddess mother, Nyx or Night. The Oneiroi, dark-winged spirits of dreams, are often depicted as bat-like creatures. These are his brothers, sons of Night, too. In the form of the spirit of dream, the Oneiroi are given the name, Morpheus and personified in notion. Thanatos, Death, a brother, belongs to this complex as well.

3. Let me begin in such ruins with a Roman-era collection of myths and the account of the one great love story between immortality’s goddess and mortal man. It is based largely on the mythologer and poet Pherecydes of Leros.  His account has perished but he is the one in which this particular telling of the myth whether Rose (Aurora), Eos or Selene.

There are three stories, three lights, three ladies, three lovers but really they are remains of the one story. I am pondering the Roman story of Selene and the shepherd, Endymion, the Greek story of Eos and the Trojan rhapsode, Tithonos and the marchen or fairytale of Sleeping Beauty, Aurora―a Roman reference again. She is called Rose by Charles Perrault in the 100 sleeping years before her kiss with the prince. I am pondering more deeply how analogies are made through poetic meanings held in abeyance. Perhaps I am thinking of a myth of the body that remains embodied and the heroic turn into mythopoetic man as we move from a heroic mode that once made meaning possible to a poetic one making meaning still possible.

I am beginning with the story as it is told in Greco-Roman imagination since it is Greek imagination in western psyche-making which tells our first story of poetic imagination (and imaginally speaking Tithonos is both a Trojan soldier and a poet.) I am musing on how poetic imagination often resolves the problems of the day-world’s mortality during slumber. Night seems to play an eternally important role.

Regarding this apparent change which is made possible in the soul of words as they emanate from the temporized sphere of a dark goddess’s eternity― poetic meanings held in abeyance turns them metaphorically; regarding this changing of hours into h’ours marking just where something new is possible―moreover necessary, there is, the myth shares, once a necessary flaw in that early mythic and poetic dream’s algorithm supposed to resolve the changing of hours in that eternal love affair that always and forever goes on everywhere at once between mortal and immortal things words attempt to embody. What matters embody, matter embodies in the aging remains of our words which live on after we are gone.

The first myth’s “love problem” gets handed down to us today in the story of Aurora’s birth. Aurora is the Roman name given the goddess, Dawn although in the story it is Selene who resolves the solution to the first light’s love problem. Pre-Sentient being is resolving being in a day-world kind of knowing passing between both science and art; the passage between both is a space in which a kind of becoming time in space and becoming space in time share without obstruction.

Here is perhaps a distinction. The Greek Goddess of dawn, Eos, links being to root it in the irrational soul carrying the same light’s meaning both ways. This is just what Selene does in the tale of the shepherd Endymion, Endymion in the same role held originally by Tithonos, soldier as poet. Later on this is the princely role in that moment in Sleeping Beauty with the midnight kiss. Selene resolves the problem Eos has at first light and throughout all time. Moon’s lingo (sleep) resolves for eternity how it is in love with the forms of time, of which, one’s consciousness is also made in image and likeness. The three goddesses form a committee of sleep to do for us now what we cannot do for ourselves daily. Within our remains is our unknowing made known.

The marchen tale, “Sleeping Beauty” carries Aurora’s curse as the rose within it but this curse is a new twist on the original love theme in how love’s “changing movement” turns the logos of hours to h-our or h’our’s psyche-making awareness which cannot ever die. (No matter which ego thinks what next morning!) Alas, because of what ego thinks in the morning and in spite of this, immortal love can only live in the body of matter’s life in as much as we are able to bring it to life ourselves.  Yet, in as much as the committee of sleep sustains our nocturnal algorithm, love seems to find its own way into our world.

The tale of Eos and Tithonos

The tale of Selene and Endymion

Sleeping Beauty In The Wood

SCENT-ENCING HERA'S EYES: ODORS OF (DE)LIGHT

Jessie Arms Botke The Peacock (1931)Oil and gold leaf on canvas (34 x 40 inches)

RE VISIONING HERA'S EYES

ONCE UPON A TIME...

                          IN GRECO-ROMAN IMAGINATION HERA'S EYES, THE STARS, ADORNED THE VAULT OF THE DOMAIN OF ZEUS, HEAVEN UNTIL HERMES AS ARGEIPHONTES, SLAYER OF THE ARGUS FLITS AMONG THE STARS, DARKENING THE BROW OF ZEUS WHO PLOTS.  HERA, EMPLOTTING TOO, GIVES THIS STARLIGHT TO THE LASHES OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL.  HOW?  LET THE POEM TELL THE STORY FROM HERE...


ARGUS PANOPTES SIMULACRUM
FIREFLY LIT
ALLURINGLY COME
WHEN ARGEIPHONTES FLIT
BEJEWELING HERA'S LASHES


©2015 Hera's Bling stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#amwriting #poetry #ohjDailyWords #vss #mythopoetics #5words


notes

ARGUS – ALL EYES; PANOPTES-ALL-SEEING ATTRIBUTE OF THE GOD, HELIOS; ARGEIPHONTES-ARGUS-SLAYER, SAID OF HERMES
Jessie Arms-Botke biography and artwork http://www.jessiearmsbotkegallery.com/jessiebotkebiography.html
you tube video on peacocks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQdc6fakRto


Enjoy the video!

TERPSICHORE NYMPHS & STUFF

 For more glass sculpture by artist, Peter Mandl  see
http://www.petermandl.com/#!glass-scultures/c1aog

I SAW A SECRET LIFE DOWN THERE

Half past sunset, a beach
a darkly fluid reach
Maggie dancing


©2015 Maggie’s Secret Life
bedtime #vss  #mpy #micropoetry #mythopoetics #lines #3lines #poetry #amwriting #lines #Terpsichore