I'm working obscene amounts of double shifts lately. obscene. so yesterday i forced myself in to the obligatory doing absolutely nothing. the night before the prospects of no plans no calls no errands no nada to have to do seemed great, but actually going through with it was a little tough. made me feel less than worthwhile. have always been in to identifying the mean teeth of doubt in my consciousness, the terms of which like a tape looping i or one plays over again throughout the head without really separating out from and seeing, and so take for granted. so i'm programmed to think that taking time off is lazy or gluttonous. go figure--of course i am.
anyhow hell yeah let's hear it for 8 episodes of the first season of SexintheCity woooohooo and also Knocked Up and the very stupid Walk Hard. and front porch time and, oh yes, an hour and a half lazed in bed w my new Vogue and a cup of hot mint tea. got my rest, got my soul full again, got my juices flowing--which was necessary if i want to get a blog in before today's 12 hour shift...
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So the afternoon before last Laura Walsh and I drove to Newark to U Del to check out the original manuscripts (oh god my heart beats faster and the water tingles in my mouth whenever i say that) of Diane diPrima's Freddie Poems. What is of interest to me here is a fine, exact example of my take on poetics. Firstly, her Freddie Poems, far as I'm concerned, is one of diPrima's clear transitions, visible within the poems themselves, into her experience of poetry as an alchemical function. Thus we witness her own self-transition and initiation, in the alchemical tradition, of go-between if you will, of she who transmutes self and journeys between the outer and inner worlds, or between the levels of consciousness. Secondly, in the exact tradition of this and in a very personal and real way, this piece of diPrima's work specifically impacted my own life many years later. This is a prime function of poet-(or artist)-as-shaman, as Gary Snyder explains in his Real Work interview with Paul Geneson of the Ohio Review (Fall 1977): "For the poet in particular, a sense of the need to look at the key archetypes image and symbol blocks and see if the blocks are working. Poetry effects change by getting at the archetypes and getting at people's dreams about a century before it actually effects historical change..."
You see, diPrima wrote this collection while in the midst of grieving the loss of her close friend to suicide. This was nearly fifty years ago. I discovered the existence of the Freddie Poems when reading her memoirs in the Fall of 03. At that time I too was in the midst of grieving the suicide of a close friend, and keeping a journal to him which would eventually become my first complete collection of poetry. I was actually calling that project the Mike Journal then! And likewise, the experience of chronicling my process of grief and understanding was my induction in to the tradition of poet as journeyer through other forms of consciousness by mere means of creation.
Wow, I am so wholly took by this concept of poetry, or any art for that matter, as means of transcending our ordinary incidences in life by penetrating to a more intuitive and in-depth, in-bliss experience. Seeing the Freddie Poems for the first time, and in their original form! was so powerful for me. I still do not, and likely will never, have words to give justice to how rich an opportunity this was. What I can do, rather, is defer to Snyder again. Reading those poems, finding the eternal echos of archetype and symbology that diPrima encountered, and nodding in recognition that I too found those same rhythms, themes and postures in my own poetry to Mike was a home-coming of the purest sense. It was affirmation of the the most primal patterns of our humanity, of the never ending cycles of lifedeathlife, and it made me beam with love to have this opportunity to exist. It was acknowledgement in my own soul, a deep-breathed sigh of comfort and relief, and mostly of pure elated satisfaction and awe.
From Snyder:
As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. Whatever is or was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious through meditation…the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past.
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