Tags
creativity, Elaine Stirling, form poetry, imagination, individuality, Navarrete quatrain, necessary tasks, poetry and prose
We are strengthened by imagination
sufficient to release a narrative suspended
from great heights to shatter at feet
kicking stones madly across continents.
We are shattered by hopes too vast
to contain in vessels paltrified by ego
and bleak histories that splinter the seams
of the well-intended like cheaply built arks.
We are scattered by indifference
to mysteries whose clues refuse to stand
still long enough for us to fire pot shots
at what appears to be unrepenting will.
We are gathered by scope of tasks
imagined and individual into watertight
vessels large enough for one with
will sufficient to master the highest seas.
~~~
© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image: woodblock of the Sino-Japanese war
(1894-95) from Throwing off Asia II
Oceantics 
And off we go, rolling the mountains high.
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…says one landlubber to another, Mikels. If I had my druthers, I’d live on the rocky coastline of Newfoundland. Someday, maybe…
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Lovely. I am awed that I can read different meanings in your poetry depending on my mood and circumstances.
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Thank you, Tim, it’s heartening to know that words, somehow, find their way through.
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I keep coming back and reading this one. While every one of the verses catches me in different ways, this verse is where I experience the most consistent zing,
“We are shattered by hopes too vast
to contain in vessels paltrified by ego
and bleak histories that splinter the seams
of the well-intended like cheaply built arks.”
I have been trying to pinpoint why I keep coming back particularly to this verse. There is an intuitive button that gets pushed every time I read it that lights up an image of the Hindenburg coming down in flamed destruction. My heart’s eye sees a flame-filled seamed, well-intended, air ark that is shattering by hopes too vast.
I’ll admit, it seems an odd leap, even as one who moves through life off innumerable intuitive trampoline bounces. The Hindenburg Disaster was in 1937. My entire awareness of it from how the story was portrayed through the show “The Waltons”, and specifically John Boy, the character who witnesses, then writes movingly about the experience.
Perhaps there is an awareness awaiting me that percolates around what you’ve written that applies across inner, national or international conflict, as well as the conflict inherent in “advancement” on natural and technological landscapes.
Whatever it is – thank you for sparking it so I will investigate further.
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A poet friend has often remarked that a poem is an organic entity that requires both poet and reader, and your comments, Creative, really bring that home for me. I read your account of the Hindenburg alongside that stanza & can only say, of course.
There’s also something quite extraordinary about the form itself, created by the poet Gavriel Navarro, whereby (for me, at least) the stanzas loop around and through each other. It can feel in the writing and reading like traveling an infinity loop. I’d like to think too that with each reread, new clarities are reached.
Thank you for your wonderful assessment.
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Happy to be here as part of the Elaine Stirling cosmic team.
Can you tell me more about the form? My right brain stands shaking its half-head in amusement as it recognizes my poor left brain is struggling to understand this literary construction project from the ground up. To do that, I find myself needing to see the drawings for weight bearing walls, plumbing, topography, AND electrical wiring. (I confess to an adult life spent with engineers, environmental scientists, and purveyors of power.)
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Poetry IS a form of literary engineering, physics, both quantum and Newtonian. The more systems experience you have, the better. Your left/right brains will come to love each other like never before! Or to use Source Energy vocabulary, it is alignment.
Gavriel has a wonderful explanation of his Navarrete quatrain somewhere in his blog at Gavriel’s Muse. I’d recommend your visiting there and asking him. He’d be pleased to guide you through it.
http://gavrielmuse.com/
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