Tags
#bringingbacktheglosa, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, Hope Mirrlees, narrative poetry, Spanish medieval fixed verse
Yesterday, while sketching rough lines for the poem you’re about to read, I was pondering the strange nature of blogs. Oceantics has been up and running since September 2012. I’ve posted 476 poems, more or less. What began as something like a dare, then a showcase, has settled into my favourite phase yet, a studio. I post poems here. I try stuff out. The most grindingly awful, I have the freedom to delete. Most, though, have stayed. I’m more in love than ever with the craft of poetry, particularly the privilege of the glosa. Someday, in the ethers, wherever we go after this, I want to bear hug the Spanish courtier who developed this awesome form. I kid you not—the glosa transcends time/space and lets you party with any poet who ever lived.
In the following glosa, I have refracted the poet’s lines to create new end words. Hope Mirrlees won’t mind; she was a great rule breaker. Scarcely known now, Hope was the author of Lud o’ the Mist, a book that inspired some of today’s most successful fantasy novelists, including Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett. Fyfield Books has published her collected poems, from which the following quatrain has been borrowed.
~~~
…a weight of glory so immense / as to appal and freeze
the mortal sense is true in poetry as well
as true in fact. / It can occur both after
and before / the one unchangeable and strict event.
—from “A Portrait of the Second Eve Painted in Pompeian Red” by Hope Mirrlees
What have you seen today?
The blind man at the caravanserai inquires.
Murder, theft, I say, endless dunes,
monotony. A date pit cracks my tooth.
I wake. It was a dream, though I still feel
the grit behind my lids. My world, by degrees,
creeps in: laptop, tablet, ipod, phone. I can’t
leave well enough alone. Popping time-released
gel caps, my shoulders ache with strange dis-ease,
a weight of glory so immense as to appal and freeze.
He reappears in scrubs, pushing
a mop outside the ICU. What have you
seen today? A kind soul, I say, paid this
forward, a venti low-fat caramel latte…
unexpected funds. Guess I’m sort of shallow.
He shakes his head. There is a smell
to presence that you mask and hold at bay,
a musk enticing as a wedding night you chase
and lose and crave what you could once foretell.
The mortal sense is true in poetry as well.
Where deepest violence now blinds, imagination,
fierce desire rise and skip ahead. They’re carving
beyond tragedy new sites. The never searched,
no precedent or archives, is where those angels
of great scholarship assemble to assist, whispering,
Exchange your weary vehemence for rapture.
We’ll provide the evidence both spendable
and luscious. Let darker realms be as they are.
The ultra-rational cannot abide our laughter
as true in fact. It can occur both after
and the during, as your friend, whose Stage IV
illness took her, came to know in final breaths.
Grief angered and engulfed me, but worse,
I also saw, as if I’d grown a multitude of eyes,
more of rage’s like and weight rush in,
barbaric, howling, overwhelming, hell-sent—
until I heard her voice. Not so. You do not have to
breathe your last to know the only destination’s love.
Everyone is light refracted, pretending death, bent
and before the one unchangeable and strict event.
~~~
© Elaine Stirling, 2016
A note about the image: I don’t know which Pompeian red painting captured Hope Mirrlees’s imagination, but I like to think it might have been this one. A caption, borrowed from Mauricio Naya’s “Muralis” on Pinterest, states: A new study by Italy’s National Science Foundation (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) has determined that the famous “Pompeian red,” the brilliant red coloring many of the famous frescoed walls of Pompeii, was actually ochre/yellow. According to the study, the yellow color was rendered intense red by the hot gasses emitted during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.
Mikels Skele said:
Wonderful, as usual. Please explain, though, the disparity between the lines of the original quatrain on this page, and the seemingly gratuitous and mystifying forward slashes!
LikeLiked by 1 person
elainestirling said:
The slashes indicate the original line breaks to keep the integrity of her work. It reads somewhat differently in meaning when you use her end words, the chimera of her writing being part of the appeal.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Bridge said:
You know how musical artists go in the recording studio and record multiple tracks and combine them to create the final recording? In some abstract way I feel a sense of your new line breaks singing an alto to Mirrlees original soprano. Then when you go into your studio to lay another track with your words, something multi-dimensional occurs – I hear an orchestra, and see a movie. The chemistry therein pulls me the way Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal’s did in Love Story, yet the magic I discover issues from the storied tomb of of biblical Lazarus.
Also, that bit about the yellow turning to red in Pompeii’s fire is fascinating. An alchemical event at so many levels.
I always love visiting your studio for the insight, awe and inspiration I experience here. This glosa especially, has me mulling where I might find some words that inspire creative connecting between magic, chemistry, geography, nature’s elements, even the history, that resides here in the Northwest Isle’s ….or something else entirely. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Kim Emma Morton said:
Thought provoking as ever, much loved and the art also, a style I am familiar with . xxx
LikeLike
elainestirling said:
Thank you kindly, Kim! I appreciate your reading.
LikeLike
Bridge said:
Sorry Elaine – somehow my comment landed under Mikels – but I must say it was his question that I was pondering and happy to see answered there!
LikeLiked by 1 person
elainestirling said:
Thank you, Bridge, for your generous response to this piece. Hope is definitely a soprano poet, and so comfortable with myth and metaphysics that one’s playing field feels infinite–in fact, almost too much space. I attempted 10-12 glosa openings over a month before the right opening line floated in like a feather..
You live in such a rich area and have seen so much beauty. Lines that are rich and beautiful, regardless of geography, are somewhere out there waiting for the “glosera” to bring it all home..
LikeLiked by 1 person