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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84

The Spider's Web: Showing What Revisions Can Make Me Do


Comments after the poem! Enjoy!


The Spider’s Web


I saw a spider spin her web

From the window in my room.

I was muted in the dark.

She was outlined by the moon

As she fixed a silken thread

To a myrtle and a post

That sagged some in the middle

Right above a blooming rose.


And I noticed how the filament

Was collecting the night’s mist

And reshaping it to droplets

That mimicked the lunar gist.

Each globule glowed with silver

As it drifted down the line

And it grew until it lost its grip

To gravity and time.

Then, it dripped down on the blossom

With a soundless, weighted crash,

And the rosebud bowed and curtsied

With every dewdrop’s splash.


I was frozen in the moment

Gazing on each crystal ball

As it glided down the fiber

Found its purpose and let fall,

And I felt my body rocking

With the swaying of the rose

From the short hairs on my forehead

All the way down to my toes

Till I was standing, dreaming

In a swoon sweeter than sleep,

Cradled in a sea of silence

Where the memories run deep.


Then, the reverie was broken

By a shape dangling in space

And I felt a primal terror

As it moved across my face.

All my innate fears were rising,

All my past enchantment ebbing,

I began to squirm and thrash about.

I was caught up in her webbing!


Or so, I thought for a moment

Till I gathered up my wits

And I looked back out the window

To the limb tip where she sits.

Yes, she sits there still this morning

Waiting for her web to shake

And pretending that she’s napping.

I think I will stay awake.


Well, with this poem, I believe that I will officially begin the revisions necessary for putting a book of nature poems together. This poem is revised from one that some of you may recognize. I will post it below. The revision is primarily based on the suggestions of my correspondence friend, Patrick Gillespie (whose novel Tiny House, Big Mountain is now available through Raw Earth Press--Ask me if you would like to know more about it!). Patrick suggested that the original poem, while containing some beautiful word combinations, sounded too mawkish, too sentimental, and, ultimately, too much like a bad 19th century poet had written it. I am a person who appreciates criticism when it is helpful, and I am more than happy to show that I am not a one-trick pony even if I often stick to certain themes, subjects, ideas, and forms for a collection. One promise that I did make to my faithful readers when I began this collection was that the poems would be song-like. I did a better job with the music in this one than in the previous version. Musical verse happens to be my preference in writing anyway, but I can do other things. Anyway...just thinking aloud.


Here is the original poem:


Arachne and the Melancholy Rose


Arachne weaves scenes beneath the bone white moon--

Its keen beams pierce black clouds like rapture--

Her silken essences flow without thought

Connecting thorny strands of Melancholy,

Red, red Rose missing her sun-lover.

The spider’s thread collects night’s mists—

Each glowing droplet a miniature moon—

Like silver oils in glittering imaginations

Spangled in the anguish of half light

Growing in the unwavering grip of gravity,

The globules drift down the glossy line

And

Drip,

Drip,

Drip

Onto placid, purple petals,

Sleepy, droopy petals,

Rose’s red, red petals

Moondreaming of Apollo’s warm kisses.


I would be very interested in knowing which poem my faithful readers (All 15 of you!) like best. If you have a little time, send me an email and let me know which you do like best, and if you have a little more time, tell me why. I am quite curious.


By the way, I took the picture of the spider web at the top in the middle of the day. I am using some heavy filtering to make it look like it is glowing in the moonlight, but I think it works.

Yorumlar


I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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