BREATH - Poetry

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Emily Berry’s Unexhausted Time is an extraordinary book-length, yet fragmentary, meditation which meanders through dreamscapes, psychic terrains, ‘incorrigible’ language and luminous symbols, asking with a seer-like voice, ‘Why then are we not healed?’’ When you are reading a poem that touches you, you are immersed in the images, the musicality and beauty of the language, the felt sense that the words create – you are nowhere else. Not all poems have this effect of course but those that do are a tool for you to deepen your understanding of youself and explore the benefits of mindfulness practice. Reading mindfulness poetry can deepen your practice in ways you can not imagine. And writing it can help you explore worlds of awareness you never thought possible. So there were a series of poems that I’ve been developing over the last year-and-a-half that have related to spirit as breath as making poetry (that is, a spiritual poetry), poetry seen as wind coming out of the body, or wind, breath, like the winds of earth. From Williams’ poem to Shelley’s poems to the Elizabethan poems, amongst others. So here is one that.. [ Peter Orlovsky suddenly arrives!] The poems in Cian Ferriter’s pamphlet (winner of the Fool for Poetry Chapbook) have a dark beauty and power. Emotionally compelling and rich with fresh and visually successful images, these poems often surprise us by making a shift from one place or time to another.’

Here are some mindfulness poems that may help you find peace and relaxation: Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth AG: .. ..(I cited some lines) from Hart Crane’s poem “Hurricane” as an example of dochmaic meter… and the whole poem is really interesting, and it’s just in the sequence of poems I’ve been referring to, one time or another, like William Carlos Williams’ poem about Thursday (air – coming in and out of his nose) , Shelley’s “Ode To the West Wind – (“Make me thy lyre even as the forest is’”… “Be thou me spirt fierce (the wind)”, or, “The breath whose might I have invok’d in song/ Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven” in “Adonais”, or a little Elizabethan poem that I’ve quoted a number of times about “What is beauty but a breath? ” Does anybody know that? – “What is beauty but a breath?” Does anybody know?Where you are. You must let it find you. Can Writing and Poetry be used to Meditate or to Cultivate Mindfulness? Which gets us to what I promised, the degree to which the projective involves a stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance towards the reality of a poem itself. It is a matter of content, the content of Homer or of Euripides or of Seami[18] as distinct from that which I might call the more “literary” masters. From the moment the projective purpose of the act of verse is recognized, the content does—it will—change. If the beginning and the end is breath, voice in its largest sense, then the material of verse shifts. It has to. It starts with the composer. The dimension of his line itself changes, not to speak of the change in his conceiving, of the matter he will turn to, of the scale in which he imagines that matter’s use. I myself would pose the difference by a physical image. It is no accident that Pound and Williams both were involved variously in a movement which got called “objectivism.”[19] But that word was then used in some sort of a necessary quarrel, I take it, with “subjectivism.” It is now too late to be bothered with the latter. It has excellently done itself to death, even though we are all caught in its dying. What seems to me a more valid formulation for present use is “objectism,” a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it. Objectism is the getting ride of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use.

In a letter dated 5 June 1950, by way of distinguishing “from” from “technical wonder,” the latter of which he describes as

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You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings. (The revolution of the ear, 1910,[4] the trochee’s heave,[5] asks it of the younger poets.) Kate’s collection merges poetry with the fragile remains of nature — leaves, shells, plant stems — to speak about wilderness as a platform for reflection.’