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10/16/2022 1 Comment Poet's Petard – October, 2022Sunlight So often, when I speak about the sun, an enormous red rose entangles itself in my tongue. But I do not have the capacity to remain silent. --Odysseus Elitis (my translation) Poets are accused of always writing about two subjects: love and death. This is true. But we also write all the time about light and dark. These dualities are not quite the same, but they operate like two monsters guarding the temple of Poetry. All poets must first make peace with them before we can truly turn our attention to all the other aspects of this demanding art I'd like to focus here on a few poets who have found a way to get past sunlight and live to make good poetry from the experience. British poet U.A. Fanthorpe offers her “translation” of the Christian story of creation, from the Old English poem “Caedmon's Song.” I'll give you the first 4 stanzas of 12. The poem is in her book Queueing For The Sun.
Nepal poet Durga Lal Shrestha at age 64 paid his respect to light by way of his poetry collection The Blossoms of Sixty-Four Sunsets (translated by David Hargreaves). Each two-stanza poem is part of a large dialogue between poet and sun. Here is poem #62: Rebirth
Finally, Vincent van Gogh, whose letters to his brother were saturated with color and light:
So there is every moment something that moves one intensely. A link to my new book: Original Flamboyance
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