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Poetry Book I:LIFE AS WE KNOW IT
POEMS, 2001-2019
Allahabad: Cyberwit. 2019. 120 pages
The poems in this volume have been
specially selected and arranged out of more than 700 poems that I
have written since 1991 so far, and that are available on my web site
at philjohn.com. My poems are sorted into various larger groups and
sub-groups, based on a combination of chronology and theme. The poems
within this volume are taken from groups 17 and 19-24, and they cover
years from 2001-2019.
My
thinking and writing is very much influenced by music; which should
not be surprising, as music and poetry have always been intimately
linked. For this collection, I am following the classic Sonata Form,
as follows:
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Observations: Exposition of
Theme 1, which is Nature and Human Id. Early on, Aristotle is
invoked, and his thinking about nature and the purpose (telos) of
things. I am drawing from visits to London, New York (and refer to
Paul Auster’s New York
Trilogy), and to Auschwitz,
the memorial to the Nazi extermination camp. Alan Ginsberg wrote a
poem “A Supermarket in California”, which I contrapose
with “A Supermarket in Auschwitz.” My “Animalic
Yoga Alphabet” is lighter fare to balance out the darkness, but
it is also a comment on the absurd modern commodification of the
ancient practice of Yoga.
-
(Human) Nature: Exposition of
Theme 2, which is Human Ego in the face of nature. Human beings tend
to question the state of things as they are. I am drawing from a
collection of four long epic poems that are contained within my first
Tetralogy. The excerpts chosen for this volume focus on human
suffering, hope and transgressions – namely war, genocide, the
Holocaust, and hubris. The realization of the immensity of human
crimes should be doubt and humility. The Camel is shown as superior
as it is said that it knows all 100 names of god, whereas we humans
only know 99. This is a warning not to overestimate our knowledge of
the divine order. I will also refer to two episodes from Homer’s
Odyssey, one of them the return of Odysseus to his son and wife on
Ithaka, after having survived sea monsters like Skylla and Charybdis
on his long voyage that had been his punishment by the god Poseidon
for defeating the Trojans with his Wooden Horse.
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Life and Death:
Development,
part 1, which requires a discussion of religious themes, with
established (mostly Catholic Christian) tradition, but then a
widening to transcendence and an overcoming of established norms.
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Love: Development, part 2,
which is the answer to the questions posed by 3: Love conquers all,
and it must be allowed to conquer all. “We’ll Always Have
Paris” quotes the movie Casablanca,
whose theme was exile,
morality and love in a time of the absolute breakdown of norms and
life itself.
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Civilization: Reprise of
Themes 1 and 2, with subthemes from the development portions
interwoven throughout.
The
excerpt of “Terror Incognitus” (“unknown terror”)
chosen for this volume, “Dark Bird Perched,” is dedicated
to James Welch, a Native American author from Blackfeet and Gros
Vente tribal heritage, and is alluding to the Sand Creek massacre of
the Cheyenne and Arapaho people in 1864, and the Wounded Knee
massacre on the Lakota Indian Reservation at Pine Ridge in 1890. The
“dark bird” may be a raven or crow and is frequently a
trickster animal; in this case, overseeing the effects of the
genocidal diminishing of America’s indigenous nations, who are
still continuing to fight for the survival of their individual
cultures and peoples. The use of winter as a sign of discontent is,
of course, as old as Shakespeare or older. Rarely, anything is new at
all.
Thus
in “The Sea at Night,” with “semper
crescis / aut decrescis”
Fortune’s wheel is invoked, a reminder from the Medieval
Carmina Burana that fate favors no one, that everything is cyclical
and outside our human control, no matter how much we may desire it to
be so.
The
aim of Section V is not to pretend that everything now is ok, but to
again weave the core topics together to finally end with the
realization that nature is always stronger, that we, as human beings,
have created a world out of balance, and that our Ego needs to
recede, to dissolve almost, so that we discover balance and harmony
again, to reject the yoke of an exclusive focus on the material
world, and to accept a level of spiritual being that is at one with
the world again, while not being unaware of our human imperfections.
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