Workshop on Wonder-- Just Poets, Oct. 19

October 19, 2013

Notes and a few poems inspired by the Just Poets retreat at the Gell Center 10/19/2013

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." -- Albert Einstein (from M.J.’s collection of quotes.)

**
Workshop with M.J.
Imagine 10 pieces of paper, with duos and trios drawing images inspired by words: awe-- thought-- solitude-- puzzle-- connection-- dream-- mystery-- prediction-- hope -- city-blocks -- garden --


Worlds: 10 creations

Our mood hums as pencils etch, colors scratch, markers
slip into spirals; lines connect
thought to puzzle, unpuzzle, then puzzle again.
We reach for edges, uncharted
Escher-fish, our fins flung to wing.

Each thought ladder-leaps
up to dream, as if to catch
the murmurs in marvel.
A gypsy skirts yin-yang,
prediction softens, winds into tune.

**
"There are those much more rare people who never lose their curiosity, their almost childlike wonder
at the world; those people who continue to learn and to grow intellectually until the day they die.
And these usually are the people who make contributions, who leave some part of the world a little better off than it was before they entered it." William H. Sheldon (from M.J.’s collection of quotes.)

Inspired by John's peripatetic walk: by Thoreau's cabin.
tatatata doo-li-da, sings Niam, three years old.

What is it we are here on Earth to sing?

Come without vanity
bOw your head
gaMble faith
Pass
Around
your gIft
aNd
lifT
voice without complaint.

(note that C - O - M - P - A - I - N - T -- is complaint transformed to "com paint" -- like an invitation to paint with our voices and lives -- how easy a letter can lever meaning!)
**
I went to the woods because I wanted...
trees for company... the sound of the wind.
By the Gell Center treehouse, you see how three large pine carry the weight,
and inside, the smell of turpentine of the fourth. If you ask who lives here, an echo
will voodoo answer: you do, you do, you-ooo, and doing turns to living silence.


**
Writing prompt from Donna and Claudia's workshop on the non-narrative poem

Mischa

murmurs
in
silence
calm
halos
abound.

His red hat echoes the last of the sun,
as he walks towards the church.
It protects him from the cold.

At Vespers, every man's lapel bears a white flower
to remember the man who saved the old books slated for shredding.
He turned the words and meanings to music before he died.
Mischa murmurs in silence,
calm
halos abound.

Rivers of wings surround
Mischa, in calm.
At first flutes shape notes like icicles
and then the strings sweep the sound
of wind in summer wheat,
the horns call down autumn
halo after halo of leaves around bare trees.
And then the flutes return like Spring
birds abound.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLFX1ZWKemk
Glazunov : the seasons

(prompt from poems provided by Claudia:
Ashbery: Glazunoviana
Laura Sims, Behind her Eyes)