Poetry - virtue, intoxication, life

No Images

She does not know

Her beauty,

She thinks her brown body

Has no glory.

If she could dance

Naked,

Under palm trees

And see her image in the river

She would know.

But there are no palm trees

On the street,

And dish water gives back no images.

     Waring cuney (1906-1976)

Poetry, sweet poetry, it speaks to my soul as colors being added on a canvas,  shapes of clay being moulded,  words forming ideas and imagery.  I love poetry, this one in particular is from a book called Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate (Looking at the Harlem Renaissance through Poems) by Nikki Giovanni. 

I like the title and was thus drawn to the book.  It is filled with

poems by some of the greatest African-American poets: Countee Cullen,  Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes,  Claude McKay and many more.  The poets speak of challenges in being of color in this country, the pain, the glory, the humanness of being alive.  The Harlem Renaissance excites me, all of that great writing and art that came out of that period of time.  I would of loved to have lived then. 

What attracts me to poetry is it’s openess to any style or form (haiku’s, stanzas, pentameter, rhyme, rhythm).  There is no wrong way to express an idea. I love spoken word.

Of course making the idea clear is important.  Like any craft it can be worked and reworked to create imagery, symbolism and metaphor that one feels with the heart, sees imaginatively, smells intensely and hears magnificently.  Poetry is like music to me, each word has a meaning and intention and it can make one’s spirit soar to heights of happiness or depths of human despair.  With poetry you know if you like it, the words resonates with you by how you feel about it. 

Baudelaire said it succinctly – Be intoxicated with life – see it in the everyday moments, a beauty, a love, a joy.

Charles Baudelaire

Enivrez-vous (Paris Spleen, 1864)



Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve. 
   Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous. 
   Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est et le vent, la vague, l'étoile, l'oiseau, l'horloge, vous répondront: "Il est l'heure de s'enivrer! Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise."

Arthur Symons (1865-1945) translation, as quoted by Eugene O’Neill in Long Day’s Journey into Night:

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
            Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
            And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.”

The Kiss
inspired by Rodin
mixed media on canvas panel
4/2011