Angel of the Divine Presence Bringing Eve to Adam, William Blake (The Creation of Eve and She shall be Called Woman), Ca.1803 Courtesy of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art / public domain
“The soul of sweet delight, can never be defiled.” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake
William Blake painted lots of men with burly thighs
He painted endings & impasses, full of weepings, warrings and sighs,
Showed us discontent and turbulence much, often, and more.
Because, as he knew of himself, ‘for double the vision my Eyes do see
And a double vision is always with me.’ As one does, he gets stuck in that place of mourning, like we do.
But he came forth back. To beginnings. Painting his “The Nativity,”
his baby Jesus spun flew out of birth through the air, arms stretched open wide,
Here in this balanced bringing Eve here, the birth-hood of woman.
No angry stretched fight-ready faces, no muscled thighs on the ready.
What a field of eyes, an effusion of gentle, this place of peaceful,
so fresh it looks transparent. Nothing weighed this down.
No rib mangling or second best. This is just fresh air.
Adam in some boyish expectation and Eve coming down curly,
Her heart and body sweet singing naked.
Down down down is up up up, it seems, a way forward to.
Birds beaked colors that faded gentle blue.
And Blake knew of misogyny and androgyny
But he let himself paint here a new equality story:
“Love and harmony combine,
And around our souls entwine.”
And he turns open nakedness into a blessing
Natural and sacred. Sweet sweet sweet.
more green woods Blake “going forth to faire free”
“When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.” William BlakeÂ
I am delighted to let you know that Linda Chown’s Narrative Authority and Homeostasis in the Novels of Doris Lessing and Carmen MartĂn Gaite(Routledge Library Editions: Modern Fiction) is now available through Amazon in hardcover and Kindle. Linda tells me a budget-wise paperback edition will be available in six-to-eight months.
This study, originally published in 1990, assesses a shift in the presentation of self-consciousness in two pairs of novels by Doris Lessing and Carmen MartĂn Gaite: 1) Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark(1973) and MartĂn Gaite’s RetahĂlas (1974) and 2) Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and MartĂn Gaite’s The Back Room (1978). Three major structural divisions facilitate examining implications of the novels for 1) feminism 2) literary narrative and 3) the lives of people-at-large. / J.D.
LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row. BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. I was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana MarĂa Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen MartĂn Gaite.
Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZineand its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights and encourages activist poetry.  Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
The title  page of America a Prophecy, copy A (printed 1795), collection the Morgan Library / Public Domain
He was the loom’s loom, spinning the fiber of revelation; offering songs of social injustice, the sexual potency of nature, and the blessedness of the lamb. Patti Smith
Like in a rocking chair on the edge of time,
this painting an overture to freedom, a ladle of love,
a luminous nest of linking ladders. Each level going up united.
It’s for to cherish this visual calmness as Blake’s visionary glory.
While his poetic prophecy may seethe with crackling doubt and dissent,
revolutionary odes, contentious acts of history and deceit,
This, the first painting with his name spelled out.
Blake fondly calls these sweet colors “illuminated paintings”
where he lays out his revolutionary love in peopled play.
It’s as though we’re inside an urban subway station
looking up. With Blake, it’s always some kind of looking.
People and how they do what matter in Blake’s sight.
Here, people spread about touching everywhere
in the kind of gentle that cooperation brings.
Fallen warriors in medieval garb, nude woman pointing to this poem.
Women reading, consoling, kinding.
This poetic prophecy one of Blake’s cosmic mythologies:
Orc’s refulgent passion grazes Urizen’s linearity.
Blake charts a new course for mental liberation.
The newspaper-like headline compels because it hearkens
a linking, a jumping up above and caring down below.
The prophetic poem contains fierce strife among nations and type.
But this sweeping image unfolds sweet closeness.
A new, all American revolutionary delight.
As Blake writes: “the fair Moon rejoices
in the clear & cloudless night.” And what a new light!
How lovely the people together democratic,
concentrating in peace, as though Thomas Paine bathed them
in common sense, and faith, hope, and charity.
Aware of the novelty of cultural freedom, Blake affirms,
“Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
Like Walt Whitman, for Blake, the sacred “loom’s loom,” the center sphere,
this image affirms a new vision of democracy, of human affairs:
a belief that “For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.”
I am delighted to let you know that Linda Chown’s Narrative Authority and Homeostasis in the Novels of Doris Lessing and Carmen MartĂn Gaite(Routledge Library Editions: Modern Fiction) is now available through Amazon in hardcover and Kindle. Linda tells me a budget-wise paperback edition will be available in six-to-eight months.
This study, originally published in 1990, assesses a shift in the presentation of self-consciousness in two pairs of novels by Doris Lessing and Carmen MartĂn Gaite: 1) Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark(1973) and MartĂn Gaite’s RetahĂlas (1974) and 2) Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and MartĂn Gaite’s The Back Room (1978). Three major structural divisions facilitate examining implications of the novels for 1) feminism 2) literary narrative and 3) the lives of people-at-large. / J.D.
Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZineand its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights and encourages activist poetry.  Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
It’s been a long time since I posted, and I have many things that I’m working on, but nothing current suitable to publish. But going over REALLY OLD files, back in 2007 when I was doing Journal Pages faithfully every day, with not much regard for calligraphy but some for inked color, and I ran across this fable about a meet-cute with a short guitar-playing guy and a really tall girl…
I remember that I was using the finest-point pen I could find–might have been a Rollerball or a Razor–and a set of Faber-Castell ink markers for the color. I also had a thing about presenting the date a different way every day, sort of like Will Eisner did with his SPIRIT logos.
And I remember yearning.
Operations
Of music, sacred smiles, and nagging doubt: Pitch-perfect was the Evening. And the Girl: Enchanting, very tall, she was…
watercolor 11/2019 
I am delighted to let you know that Linda Chown’s Narrative Authority and Homeostasis in the Novels of Doris Lessing and Carmen MartĂn Gaite (Routledge Library Editions: Modern Fiction) is now available through Amazon in hardcover and Kindle. Linda tells me a budget-wise paperback edition will be available in six-to-eight months.
Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZine and its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights and encourages activist poetry.  Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 