Blake’s Stage Directions : [“Milton led by Melancholy into the Groves away from the Suns flaring Beams who is seen in the Heavens throwing his darts & flames of fire The Spirits of the Trees on each side are seen under the domination of Insects raised by the Suns heat.”]
It is my honor and pleasure to bring you the sixth in what will be a series of ten Blake poems by the extraordinary American poet, Linda Chown. /. J.D.
How this splurge of Blake’s fairytale painting haunts my soul
in its wispy lingering transcendental colors and mystery.
Spontaneous Blake always makes me want to study,
to know his axes whole and catch more turns
layered and hidden inside such trenchant color treasure.
It is like I need a whole new key to see
who’s who and what in this vast Cartesian shakedown.
Body and soul, heat and shade, green and orange
vibrate in my watch. Melancholy walks with book-bound
Milton in all his academic hesitation he goes
under Apollo cavorting his leg-spread body around.
See him again. Look how he mates the sun.
As always, Blake layers his 360 degrees
to let more come through. That strange crooked melon sun
draws these serious people and insects into opaque light.
Blake knew Milton would hide in his robes, wouldn’t he?
This world is all too fecund for him to see.
And this timidity cranks this sun energy crooked
The all mental mind that encloses itself
And hides in a forest crocks the sun’s heart-heat
Blake joyfully proffered once:
“He who kisses joy as it flies by
will live in eternity’s sunrise.”
No sunrise here, or joyful kissing.
Melancholy and a lot of missing.
This haunting half-hearted vision of intensity,
this twisted sun face stuck squeezed and squinting.
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 María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín 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 Dayjamiededes.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.
“When you see with, not through the eye.” William Blake
[Lamech is the sixth generation descendent of Cain]
Our eyes can be a noose, shutting off all but feeling
when you can only see with.
Blake knows pain’s light’s so fierce
He thus turns it all bright white here unforgettable.
With no hiding in myth or long words,
we see only instant gutted grief everywhere
rolling in eerie-dense earthen white.
Everyone is seeing transitive with their eyes,
not intransitively and freely through.
A tourniquet of frozen seeing freezes word-say
And the three of them alive today only
Horror-see, struck in white trauma.
This painting chants impediment and limit
The very act of looking burns heart-holes with no exit.
This view is split into two larger than life grief crimes:
polygamy on the left and Lamech’s Cain-tinged murder right flat dead
When it gets this bad, everyone sheerly shrieks inside unlooking
No one sees each here. The whole painting a bleached wound.
Blake knew color and looking were dangerous commitments.
“Colours are the wounds of life,” he tellingly said.
Oh say can you see how it feels to be Lamech scorned and doomed
How does it feel at the end of the world when there is nothing to
see, but distance and heartbreak wrapped in “frantic pain”?
Like a fiend in a cloud
With howling woe,
After night I do croud,
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increas’d;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.
William Blake
The other poems in Linda’s ongoing Blake-poem series:
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 María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín 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 Dayjamiededes.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. Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and The Suicides, c. 1824–27 by William Blake. Housed at the Tate. / Public Domain photograph.
“Colors are the wounds of light.” William Blake
I’m delighted to be able to present to you the fourth in Linda Chown’s Blake-poem Series. Another treasure … / J.D.
Blake’s art always needs at least one second
seeing. His are other than seeming seems.
Always a mysterious energy barely seen.
When at last I saw the color high up high there
in what seemed a stern monochromatic view,
a soundless forest, every thing forward:
harsh twisted trees under that bright ledge,
warped interrupted colors, grain-stains
of people stuck and fixed,
Then I found Blake’s magic: his veiled circus of color,
a cacophony of sights to touch with your eyes.
He knew so much William Blake did.
He knew that colors are not primarily pretty
but are “wounds of light,” the wounds
of life scratching and rubbing deep.
And up there in that pulsing arpeggio of light infusing color.
Those brazen colors, like in a local circus,
Virgil swept big in pale red, Dante gazing blue, puffed out harpies, all those smirking bloated shapes,
shaky suicides ambiguous in occupied trees.
Blake’s heroic grains of sand vertical, standing:
all his world a sweet melding
among the grain-texture of forest trees
A new life and death infinity in this touch of your hand,
And in this one Blake let life and death be together.
in this blue blur of shapes and sufferings, heads straight, stranded in this strange hypnotic delirium of a lost place and its puzzled peoples. Stuck in trees upside down transgendered. It was an image of how it was
not representational at all.
Blake was too far from particularity
to copy merely, tritely.
This odd aloneness of many gasping, shaken, all transmogrified. It’s a soundless forest, stunned where reality shifted like in an infinity-keen Redwood Forest,
the needles underfoot, crackling to stay. Here as always, Blake votes for all, gives the suicides and the harpies
their darting wound of color, to become more than the label living gave them and held them together with that teasing, penetrating all color.
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 María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín 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 Dayjamiededes.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. Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
Image courtesy of the Tate Museum; Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) license
“You never know What is enough Unless you know what Is more than enough …”
William Blake
(How can I see so much into
those burned and writhing faces?
Not together. They are so apart.)
In a siege, an overture of feeling,
Blake pulled emotions flat,
froze the tears, hung guilt in a running,
Eve rounded stiff, giving her birth away to a grave.
Adam knows the cows won’t come home
And his arms roam in anguish.
The whole painting a tomb
of what should not, could not, but was.
Arms stretching unique,
Wheels, a circular unrolling,
The sun a fiery inert shape
casting dubious anti-light.
Behind the straight lines,
ineffable tragedy burning.
Father I can’t say Son, please don’t go away Death dropped me dead, dad, in a coffin under I wonder who sees anything over anyway These colors exacerbate us all alone
Bread and stone locked in bone here
Blake pours out the beginning of the end
A deafening overtone driving us deep
A heartland of grief in ballistic color.
Looks without seeing. Nights without breathing.
Blake lets us look, stunned, alone, after, while grief is weeping.
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 María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín 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 Dayjamiededes.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. Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
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.
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