Lunar Soil

I finished the entire fifth draft of my epic poem The Parliament of Poets, after four years of writing, on March 30, 2012. I’d welcome invitations to read from it.

See my reading at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, March 24, 2012, from Book III, in medias res, on the moon. Copyright (c) 2012 Frederick Glaysher.

“Who needs warp drive when I’ve got Queen Mab,
My escort and midwife of my dreams.”

YouTube:  http://youtu.be/XlWTzhNjIb4

Earthrise, Apollo 11

The Parliament of Poets

February 4, 2011

Book XII

Mbeku, the flying African tortoise, like the last stage of a Saturn V rocket, propels us out of earth orbit into a quarter of a million miles to the moon, 25,000 miles per hour, clutching me in his feathered arms, his cracked shell pointing backwards at the moon, hurtling, pirouetting, twirling, in the weightlessness of space, in brilliant white sunlight, in the blackest black of eternity, through timelessness, into the future.

Back to the Sea of Tranquility, back to the descent stage of the Lunar Module, of Apollo 11.  Third time on the moon, the Poet of the Moon, more times than any astronaut. After a long journey, arduous, an ordeal.

The far side of the moon, as dark as the dark night of the soul. The starry cosmos, a universe of galaxies, sextillions of stars. Lunar sunrise. Earthrise…

The end of Nihilism and Scientism, the unity of science and religion, reason and intuition, the Imagination, the two cultures reconciled. The unity of Unity, oneness, our fragile, delicate Earth, three dimensional in its fullness, floating through eternal timelesssness. A new panorama rises before humanity.

The Parliament of Poets, nearly three years of writing, after decades, a full rough draft.

Frederick Glaysher

Worldview, Apollo 11

Saul Bellow in his 1987 Bennington College address Summations refers to Osip Mandelstam’s comment that “a worldview is a tool and instrument, like a hammer in the hands of a stonemason.” The average reader, Bellow goes on to say, looks always for the worldview, thinking it is everything, filing away the summation, its neat, little abstractions. I would say, many writers, too, make the mistake of fixating upon the worldview, the struggle to achieve an understanding of one’s experience that is not derivative from the prevailing one, a mere reflection of the already thought and written, though so much writing merely reflects the fads of the academy and literati.

Osip Mandelstam and Bellow are right. It is the hammer in the hand of the genuine artist or poet. Painfully, laboriously forged, the tool, once achieved, is no longer to the poet what is of first importance. The work of art, beyond the abstractions and the banalities of “a worldview,” reigns supreme, leads to new states of consciousness that cannot be summed up. They are what art is about.

Art transcends worldview.

Frederick Glaysher