Reading from the eighth draft of my epic poem The Parliament of Poets at the Austin International Poetry Festival, September 28, 2012, in Austin, Texas, at BookWoman, a feminist bookstore.
From BOOK III,
“While I was trying to absorb it all,
a figure emerged from down the hill…”
Filed under Epic
Notes over my writing desk
Notes Over My Writing Desk, from top left down to right:
“The heart of so great a mystery cannot ever be reached by following one road only.” – Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (c. 345 – 402), a Roman statesman, orator, and man of letters, quoted by Augustine from exchange with St. Ambrose. Quoted by Arnold Toynbee in his Gifford Lecture.
“The passionate love of the artist for his subject is the soul of art. Without love no work of art is possible.” –Tolstoy, Letter, September 1889.
Virgil– write it out in prose. “No day without its line.” [Apocryphal? It shouldn’t be…]
“For the artist, however, a worldview is a tool and instrument, like a hammer in the hands of a stonemason.” –Mandelstam, from “The Morning of Acmeism,” quoted by Saul Bellow in Summations (The Bennington Chapbooks in Literature, 1987).
“Get the work out.” –Robert Hayden, to me once in conversation.
From top right, down:
“Long choosing, and beginning late.” — John Milton, Paradise Lost, BOOK IX
“Make the works.” — Walt Whitman, on a type of name plate reportedly on his desk
“I think we’re in danger of seeing a new dark age come over the mental life of the country. It is a very serious matter.” — Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December (1982).
“And the honour of virtue consists in contending, not in winning.” — Montaigne
“Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.” — Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 1850.
“The supreme test of a book is that we should find some unusual intelligence working behind the words.” — Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 1850.
Bottom, right, from a dream, August 30, 2008:
“This is the structure, this is the theme”: Sacrifice thyself for the good of others. Serve them. Lead them to the Light. Accept and bear thy load of suffering and pain for their sake, for the sake of God, the Absolute Reality. Oneness of God. Oneness of the Prophets. Oneness of humanity. “Radiant acquiescence.”
Filed under Epic
On Bay View Beach, Petoskey, Michigan
Bay View Beach, Little Traverse Bay, Petoskey, Michigan
August 30, 2012, shortly after finishing the entire 8th draft of The Parliament of Poets and the Summer Serialization, recovering and trying to clear out my head on the beach down in front of the historic Chautaugua Bay View Association and Terrace Inn, where I stayed.
Filed under Epic
Galaxy NGC 6822
August 17, 2012.
This morning I finished the entire eighth draft of The Parliament of Poets.
The eighth draft of the printed ARC or Advance Review Galley was only partly finished, up to the time whenever it was I sent it out and had it printed by Lightning Source, which version was about July 8th. That means up through BOOK IV, for the printed ARC. Most of the digital copies have been July 17th, to BOOK V, or earlier.
The Summer Serialization version, in ePub, has, however, been the eighth draft of each book. In fact I’ve finished each book usually three or four days ahead of publishing it on Sunday mornings throughout the summer. I’ve now finished BOOK XI and XII, so the entire epic is the eighth revision. I made some interesting changes and clarifications, much sharper here and there, with additional lines. Some nuances in BOOK XI, set in Africa.
This morning I found particularly exhilarating the Gates of Horn and Ivory in BOOK XII. I remembered and realized that I had written about both in my book The Bower of Nil and that there were fruitful connections to be made.
Filed under Epic
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