Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Medusa and Aphrodite appear in this book. When you write about such
familiar figures, how do you get past the stories readers already
think they know?
  

    
Following up on Jon, as someone who loves Classical mythology, could
you also elaborate on the importance of rediscovering or reclaiming
the powerful female figures of ancient Greco-Roman myth? 
  

    
And just to make the question larger--how do you experience the
differences between the Western Greco-Roman goddesses, the ones that
come from Gimbutas's work, and the ones from, say, Candomble? When
you begin to write, which comes first, the gestalt of the goddess
who speaks, or a subject/theme that then conjures its particular
form and shape of spiritual voice? 

(I realize there may or might not be a distinctive "first" in the
process as it happens...)
  

    

Stan <plantone> asked me to post these two poems:

IN THE FACE OF FEAR WE DANCE

In the face of fear,
we dance.
In the face of death,
we make love.
We send our children
into the future
like doves
to sing Her holy names.
Here
there
everywhere
Aba, Shallah Nashah


THE DARK MOTHER GIVES THREE GIFTS

The Dark Mother gives three gifts
Aba, Shallah, Nashah
One comes from the river
One comes from the earth
One comes from the land of dreams
  

    


Since no writing or written texts from this period have been
discovered, when I wrote the four novels of the Earthsong Series, I
had to invent the rituals, prayers, and mystical knowledge of the
Mother People (i.e. the small, diverse groups of Earth-centered,
Goddess-worshiping people who populated Europe 6000 years ago.)

The two poems in post #29 are from Earthsong Novel #2 "The Horses at
the Gate." The main character, Marrah, has gone to the sacred city
of Kataka to be initiated into the secrets of the Dark Mother,
another name for the Earth itself. "In the Face of Fear We Dance" is
a prayer to the Great Mother/Dark Mother. It shows faith in Her love
and compassion combined with the feeling of being protected by the
infinite love and forgiveness of a living, sacred Earth.

The second poem "THE DARK MOTHER GIVES THREE GIFTS" is a riddle
that Marrah encounters as she is initiated into the secrets of the
Dark Mother (By the way, the gift she gets from the "land of dreams"
is spectacular.)

The words Aba, Shallah, Nashah", which are present in both poems,
are chants in a sacred language (which I also made up), based on
models of Hindu and Buddhist mantras. They, at the same time, praise
and summon the spirit of the Dark Mother.

I take historical research very seriously. Although I have written
these poems and chants, all of the chants, rituals, symbolism, etc.
that I have imagined are consistent with the archaeological and
paleontological data about the religious beliefs and world views of
the Earth-centered, goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe.

That data was the foundation for and inspiration for these two poems
and several other poems taken from the Earthsong series novels that
appear in "The Goddess of Burning Hair."
  

    

Before I talk about how I wrote poems "reclaiming of the
powerful,female figures of Ancient Greece," and how I "experience
the difference between the "Western Greco-Roman goddesses, the ones
that come from Gimbutas's work, and the ones from, Candomble," I'm
going to 
share a few poems with you from "The Goddess of Burning Hair" The
first two are about Cassandra and Leda (one is prophetic and one is
funny), and one poem about the Yoruba Afro-Brazilian,  Candomble
goddess Iemanja (goddess of the sea, protector of women and children
and creator of all living things).

MOCKING CASSANDRA

they mocked her when she said
cities would go under
rocks melt   ocean boil
birds fall from the sky
beaches be ankle-deep in green foam

they laughed at her for laying in stores
filling cans with water
called her crazy   cracked
drover her frown town to town like Mirabi
in rags with a begging bowl

when she kept crying   look! it's getting closer!
wet bulb 35C!  brownouts! blackouts!
famine!   war!   pestilence!
people cooked in their beds!
they shook their heads   rolled their eyes
put AirPods in their ears and watched the playoffs
bought virtual genitals and hooked up in the Metaverse
ate potato chips and smoked weed
shot up high schools
and made videos of their cats playing the piano

poor, crazy Cassandra, they said
hypervigilant, hysterical, neurotic
just shut her up   she's spoiling the party

but she could see darkness
running around the rim of the horizon
see the light blurring
see the end of dishes washed by machines
air conditioning   ice cubes
the easy way you could call people
on the other side of the planet
hear their voices   see their faces
tell them you loved them
  

    
Cassandra--rather a perfect figure for our current moment.

(I put her into a line in a recent poem, read it to a mixed group,
and was stunned that many -- all were highly educated but not
literary -- had to ask who she was. Sigh.)

Thanks for posting some poems for people to read, Mary.
  

    
So how do I perceive the difference Greco -- Roman goddesses and
the Afro Brazilian Condomble goddesses?  The major difference is
that the classical European goddesses are things we can read about,
but there are few of any people worshiping them today. Athena had
her time in the sun so to speak as did Aphrodite. In order to even
know about these Goddess, you probably have had to learn about them
in high school or sought them out or be particularly interested in
classical culture and myth.
  

    <scribbled by mm Sat 26 Sep 26 13:46>
  

    
Condomble is a religion that has endured since the 1500s and the
first slaves were brought to Brazil and it is still a living
religion with approximately 2.5 million followers, not all of them
Afro-Brazilian by any means. 

I have witnessed the drumming, rituals, and ceremonies associated
with the Condomble goddesses-- the trance dancing, the words of the
goddesses coming out of the the mouths of the worshipers. I have
seen offerings givento the Goddess of the Sea  Iemanja-- people
carrying a small boat, painted blue and white, which are Her colors,
a boat filled with flowers and food-- taking into the water by
dancing people wearing her colors, and set a float as an offering to

Her-- and all this on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro while the
tourist set around getting suntans. 

So the Condomble goddesses seem alive to me. I didn't have to
invent the rituals and symbolism that surrounds them as I sometimes
had to do with the classical goddesses. I could use the real
symbols, some parts of the real rituals in my poems.
  

    
How do rhythm, repetition, and silence help a poem become an
experience for the listener? Could you demonstrate with a few lines?
  

    
I think that depends on what kind of poetry you write and what kind
of poetry you read

Language Poetry, for example, is very different from lyrical Poetry.
Same for ethic Poetry and what I generally call academic Poetry.

I write lyric poetry. It's a long tradition. One of my favorite
lyric poets in English is William Blake.


I intend for my poetry to be read out loud as well as read on the
page and I want both experiences to be as complete and interesting
and beautiful as possible. 

On the page, I indicate silence by using blank spaces instead of
commas, and I don't use punctuation like periods at the end of
lines because I like the lines to be read and ways that make it
possible to join them with the line before or the line after. 

Repetition produces a chant like Quality. If you think about it,
most chance are built on repetition. Here is an example from TIGER
OF FIRE/TIGER OF FLAME, the sink to last poem in "the goddess of
burning hair." I wrote this poem to be a chant.
  

    
Here are a few lines taken from the last stanza of the poem:

tiger of fire  tiger of flame
you who blind us with longing
you who blind us with love
you who burn in us forever
with the light of creation
  

    
"Ethic Poetry" above should've been "epic Poetry" And
"sink to the last poem" should have been "second to the last
poem" (I don't think my version of AutoCorrect is a native
speaker of English)
  

    
As for silence, you can't see that on the page, but you can hear
it when I am reading the poems. Silence is a counterpoint to rhythm.
You might think of it as the silence between the beats of a
drumstick.
  

    
That gets me thinking about ways of representing silence visually on
a page. Pondering whether blank space visually translates as
silence.

But silence is always relative, as John Cage pointed out. We're
never completely without sound.

Your spirituality is an important aspect of your poetry, which
brings up the association of words and spiritual or mystical
understanding... there are some things in our experience that it's
hard to communicate with words. Do you think poetry is a way to talk
about transcendant experience?
  

    
The convention in reading poems on the page is that blank space is
silence and pause. Some of the more experimentally inclined poets
might use   [                 ] but in the usual understanding,
blank space is what you do, and the bracket thing is a signal of
being in a certain school of aesthetics. "Regular" readers would
find them something added, and a bit tricksy. 

Mary, I'd equally call both Blake and you "visionary" poets, a
subset of "lyric" but more dialled in to what I feel in you both. 

Not that it's my place to second-guess a poet's own
description-label of her own work, and I get that you were inside a
particular context in your answer.... so let me turn this into a
question: Do you think of yourself as a visionary poet?
  

    
Also, following up on those poems about women on the American
frontier, could you please talk about when those poems were written
and what your literary goals or interests were at that time in your
life?
  

    
I think my earlier question may not have posted, so I will post
again: Could you please talk about your poems about "pioneer
women"-- women on the American frontier. They appear to have a
different rhythm and feel than your poems with Brazilian themes. 
  

    
Hi Mary! Coming in late, and letting you know I haven't read the
whole interview - just dipped in from where you were discussing the
difference between Greek and Comdombe (sp?) gods in terms of who now
has actual worshipers.

It reminded me of a story my pagan friend Francesca De Grandis told
me about attending a pagan event years ago where all the presenters
and leaders were men, except for one woman who was a devotee of
Isis.  It was an event that everyone participating believed was
Important, but it was not moving anyone until the woman got up to
speak.  Instead of leading a ritual or speaking wise pagan words as
all the men had, she got up and (compellingly) *prayed to Isis*. 
Francesca described it as transforming the whole event.  One person
acting on the belief that they were in true conversation with spirit
instantly revealed that everyone else had been simply in
conversation with themselves (or their social politics or history). 
It didn't prove that Isis was "real" and that, say, Athena was not. 
It simply showed the difference between genuinely connecting with
the world and the other less connected thing we usually are about
doing.

Which is, in my opinion at least, a lot of what your work is about. 
Not having seen them yet, my guess is there is a lot of spirit of
direct communication with a frontier "reality" that is deeper and
wider and feels more meaningfully accessible than we usually allow
in your "pioneer women" poems.  Anyway, be that as it may, it seems
something worth bringing into the conversation for consideration.

Very much looking forward to getting the book!
  

    
Do I think poetry is a way to talk about transcendent experience?
The short answer is "yes." Here's why:

I don't think of myself as a "visionary poet" in the sense that I
have some special power no one else has. I think all of us--you, me,
every human being--has the ability to a connection with the divine:
that creative, transcendent, and--in my mind--sacred force that is
beyond our human concepts of gender, reason, and what we perceive of
as reality. 

The very high fevers I have some six or eight times during my
life--fevers that were as high as 107 degrees and sometimes even as
high as 7.1 degrees--let me see the world around me in a different
way. They are a disability that has proved to be a gift, because I
saw and became part of a different reality that can't be described
in words, because it comes before words. It was benevolent, filled
with the kind of soft, warm light you sometimes see on summer days
just before sunset. Everything was one unified thing and at the same
time everything was distinct and separate down to the finest
details. (As I said: there are no real ways to describe this in
words). 

When this happens, everyone around me is always frantic because they
think I'm dying, but I'm always happy, cheerful, even silly. I try
to reassure them, crack corny jokes; once I even spoke in rhymed
couplets for 4 hours straight, and no one could get me to shut up
(except by throwing me into a tub of ice water to bring down the
fever). 

I never found an account of someone who had had the same experience
until I began to read the mystical poets. The difference is that
most mystical poets describe this experience in religious terms,
whereas I simply try to report what I've seen and experienced. 
  

    
So, again, do I think poetry is a way to talk about transcendent
experience? 

I think it might be the only way because poetry can go to places
beyond logic, use metaphor and simile to connect things that are not
usually connected, use repetition and chant-like structures; and
when poetry is read, it can use the silence between words as well as
the words themselves. (In fact, on second thought, you can actually
see the silence in my written poems   because I use three spaces to
indicate commas or pauses, just like I did in the sentence above
between the words "poems" and "because.")

I think many of the ideas for my novels and poems, many of the
images, many of the rhythms and sounds come from this place where
words don't exist, bubbling up until they reach my conscious mind.
They don't come to me as complete poems whispered in my ear by
some muse with a strange sense of humor.  I revise my poems and my
novels meticulously, multiple times, using all the craft I've
learned, all the education I've had, all the things I've learned
about people, life, nature, and compassion.

I've described my creative process more completely in a small book
I wrote in 2022 called "Creativity: Where Poems Begin" if
you're interested in knowing how I've trained myself to re-enter
that space where words don't exist to get ideas and solve
problems--something I did when I was writing many of the poems in
"The Goddess of Burning Hair."

Let me leave you with two thoughts about all the above:
1. This experience is not the same a taking drugs to alter your
consciousness. This is more like flying. Taking mind-altering drugs
is more like being run over by a dump truck filled with drunken
chickens.
2. Please don't go out and get malaria to find this place before
words. In the first place, the path to 107 degrees is horrible. Your
teeth chatter, you shake, you feel horrible, and you might die.
Second, the wordless place before words is always there: inside you,
outside you, all around you.
  

    
Which brings me to Sean's question about the difference between my
poems about Brazil and my poems about frontier women. Actually, the
differences aren't as great as they might seem. I have been writing
what is now called "ecopoetry" for over sixty years.

For many decades, I have believed that the Earth is a sacred trust
that we need to care for, not exploit and destroy. This doesn't mean
people can't own property; it means for the good of other people and
for the planet, we should not destroy and exploit it, cause other
living things to go extinct, destroy ourselves, and leave a
wasteland where there was once life and beauty.

 The Afro-Brazilian goddess, Iemanja and Yansan; and The Goddess of
Burning Hair and Solange (both of whom I imagined), are all spirits
of nature (of the ocean, of the rivers, of the jungles and the
forests of the Amazon). They are--in one way or another--one with
nature.. In my poems about frontier women--"Wild Woman,"
"Betony," "On the Dark Side of the Moon," and particularly
in "Walking the Sea to China," the women are transformed (as all
of us can be). They too are one with nature: walking on water as if
it were solid earth; "part now of all things;" fingers, twigs;
feet, roots; arms trees;  giving birth to a daughter who is both
human and a wood mint--a daughter named Betony who "cures all
wounds."
  

    
> poetry can go to places beyond logic

I'm reminded of the quotation from Aristotle that

"Poetry is superior to history; because history tells us what has
happened, but poetry tells us what might happen."
  

    
Great quote! Thanks, Ron