the poetry of vision

i would like to share some of my poetic loves & influences with you all. i am definitely interested in hearing about the same from others. the pic shows a shelf some of my favorite poetry collections--anthologies & larger volumes are elsewhere.

i love the american conversational surrealist school of poets, especially james tate, who writes mostly whimsically funny prose poems where anything can happen. he has an academic chair & has won the pullitzer but is quite weird. this school also includes charles simic, who was poet laureate of the US several years ago, bill knott, & russell edson, who is quite weird as well, although seemingly not as naturally as james tate. this is pretty academic stuff, you will never see guys like this doing a poetry slam, ha ha, it is more about literature than performance.

another school of poets who blow me away are the french symbolists. it makes me want to learn french just to read them as they were written, because i have seen many translations of stuff by beaudelaire, for example, that are all very different. i love apollinaire above all poets, his writing is luminous. he exudes love & vision, he totally embraces the strangeness he sees. he was in with the cubists & the surrealists as well & did graphic poems. his long poems like "zone" & others are up there with ginsburg's "howl" for me, as far as being monumental works that stand up to countless readings. apollinaire is the yang to baudelaire's yin, but i still love the "flowers of evil" for it's vision & beauty. two of my treasures are the cubist poets anthology & the book devoted entirely to baudelaire's poem "invitation to the journey", a poem that just kills me to tears often. mallarme, valery & rimbaud are others of this school that can knock me out.

a book i want to especially recommend (if you like surrealism) is "night journey" by maria negroni. the poetic material was born out of a series of fairly lucid dreams which her jungian therapist, anne twitty, helped her to form into poems & then did the english translation. negroni is argentinian so you get the spanish originals on the left & the english translations on the right. vivid stuff, a unique kind of collaboration.

i have an expanded definition of "surrealism" beyond the narrow one dealing with automatic writing experiments of the pioneers. my definition includes what we call #psychedelia & what we call #cyberpunk virtual reality, as well as the lucid dreaming & visionary dream states. a lot of poets are trying to describe the light of other worlds shining thru the cracks of this dimension & that's what i love in poetry, so i can't talk about luminous poetry without mentioning the psalms & parts of the book of isaiah. as leonard cohen said in "hallelujah":, "there's a blaze of light in every word", writing about the psalms of david. i would put a lot of biblical poetry, including some of the book of revelation, in the general rubric of surrealism & symbolism. i would also have to mention swedenborg, who influenced the symbolists with his interpretations of the more imaginative books of the bible & with his dream interpretations. "swedenborg's dream diary" by lars bergquist is highly recommended & shows that swedenborg was way ahead of jung. "gallery of mirrors by anders hallengren is also recommended for tracing the influence of swedenborg on many writers, of which william blake & borges are the best known. of course jesus was also a symbolist poet, the gospels say that he never taught the multitudes in plain language but rather couched everything in parabolic prose poems simply to mystify them. the concrete-minded fundamentalists just don't get it & never have.

i love rilke's work & the "letters". i read american poets mary karr, robert bly & billy collins. my earliest influences go back to walt whitman, i have read the "leaves of grass" many times & can see that alan ginsburg did as well. i am not really into the beats as much as most people i know, though i do have kerouac reading "on the road" on CD & enjoy that a lot, but at one time i was reading everything ginsburg wrote & also love his music CDs. i also like ferlinghetti's "coney island of the mind", which was a very early influence.

another early influence, though i have never really got thru the whole thing, is dante's divine comedy. i realized when i got into it that it is totally visionary, but hard to see it at that level because of the extremely flowery language & tight verse format that is a long ways away from the conversational forms we use today. there was a biography of dante written not long ago by reynolds that suggested dante smoked dope & i wouldn't be surprised. but, the earliest influences were the rock poets (who definitely smoked dope, like ginsburg): morrison, keith reid of procul harum, pete sinfield of king crimson & a bit of cohen & lennon & dylan (did you know "all along the watchtower" is based on the book of isaiah?). these guys raised the cultural level of pop music.

if you do't know the griffin & sabine books by nick bantock, that is the subject of a post of its own. these are exquisitely poetic art books that include actual beautifully crafted letters.

i think apollinaire speaks for all visionary poets with these wonderful lines from "the pretty redhead":

We are not your enemies


We want to give you vast and strange territories


Where flowering mystery offers itself to anyone who wishes to gather it


There are new fires there colors never seen before


A thousand unfathomable phantoms

To which reality must be given


We want to explore goodness that big country where everything is silent


There is also time which one can drive away or make come back


Have pity on us who are always fighting at the frontiers


Of the limitless and the future