Monday September 6, 2010 Labor Day

I have been reading This Dancing Ground of Sky, The Selected Poetry of Peggy Pond Church. With an introduction by Shelley Armitage, Ph.D. " Peggy Pond Church was a New Mexican poet whose poetry has the primal quality of the dominant image, event, or experience. Her poems often begin with the values of rhythm and tone as connected to the image. Form then comes from the poet's meditative awareness of values in the world and within. Rather than a documentary realism, she, accomplishes through the image a translation of experience--indeed the value of that experience that imparts a keener sense of being alive. In the Past Recaptured, Proust, advocated that it is underneath these little recorded details--images, say, of nature, domestic life, a marriage--that reality is hidden."

When she writes about the assessment of the wells of creativity, she quotes Rilke, "I await the birth hour of a new clarity," which is Rilke's line about the coming of the muse. " Whether geological or psychological, Church's poems most often unite the inner and outer worlds as well as the parts of the self: "I realize the important things to me have been the epiphanies...Usually, for me, things seen, rather than things done."

"For Church, this translation from the simple image, keenly observed, to the essence or value of that image echoes one of Webster's definitions of translation: "being conveyed from one place to another; removed to heaven without dying." In her work, self expression and revelation of the world are one and the same. Her work has a cumulative effect on the reader as Thoreau, whose works she studied."

Her poetry translates and relates, she attempts to connect her writing between inner and outer worlds. "As she commented to Sarton in regard to her life, "solitude is a way of waiting for the inaudible and the invisible to make itself felt."(Most of this is from the introduction of the book, This Dancing Ground of Sky. I have made small changes and am not sure I put the quotation marks in exactly the right place?)

I am taken by how similar the process is between the author, and the visual artist.

This is a piece I wrote about seeking the "muse." However we imagine the "muse" she is necessary to those of us who create.

Seeking the Muse

Today, my eyes are cast down,
I'm looking for what is left for me.
Bits of enthusiasm,
shredded in daily use,

I click listen live,
And hope to hear
Your rejoicing.

Inspiration exhausted,
Worn and used carelessly,
Abandoned without thought.

What I need is,
The ability to see colors,
new and unused.

Perhaps, I will follow my heart
Lift my eyes from this lowly plane.
And look up to see,

The clear blue of the sky.
I'll feel the wind blow through my hair.
And I will remember,
All of the gifts you have given me.

Time is this moment,
No other,
No beginning
No end
Settle in....

Count all of
The stars above
You are "home,"
You have what is needed
You are ready
When she comes.