I am dubbing this once in a blue moon full moon New Year--which begins with ten-foot tall blue people with tails (as Mihku calls them!) saving their planet from techno-military-industrialization with arrows--the New Year of the Arrow.
Inside me and in those around me, I am finding strengthened clarity of purpose and claiming of agency as 2010 begins to begin. May your arrows this year fly with a minimum of confusion, straight from the center to their intended homes.
It is still early in this world, do you hear me
The beasts have not been tamed, do you hear me
My spilled blood and the pointed, do you hear me
Knife
Like a ram running the skies
Snapping the stars' branches, do you hear me
It's me, do you hear me
I love you, do you hear me
--Odysseus Elytis, from The Monogram, trans. Olga Broumas
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4 comments:
Greetings and happy new year! (On some calendars anyway.)
Found your newly arrived blog through a link in Jilly Dybka's Poetry Hut Blog.
I love Olga Broumas's Elytis translations. Elytis's poems hadn't grabbed me much, prior to reading Broumas's translations. In July 1990 for ten days I was in a poetry writing class Olga Broumas taught at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference -- that was around the time (or maybe just after) that she was working on the Elytis poems. I loved the class.
A few months later in St. Paul I heard her read some Elytis, and in one instance she alternated line by line reading each line first in translation and then in the original Greek, to give a sense of how the sound and movement of the poems compared in the two languages.
Thinking about Goddess art (your previous blogposts), what I thought of immediately -- I don't know if you've familiar with the book The Moon and the Virgin by Nor Hall, originally published sometime in the 1970's, and reprinted once in the early 1990's, one of the large New York publishers, not sure if it's in print now.
Hall is a Jungian (more or less) analyst, lives somewhere near St. Paul, the book is an exploration of female/feminine archetypes, drawing much on examples from ancient art and contemporary (mostly) poetry. I'd know of the book since it first came out, though didn't get around to reading it till it was reprinted. It profoundly affected me, I guess I would say affirmed or confirmed or agreed with many things I'd long perceived and suspected about the inner and outer worlds I've found myself in.
The book includes a number of illustrations, drawings that reproduce ancient sculptures and carved images. The artist who did the drawings, Ellen Kennedy (now Ellen Kennedy Michel), is the daughter of one of my early poetry teachers. In that respect (and in other more obscure ways) I feel a personal poetic lineage with the book.
There are, certainly, poets I've read whose work explores Goddess territory in various ways. A few who come to mind offhand are Sharon Doubiago, Judy Grahn, Sheryl Noethe, Audre Lorde, Olga Broumas, Siv Cedering, Joy Harjo, Hilda Doolittle/H.D., ...just naming a few modern poets writing in English. The more ancient world obviously is abundant with the stuff.
Enjoyed reading here -- I'll come back and read more.
Thanks for your comment Lyle--and for the great list of Goddess poets! Yes there are quite a few, aren't there--also I can think of poems by Diane DiPrima, Judy Johnson, Sonia Sanchez, and Janine Canan, who edited an anthology of goddess poem called She Rises LIke the Sun.
I read Nor Hall's book a long time ago--it is wonderful. Glad to think of it again.
Happy new year,
Annie
Namaste,
Thanks for remembering She Rises like the Sun, now out of print.
Happy New Year, Annie,
Janine Canan
Hi Janine!! Good to see you here. And I hope someone will reprint She Rises Like the Sun soon--it's a very fine collection.
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