BRIDGET, PRONOUNCED BREED
from the look of her not too good but I expect shell recover
it was like walking with the sun
who are you
to tell me
what to do?
(night falling)
strange aims
strangeness
nothing
to speak of
hot
night
endless
it was
hard
it was
hard
for a very
long
time
feelings which are
settled
no longer
settled
why dont you just
take the car?
I wish I could
speak
I no longer feel
as though my feelings
Much past experience convinces me that my capacity for self-delusion in these matters
is strictly speaking: boundless
When I took her home she stayed very close to me as we walked as we walked.
Her sheer presence was dazzling, wonderful. It was like walking with the sun.
What do we read
as we read
books unreadbarely regarded
Thinking is still contained in perceiving. Perceiving is still a thinking of the senses.
Thinking isThinking
To overcome the world means to behold the world as it was before it became dead in us
During the months before the first menstruation, and for some time immediately afterwards,
girls are often passive, seem sleepy, and withdraw into themselves
I guess the aleatory look of the spattered paper is supposed to play off the rigid deliberation
of the ruled lines, but the results are consistently boring.
Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the age
of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance on human promises?
lotus-bearer
lord of the world
lord of what we
see
is also a timid man, this violence is never expressed physically but only verbally
in the manner of certain painters who paint the same painting over and over
again, writes the same poem over and over again. Form is not at /
issue
The beloved
speaks, softly, out of a
machine, her voice
broken with
sorrow
I can barely
listen to y-
ou I
fall in love
whenever
I hear
you
speak
She is: beautiful blue-eyed red-haired self-destructive
She is: dark, with gray in her hair
what does it mean to love
it is a kind of fiction
an agreement to be deceived
it is a
word, spoken, in haste,
powerful with
fiction
The link in my mind between self-consciousness and religion. Religion is a
mode of self-consciousness which doesnt admit to its own bases. A mode of
self-remembering which continually manifests itself in an effort to forget. But
imagination = self-consciousness
that guiding point to which we can
re-
turn (thoughts tower)
There are all these women. Which of them do you want?
You.
Thanks for the drink and the conversation. Id like more of both.
secret lookscharms
words meant only for
With his thing out.
With his thing out.
With cum on his thing.
With cum on his thing.
And the cum is soiled.
Well, said the little girl in the tree, some people call me Mother Elderberry;
others call me the dryad; but my real name is Memory. I sit in the tree that
grows and grows; I can remember everything and therefore
I tell
stories
Rs fear that if she analyzes it it will go away (the childs fear of thought; the
association of thought with death and growth); her Im a big girl now; her
fascination with/fear of deathall these suggest that she has reached a
transitional point in her life but that she lacks the resources to make the leap.
At her age (34) she is getting rather desperate. Prescription: NO love affairs,
womens groups for at least six months
Had you followed your impulses here you might have arrived at something approaching
understanding. But no, you chose to remain the critic, the judge, the expert.
What Is...remains elusive.
You cant name them because the power is too direct. But you can refer to them
indirectly.
They are called The Shining Onesones who inhabit any body.
At the
slipping (shopping)
center it is
warma warm breeze
(not
enough)
I
close
my
eyes
She looked at me the way any man wants a woman to look at him. She looked:
radiant, beautiful. She was all the women I had ever desired. She told me she
was about to throw up.
your bodyendlesstime
sweeps everything (wait and
and see) In the field the children dance. I wish.
My son
chases
the
ball.
Time fixes everythingin the sense of
affixes, immobilizes it
light
covers everything, touches it
deeply
as I
touch
you
or would
touch
you
(eyesIsis!) It was the good crossing guard, Mary Foley. She stood in the
path of a runaway car and pushed seven children to safety. My first thought
was that a child had been hit, said Sister Charlotte Ann, but no, it was Mary.
We heard brakes screech and children scream. The kindly granny had helped
youngsters survive the busy intersection near St. Marys Grammar School in
Melrose, Mass., for 10 years before her final act of love ended in tragedy. The
outstanding thing about Mary was her giving character, said the Rev. John Finn,
pastor of St. Marys. There was not one selfish thing about her. She gave her life
to the children.
How does love
linger in ushow does it
speakhow does it
rise
again
what is the source of this
connection?
A strong ascetic element was present in Irish monasticism from the beginning,
based on that of some of the early fathers who lived far from civilization in the
desert; so that in remote and practically inaccessible places we find not only
provisions for solitary hermits, but also small monasteries with two or three cells
that might better be called communal hermitages.
And so, just as from the Fancys image, taken from the body, there arises in the
appetite of sense a love inclined toward the senses, so from the intellects
universal species or Reason, which is entirely remote from the body, there arises
in the Will Another Sort of Love
Stunned
in this
wretchedness
of silence
im-pression ex-pression de-pression pressure
what is it, love? speech!
it is therefore supposed
the lion continues
destruction of structures
means eye and foundation
jeered at as men
superficial appearances
are transmutations
on this account
to the path of Gimel
subconscious level
was patroness,
a curve, which could,
the history of Poetry
is a History
of Loss
It is necessary
to put fresh flowers
on her grave Thin, beautiful body. Her
father photographs, loving, but there is an edge to his voice, a sharpness. Rita,
listen. Not for long now.
The abstracting by which she is able to make her points is also true of the
magazine as a whole. What McLuhan calls a galaxy or constellation of events is
absent from her work. Despite the attempt at variety among the articles. Love =
power = imagination
The gods of the North have suffered two eclipsesfirst by the advent of
Christianity, which destroyed their shrines and condemned their stories, and
then by the Classical Renaissance, which as early as the 12th century gave
Europe a repertoire of Greek and Roman myths which almost completely
annihilated the Germanic
seeing at once too many people and too fewhaving the wrong
relationship
to people
What I call the auditory imagination is the feeling for syllable and rhythm,
penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating
every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin
and bringing something back,
seeking
the beginning
and
the end
eyes
elusive
distanced polytropon voyager
(that man
that came out
of the sea)
I dont know what to do. My editor hated the book. She cut out all of the
history, all of the anthropology, and left me with just a few insights and a bunch
of sex stories.
I know what to do! Cut the insights.
Sam Spade looked up as Brigid OShaughnessy popped another pill. You dont know
what the fuck youre talking about.
I am the wind on the sea
I am a wave of the ocean
I am the roar of the sea
FIERY
BURNING
RED-HEADED
WOMAN
Bridget is the ancient Irish goddess of fire, poetry, fertility, household arts, smithcraft, etc. Christianized, she became one of the patron (in this case, matron) saints of Ireland; my poem is an invocation, an attempt to make her happen.
NOTES TO BRIDGET, PRONOUNCED BREED
In its themes and techniques my poem Bridget, Pronounced Breed raises a number of questions. The poem continually shifts not only from one speaker but, in the manner of open form, from one context to anotherthough it always maintains some sort of connection to its title figure, Bridget, the ancient Irish goddess of fire, poetry, fertility, household arts, smithcraft, etc. Christianized, Bridget became one of the patron (in this case, matron) saints of Ireland, and my poem is an invocation, an attempt to make her happen. The poem's sexual themes are in keeping not only with Bridgets status as fire goddess but with my belief that such huge mythic figures are created out of desiredesire which ultimately removes itself from the realm of any particular man or woman and deliberately enters into the realm of mythology (It was like walking with the sun). There is much involved in such a subjectimagination, modes of love, etc.and the figure of Bridget herself thrusts us back into the rich oral past of Irish folklore. To mythologize, as I do in this poem, is also to take some sort of public stance rather than merely asserting ones own subjectivity, and that too is an issue of Bridget. There is, it seems to me, a persistently public aspect to human consciousness which does not disappear even in the most inward of states: one is always in the world. This is reflected in my poem in the many quotations it containsquotations which come to me from more or less public sources and which, in the manner of T.S. Eliots The Waste Land, are collaged into the poem's fabric. Finally, the poem is meant to be spoken. As the great English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing of his poem, Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves, put it,
Of this long sonnet above all remember what applies to all my verse, that it is, as living art should be, made for performance and that its performance is not reading with the eye but loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables, and so on.This sonnet shd. be almost sung: it is most carefully timed in tempo rubato.
SOURCES OF QUOTATIONS: George Khlewind, Stages of Consciousness; Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment; Kenneth Bakers review of Richard Chase's work in The San Francisco Chronicle, 9/6/85. Mark Twain on credit was quoted in The Chronicle 9/13/85; the lotus bearer is Avalokitesvarasee the Britannica; H.C. Andersen, Mother Elderberry in Complete Fairy Tales, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard. The story about Mary Foley (as far as I know, no relation to me) is from Weekly World News 10/8/85; The Northern World, ed. David M. Wilson; Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Platos Symposium On Love, trans. Sears Jayne; Paul Foster Case, The Tarot; Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy; T.S. Eliot, "The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism" as quoted in McLuhan: Hot & Cool, ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn; Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, Gods and Heroes of the Celts. Polytropon is the word Homer uses to refer to Odysseus at the beginning of The Odyssey. Odysseus has a mind of many turns. I was thinking specifically of the Nausicaa episode and of the many invaders of Ireland. I discovered recently that I had unwittingly stolen the title of my poem from Robert Kellys Shillelagh Law, which I had read as part of a course given by the Before Columbus Foundation:
to speak or to receive,
to drink
Never trust an irishman who doesn't
I used to say
but trust her
that Brigid (pron. breed)
winter flower of western woman