Orchids & Neurons - Molecular Poetry

Apr 3

Apr 3 Orchids & Neurons - Molecular Poetry

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Nonfiction

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Book excerpt

Poet’s Statement

I am a lover of oils and potions,

physics and metaphysics.

I seek patterns and meaning.

I create my own music and magic

from words and sounds and silence and shapes

and look for kindred souls

in the ruins of Pompeii.

We live on a planet that is a thin place - a place where time and infinity/light continually intersect. And yet we are taught to experience life as thick. When we move intentionally through the thickness that surrounds us and perceive Light, we can begin to punch peep-holes into and through Time.

This is my solitary 4-P journey… my journey with the partners of Prose, Poetry, Photography and Prayer. In my journey of Time and Light, I’ve learned that I can free myself from the ballast of ordinary Time and soar in the Light. This is Time Travel for me.

The most redemptive partner of my four is poetry. The process seizes me, and I become consumed by the emerging poem until it is complete. Poetry and prayer are closely related, at times with a loss of boundaries. That is why, I suppose, the sharing of poetry is an intimidating process.

For me, poetry is molecular and metaphysical. If it is not experienced in those two right hemisphere spaces, let it go. As T.S. Eliot said in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919,

The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

It is my wish for you, my reader, that my Orchids and Neurons poetry touch you on a time-released level.

For the record, there are five poets who have deeply affected my feeling, thinking and writing – indeed, who I am – over many years of immersing myself in their work: William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot and Mary Oliver. Here is a stanza from the most brilliant wordsmith of all, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in “God’s Grandeur.” Let it play in the background of your right hemisphere as you read any poetry:

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.