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With some grapes, carrots, peanuts and
cashews, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and some water, my sister Jess and I were off to the Once-every-Two-Year Poetry Festival. We were taken to a place outside of the City, outside and far away from the Noise and Polluted Skies.
We were taken to a Land surrounded by Trees, and the trees spoke to us, the aroma of autumn filled our nostrils, burning ash trees, burning wood, burning bark. Ah, the drug in the forest that lifts our bodies from the ground, floating, our shoelaces grazing the hay, giving unto us a form of Grace, something Beautiful, yes, truly Beautiful, for Beauty is given and Beauty knows how to Give.
We chose to listen in on the discussion: Poetry as Truth and Beauty. Truth was suggested to mean at times an "Ugly Truth" that we find as unattractive and disturbing and jagged like the side of a mountain. The truth isn't always easy to accept, or to look at, or to Paint as Art, or Sing about in a song, or Act out on some Stage with Florescent Lights. I don't think it is easy, but I think we do it because we know that if we don't then the truth isn't being exposed, and of course this is the purpose of all artists, I believe.
Without Truth, can there be Beauty? Does Beauty spring out of Truth? Can the one exist without the other? Is this an Absolute, Objective, Word? We read things or hear things like "The truth shall set you free" and sometimes we wonder what that means in our lives, and maybe ask ourselves from what are we being set free, our bondage? Our slavery to inherent imperfection?
Writers, Artists, want to tell the truth, want to make aware injustice: Poverty, Sex Slavery, Street Wars, Drug Lords, White Collar Liars, Corruption of political Agendas, Homelessness, Racism, Sexism, Harassment, etc. Does the world really want to know this? Do they really want to be reminded? Do they dare look?
And then we came to Beauty. What is one's view of the Word, what is one's experience of the word? Oh, we say, Look at this or look at that, how beautiful! Or we say to another “You’re beautiful, beautiful like the Rising Mist of the Water Falls, your skin like the slippery rocks behind it, smooth like a skipping stone that bounces over the surface of the lake.“ We say these things. We point, become subjective, and does it hurt to question why we say these things? Is the word overstated? Overused?
Can there be an Ugly Beauty? The subject may reveal a boy in a gutter bleeding to death, and we think, this cannot be beautiful, but the communication of truth and street struggle and making this aware for the world, is the beautiful element because one is attempting to stir and change attitudes and draw out violence in the community, and maybe with just enough Crimson drops on the canvas will capture the eyes of some gang member and convict him or her to throw in the guns and box cutters or give up their right, to surrender to the higher calling within them that echos in their wounded soul. O wounded soul there is Hope for you.
Is there an Invisible Beauty, an Objective Beauty, that is there mysteriously by grace? There is a Magical, Graceful, Intimate, Space between the Reader and the Source, where a beauty I believe is born, or was always there, in the dust of the pages. Maybe distinguishing these words in our life will take a lifetime of observing and listening and serving, can we fully comprehend beauty or truth? Can we in our vase-like or dumpster-like minds which contain for us the forms and Lines and Compositions of Objects or Feelings or Ideas or Values or Beliefs?
Is Poetry really meant to console the reader? Or is it meant to disturb the reader? It is unquestionable that Poetry is crucially necessary in our times. And maybe poetry moves us the most when we do not think about it or analyze it, just listen to the sound of it, like listening to the sound of trout splashing in the lily pad pond.
Listen. Listen. Listen to the sounds of the Earth, the suffering, subjugated, earth, crying out for Liberation due to it's frustration of Incompleteness, wanting to be whole again. Like us, wanting to be whole again, and somehow looking for this salvation of the soul and body, for this deliverance we Look for, and maybe think we have found, maybe not.
There were some great poets there. To name a few, Philip Levine, Paul Muldoon, Joyce Carol Oates, Venus Khouryghata, and Cecilia Vicuna. It was an Inspirational Day. A day of grace and peace and love. A Sacred and Holy Day. To sit and eat lunch on Stone Steps with Thick Marble Banisters, the Old Stone Ruins, the gentle Streams running through...
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Writer Profile
Daniel Brophy
Homelessness. Poverty. Hunger. Men under bridges with rain dripping on their scruffy faces.
Every day I am exposed to these tragedies. I can't help but to address them, somehow. But in them, in the corners, in the cracks of the paint, or on the walls in graffiti, their is some message of hope for the viewer. I guess what I want to say is this - in our darkest most depressing of times, there is hope, we just have to find it, to look at our life, to listen to it, and find it.
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