One Room with View: Profane and Sacred Poems

By Russell Joseph Geary

One Room with View is a compilation of poems, short essays
and musings of G.H. Geary over a 30 year period. When
her therapist said to her Youre not crazy, youre a poet and
her friend said Write your distractions! she had an epiphany her delusions, ironies and inconsistencies might be the stuff of art. So with a lot of note-taking, lineation and flagellation of commas and function words, she began to work. The writer is not her best editor. Here it is, the good, the bad and the ugly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 21, 2010
• ISBN: 9781462808816

Russell Joseph Geary

Russell Geary was a dreamer who accomplished a great deal in his brief life. The middle of 5 children, he was often left to his own devices, and many devices they were. He was a self-taught musician, composer and painter, as well as a novelist who wove utopian ideals, magic, mysticism and humor into three novels, Erika, Lucidia and sequel. Russell graduated with honors from Northwestern University with a major in comparative literature. He was an ardent student of Tibetan Buddhism. His life was cut short by depression in 2002, at the age of 25.

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Copyright © 2010 by GH Geary.

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Contents

Notes on Poetics and my Poetry

Recommended reading

The Second Coming, by William Yeats

Why do I write to you?

Notes—presences

La Nostalgie

Contemplations upon the Desert—

Holy Weeks, 1983 and 1994

Notes: Contemplations upon the Desert

DREAMWALK

EROS

Dreaming

Catechetics

Flights of Fancy

Satan speaks

Notes

Starlight

FELT THOUGHTS

felt thoughts

Thoughts

No pain no gain

Format

dissociative reaction

Maternity

Obits

A Walk with Gregory

Long Odyssey for Indian Remains Nears End

Starry Night

IRONIC CONVERGENCE

Ironic Convergence

The Ladies of the Broadmoor

Letters to Angels

LIFE LESSONS

Life Lessons

My Father’s Chair

Upon my Father’s Grave

Hypocrite Lecteur

The Neighborhood

a la Buscaglia

This is a rare spring

intuition

Son

Remember

Sitter

Michael in verses

Point break

Some spirit

To my therapist

Doctor

PLEASURES OF LOVE

Pleasures of Love

Reflection on the Mists of Avalon

Reflection: The Mists of Avalon

Do you know

The Listener

The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm, 1956

Bungalow, 1965

On doing/not-doing

Incomplete Sublimity: Meditation on the Song of Songs

For my friend, who longs to play beautifully

Lake Michigan at sunrise

Gardens, 1966

The Girl on the Grecian Urn

On Catching Sight of You Across the Room

hold, hold harmless

STRANGE ARRANGEMENTS

Strange Arrangements

In many cultures women wear gold

to indicate fertility.

The Visit

intuition

Devolution

Sin’s pace

translation from Marie Noel

Pennsylvania Spring

Lovers

Narcissus and the Star

Romayne—a bag lady

Archeotheology

Journal—a found poem

Infant Songs

Etc.

According to St. Paul

TOUCHED

Martha

Prayer for the human spirit

On the Sorrowful Way: Meditation on Psalm 18

Vows: To Jesus, Companion of my Soul

Meditation on the Liturgy of the Hours

On Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace

Paul, the barber from Iraq

Highway to heaven—for Michael Landon

Holding c1981

Sapientia Christiana

O earth

Life is a gift

God is He Who Is

Friends

Escape, Cancel, Override

Holocaust

Letters to Angels

God: I AM

Man: AM I?

marry and/or burn

(but burn)

On-Line Search

Maternity

Archetypes

Eloquence

Priests of my Acquaintance

Droit de Seigneur

G. Sorge E. care

On the artist’s model

Luminous Being

pass—passage—passion—passivity

Bookends

Practicing Confession

Silent Running

On the Problem of God

Subtle is the Lord

Easter

Inspired by Marisa Grifone

who told me to Write your distractions!

Encouraged by my doctor

who patiently coaxed my rhizomes into bloom

and by my husband, who conferred on me a suitable pseudonym

My daughter says to me as she reads these lines

"But you’re my mother, how can you say these things?"

My darling, I have lived not often but well

and I have served not well but often

If that offends you put this book aside

And read again when once your darling girl

stands at the brink of awesome womanhood.

Notes on Poetics and my Poetry

The natural breath group in spoken English is ten syllables, beginning with an unaccented (stressed) and alternating with stressed. This is called iambic pentameter,and is represented:

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day

The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea."

(Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard)

By comparison, the natural line of spoken French is the alexandrine, which has fourteen syllables.

For emotive force, think in terms of music and art. The images and metaphors evoke memories from one’s own stock of experience, education and dreams. This is largely visual, but also highly interpretive. The music of poetry derives directly from the sounds of speech and instrument. e.g., the percussives are both meter which is tempo or beat, and the use of explosive consonants B,D, K,P,T

The melodic components—vowels, labials, sibilants,m,n, the length of phrase, and rising and falling intonation make up the melody.

These components are reinforced through repetition—alliteration, assonance, consonance.

On the concrete level, simile and metaphor should look, not literal, but real, i.e. out of the world accessible to experience. or interpretation, even of dreams and nightmares. Jung says that since the content of dreams is made of archetypal objects and activities, it is familiar in some way to everyone. I do believe that popular songs today, so often inspired under a drug-induced psychosis, come from that archetypal world. That is why it seems in hearing the song, with the least push from delusion, the listener finds that the song seems to be sung for me.

On the second level, conceits are constructed from this subconscious materia infirma or intuition to convey an abstract or spiritual theme. The conceits may be vast and yet stand up literally. Still, the Archetypes move freely from level to level, transforming, destroying and reforming meaning.

The overall poetic format is a vertical scroll. Much prose scans beautifully and has all the poetic elements, but must be read in a zigzag fashion. A well-honed poem may be read vertically in smooth progression, with each phrase having its own place, unless the poet deliberately wishes to interrupt the flow to enhance tension and engage the reader in the exploration of the poem.

Poetry should be read aloud.

Gratuitous rhyming and specious Personification are to be abhorred.

All technical devices should be subordinated to the theme.

Recommended reading

Marlowe’s Faust, Goethe’s Faust (auf Deutsch)

anything Shakespeare—not all at once!

Dante’s Inferno, Ciardi version (I could not get worked up about Purgatorio and Paradiso—I’ll save them for when I get there or the monsoons hit Chicago anything Homeric by Fitzgerald (do you read in the original?)

Robert Browning: My Last Duchess, Rabbi Ben Ezra (lst stanza)

W.B.YEATS: The Stolen Child,The Rose of the World

The Lake Isle of Innisfree, When You are Old The Folly of Being Comforted, The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water, No Second Troy, The Fascination of What’s Difficult, The Wild Swans at Coole, Easter l916, The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, For Anne Gregory, Byzantium Crazy Jane talks to the Bishop, After Long Silence, Lapis Lazuli Long-legged Fly

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets, the Wasteland, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey

William Morris, Christ Keep the Hollow Land

Gerard Manley Hopkins: God’s Grandeur, The Starlight Night, Spring, Pied Beauty, The Windhover, [Carrion Comfort], [Thou art indeed Just, Lord]

Randall Jarrell

Dylan Thomas: the Force that Thru the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

Thomas Moore: Believe me if all these Endearing Young Charms

W.H. Auden: Musee des Beaus Arts

William Carlos Williams Reader

The lyrics to many popular songs of many genres are often excellent poetry, though many do not scan : that is, the lines do not have a full complement of syllables if read without the music. This reminds us that in olden days poetry was always sung.

Billy Joel records, Elton John, the Beatles

R.E.M.: Life’s Rich Pageant, Out of Time

The Who: Tommy, a Rock Opera

Cole Porter—almost anything

Irving Berlin, George Gerschwin, Porgy and Bess

Hoagy Carmichael: Stardust

Don McLean: Vincent (inspired by van Gogh’s painting Starry Night)

American Pie

Simon and Garfunkel, The Graduate sound track, Best Hits

Anything Paul Simon (no, not the senator)

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

Jethro Tull, Aqualung

Indigo Girls

Maura O’Connell: songs by contemporary Irish poets

Benjamin Britten

Anything Samuel Beckett (in performance only)

For enlightening essays on poetics, I suggest Norton’s Anthology, vol. 2., by Samuel Taylor