The Dark Arts of Halloween VII

Film has it's magic and in the early days it was a silent magic. Alister Crowley, the famous black magician of England claimed film for the anti-Christ, although many of are not willing to cede that claim.  But it's okay to have a little fun with the darker side of film.  I have decided to seduce you into a world of dark desire and flying in the night from the earliest days of film.  Nosferatu was one of the greatest silent films of it's day, made by the great director,  F. W. Murnau. This adaptation was more faithful to the novel than most later adaptations, although departures from the novel by film were usually not as severe as film departures from Shelly's Frankenstein. 



Here is a little on the film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu

The novel itself was extraordinarily well written.  To give you a little chilling effect I have an excerpt from the novel describing the vampire.
"His face was a strong-a very strong-aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor."

Here is a little more on the famous novel by Bram Stoker it was based on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula

The Dark Arts of Halloween VI

Now we get to the dark art of puppetry.  These inoffensive little pieces of cloth and string here conjure up Halloween for us:

The Dark Arts of Halloween V

Poetry, an angelic art, may also be a dark art, leading use to experience the emotions of fear, horror and disgust. After all isn't poetry about emotions, and who are we to refuse to explore these emotions also.

I found this wonderful u-tube presentation  of a contemporary poem by it's author, presented here with puppets, a Confessional for Puppet's Halloween.:



And here by the conjurations of an animator, Edgard Allen Poe has come tapping at our door to read a poem:

The Dark Arts of Halloween IV

Continuing with our rather haunting theme for this week we are exploring the dark art of the devil's music, the blues. I first heard this little number on a Maria Muldaur album, Maria Muldaur and Her Garden of Joy, but I didn't find that on U-Tube.  So here is the best version I could bring you:

The Process of a Poem

A few days ago I wrote a blog entry on the process of a painting, but I am not a painter. So I directed you to someone else's blog, where she demonstrated her steps in producing a painting.

I am however unsuccessfully, a poet, so today I will discuss the process of a poem. I'm not going to go in a linear step by step manner. Rather I am going to discuss the various things I have done in writing poetry so that you can assemble your own process. For those who do not want to write but want to understand, I hope that you can see inside the feverish skull of a poet at work.

I was first introduced to poetry when Beat poet and ad copywriter Lew Welch came and spoke at my high school. He read a few of his poems which I neither remember now nor understood then, but I like something about poetry and I caught the fever from Welch. He said we could write poems, that we could put anything we wanted in them, even a shopping list. So a wrote my first poem, complete with a shopping list. I give gratitude to God that I long ago lost the poem, although I may try sometime another shopping list. The important thing was that I began writing. Maybe, like the Zen poets, I'll write a death poem --and it will be a shopping list.

Then I discovered that poetry was about emotion, So I began to write in states of emotional ecstasy or emotional longing. I wrote in a pagan language, deifying the woman of my imagination and worshiping forces of nature. In other words I was a teenage boy who had discovered poetry. Again I give gratitude to God that I long ago lost these poems. But the value to writing them was that I my emotional state grew deeper and I gradually reached towards the subtle emotions. Often in a poem, we don't at first perceive that there is emotion involved at all. We have to leap into a visual or intellectual world of the artist to feel the emotion. We have to be there with the poet. So the job of the poet is not to give an exact description of his state of mind or heart, but to beckon us forward to the edge of the known universe. He invites us to fall into his world like Alice fell.

Then I began to read the great dead poets, and a few living ones. I read Dylan Thomas and Hopkins and I fell in love with their use of alliteration and assonance. I learned that internal rhyme could provide rhythm even in a free verse poem.

I learned about the majesty of long lines in Whitman. I played around with end rhyme verse. Eventually I learned how to count the accents of my poetry and meter it and I learned from Hopkins how to spring that meter free again, in an irregular meter that wasn't quite free verse.

I learned from the contemporary and from European poets something called the deep image --a sort of surrealism I suppose, but tamed a bit. Where you use deep and inexact images from the subconscious in a poem that includes less deep imagery to provoke. In other words you shift levels of consciousness to bring the reader into your deeper place. The poem may have a non-surrealist structure but it has deeper images as well.

Then I learned to fall completely into the poem, to let it overwhelm me like a shamanic trance. Each poem I wrote I had to find the place where I was to begin and that was a magical struggle. I put my desk in the center of my room, and I put an old typewriter on it (this was before PCs and Macs) On one wall I put a bookshelf filled with volumes of poets --Blake, Neruda, Lorca, Whitman, Thomas and others. Every morning I walked around my desk. I kept walking under I felt I was ready to enter the word of poetry. Then I picked up a poet to come with my on my walk around the desk. I read some poems--maybe even out loud. I learned to hear the poet even when I read him silently. I read until poetry overwhelmed me and I moved past the state of being the listener to the state of being the poet. Then I sat in the chair and fought with the keys of the typewriter to hammer out a poem.

When I finished a draft of the poem I pulled it out of the typewriter. I stopped being the Shaman and applied intellect. I counted it's meter. I looked for opportunities to enhance internal rhyme. I determined what I really meant.

Then once more I became something else. I became an alchemist. I began to grind, boil and recast my metals, precipitating and refining over and over and over. Having spent an hour or so writing a page of poetry, and a few minutes to an hour lending a critical eye to it, now I alchemized the poetry and myself. I cut myself to pieces and I floated down a river until I reassemble as a new poet with a new poem. I sacrificed everything. I spared known of my pride in producing the finely crafted poem.

All of those poems were lost. Only God knows them. But that allowed me to begin again. I had deepened and matured the channels. I didn't need to use the exact same techniques, but I need to learn more about emotion and poetry. I stopped writing for several years, but poetry loved me and I loved her. She was my wife and no man could set aside what God had joined together.

The summery of my old method still exists in mature technique. I write without reservation, I lend a critical eye, and I edit without mercy.

Again my reader I will go back. As I promised you, this is not linear. I want to cover some techniques for starting a poem. One can copy the first line of another poem, follow the lead of that first line but with your own heart. Then in editing the poem, you destroy the other poet, you place him on the sacrificial altar.

You can start with lists. You can list five images of colors, five images of scent, five images of sound, five images of object, etc and then take a knife to the list. Let the list run blood. Start over again with the hacked up and pulpy remains and construct a poem.

You can go for a walk and record the pressure of the word against your skin and ear drums. You can let the world sing to you. Then you can leave that world in order to describe the emotions it gave you. You can walk in the memory or the imagination of that world. The emotions are pinned by your heart to the wall of your mind. it doesn't matter if the world is real or the word alone is real. You can follow the walkway to where the heart left it for you.

Or you can refuse to write the word down. You can memorize the word before you sleep and fall into the dream of those words. You can walk with the words for a day or longer and tumble them over and over, speaking them in your mind over even in your tongue until you can't hold off any longer. And you reach for your beloved and move with your beloved. But then you have to move away from your beloved. To move back towards the world in savage reordering of the words.

The poet must never be afraid to start, to look or to change. Where do you being. Sit down and make a shopping list.

The Dark Arts of Halloween III

Okay kiddies --now it's time for another "dark art" --the art of the mask. We'll keep this one simple. Hold on tight.

The Dark Arts of Halloween ll

Another dark art that can be practices this time of year is making mobiles. Not the pretty kind that tinkle in the wind, but the kind that creep up the neck and tighten up your jaw. Here is one for you.

Musical Saw? #2

As I promised more on the musical saw. In fact I will be providing much more later. Years ago in Santa Cruz I knew Tom Scribner who, among other things, was a legend in the musical saw field. He did more than anyone else in the 60's and 70's to revive the playing of the musical saw and an musical saw gathering started up in the Santa Cruz mountains as a result, after he died. If he taught you how to play the musical saw he would award you a P.h.d in musical saw playing. If anyone has one of those please send a photo in the comment section to show it off.

I remember many occasions upon which I was walking in downtown Santa Cruz and I could suddenly here the eerie, winning sound of the saw. I would follow it's beckoning and find Tom sitting somewhere downtown playing the saw, then I would sit beside him and listen for a while, and find him always willing to chat after a while. I'll provide more detail on Tom and his history in later posting.

Practical advice for those thinking of taking up the art: don't play the tooth side, you will use up to many bows. Actually look for a saw that has a good handle or one specifically made as a musical saw. And bend and play it before you buy it. If it doesn't produce a lot of high pitched sounds it's no good for anything except cutting wood. And between you and me, I think cutting wood is more work than making music.

Besides the saw convention in California there is now an annual one in New York City. I have a little U-Tube from that here for you.

The Dark Arts of Halloween

Well it's an arts blog and it's Halloween so it's time for a little of the spooky arts --like pumpkin carving. The winner of our pumpkin carving contest is my friend Greg Bau, who owes me a beer for appointing him the winner. Here is Greg's pumpkin, courtesy of his mobile upload.

I am willing to consider a runner up contest, of course, and I prefer dark beers, especially porters.

In the comments anything you have to say about other dark arts, like costume making and baking goodies would be welcomed. For the right brew I can award winners there also.

As to why pumpkin carving is a dark art, I am including this U-Tube:

Catholicism and Poetry #5 Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1899) was a English poet and Jesuit priest. He converted from the Anglican church to Catholicism while studying at Oxford under the influence of John Henry Newman, one of man important people with whom he maintained correspondence. He developed at Oxford a friendship with the poet Robert Bridges, later poet laureate of England.

When he entered the Jesuits he burned all his poetry, but when his religious sentiment called forth a new kind of poetry he wrote while telling almost no one about the poems. While never abandoning Aquinas Hopkins began studying Duns Scotus who places emphasis on the uniqueness of each thing and person and in having exacting perception. This fit Hopkins temperament and guided the way he looked at things in his poetry. His poetry is a fusion of Aquinas, Scotus and the world that he sees before him to the service of the God he loves. Because he studied Scotus, however, when he took his final theological exam in the Jesuits, he failed, not relying solely on Aquinas for his answers, and he could not advance in the order. He studied Welsh, but gave it up when his superior suggested that unless he was going to use it in his mission in Whales to draw closer to people, it might not be a worthy pursuit. Yet the Welsh language enriched his poetry in the same way that it enriched Dylan Thomas's. He also had studied Old English and the poetry in that language, which , similarly to the Welsh, relied on internal rhyme devices, like alliteration and assonance. Hopkins did not publish his poetry, sharing them with Robert Bridges and a few others, mainly other poets whom he knew. Bridges revered him through he sometimes criticized his poetry, and in 1918, years after Hopkins death, Brides, as poet laureate had them published.

This U-Tube embed is a five part documentary on Hopkins, so start with the first and click onwards.

Lets take a look at one of the poems read on this documentary:

As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

As kingfisher catch fire,dragonflies draw flame

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring;like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves-goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me:for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices:

Keeps grace: that keeps his goings graces

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is-

Christ-for Christ plays in ten thousands places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Hopkins here, as in most of his poetry, uses a sprung rhythm, that is the same number of beats as a regular line, but sprung from there position in the line to fall in differing places. This technique falls between classically metered poetry and the loose rhythm of free verse, such as in Whitman. However in this poem some of his lines have a more regular meter. Hopkins often mixed the two as if to place emphasis on why his meter varies in the other lines. He uses assonance and alliteration to spring the meter free and make it fall where he may it. (To spring free my grammar to make my point!)

In this poem Hopkins begins, as he often does showing the action and beauty of God in creation. But that is just a begging point. But then Hopkins does something different, swinging on the cord of a bell he carries us from the natural to the human world. Just as each natural thing serves it's purpose for God, so to does each human being, doing for me , that I came for. Each just man justices, and by that he is Christ for others, part of Christ playing in ten thousand places that the Father can see him lovely in limbs, see him through the features of men's faces.

Wikipedia on Hopkins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins

Poems of Hopkins

http://www.bartleby.com/122/

Time line for Hopkins Poems

http://www.google.com/search?aq=1&oq=Gerard+Ma&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=gerard+manley+hopkins+poems#q=gerard+manley+hopkins+poems&hl=en&prmd=ivbo&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=3OrETIXxJoX0swO6i92bDA&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=11&ved=0CF0Q5wIwCg&fp=973e9f93f0f871cc

Catholicism and Poetry #4 Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas is not in any was a Catholic poet, and yet because of time in Welsh churches as a youth, the reading of the Bible, and an unfulfilled attraction to the Catholic faith, many of his poems show a deep spirituality. Thomas was the son of a failed Welsh poet and school teacher who raised his on great literature, hoping not vainly that his son would succeed where he had failed. Thomas's poetry was marked strong cadences derived from internal rhyme: alliteration and assonance. Although his meter was more regular than Gerard Manley Hopkins, his poetic energy was similar. His topics vary widely, but many of them come from his youth and others are spiritual in nature. Some dealt with death. He was one of the most brilliant poets and playwrights of his day, popular with British and American audiences as a reader, and with the British radio listening public.

In spite of his intellect and spiritual leanings, Thomas was also a notorious drunk and a con artist who would talk people out of money, justifying it as necessary to support his writing.

Here is a U-Tube animation with Thomas's voice that tries to recreate what it would have been like to here him read the deeply spiritual "And Death Shall Have No Dominion".

And here is the text of Thomas poem:

And Death Shall Have No DominionAnd death shall have no dominion

Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion

Thomas drew on Romans 6:9 "We know that Christ raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has power over him." and Revelations, chapter 17, which promises that Christians on rising shall receive new bodies. Another biblical source may be Daniel 12:2-3 Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some shall live forever, others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace. But the wise shall shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament, and those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever."

However Thomas's reference from the stars may be partially scientific, in that we are born in the stars, or a reference in part to Orion the hunter who has stars in his knee and shoulder.

Thomas also makes reference to love in this poem. He seems to make a reference to the old tradition that sailors shall be tossed from there graves in the sea at the resurrection. An attempt to pin down exact meanings for this poem is futile, but I can say that the poem seems a definite statement of belief on Thomas part.

More on Thomas at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Thomas

And Dylan Thomas Home:

http://www.dylanthomas.com/

And other poems by Thomas:

http://www.internal.org/Dylan_Thomas

Sing Out Magazine: The Sing Out Radio Magazine

Sing Out Magazine, for those not in the folkie know, is a magazine founded in 1950 by folk musicians and folk types including Pete Seeger. It has weather the political and economic storms of the years to continue writing about folk songs, musicians and issues in the folk scene. It was started as a successor to People's Songs, which had started as a mimeographed handout and grew to a circulation of 3,000, then folded as an anti-red wave affected was leveled against progressive organizations. In 1950 some of the same people got together and planned the first issue of Sing Out!, which had just broad enough appeal to last.

Sing Out has grown into a larger organization with a resource center and a radio program on NPR. Songs from past and present issues of Sing Out can be heard on this show, produced by the group that has been the heart and soul of the last two folk revivals, and the slow times for folk music in between.

I found some Homer and Jethro on the Sing Out page and track it's source down, so to give you a little flavor of Sing Out I'll post them here.

To find Sing Out Radio go to:

http://www.folkalley.com/music/singout/

And to find the online Sing Out organization and magazine go to:

http://www.singout.org/