This work first appeared in the online journal

Magnolia & Vine,

no longer active. I've posted it here for your enjoyment

 

 

A Constellation of Perceptions

 

a passage in poetics in one act

[with an invocation of Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Denise Levertov]

 

 

Characters:

 

 

Goldfinch: Adult female dressed all in white. She wears a loose tunic or dress with two large pockets. Bare feet. 

 

Pomegranate: Adult female dressed all in white. She wears a loose tunic or dress with two large pockets. Bare feet.

 

Rheade (flute player—any style wooden or bamboo flute): Adult male dressed in a loose white men’s tunic with pants and a saffron-colored raw silk scarf. Bare feet.

        

Stage directions are given for a theater, but this piece could be easily performed outside. 

 

 

 

Opening

 

[Stage is bare except for an old wooden school chair with a writing surface on one arm, downstage left. Goldfinch sits in the chair. A small, black journal rests open on the writing surface. She writes with a black pen, bent over the journal slightly. Flute music is heard offstage. The mood is meditative, the melody not a recognizable song (an original composition or improvised). Flute plays for two minutes, then fades.]

 

[Enter: Pomegranate, upstage right. She trails a very long, narrow piece of paper (as for an adding machine or register). It moves through her hands as she reads from it, like off a ticker-tape. She walks slowly downstage to stop stage center.]

 

Pomegranate: As poetry changes itself it changes the poet’s life. By 1860 it was impossible for Emily Dickinson simply to translate English poetic traditions . . . In prose and in poetry she explored the implications of breaking the law just short of breaking off communication with the reader. Starting from scratch, she exploded habits of standard human intercourse in her letters, as she cut across the customary chronological linearity of poetry . . . Repetition, surprise, alliteration, odd rhyme and rhythm, dislocation, deconstruction . . . [she] built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse. 1

    

[Pomegranate stops, downstage center, the paper still moving slowly through her hands.]

 

[Goldfinch stops writing and sits back in the chair. She appears to have remembered something and speaks, unaware of any other presence but her own.]

 

Goldfinch: That was the year, wasn’t it? “Odd rhyme and rhythm,” when poetry first came to me, really came, like a visitation, as if forging through the snow and ice of the seemingly endless Vermont winter to knock on our classroom door, asking only for me. Lone girl in the Sophomore English class, a day student at a boarding school for boys. My boy-crazy hormones all aquiver as if perpetually urging spring. It should have been exhilarating and yet, I ached for her, for someone like Dickinson to enter my life. 

 

I sat always to the left side of the teacher’s desk, not completely out of the group of seven boys positioned around the brick-walled room, just slightly in my own sphere. The angle enabled me the only view out the old, large windows.     

 

By my Window have I for Scenery

Just a Sea—with a Stem

If the Bird and the Farmer—deem it a “Pine”—

The Opinion will serve—for them—

 

When our teacher first assigned Dickinson, I could barely understand her, but she drew me in—a sudden blaze in the fireplace. She offered me warm tea in the form of poetry, from what seemed to be a bottomless cup of observation, contemplation, and rapture. I wrote a poem when I first discovered her. It started: I walked upon your garden too heavily I fear, you were angry because I crushed the dew. My teacher called me a poet. My words were foolish and sentimental to me and yet, Dickinson had begun to give me a kind of inner permission. Permission to explore and connect. Permission to seek a wholeness. The wholeness within the fragments of both beauty and sorrow I saw and felt.

 

Pomegranate: The more you try to catch at the particulars in a writer, the more particulars you think you have found, the farther you get from where you thought you were supposed to be going. I am finally learning to let myself drift. But there are different rivers and currents to drift on. Rafts or writers are made from different materials. Trust the place to form the voice. 

            

Goldfinch: Why did Dickinson move me so? She was a woman, for one, and I needed her, especially being in school with so many boys and living then with my father. My mother was gone, not dead, but far away in Florida which had nothing to do with Vermont or Dickinson’s Amherst which too had snow and cold and celebrated spring with intense wonder each year. I was hungry for a female voice to give me some sort of nourishment. And yet, Dickinson was not a woman to me in many ways, because her use of language appeared so quirky, so unfamiliar that I could not connect to her in that way. She did not sound like any women I had ever known; she also did not sound like any other poets I had been exposed to. Not that poetry was something abundant in my life—Dylan and Joni Mitchell lyrics aside, it most definitely wasn’t. So I had nowhere to place Dickinson, still I intuitively sensed she expressed something beyond the realm of the everyday—even an everyday way back in the Amherst of the 1800s. 

 

Pomegranate: A poet is never just a woman or man. Every poet is salted with fire. A poet is a mirror, a transcriber. 

 

Goldfinch: Did I have had an inkling that Dickinson was a visionary in some way? A transcriber, I might say now, of existence which reached far beyond anything I was experiencing in the day to day events of my teenage life and mind? Perhaps subconsciously so—oh how I see now her revealing, her seeking, her concealing. 

 

Pomegranate: In some sense the subject of any poem is the author’s state of mind at the time it was written, but facts of an artist’s life will never explain that particular artist’s truth. Poems and poets of the first rank remain mysterious.

    

[Pomegranate has accumulated a large pile of paper at her feet. She nears the end of the paper scroll and lets the rest drop. She steps out of paper pile and exits, downstage right.]

    

[Goldfinch slowly closes her journal, putting it and the pen, into her pocket. She crosses the stage to the pile of paper, sits down cross-legged within it (but not on it) and begins to tear the paper into small pieces.]

 

Goldfinch: [speaking as if in a slight trance] For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,—re-attaching even artificial things and violation of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,—disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. 

    

(she shakes her head slightly): God? Did I just say the word God? My mother hated the God of her southern Methodist mother and so, in mimicry, did I. Not hate, really, but a squirming discomfort. And the name Jesus just made me nervous whenever my grandmother intoned it. Did I believe in him? She would sweetly-firmly corner me. She accepted Jesus as her savior, whatever that meant. Some of my cousins and I still joke about it, but I understand now that my grandmother was simply seeking. The word seek comes from beseech: “to beg urgently.” We are all in a constant state of seeking—begging for it, really—for an original “Whole,” as Emerson said, even if we don’t realize it. This is why we have such endless subject matter for poetry, for our constant Beseeching with words, and this is why poetry is created—it’s a path for seeking.

 

[Goldfinch pauses, hands stop tearing paper. She stands, brushing off torn paper from her clothes.] 

 

[Enter Pomegranate downstage right with a broom, a tin pail, and a tin dustpan inside. She walks to the pile of torn paper to stand to the right of Goldfinch. They do not acknowledge each other, both contained in their own spheres.] 

 

Goldfinch:     Poetry is a quest to embody what the lyrical sensibility inherently knows to exist within us, and without us.

    

[Goldfinch walks slowly back to desk, sits, pulls her journal out of her pocket, and places it on the writing surface. She speaks one line from Dickinson, then begins to write.]

 

Goldfinch: Nature is a haunted house—but art is a house that tries to be haunted. 

    

[Goldfinch puts the bucket down, places the dustpan on the floor, and begins to sweep up the torn paper, sprinkling them slowly into the bucket like white leaves. She speaks as she does this.]

 

Goldfinch: The “house” is our wholeness, our place of Being, which is “haunted” by the Divine, most strongly felt and experienced in Nature, as Emerson said, as all the Transcendentalists espoused. But Dickinson was of no particular creed except her own. Art, or more specifically Poetry here, is an attempt to reveal our wholeness again. To make us “haunted” with Spirit. To reveal the veils of concealment, while retaining a sense of mystery.

 

[Goldfinch finishes sweeping, places the dustpan back in the bucket, exits slowly, downstage right.]

 

[Goldfinch continues writing in her journal. Flute playing is heard from offstage for a minute, then fades. She closes the journal, gets up, places it and the pen in her pocket. She stretches her arms up, then brings them down, swinging them back and forth vigorously as if performing morning exercise. She grabs the back of the chair to drag it across the stage on two legs far downstage right. She upturns the chair forcefully so it rests on the floor upside down in an arched position. She sits gingerly, awkwardly on the side of the chair, limbs somewhat akimbo.]

 

Goldfinch: Did H.D. go over the top placing Modernist poetry on a status with sacred ritual?  With the ability to bring humanity to a deeper insight, to a higher level of awareness? Grant it the power of invoking Spirit? 

 

No, I don’t think so. Poets wrote the first incantations so, why not? The exhilaration of surviving World War II had left her in an exalted state. If poets do not seize the moment to write of such transcendence, no one will. That’s what Dickinson did nearly a century earlier, and though hers was an interior transcendence, it touched the earthly, the universal, and the sacred, and interwove them. So too, H.D. announced her offering to the world in the form of poetry, because she saw the poet to be the prescribed visionary of truth for humankind. 

 

[Goldfinch stands. Flute music heard softly offstage. Exits downstage right.]

 

[Enter Pomegranate centerstage right carrying a bundle of large sticks in her arms. She kneels down by the chair, lets the sticks roll to the floor. Flute music fades from offstage. She begins to place the sticks in a lean-to arrangement, using the chair as the base. She speaks while crouched on her haunches. (Note: her pockets are full of bright flower petals).]

 

Pomegranate: These poems were a direct response to the war, during which H.D. remained in London through all the bombings. H.D. called for an alchemy of religions and spiritual beliefs from throughout the ages to create a new beginning—to “re-invoke and “re-create.” It was the poet who would bring about this integration. Hers was a voice calling forth all to be poised for the tremendous personal and social healing waiting in the “gloom” after the traumas of war. 

 

But we don’t need war to invoke poetry. After any trauma, poetry brings voice to the healing. And poetry brings voice to that which may not need healing, but simply a transcendence from the ordinary, which may cause eventual trauma. Where is meaning in the normal, the customary, the routine? Where does Spirit come to play in the everyday, the day to day? We beseech. We be speech. Speech for extraordinary living—breathing out of the ordinary.

 

[Pomegranate steps back from her assemblage, considers it, is satisfied. She sprinkles the flower petals from her pocket over it. Exit: Pomegranate centerstage right.]

 

[Enter: Rheade downstage right as Pomegranate exits. (Note: the flute is first heard off stage.) He stands beside the chair, continues playing.]

 

[Enter Goldfinch centerstage right carrying a six-foot wooden ladder which she sets up centerstage left, the open A-shape of the ladder facing the audience. She mounts the ladder and sits at the top, turned toward the audience. She removes a ball of thick chartreuse yarn from one pocket and large, wooden knitting needles. A very narrow 20-inch length of scarf has already been started. She begins to knit, letting the scarf fall from the ladder like a vine.]

 

[Enter Pomegranate upstage right carrying a 6ft. wooden ladder which she sets up centerstage right, parallel with first ladder. The ladders should be a little over 10 feet apart. She mimics what Goldfinch has just done.]

 

[Exit Rheade, downstage right, flute fades offstage]

 

[Knitting, Goldfinch and Pomegranate begin to speak in turn, but as one, aware now of each other.]

 

Goldfinch: Such poetry is exploratory. How to go about such a poetry?

 

Pomegranate: I think it’s like this: first there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand their equivalence in words.

 

Goldfinch: the poet is brought to speech. 

 

Pomegranate: Suppose there’s the sight of the sky through a dusty window

 

Goldfinch: and clouds and bits of paper flying through the sky . . .

 

Pomegranate: the memory of a long-past thought, or an event tied to what’s seen or heard or felt, and then a notion, an idea, a concept

 

Goldfinch: each playing on the other; together with what she knows about history

 

Pomegranate: what she has been dreaming

 

Goldfinch: the condition of being a poet is that such a cross section, or constellation of experiences periodically wakes in her this demand

 

Pomegranate: the poem. 

    

[pause]

 

Goldfinch: To fulfill this demand begins a contemplation, a meditation; words heat the feeling and warm the intellect. 

 

Pomegranate: To contemplate comes from ‘templum,’ temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the oracle.

 

Goldfinch: It means, not simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. 9

 

[pause]

 

Pomegranate: Levertov’s approach to the poetic process is organic. She involves the poet’s total experience in a harmonious way. 

 

Goldfinch: A conscious recognition of something perceived leads the poet. She is moved to such a degree as to seek a way in which to manifest it. 

 

Pomegranate: Levertov uses the word “demand” to explain the force of the calling to write a poem—she is not being gutless about the dynamic energy behind the creative urge 

 

Goldfinch: Her language suggests a consciousness involving a heightened awareness, an awakening to a realm beyond simple perception.

 

Pomegranate: Form is a revelation of content, as if the poet is traveling, body and soul, with the poem as a living being.

 

Goldfinch: And together the two entities will bring forth what is meant to be revealed.

 

In Unison: It is a holistic happening, not something forced through.

    

[Goldfinch and Pomegranate freeze. Flute is heard offstage then fades.]

​

 

***************************END*************************************************

 

 

NOTES

 

The names of two women characters in the play were inspired by the imagistic poet, H.D,. from Tribute to the Angels, p. 157

 

Our Lady of the Goldfinch,            

Our Lady of the Candelabra,

 

Our Lady of the Pomegranate,

Our Lady of the Chair;

 

we have seen her, an empress

magnificent in pomp and grace,

 

we have seen her 

with a single flower

 

I subsequently researched the symbolic attributes of goldfinches and pomegranates. The two findings which resonated with me the most are as follows:

 

Goldfinch: “Since Ancient Egypt, the human soul had been represented in religious art by a small bird. We see the Ba - the soul bird - on a detail of an Egyptian coffin. A very general reading of the goldfinch might, therefore, remind the viewer that his soul is ‘in the hands’ of God.”  http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

 

Pomegranate: “In some Hindu traditions, the pomegranate Hindi (Beejapuram, literally: replete with seeds) symbolizes prosperity and fertility, and is associated with both Bhoomidevi (the earth goddess) and Lord Ganesha (the one fond of the many-seeded fruit). The Tamil name maadulampazham is a metaphor for a woman's mind. It is derived from, maadhu=woman, ullam=mind, which means as the seeds are hidden, it is not easy to decipher a woman's mind.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomegranate

 

The name of male character, Rheade (flute player) was based on Native American myths of how flutes came originally from a man hearing the music from reeds. The variant spelling is meant to give it a Celtic quality in honor of my heritage.

    

Source materials for noted lines:

 

p. 1     Pomegranate soliloquy, Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson.

p. 2     Emily Dickinson “By My Window Have I for Scenery.”

p. 2     Pomegranate, Susan Howe, “Talisman Interview.” 

p. 3     Pomegranate, Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson.

p. 3     Pomegranate, Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson.

p. 3     Goldfinch (trance soliloquy), Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet.”

p. 4     Goldfinch,“Nature is a haunted house—but art is a house that tries to be haunted,”

    Emily Dickinson, Letter to Higginson (L459A).

p. 6     Pomegranate, “I think it’s like this . . .” Denise Levertov, “Some Notes on Organic Form.”  

p. 6     Goldfinch, “It means, not simply to observe, to regard . . .” Denise Levertov, “Some Notes on Organic Form.”