Month: March 2017

White Buffalo is an attempt at song. How Is It Enough To Say is a quarrel with certain tenets of Confucian thought—carried forward in song. Apex is a meditation—in the now near-erased voice of prayer—written in fragments of song. Beauty is a lasting song. In some form.

Beauty is a primary kernel of being; it is that faith that pulses us towards the soulful alchemy of tomorrow’s melody.

I think perhaps “beauty” is the term for what we experience in those moments we escape our ego-community, the ones when all the energy tied up in whether or not we are doing what we should be, whether or not we are going to be able to get what we need or accomplish what we feel like we must, whether or not others are treating us equitably

Beauty for me is the essence of now-ness. In poetry my task is to find language and context that invite readers into the quirks of my ravishment. If my language can startle or disorient perhaps it can invite.

It seems we meet beauty not by definition but by experience – an openness, a willingness to be taken by surprise.

Beauty exists, but demands to be discovered by the artist. Like the passing of invisible soothing hands over his eyes, he is now capable to superimpose passion and creativity over the mundane of this world in an alchemy that transforms mere notes, basic colors and inert words into the language of the eternal.

Beauty is the tuning fork of the universal. We seek it out, we feed off of it, and we desire more. We want to chain our hearts to beauty, to possess beauty, hold beauty closer than life itself. Inner beauty runs by different rules. Though I believe beauty is a force, an aura, an inner light, the mind of God, what have you.

I think of beauty as a superfluous grace. It’s an unpredictable and spectral light born out of our perceptions. It livens and freshens. It need not have any calculable form or ethical value. It can appear differently to each individual. A symbiosis between the world and the perceiver.

First, I conjure visual beauty, the paintings I share with children as an art docent in my granddaughter’s class and some amazing photos that friends share over social media. I’ve become aware recently how photos get doctored and how famous art has faded. Visual beauty changes across time. Acoustic and linguistic beauty changes less.

The more deeply we think about our world, the stronger we feel about it. We experience the world’s pain. We experience the artist’s pain, the scientist’s pain, the child or parent’s pain. And this pain, which resides in our hearts and souls and even our bodies, gives rise to joy.

If you say the night, or a woman, is beautiful you mean more than ‘attractive’ or ‘appealing’. Beauty contains those concepts but is deeper and wider. Something that is beautiful is mesmerising, inspiring an emotional response that leads to reflection and even revelation.

Beauty is an idea, a seed planted watered and that blooms only in an abundance of love. Kindness, compassion, truth, and the twins justice and mercy, cultivate her. The measure each of these gives to her care shapes and forms her within the soul.

My concept of beauty, at least in written form, started with the image that made me tingle, that made me want to stop right there and read the words again.

Beauty revealed through music, art, or literature can catch our breath in such a way that time stills and we want to linger in that moment. Thus, for the span of a heartbeat, harmony with ourselves, with each other, and with our world prevails. That is the magic, and the power, of artistic expression.

Beauty is something that grasps and transfixes me. I stop to stare at the way a chickens feathers catch the light. I point out the rainbows contained in the roadside oil spill. Many sunsets are colourful, but some truly arrest my attention, so that I cannot stop looking at them. This is, I admit, a grave problem on my evening drive home.

Through some unknown process, it gives our spirit a reason to grow and understand more, to find our own creativity and fire. It’s then we begin to feel a greater spiritual connection to beauty, manmade or natural.

Beauty cascades from in between curtain pores as the first rays of sun pass through. It resides in the folds and gaps of lovers holding hands, in the comfortable silence that passes between their souls. There is beauty in the dust jacket books, signed by an unknown person for his beloved, in the way he dots his ‘i’s’ and puts a dash on the ‘t’.

Under a leaning yellow willow tree, a Czech woman in a red coat sits still, staring into her Sixties, long black hair like the fine, forlorn branches, tickled by cold March fingers. Two boys walk past, just cubs testing strength: elbowing and flicking each other; never still with never-men giggles.

It is hearing rain falling after a drought, the sound of a donkey’s braying, the scent of cardamom and cloves, the sight of the first slim green fingers of new grass in Spring, the knowing that old scripts in one’s mind are being replaced by new ones.

It derives from the gifts of the universe and the gifts we give back. Beauty in its complexity moves us to celebrate life in its vagaries; its simplicity and resonant harmony enables delight and understanding, our making peace, our moving forward.

On a bright but cool summer morning, my father is casting a fly rod out over the pond, his fishline arcing across the napoleon-blue sky; Shubert’s “Trout Quintet” swims softly from an open window; in a nearby field, my beautiful horse with the golden mane stops grazing and stands at ease, his ears relaxed as he connects effortlessly with the music, and I know that he is at prayer.

When I’m open to it, all my senses are engaged and combine to create an experience beyond each individual sense. In my work I try to recreate, not the subject, but that effect, which is beauty. This planet is its epitome.

I found art. I found language. I found essence in the natural world fortifying itself into form. I don’t know how I did — a lucky sequence of accidents, I guess. But when I saw beauty pushing up and into moments, I was startled alert. Alert and activated. Hungry for what feels divine.

Beauty is found in the paradox of the ephemeral and the eternal: of flesh and spirit, of breath and bone, of the broken and the whole, of the flower and the stone.

It strikes me that I write poetry the same way my four-year-old boy drinks grape pop. I love the taste of it, the mess of it, the attempt to control it, and once it’s done I love to talk about it all happened. I have other, bigger picture thoughts on poetry, but right now I’m enjoying the delightfulness of this idea.

It is seen in the loveliness everywhere around us, heard in inspired music, felt when we witness a noble deed, when we experience ecstatic or self-forgetful love. Beauty is not different for the sake of it, though it often seems to strain at the boundaries it heals rather than breaks, but wherever it is found we feel uniqueness, a specialness (even if it is the nth sunset we have seen!) which is the mark of the personal… for me, beauty is the breath of God flowing through his creation.

Can poems about a famous disaster which caused a tragic loss of life truly be called beautiful? In contemplating this question, I am reminded of two very different poems. The first is an excerpt from a poem by the fictional Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, which begins “The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.”