Poetry in Motion

The poet David Whyte once said: “you could do worse than to read a bit of poetry everyday.” Sound advice, though I fall short. 

In 2022, I began a series of mixed media works to better understand several poems on my radar. I started with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets  – an epic poem that held a personal mystery for me. After my mother’s death, I found a heavily annotated copy of his verse on her bedside table. I read and reread it and couldn’t understand the source of my mother’s fixation.  So I approached  the poem via mixed media. Something about the process of cutting out, arranging and gluing down images while listening to the poem on a loop  yielded answers. Elliot challenges our attachment to linear timelines and finite conclusions. My mother did not relish her early exit and I think this poem offered her solace, as well as hope. Maybe  her time wasn’t really up, but her departure a detour. Or maybe her reality was one of many–this poem complimented her fascination with quantum physics and these parallel universes.

Here are the passages that inspired each panel:

THE PAST HAS ANOTHER PATTERN AND CEASES TO BE A SEQUENCE

Dry Salvages

It seems, as one becomes older,

That the past has another pattern,

and ceases to be a mere sequence—

Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy

Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,

Which becomes, in the popular mind,

a means of disowning the past.

 

WE SHALL NOT CEASE FROM EXPLORATION

Little Gidding

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

 

THERE IS ONLY THE UNATTENDED MOMENT

Dry Salvages

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.

THE ENCHAINMENT OF PAST AND FUTURE

Burnt Norton

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

I then decided to reexamine some of my favorite poetry passages:

WIDENING GYRE

The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

TELL ALL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT

Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant
Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

THERE ARE SPIRITS

Voices over Water
W.S. Merwin

There are spirits that come back to us

when we have grown into another age

we recognize them just as they leave us

we remember them when we cannot hear them

some of them come from the bodies of birds

some arrive unnoticed like forgetting

they do not recall earlier lives

and there are distant voices still hoping to find us

THERE IS VISION AFTER VISION

 
Rainier Maria Rilke

The man who cannot quietly close his eyes

certain that there is vision after vision inside,

simply waiting for nighttime

to rise all around him in darkness-

it's all over for him, he's like an old man.

 

IT IS A SERIOUS THING JUST TO BE ALIVE

 

Mary Oliver

It is a serious thing

just to be alive

on this fresh morning

in the broken world.

For me, a good poem illuminates new ways of thinking about the world and knocks aside stale perceptions. Great poetry is transcendent and never static, just like interesting works of visual art. Responding to verse through another medium was an invaluable way to dig deeper into overlooked passages or fainter innuendo.

I want to know what poems inspire you, stump you or delight you. So please share your favorites at hello@isacattostudio.com.