NOTE: This con­tent is from my blog, Bare­back Alchemy. If links here aren’t work­ing, please try there: http://melissastuddard.blogspot.com/2012/05/mnemosyne-weekly-poem-ten.html W. B. Yeats The Lake Isle of Inn­is­free Photo by Ken­neth Allen This week, thanks to the rec­om­men­da­tion of Robert Craven, author of Get Lenin, we’ll be tak­ing a poetic jour­ney to “The Lake Isle of Inn­is­free,” cour­tesy of William But­ler Yeats. Yeats com­posed the poem in 1888, and it was first pub­lished in 1890 in the National Observer. Click here if you want to have your mind blown by an amaz­ing audio record­ing. As well, feel free to leave remarks about the poems at Bare­back Alchemy. I love hear­ing what you think! Here’s last week’s post­ing, if you want to leave com­ments on Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer “: The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Nine. Also, if you’re new to the blog, please check out the first Mnemosyne Post. And please keep sug­gest­ing titles! I always learn the most from the ones I would have never thought to select myself. Have a great week, every­one. May your hearts and minds find peace in the “bee-loud glade!” The Lake Isle of Inn­is­free I will arise and go now, and go to Read the Rest…

Recently, I met some­one new. At first glance, due to his pro­fes­sion and appear­ance, he reminded me of three peo­ple I had been close to years before. Imme­di­ately, my mind decided that he was a mash-up of these folks and started scan­ning the con­ver­sa­tion, his ges­tures and expres­sions for evi­dence that, indeed, he was such a com­pos­ite char­ac­ter. Luck­ily, I caught onto my mind’s machi­na­tions before it could fully con­jure this fic­tional per­son. “I know noth­ing,” I reminded myself, although not in Sgt. Schultz’s fake Ger­man accent. For those too young to remem­ber, he played the fool­ish camp guard in Hogan’s Heroes. In Zen, spir­i­tual aspi­rants are also known as fools, will­ing to encounter the next moment with nei­ther fear nor anger, no mat­ter what hap­pens. In short, being a fool means not need­ing to be “right”. Although it was quite pos­si­ble that some of my assump­tions and first impres­sions would turn out to be accu­rate, the real­ity of this per­son might also be quite dif­fer­ent from my ideas. Could I drop my inter­nal chat­ter and enter the moment, rather than ana­lyze, antic­i­pate and pre­dict? Before I started prac­tic­ing Zen and med­i­ta­tion, I often believed that the por­traits my high Read the Rest…

Before this morning’s yoga class a fel­low stu­dent shared that to be inspired is to be “in spirit” and that to feel enthu­si­asm is to be with god (en+theos). This got me think­ing (as a lot of things do) about poetry. For a few years, before I had chil­dren and when time to read and write was plen­ti­ful, poetry was my reli­gion. It was my sun and my moon. I mem­o­rized scores of poems, in the event that I was trapped in a cave I wanted to be the per­son who knew more poems than my cave-trapped friends. (At this time in my life I wasn’t friends with any­one who might know some­thing useful—like how to get out of a cave.) Poetry was my inspi­ra­tion and my enthu­si­asm and, although I am not quite as steeped in it as I used to be, it still is one of my great loves. The first def­i­n­i­tion of inspi­ra­tion in Merriam-Webster is this: A divine influ­ence or action on a per­son believed to qual­ify him or her to receive and com­mu­ni­cate sacred rev­e­la­tion. And what poem, I mean what really good poem, is not a sacred rev­e­la­tion? Whether the poet is play­ing in the Read the Rest…

a foun­da­tion of the spir­i­tual life is to not essen­tial­ize the spirit as an entity in itself. the spirit is not an entity, and it does not reside, in some mys­te­ri­ous way, within our bod­ies. nor can the spirit be found some­where else out­side of us. it is com­mon to think that we can ori­ent our­selves towards the spirit by look­ing inwards, but the spirit is not in me nor in you, the spirit is between you and me. buber likened the spirit to the air we breath, it is always within us and at the same time it is in the world in which it par­tic­i­pates. remove one or the other and life comes to an end. spirit is what emerges in the between of an i and thou, it is a cre­ation of the rela­tion­ship. god is not to be found in our tem­ples, we find our tem­ples in god. god is not in the litur­gies by which we offer our wor­ship to him, our worship-liturgies are in god. that is to say: the find­ing of the god we believe in, pre­cedes the litur­gies we uti­lize in order to wor­ship him. only after we have cho­sen our god –be the Read the Rest…

Why not be an anar­chist for love? Explode as gen­tly as a rose. Can Krishna’s sky be scrawled on a wall? Does Mary appear in a frac­tal of shat­tered glass? The face of chaos, like the face of the Beloved, is too beau­ti­ful to name. Jesus burst the wine­skin of God’s law. Now it’s time to burst Jesus; he won’t mind. Burst Marx, Jef­fer­son, Obama; split open the left and right. Let them seep into each oth­ers vine­yards. Your wild heart could make this world dance naked, crush­ing every kind of grape in one bar­rel. But first, fer­ment your mar­row, dis­til your blood. Wake up beyond the mad­ness of two. Don’t be drunk or sober.

when we med­i­tate, or dur­ing some prayers, we will some­times close our eyes. the assump­tion is that lim­it­ing our men­tal and phys­i­cal expo­sure to the stim­u­la­tion of objects and other con­tents in our sur­round­ings, will aid in the often dif­fi­cult task of con­cen­tra­tion and mind­ful­ness. the idea is to priv­i­lege the within by pre­vent­ing the out­side from encroach­ing. but what­ever we have within, is the same as what is out­side. if the out­side wasn’t within us, it wouldn’t be in the out­side in the first place. we use our inside world in order to cre­ate the out­side world, and then we carry it deep within us wher­ever we go and what­ever we do. the out­side world is a reflec­tion of our inner world, and there­fore it can­not be med­i­tated away, it must be given away. the free­dom of the within utterly depends on the social trans­for­ma­tion of the with­out. to be able to free our within we must rad­i­cally trans­form our with­out. one of the con­se­quences of the dual­is­tic error of mak­ing a dis­tinc­tion between the inner and the outer is man­i­fested in the way we often inter­pret the con­cept of mate­ri­al­ism. we con­trast to mate­ri­al­ism the con­cept of the Read the Rest…

Poetry Fes­ti­val: A Cel­e­bra­tion of Lit­er­ary Jour­nals Sun­day, May 20, 2012 | 1:00 to 5:00 PM West Cald­well Pub­lic Library 30 Clin­ton Road, West Cald­well, NJ 07006 973–226‑5441 Sched­ule 1:20–1:30—Welcome 1:30–1:40—Lips: Linda Cronin, Jim Gwyn 1:40–1:50—Tiferet: Mark Hill­ring­house, Linda Radice 1:50–2:00—US 1 Work­sheets: John McDer­mott, Sharon Olson (20 minute break) 2:20–2:30—Raintown Review: Rachel Hadas, Rick Mullin 2:30–2:40—Schuylkill Val­ley Review: Grant Clauser, Sean Webb 2:40–2:50—Journal of NJ Poets: Tina Kel­ley, Char­lotte Man­del (20 minute break) 3:10–3:20—Edison Lit­er­ary Review: Deb­o­rah LaVeg­lia, David Vin­centi 3:20–3:30—Paterson Lit­er­ary Review: Susan Balik, Francesca Maxime 3:30–3:40—Painted Bride Quar­terly: Miriam Haier, Susanna Rich (20 minute break) 4:00–4:10—Adanna: David Crews, Lynee McEniry 4:10–4:20—Exit 13: Jes­sica deKon­inck, Adele Kenny 4:20–4:30—The Still­wa­ter Review: Robert Carnevale, Made­line Tiger   Book Sales Books will be avail­able for pur­chase and sign­ing Full sched­ule and Direc­tions avail­able at: http://www.dianelockward.com/fest.html  Be sure to visit our Tiferet table!  

Poetry in New York TIFERET JOURNAL POETS TO APPEAR AT BOWERY POETRY CLUB May 20th at 3 pm Con­tin­u­ing a pop­u­lar poetry series, four poets whose work has appeared in Tiferet Jour­nal will read from the pub­li­ca­tion and their other works in New York City at the Bow­ery Poetry Club, 308 Bow­ery (between Hous­ton and 1st streets), at 3 p.m. Admis­sion is $8.00. Read­ers Donna Baier-Stein, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Frances Richey, and silent lotus pub­lish widely in jour­nals and antholo­gies. The four poets will sign their books and answer ques­tions about their craft. Tiferet founder and pub­lisher Donna Baier Stein’s novel FORTUNE received the PEN/New Eng­land Dis­cov­ery Award and her story col­lec­tion Great Draw­ing Board of the Sky was an Iowa Fic­tion Awards final­ist. Stein, a found­ing edi­tor of Belle­vue Lit­er­ary Review, is a free­lance writer/editor, with clients includ­ing Smith­son­ian, Time, The Nature Con­ser­vancy and other pres­ti­gious mag­a­zines. Her writ­ing awards and fel­low­ships include those from Bread Loaf Writ­ers Con­fer­ence, Poetry Soci­eties of Vir­ginia and New Hamp­shire, The Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity, New Jer­sey Coun­cil on the Arts, Ama­zon Break­through Novel (final­ist), and the Sum­mer Lit­er­ary Sem­i­nars. Fin­ish­ing Line Press cur­rently is pub­lish­ing her newest chap­book Some­times You Sense the Dif­fer­ence. Angela Alaimo O’Donnell teaches Read the Rest…

As I step off the train into the flow of foot traf­fic, wheel­ing my unwieldy suit­case behind me, I am keenly aware that I look like a tourist. Yet, this is my city; the sounds and smells are as famil­iar to me as ever; the exhaust fumes and warmth gen­er­ated by hun­dreds of bod­ies wel­come me home. I join the herd of com­muters and vis­i­tors climb­ing the stairs from the plat­form to the lower con­course, and I can hear jazz music being played on a key­board: Gabriel Aldort leans for­ward into the micro­phone and his husky voice fills the room. It takes me a few beats to real­ize that he has switched to a Billy Joel song. I pic­ture the album cover in my mind, and lean against the pil­lar to enjoy the melody and the mem­ory. He takes a short break to chat with a tran­sit cop, and I round the pil­lar to get a closer look at his set-up. His key­board cover, open on the floor in front of him, is quickly fill­ing with sin­gles and a few fives. There is a photo of an infant, and next to it a sign indi­cat­ing that he is an MTA Arts Read the Rest…

Poetry Cor­ner May 2012 Silent Lotus’ Selected Poets’ Bill Car­pen­ter and his guest Kath­leen O’Kula           Peace   My fist opens in a blos­som of fin­gers palm exposed its five petals no longer a ham­mer or a club but a cup or a bowl or if joined with another a link in a chain of con­nect­ed­ness that the fist only wishes it could break.           Ante­lope Canyon   The stocky Navajo col­lects his twenty dol­lars and dri­ves me the half mile to the site. “I’ll be back in an hour to get you,” he says. I’m left in a canyon of mean­der­ing walls that never touch, north male, south female, its amber space sculpted by flash floods, light falling in a cur­tain through the chink of sky onto the image and its reflec­tion, one in light, the other in shadow, a topaz split into a cubism of curved space. Mid­way, I sit in a hol­low, between the halves of this pet­ri­fied storm, show­ered in a veil of sand that chimes like an inverted rain­stick, as the wind whis­tles a ser­pen­tine song. “Did you hear the walls talk?” my guide asks. “I go to restore bal­ance,” Read the Rest…