Pine-needle mystic, dark and distant on
The fir -- a green assemblage, evergreen,
Immortal, static, never seeing dawn
Except through bias -- somehow, I'm serene
About it, painting pine-tree-scented petals
Over lilacs and writing sonnets one
Scene at a time. Last month, the artist settles
For vacuoules, but today they've been withdrawn,
Removed and washed, their insides scraped, their Chi
Redrawn to fit another story; we'll
Revive the mystic just to say that we
Recycled. Hear the artist break his quill
And filter art is either plagiarism
Or revolution through a silent prism.
2 comments:
Ah, the loveliness of this is the very pungent scent subtly conjured by its very mention, tied in so deliciously with the fantastic imagery.
How did you manage to decide that art is necessarily plagiarism? I must disagree. Though having chanced to read Mains' notes on Drummond of Hawthornden I could see half a basis for such a suggestion, yet no firm ground. My work is not.
Delightful images and poignant sonnet in tribute to...sonneteering and finding inspiration?
Wonderful, with an eerie thread of disgust or something haunting its fringes. Even invoking "chi" eh?
La, excellent...methinks.
Thank you, Jenny. The quite about art and plagiarism is itself stolen from someone else; it means that all art is either original creation or mimicry of what another has done before. Having read that quote, it hangs like a cloud over my writing. I wonder if treating a sonnet as canvas could elide my difficulty, but even then what art is possible that is revolution rather than repetition? I am striving to find it. Even this piece is a mockery of that frustration -- the first line is stolen from one of my early sonnets, the lilacs from Eliot, the silence at the end from Keats' Darien. The drumbeat of "re-" words -- remove, redrawn, revive, recycle -- reinforces that, and gives this sonnet a double layer of self-awareness (or no such self-awareness at all.) But I do like this one, and am glad you liked it too.
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