The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.
—Charles Olson
This is not at all what I intended to write when I began this project. I was going to write many small memories of a town. It quickly became obvious these small antidotal notes were irrelevant. Not to say that Kenmore holds no gripping stories; it does. But that could not be the poem I needed to write.
The mind hovers between fact and myth. We need our stories as much as we need our facts to make informed decisions. And going through the stories I took as fact and tales told as mythic I began finding many similarities. I started looking to their roots, definitions and core stories and came up with this amalgamation.
The myths and legends and belief structures that influenced my understanding of the world are best represented by the Roman Catholic Bible, the King Arthur cycles, and Hamlet by William Shakespeare. However, I did not want to use these texts directly, choosing to not stare directly into the light for fear of blindness, I chose to go to their source texts, The Book of Enoch, The Mabinogi and The Tragedy of Amblet by Saxo Grammaticus.
Hamlet has been viewed as a figure of inaction, however in the tale translated by Saxo Grammaticus, Amblet must act insane to save his life from his Uncle who killed his father. In his actions Amblet uses deception to win back his crown. Grammaticus elevates Amblet to a great actor, as one who must imitate not to just make a living, but to keep on living until he can have his revenge. So to sculpt a tale of a great poet, the Tale of Taliesin is a great place to begin.
The Four Branches of the Mabinogi is a quartet of short stories written in the Middle Welsh language. It is one of the oldest and most complete repositories of British Celtic Myth. One story, The Tale of Taliesin, narrates the mythical origins of the famed poet. Taliesin, the 6th century Welsh poet, whose work survives in the Book of Taliesin, was a renowned bard believed to have sung at the courts of at least three Celtic kings, including King Arthur. The idea that he was a bard at the court of King Arthur dates back to the 11th century, and was elaborated upon in later works of poetry, including Tennyson's Idylls of the King. In the myth Gwion Bach was the servant who wins the gift of poetic inspiration intended for Morfran and becomes, when reborn from the shape-shifting goddess Ceridwen, Taliesin.
To complete the story of the poet I was at a loss as what to do to make the story interesting. Poets do not make for great fight scenes and the act of writing is not compelling. So I turned to The Book of Enoch which is a non-canonical biblical text detailing the experiences of Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, the man who walked with God. Although apocryphal, it was quoted as a prophetic text in the New Testament and is thought that the writers of the New Testament were familiar with it and influenced by it in thought and diction. The work is considered Apocalyptic Literature and is divided into five sections each represented in the poem. They are The Book of the Watchers, Book of Parables, The Book of Heavenly Luminaries, The Dream Visions, and The Epistle of Enoch. The Book of Enoch describes the fall of the Watchers, the angels who fathered the Nephilim (bene Elohim, Genesis 6:1-2 ). The fallen angels went to Enoch to intercede on their behalf with God after he declared to them their doom. The remainder of the book describes Enoch's visit to Heaven in the form of a vision.
You are here: God >> The Bible >> Genesis 6
1 When the human population began to grow rapidly on the earth,
2 The sons of God saw the beautiful women of the human race and took any they wanted as their wives.
3 Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not put up with humans for such a long time,
for they are only mortal flesh. In the future, they will live no more than 120 years."
4 In those days, and even afterward, giants lived on the earth, for whenever the sons of God had intercourse with human women, they gave birth to children who became the heroes mentioned in legends of old.
5 Now the LORD observed the extent of the people's wickedness,
and he saw that all their thoughts were consistently and totally evil.
6 So the LORD was sorry he had ever made them. It broke his heart.
7 And the LORD said, "I will completely wipe out this human race that I have created. Yes, and I will destroy all the animals and birds, too. I am sorry I ever made them."
8 But Noah found favor with the LORD.
I chose to change the name of the poet to Isadore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont the creator of the Les Chants de Maldoror . His influence on surrealism made this an obvious choice for this work.
This may not explain fully why this poem is as it is. But it is my hope you will understand where this came from and how much of me is in these stories and how these stories make up the me that sees and filters and envisions all that is the connection to the space on the planet I inhabit.
Buy the book here at Amazon.com 