myth and poetry

Mythopoetry Scholar

Matter & Beauty
Mythopoetry Scholar Ezine vol. 2 Matter & Beauty
in the carnival of Orpheus lights dance unbowing
-Richard Lance Williams

scanner art, "Collapsing Forms" first published to ricwilliams.com "Scanner Art: Bones and Stones"

Collapsing Forms, scanner art by Richard Lance Williams

a photograph kills
Barthes told
us that

the eye
sees death
Dylan wrong

everything is
(& in being
so dies)

Shiva
creating
with death

dance with
that my
love


nothing
holds
more

& longing
cannot cease
 in what passes

thru for Heraclitus
knew what Parmenides
could not preserve unchanging

with cutting things in half
& half again as Xeno
miscalculated

the kids see a vastness
& their egos
shrink

reduced
to a math
of sum zero

but how souls
push against
time’s

linearity
deny
one

way signs
gesture toward
a quantum physics

bodies matter with
their wanting with their
eyes that have a rounding lens

how this poem turns on itself
says yes to its suffering
its unclaimed body

photographs catching
the glints of what
cannot reach

yet reach
wanting
want

satisfied again (& not)
with depthless
surfaces

“1. The world is all that is the case.”
unmeasured unmeasurable
seen in unseeing


notes
 

Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida; “He not busy being born is busy dying,” in Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma ( I’m Only Bleeding)”; Shiva is the dancing creator, destroyer, and preserver of the universe; Heraclitus famously said you can never step in the same river twice; Parmenides claimed nothing changed; Xeno said an object could never reach its destination because it could only always get halfway there, then half again, ad infinitum—he was proven wrong; in this materialist age children see themselves as only bodies in an infinite universe and the smallness they experience (ants as it were seen from the Empire State Building of the universe and fodder for the titanic military / corporate / consumerist / faddist / fungible culture that eats energy & spits out shit) leaves them abject (the self left abject by the super-ego as Julia Kristeva has it—what matter if I do anything, I’ll just die); soul suffering is experienced as timeless & bodiless: this feeling is lent credence by the multiple universe/parallel universe hypotheses of quantum physics; wanting want (as in not having a want as well as being possessed by pothos (the want that cannot be fulfilled) can be seen paradoxically as the quantum physics/materialist path out of materialism); as above, so below—“Gotta gotta get up to get down” from Coolio’s “1-2-3-4 (Sumpin’ New)”; first proposition in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; one doesn’t need a light to see what is unseeable even as it is beyond blinding; Orpheus goes down (Don’t look now!)—fix not thy gaze upon the face of one for thus forsaking the many they will tear you apart.

© 2010 Richard Lance Williams May 17


Richard Lance WilliamsAuthor Bio
Richard Lance Williams
received his master’s degree in mythology with an emphasis in depth psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 1998. Ric has edited the Litera listings of The Austin Chronicle since 1988. He wrote the “Poet’s Beat” column (interviews with local poets) for The Austin Light from 1987-1991. He edited for Ed Buffalo’s poetry anthologies Aileron and Vowel Movement in the late 80’s and early 90’s and was the associate editor from 1997-1999 for Alchemy on Sunday, the literary journal of Pacifica Graduate Institute. He has written and/or edited for the Austin Chronicle, Man! Magazine, and the Salt Journal. His interview with Larry McMurtry is included in Conversations with Texas Writers, published in March 2005 by UT Press.


Publications:

Secret Book of God
read an excerpt from this book
poetry, 104 pages, soft cover
bookstore price: $14.95

December 2007 - Robert Bonazzi, critically acclaimed author and Poetic Diversity Columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, announced Ric Williams’ the secret book of god as the best book of poetry by a living Texas poet in his 2007 Poetic Diversity Awards. These awards intend to bring recognition to significant books that have been overlooked. Previous winners of the Poetry in Texas award are Paul Christensen (Hard Country, Thorp Springs Press) and Naomi Shihab Nye (You & Yours, BOA Editions, Ltd.).

Purchase Here


Woman In The Tower: Stories for the Wounded Child
read an excerpt from this book
read what people are saying about this book

Fiction, 200 Pages, Hard Cover
Bookstore Price $19.95

Richard Lance Williams reads from His novel:
WOMAN IN THE TOWER
Purchase Here


Website: ricwilliams.com

also in this issue

finches with bellies full
The Burden of Beauty

Table of Content
mythopoetics mythopoesis
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