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Thursday 10 April 2014

Joseph Ceravolo: I work in a dreamscape of reality


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[Untitled]: photo by A.D.Q, (Arthur Quesada II), 21 September 2013

 

I work in a dreamscape of reality. Everything seems to shut down for a split second. The language the feeling seems to exist on the edge of shutdown when suddenly all opens up. It's a tremendous relief. One doesn't worry about success or failure, only the motion of the gods feeding the words, and that freedom, that freedom.

15 July 1986


Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988): I work in a dreamscape of reality..., from Mad Angels (poems 1976-1988), in Collected Poems, 2013




[Untitled]: photo by A.D.Q, (Arthur Quesada II), 19 September 2013
 

[Untitled]: photo by A.D.Q, (Arthur Quesada II), 1 September 2012

8 comments:

Hazen said...

"One doesn't worry about success or failure, only the motion of the gods feeding the words, and that freedom, that freedom." Oh yes, oh yes . . . and the photos too!

Poet Red Shuttleworth said...

Thank you, Tom, thank you!

Barry Taylor said...

I wanted to offer this - from DH Lawrence's essay on Walt Whitman - in response to this and the previous post, taken and digested together:

'The journey itself, down the open road. Exposed to full contact. On two slow feet. Meeting whatever comes down the open road. In company with those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no goal. Always the open road.

Having no known direction even. Only the soul remaining true to herself in her going.

Meeting all the other wayfarers along the road. And how? How meet them, and how pass ? With sympathy, says Whitman. Sympathy. He does not say love. He says sympathy. Feeling with ...

It is a new great doctrine ... A new great morality ... Europe has never got beyond the morality of salvation. America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism. But Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself ... The soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road.

Hazen said...

A wonderful offering Barry. Thank you. And thanks again and always Tom for putting the ball into play.

Mose23 said...

You can't ask for more than that freedom. You'd be an idiot for thinking there was anything else worth hankering after.

TC said...

All this testimony deepens and extends the range of the proposition.

Who among those who are elected to experience it can ever say no to that moment when on the edge of shutdown all opens up and there is that freedom, that freedom.

It can't be commanded or conjured up. And is surely more likely to bloom from the dry ground of failure than from the deceptive oasis of success.

Aram Saroyan, a poet who like me and not a few others gratefully recognized Jo Ceravolo's unique genius a half century ago, when, amazingly, all of us were young, wrote a two-word note in response to this post:

"Holy Joe"

TC said...

Forgot to mention -- and thanks to Hazen for reminding me -- the photographer here, whose work made me think of Joe's dreamscapes, is from the Philippines (in case anybody wondered about the location).

Nin Andrews said...

So beautiful. I think that is a precise explanation of why you do art--that split second when time stops and you get something like relief.