http://sandiegofreepress.org/2013/11/a-place-called-i-park-erasing-the-separation-between-life-and-art/

Even before opening Auroras, the latest collection of poems by David St. John, I immediately thought of Wallace Stevens’ “Auroras of Autumn”—his personal ruminations about a poet facing death and the limitations of the individual imagination. Harold Bloom said of it: “Watching the auroras, Stevens re-enacts the central Romantic confrontations between the power of a poet’s mind and the object-world or universe of death.”

photo by Joshua Strang

But the poems in St. John’s collection reside beyond this crisis, where phenomena contain the imagination rather than the imagination containing the phenomena, where we triumph over death, for the time being, with red strawberries in a white ceramic bowl. Stevens felt afraid and powerless. St. John is quietly observant in a neo-Buddhist acquiescence to change, fate, purposelessness, and death. Indeed, in the first poem, “The Lake,” the poet proclaims:

What’s given to us however dulled & undeserving we remain

Is beyond our reckoning

St. John is not afraid to take as his subjects the regretfully typical occasions of death, violence, prurience, leavings, depression, suicide, incest, and disintegration of relationships—reduced and detached by Stevens in his pantomime in the sky.

No doubt the most chilling poem in the collection is “From a Bridge,” in which a boy observes his mother killing herself by jumping in a river. I don’t know if this act or any of the other situations portrayed in Auroras, is grounded in St. John’s own experience, so to me this is a conflation and reworking of Stevens’ two rather detached women in “Auroras of Autumn:” the symbolic but impotent mother in the theater of childhood who sings half-heartedly, and the lover who might next spring be hanging (dead) in the trees. By adding the boy’s perspective, St. John anchors Stevens’ “ideas” in a cutting, real-life tragedy.

The tragedies and disappointments in this book are what they are, defying any greater significance. Refusal to bestow meaning is represented in “Without Mercy, the Rains Continued,” where the persona receives in the mail a cassette tape on which an old lover, decades earlier, had secretly recorded (under their bed) a conversation in which she asks something of him and he responds with silence. He decides to respond to this missive, again, in silence.

One of the more poignant poems in the crux of the book is “Human Fields” which portrays a killing field where thousands of war or genocide victims are buried, sometimes reaching their hands or shin bones up from the ground, announcing a “new order” (as opposed to the order imposed by the woman’s song across the port in Stevens’ “Idea of Order in Key West”)…

As if some heaven of actual memory
Had begun to radiate at last beyond

The cold & actual sky

Stevens’ poem hinges between cantos VII and VIII, at the transfer of power from “flippant communication” to a “time of innocence.” Such a crossing from the act of explication to the act of mere offering is remarkably represented in St. John’s “Reckless Wing,” where one person, with her arm, swoops away all the ephemera (newspapers, coffee cups, toast rinds) positioned on the kitchen table between herself and the persona, and locks his gaze in hers “to make/Plain another new beginning.”

The Romantic confrontation that Bloom refers to is represented in Shelley’s conceptualization of the imagination imposing meaning on the silence and solitude of Mt. Blanc—and in St. John’s “The Empty Frame” where the persona recalls

The story of a boy who’d lie

At night in those fields believing
A world beyond always awaited

Restless in its insistent music

But the grown boy has returned to his childhood home (the cold, dry white cabin of Stevens’ “Auroras”) to find something very different. Although the house has been razed, he mounts the destinationless concrete stoop and imagines seeing through the missing kitchen window frame Stevens (I like to think) writing by the lamplight that guided him there. He asks Stevens, “When did you first know I’d come back [to your aesthetic]?”

And in the following poem, “Late Offerings,” we find the luminescent celestial serpent of Stevens’ “Auroras” snaking up the face of the poet who enjoins the muse to

Release me to

The presence
Of the present.

Its difficult passage
Its steep ascent

The shale-splintered
Cirrus-scaled aperture of

Phantasmagoric sky

St. John has entered Stevens’ cabalistic theater of the Sublime, but wishes to be “released” to the present where real things happen to real people and we all make something different—and inscrutable—of them. Light snakes, like Stevens’ boreal serpent, through his final hymns, imposing its caprice on the inner necessity of the poet.

Overall, the poems in Auroras glow like their namesake, pulsating with the light of their unique place on the color spectrum, but they pound brilliantly in the last section, “The Auroras.”

This section begins with dawn, a sign of cyclical immortality painfully missing from Stevens’ “Auroras.” St. John’s first aurora, “Dawn Aurora,” is a direct response to and departure from Stevens’ auroras and Shelley’s Mt. Blanc and his West Wind—even from Whitman’s blades of grass—and a reassurance that his forefathers’ art is as brilliant as the lights of the sky yet lasting, spanning the generations of poets:

…Look to your sons, look to your daughters,
Look to the blades rising out of the dark lawn. Don’t worry;
each of your myths remains emblazoned upon the air. The way
the wind moves across the vellum of the mountain,
as the silence lifts its chords from the old piano. In the still dark
& still uncertain dawn, there begins that slow revelation larger
than the mind’s, as the light grows coronal, & the house fills
with those elaborate agendas of the day. The monastery & philosophy—
this morning, both seem so far away.

St. John’s “Autumn Aurora” reflects understanding of the cast of illusory characters in the beginning of Stevens’ “Auroras of Autumn.” An apostrophe to the reader follows, where the poet defines himself in Stevens’ terms: priest of the Sublime, extremist, illusionist, playing to the reader on his dulcimer, helping her discover what seems impossible—the fragrance of the moon.

The poems of Auroras, collectively, are offerings in the dawn beyond Stevens’ autumn auroras. They give to us the present, ordinary circumstances, in indifferent observance, yet with the language and artistry needed for the reader to create her own significance, her hope, her consolation—and a reassurance that there’s nothing to “understand” in circumstance, death, or destiny, like there was in the superstitious days of yore.

In the coda, “Dark Aurora,” the persona responds to a beautiful letter from “you” (the reader or Stevens, perhaps) only “with the poor reflex of intellect” (which is what I am doing here, it seems). Yet the intellect is incapable of shedding any light. St. John’s auroras end as did Stevens’, as do all natural pursuits insofar as they are conceived: in the darkness of the extinguished sky, the darkness of midnight ink, the darkness of death.

—Ruth Zamoyta

These ten questions were posed as part of a blog round robin.  See below for the other interview links.

What is the working title of your book?

Memento Tsunami. I like that the title needs no translation. The words register in many different languages directly. ?Memento? is Latinate and ?tsunami? is originally Japanese and they are the same in English, Greek and French. I like to think the poems in my book are an attempt to create a bridge between two worlds, or two ways of being in the world.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The title poem refers to the tragic Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004.  The poem was written soon after.  But as the years went by, I came to think of the phrase ?Memento Tsunami? not only in relation to an all-encompassing materialism, but also as describing a creative (and destructive) force.

What genre does your book fall under?

Lyric poetry with experimental aspects.

What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I would cast Monica Vitti of Antonioni?s L?Avventura, because she serves as a projection of interiority in that film. And she looks like Greek sculpture.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Memento Tsunami is a collection of  abstract, lyrical poems that reflect a nostalgia for origins as well as a 21st-century visionary impulse to reconcile disparate worlds.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

This book was published by Ellen Foos of Ragged Sky Press in Princeton, NJ.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

A few of the poems are from the beginning of my adult writing life, when I lived in France twenty years ago.  But most were written and revised in the past 5-10 years.

What other books would you compare this one to within your genre?

I think Memento Tsunami has some kinship with the early work of Fanny Howe, Anne Carson and Gustaf Sobin. These poets were very influential for me.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I?ve had many formative experiences in my literary life.  The beauty and complexity of Proust and Henry James; the twisted idealism of New England Transcendentalists like Thoreau, Alcott and Emerson; and the testimony about ?Greekness? from poet George Seferis?these all inspired me to write these poems.

What else about your book might pique the reader?s interest?

Having worked in the film industry in France and made short films of my own, I have many film references in my poems that might amuse a cinephile.

Two more poets have answered these same 10 questions.  Check out their interviews by clicking on the links below.

Adrianne Kalfopoulou lives and teaches in Athens, Greece where she is currently on the faculty of Hellenic American University. She has taught in the Scottish Universities’ International Summer Schools Program at the University of Edinburgh, and is part of the adjunct faculty in the Creative Writing Program at New York University, and various creative writing workshops in Greece. Her most recent book is Passion Maps (Red Hen Press).

Lorraine Henrie Lins is the 2010 Bucks County (PA) Poet Laureate. Her first chapbook, I Called It Swimming, was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press. Delaying Balance is her most recent collection.

Previous Interviews:

Kyle Laws’ poems, stories, and essays have appeared in magazines for thirty years, with four nominations for a Pushcart Prize. Her books include George Sand’s Haiti (Poetry West), Storm Inside the Walls (little books press), and Going into Exile (Abbey Chapbooks), among others.  She currently is editor of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. A full-length poetry collection titled Wildwood (Lummox Press) is forthcoming.

Michael Hathaway works as Keeper of History for Stafford County, Kansas.  He founded Chiron Review literary magazine in 1982 (currently on hiatus) and has published 12 books of poetry and prose available at Amazon.com.  His most recent collection is St. John Pastoral from Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.

Lois Marie Harrod, a Geraldine R. Dodge poet and former high school teacher, teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey.  Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis from Cherry Grove Collections is her 13th collection.

by Vasiliki Katsarou

Eating Her Wedding Dress contributor Andrea Potos’ latest collection, We Lit the Lamps Ourselves is an exquisite volume.  The poems slip seamlessly into and out of the voices of women poets of the past, including the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath.  The poems are bolstered by the beautiful lexicon of the nineteenth-century poets themselves, whose brief quotations are in italics. There is a silence—a primal hush–that surrounds Potos’ poems that touches on the silence of great poetry itself.

Broken into two sections, We Lit the Lamps Ourselves takes up the question of genius—and specifically, female genius–a perennially debated subject, especially in the world of contemporary literary fiction.

(W)ho can say what happens / to a woman alone in her room, asks the poem “Two Emilys” and later, the poem “Charlotte Brontë, Student” alludes to the creative dynamism of the female psyche:

what we are not given to know,
what cannot be reduced–
woman’s mind bursting the bounds of breads and puddings,
of embroidering collars and bags.

And even in the less equivocal voice of Brontë’s biographer, Mrs. Gaskell:

She must not hide her gift in a napkin, (…)

she must bow to the word, the God-
appointed pen.

I appreciated Potos’ savvy emphasis on the Anglo-Saxon component of English in her use of crisp, monosyllabic words like heft, shun, turf, hew, sheen and capitalization of abstract nouns like Real, Infinite, Possibility, Imagination, Repair–along with unabashed references to Divinity–which make these poems feel situated in the world of the mid-19^th century.

I was also surprised to find that this luminous volume, in its voluptuous interiority, reminded me at times of the lyrical poetry of a poetic mentor– the expatriate American poet Gustaf Sobin, born in New England, and living in Provence where he passed away in 2005.  (His poems were collected recently by Talisman House, Publishers.)   This, for example:

to dwell on pristine
dunes of mind, each wind-
lashed grain afire

(From “Being Emily Dickinson”)

In the second half of We Lit the Lamps Ourselves, the contemporaneous persona of the poems is more distinct.  This voice addresses the past in a more evident, less conflicted way, with references to the gym and the mall, Reeboks and the cineplex.  Has her excursion into the past given the contemporary poet some sort of leave?

(…) permission
to empty our boxes of Milk Duds
and JuJu Bees, our Good ‘n Plenty
and tall cups of Hi-C,
the dark velvet drapery rolling open,
manuvered by careful, invisible hands,
while far away on the walls–the relief sculptures
of gnarled, windswept trees,
cliffs where a heroine might perch
awaiting her story.

(From “At the Mall Cineplex”)

As an erstwhile filmmaker who herself wrote and directed a film set in 1843, I found Andrea Potos’ collection, We Lit the Lamps Ourselves, to beg the question of whether it might feel necessary today– in our media-saturated age of IMs and technological neologisms–for the artist to immerse herself in a bygone era in order to approach poetry’s more timeless underpinnings.

Vasiliki Katsarou

Ought poetry to address, or embody, important subjects?

Louis Simpson wrote, in “American Poetry”:

Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.

Is race important?

In an essay in American Poetry Review in 2007, “Mystifying Silence: Big and Black,” Major Jackson wrote, “Contemporary fiction writers, it seems to me, are more willing than poets to take risks and explore reigning racial attitudes of today and yesterday.” and “Luckily, a few contemporary white poets writing today, even at the risk of criticism from contrarian black poet-critics such as myself, actually do exhibit great hubris and are willing to take the risk of censure and disapproval.” One of the poets he includes is Tony Hoagland. “I would rather have his failures than nothing at all. At least his poems announce him as introspective in a self-critical way on this topic. Self-censorship should never be an option for poets.” Jackson writes that Hoagland’s poems provoked the organization of a “conversation” at the Geraldine Dodge Festival on the topic Race & Poetry, which featured Lucille Clifton, Terrance Hayes, Hoagland, and Linda Hogan in dialogue.

At this year’s (2011’s) Associated Writing Programs conference, Claudia Rankine spoke passionately about Hoagland’s poem, “The Change,” its hurtfulness, the phrases that “stuck in her craw” and pushed her out of the collegial space she had assumed that she shared with Hoagland. Hoagland wrote a brief response. Rankine then posted an Open Letter posing questions about how poetry might or must address/include race and identity. She asked for responses and said that she would post all the responses she received before March 15, 2011. She has done this. There are about a hundred responses–some posted after the deadline, so more may be coming.

AWP speech, open letter, and open letter responses: http://www.claudiarankine.com/

–Arlene Weiner

The first time I heard Philip Larkin’s “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” recited to me from memory and in its entirety was on a Valentine’s Day date with Sarah in 1992. In fact we recited it in unison, and though I don’t know who started it, I knew it boded ill, spiting my lavish expenditure on long-stemmed roses and the usual trappings of romance.

Thirteen years later I heard it being recited over the telephone to me by a girl I fancied; I fancied Constance the more because she knew poems by heart; and I wrote two poems to her, the first of which provoked her interest while the second merely provoked her, and she refused to read it. Which is a pity, as it was the best of the love poems I had written till then, or at any rate the least bad, and the only poems I write are love poems, poetry by heart.

Larkin, talking to the Paris Review, said (and one wouldn’t have expected it of him), “Some time ago I agreed to help judge a poetry competition—you know, the kind where they get about 35,000 entries, and you look at the best few thousand. After a bit I said, Where are all the love poems? And nature poems? And they said, Oh, we threw all those away. I expect they are the ones I should have liked.”

There seems to me no genre of literature or perhaps of any art other than poetry that is adequate for love. I attribute the bad reputation of love poems in the modern world in part to the bad reputation of love but also to the fact that the only kind of poem that many people will ever write themselves is a love poem, which is the same reason crocheted tea cosies have a bad reputation. Teaching a modern poetry survey in Vienna, I had the students write poems, because you can’t really understand anything unless you do it yourself, and I shared with them my love poems to my Hungarian girlfriend in spite of their badness, because of their badness, because you can’t understand good art unless you look regularly at bad art.

Shortly after, my Hungarian girlfriend left me because I was either too dangerous or too dull (fifteen years later, when she finally told me why, she could not make up her mind between these two seemingly contradictory explanations, though she had since changed her mind about both), and I was teaching a survey course to sixty girls in Bratislava on the poetry of love and death (which I could not decide between).

When Mária and I met after those fifteen years, we immediately began exchanging poems: Pushkin, Yeats, Thomas, Bryusov, Hrabal, Cummings, Neruda, Marvell, Menashe, Akhmatova—but especially Pushkin, and reading Pushkin to define your love is like finally opening the bomb-making manual with a sigh of inevitability. We emailed copies we had found on the Internet, mailed books with our own notes in them, and wrote our own poems to each other, when our feelings reached such a pitch we could not communicate in any other way.

On a blustery railway platform in the London suburb of Seven Kings, the words

Az a kék ajandék,

(“This blue gift” [the color of my mood as I traveled farther from her]), began to repeat themselves in my head, then

amit a szél
félreért,
félredob,
és nem hisz,
de elvisz
hideg Hét Kiralyokbol,
az a kertedet keres.

(“—which the wind misconstrues, flings aside, cannot use, yet carries from cold Seven Kings—searches for your garden” [in the Danube basin, basking in a heat wave]).

It is a bad poem, of dubious grammar, mixes English and Hungarian idioms, is doggerel, really, a lullaby, maybe; has nothing to be said for it but the fact that by the time the train pulled in it had concentrated my unhappiness and happiness, my hope and regret in such a way as to be meaningful to only two people far away from one another, to whom it turned out to be as useless as a crocheted tea cosy is useful, and what more can one expect of poetry? For like Lady Bracknell, after fifteen years Mária had changed both the fashion and the side and decided that though I was not dull, dullness was what she wanted, or at least all that she could bear.

Her poems were good, really good, tranquility recollected in emotion, like watercolors where the object represented and the spontaneous stroke of paint that represents it are not distinguishable. But I promised to never show them to anyone.

—James Papp

James has taught English literature at UCLA and Comenius University in Bratislava; has been associate director of English Programs at the Modern Language Association and manager of the Fencers Club in New York; currently deals in and restores old master and nineteenth-century drawings and paintings and antique frames; and directs the online museum mmmwop.org.

This spring, just before she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry, I went to hear Rae Armantrout read and discuss her work with Zen priest and poet Norman Fischer.  The program was organized by Poets House in New York, at its new, glistening home in Battery Park City.  The evening program was entitled “Lyric Persuasions”and its purpose was to discuss the contemporary lyric poem.

Armantrout is a West Coast poet who has been peripherally attached to the Language Poetry movement.  In recent years, there has been a development in her poetry towards an exquisite collage of “found language.”  From her latest book, VERSED:

The outer world means
State Farm Donuts Tae Kwando?

Thoughts as spent fuel rods.
—from “Outer”

The child fights cancer
with the help
of her celebrity fan club,

says,
“Now I know how hard it is
to be a movie star.”

*

“Hey,
my avatar’s not working!”
—from“Operations”

Armantrout began her talk with a nod toward the lyric as generally understood:  a refraction of personal sensibility and emotion through the singular consciousness and language of a “privileged” speaker:  the poet.  Armantrout went on to say that since the confessional poetry of the 60s and early 70s, this personal emphasis in poetry has essentially gone out of style, to be replaced by other concerns: be they political or more narrowly “linguistic.”  The philosopher Theodor Adorno’s warning “how can there be poetry after Auschwitz?” was reflected in an audience member’s observation that “language is always suspect and meaning is almost exclusively associated with propaganda.”  In the second half of the 20^th century, and certainly since the Language poetry movement, contemporary poetry has been more and more infused with a sense of itself as a construct—and not any sort of transparent conveyance of the voice of the poet into the mind of the reader.

Armantrout gave an example from the poetry of Michael Palmer (an influential Language poet).  These lines are from his poem “And Sighs Again (Autobiography 15)”:   Did I say father and son // when I meant / farther and farther from the sun // Did I say fold / when I meant fault

Any meaning suggested in the poem seems to be undercut by the words themselves.  Meaning proffered is simultaneously meaning withheld, compelling the reader to step into the breach and (re)construct the poem for him or herself.  Armantrout described Palmer’s poem as an example of “artful self-erasure,” and Fischer agreed that this was essentially what Armantrout herself accomplished in her own work.  Armantrout noted that poetry that “opens meaning up” is preferable to poetry that “closes meaning”—that narrows it down to the personal intentions of any individual author.  Understood in these terms, poetry is theoretically more “democratic” in that it is open to the approach of any reader.

In the revealing Foreword to Rae Armantrout’s collection, VEIL, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2001, poet, critic and sometime collaborator Ron Silliman noted that Armantrout works with her poems over years, gradually eliminating personal indicators, and especially pronouns like “I, you, he, she.”  He observes that the resulting experience of reading her poetry is more “interior” for the reader.  Whereas at Poets House, Armantrout and Fischer framed their work in the context of the lyric, Silliman calls her poetry in his Foreword, “the literature of the vertical anti-lyric”; a “machine made of words”; “meaning management”; and poetry that is “directly opposed to the vignette school of suburban verse.”  Given the untenable speaker in her poems, they “don’t ever propose resolution.”

During the Q & A, I asked Armantrout and Fischer about implications:  if meaning is not “fixed” in any definitive way, how to know whether the poem one is writing is “done,” and how much responsibility and work is expected on the part of reader to “complete” the poetic process?  In answering the question, both poets gave a nod to Octavio Paz’ belief in poetry as something that protects an aspect of language that would otherwise be consumed by the everyday uses of language in media, advertising, and propaganda.  Fischer went further, referring to a sacred element in poetry that is offered up as if toward a god, and that as such, he imagined a reader as “overhearing” this one-way dialogue.

The contemporary poetry world is a vast place indeed, filled with myriad poetry circles that collide, cause friction and delight, but are not absorbed by or readily reducible to each other.  For some poets, language is a time-tested tool whose soundness has been long-demonstrated.  Like a shovel or a pail whose contours are recognizable to all, language can be counted on to support and move meaning from one location (poet) to another (reader).

For other poets, there is some wariness toward the tools themselves, some awareness of the cracks, the patina, the weaknesses.  These poets set out to create something less recognizable than a wall or a tower, but a more singular, imperfect, vulnerable structure—something like an artifact of our time.

—Vasiliki Katsarou

Recently I was in a Vietnamese teashop in Burlington, Vermont. The room in back of the shop was charming. Sunshine came through windows with bright green frames. There were plants on the sills and board games and a few dozen books. From my table I saw what looked like a poetry book.

Yes, it was: Spring Essence, a book of Vietnamese poetry in three presentations: in the familiar Vietnamese typography with its many notations that make it look like a little like musical notation with its slurs and rests; in a calligraphic script (Nôm); and in an English translation by John Balaban.

John Balaban is a poet himself. http://www.johnbalaban.com/poems.html During the Viet Nam War, he was a conscientious objector, but he went to Viet Nam to volunteer among the people, and was wounded during the Tet offensive. While he was there he had learned that there was a strong tradition of singing folk poetry among the Vietnamese, and went back with a tape recorder to collect songs, later publishing these Cao Dai in the United States.

But the poems in Spring Essence aren’t Cao Dai, folk poems, but highly refined poems. “Spring Essence,” Balaban explains, is a translation of the name of a Vietnamese poet, a woman who lived in the 18th century, or possibly a legend to which a type of poem attaches. If she existed, the facts of her biography are drawn from her poems.

The poems are formal. The Vietnamese language is a tone language, with six tones, and the forms require a specific tone to occur at each syllabic place. (So it is a musical notation.) Did I think da-DUM da-DUM posed difficulties?

[Postscript: I have just found out, in the NY Times account of a concert by two Azari singers, that “balaban” is the name of an Azari musical instrument. So possibly John Balaban’s ancestry harks back to the Silk Road and he was fated to be a poet.]

[Postpostscript: There’s a thread of green, from Vermont to window frames to Spring Essence, in this post. I wrote it at the vernal equinox.]

[Facts in this entry from John Balaban’s Web site, Wikipedia article on Balaban, the preface to Spring Essence, and the publisher’s web site.]

—Arlene Weiner

Passing Through Albuquerque
by John Balaban

At dusk, by the irrigation ditch
gurgling past backyards near the highway,
locusts raise a maze of calls in cottonwoods.

A Spanish girl in a white party dress
strolls the levee by the muddy water
where her small sister plunks in stones.

Beyond a low adobe wall and a wrecked car
men are pitching horseshoes in a dusty lot.
Someone shouts as he clangs in a ringer.

Big winds buffet in ahead of a storm,
rocking the immense trees and whipping up
clouds of dust, wild leaves, and cottonwool.

In the moment when the locusts pause and the girl
presses her up-fluttering dress to her bony knees
you can hear a banjo, guitar, and fiddle

playing “The Mississippi Sawyer” inside a shack.
Moments like that, you can love this country.

From John Balaban, Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 1997).

Beauty infuses David LaChapelle’s artwork—his paintings as well as his writings, most recently the second printing (posthumous) of A Hymn of Changes: Contemplations on the I Ching. This poetically written guidebook can be used as a tool for divination and personal growth, but it can also be used to guide artists in understanding and using their craft. In the very first paragraph of the Foreword, LaChapelle relates a transcendental moment of his youth when he became awakened to his calling: artistic production:

As early as three years old… my time was spent watching the sun rise over the sensuous curves of glaciers and sink into the Pacific with the lingering smell of fir trees carried by the thermals from the forests below.

When he returned to his childhood territory of Mount Olympus in Utah as a young adult, LaChapelle looked out over the same scene and thought to himself, “Nothing I could ever do in my life could match this.” He immediately determined that he would paint the pictures of the I Ching. “Never in my life has an inspiration come so directly and with so little warning.”

The I Ching is an ancient Chinese instruction manual to be used with a method of counsel using dice or yarrow sticks. Although to some the I Ching is dismissed as a parlor game, its essence is a wisdom that has permeated the globe over many millennia. When one’s desires and perspective are in disorder or unclear, one clutches the first thing that promises enlightenment, as a man who is being carried away by rapids would reach for the first limb or stone to anchor him. The I Ching presents a comprehensive ordering of nature. The random cast of the dice is a troubled soul’s invitation inside:

Inasmuch as the I Ching may be a code of universal structures, it is a language which names the very subtle and often hidden patterns in our lives…The repeated contemplation of symbols, which speak of fundamental energy transformations, begins to act as a feedback system which helps reorganize the psyche around these core images.

The changing of the symbols with each throw of the dice invites us to transform our understanding of ourselves, and to act. LaChapelle noted that as he sat down to write A Hymn of Changes, he threw Retreat with five changing lines, which produces Decrease. He took this to mean that before writing, a period of withdrawal from the world is necessary. The image of Decrease is a lake beneath a mountain. “The waters of the lake are able to distill the essential qualities of the environment and reflect them in a way in which the universal can be made approachable and within the grasp of our daily experience.” The act of reading the random throws is in itself an act of creativity, which always results in greater knowledge of one’s needs and desires. There can never be a mistake.

The trigrams (different combinations of three solid or broken lines) are “the essential alphabet of the I Ching.” The eight trigrams are the building blocks of the 64 hexagrams which are used in divination. When the artist reads LaChapelle’s interpretations of the trigrams, he or she immediately notices that they represent important elements of art, as well as life:

The Creative: We hover in the heavens, in the “seat  of possibility and freedom,” our creative impulses moving, growing unhindered.

The Receptive: Daring to “touch the pain as well as the joy of life,” we are manipulated and inspired in all our elements. “Every mood, every emotion, every thought plays within our bodies, asking a new response and new expression from our form.” We are strong enough to withstand such penetration, but pliant. We must give continually, in order to have room to receive more.

Arousing: The quickening of Creation, the communion of Creation and Reception of Heaven and Earth. Movement, action that is fearsome but inevitable, and to which we surrender and are “carried into unexpected territory.”

Keeping Still: Consistency through change. The mountain represents Earth’s touching the heavens—art as vehicle through which transcendental significance is carried to the world. The mountain keeps stable despite shifting moods and events. To produce a coherent work, an artist must possess internal strength and integrity, but must beware of rigidity.

Wind: “Wind moves unseen across the Heavens and touches the four corners of the earth.” Its gentle persistence penetrates rocks, pollinates, and clears away chaff. “The Wind is the breath of the planet and the movement of our own life force.” It is an inhalation as well as an exhalation.

Fire: Also described as Clinging, Perception, Clarity, Dependence, “Fire clings to that which it burns. Light is created by the dissolving of forms. All of the visible world is bathed in light. This is a part of an eternal paradox; in order to see form, form itself must dissolve.” The sun dies to produce life. Fire consumes boundaries. Submit to it, and we will be exposed in perfect clarity. Our self will have an outlet, and we will let others in.

The Joyous: Also Expression, Lake. “Looking upon a lake we see both the passing wonders of the sky and the mysteries of the Earth.” Lake is about boundaries. Too much inlet or outlet results in flood or drought, upsets the balance of expression. The Lake can be seen as a balance between the artist’s expression and the observer’s impression. Art is a collaborative event. If an artist portrays too much of herself in her works, the viewer cannot identify. The observer must be vulnerable to the artist’s message. He cannot read too much into the art, or he will shroud its original beauty. “Finding our balance within, we can reflect higher truth and merge our depths with the forms of the Heavens.”

The Abysmal: Also Danger, Emotions. Water settles in the deepest, unknown, hidden places. To seek it requires courage, acceptance, adaptability. Water is the basis of life, a model for a relationship: bound yet fluid. It is the symbol of emotion, changing with the tide. To avoid being swept away, water tends to flow in streams. This is the need for an artist to embrace the most terrifying truths, and to impose form on passion to make it accessible and influential.

Repeated use of the I Ching method conditions us to be open to change, to “the movement of life.” Guards are dropped, one becomes vulnerable. Vulnerable to what? For followers of Chinese philosophy the answer is “To Tao.” This is one precept of the I Ching that I find myself resisting. It is the core difference between Eastern philosophy and Post-Enlightenment Western philosophy: the idea that there is an “unseen matrix of the world” to which we must submit if we are to find, in LaChapelle’s words, “belonging, guidance, and purpose.”

I am reluctant to yield self-determinism to allegiance to a universal order. To me, the self is central and superior to the world order. To me, the self creates it. I like to think that “belonging, guidance, and purpose” are our own creations, self-directed, and that the matrix is merely a presentation of reality not to which we should align ourselves but which we should observe and understand, and on which we superimpose our own freely created life. LaChapelle claims “There are times to let go and trust the greater flow.” I believe that the self ordains the power and direction of the flow; when she lets go, it is a conscious act not of surrendering, but of seizing, of overcoming ambivalence. There are many drives in many different directions, all self-imagined, one chosen. We step in, the matrix adjusts.

For the artist, submission to substance, beauty, and inspiration is creation of substance, beauty, and inspiration.

Artists change lives through their art, but LaChapelle went a step further: he healed through direct dialogue and engagement with people searching for direction. He eventually created more than striking, penetrating visual art and beautifully written books of wisdom; he created friendships with hundreds of people whose lives he changed through his extraordinary power of counsel. His interpretation of the hexagram Grace reminds artists that the greatest attribute of art is its ability to reflexively open, enlighten, and satisfy the creator’s own spirit:

The clarity of Fire dances upon the majesty and stillness of the Mountain. This is emblematic of the beauty or Grace of art: the purpose of art is to still the mind and take the viewer to the edge of their own soul. Art alone cannot do your inner work, but it can inspire and set the stage for profound spiritual contact.

No doubt A Hymn of Changes will be used widely by divination groups, but it is equally suited to use in writers’ workshops, at artists’ retreats, or by individual creative spirits looking for clarity or impetus. Poets, writers, painters, sculptors, mixed media artists, musicians, composers, dancers, actors, architects, designers, tattoo artists, and any other creative spirits who have been influenced by the I Ching, or who are looking for new tools, should read this “hymn” by a man who was at once an artist and a healer.

—Ruth Zamoyta