Into the blind world
& Gone south.
Photo ©Jesse McKinnon.
Into the Blind World.
Into The Blind World originally published by Rob McLennan. Published in Ottawa by above/ground press, January 2012, after an original run of 26 copies produced for private distribution, March 2010 by Gorse Press, Prince George, BC.
“This poem/fragment is based on a selection of lines sent to me by Arianwen Goronwy Roberts, a young student, poet, and artist who I jokingly referred to as Virgil one night when she soberly drove me home after a drunken literary event in the fall of 2009. I got Arianwen curious to read Dante’s Divine Comedy & at some other drunken literary event asked her to send me the Dante lines or sections that she liked or stood out for whatever reason. This she did from an on-line translation: The Divine Comedy: Hell - no translator given. Within those stanzas, verses, and narrative fragments I could see certain words/phrasings and images that prompted my own “translation” and improvised responses.
I’ve made no dramatic attempt to describe sinners being dipped upside down in hot tar – or include any of the other dark & menacing monsters contained in Dante’s hell - or develop the relationship between Dante and Virgil, his poet/guide through hell. Instead, I took only words, phrases or images from Arianwen’s choices that I could then reconfigure without, I decided, any presumption to condense the narrative in Book One, or make any literal reference to snakes, lizards, and lions etc. (though somehow a lone fox trotted in).
The “ending” does not wholly contain the sanguine possibility Dante recognized in Canto xxxiv – a “return to the bright world”- “to look once more upon the stars”. More so, I believe it when the poet Robert Creeley writes - “the darkness surrounds us” - yet within it we must live and experience whatever range we are given or decide.
When the writing stalled, I also took lines/ideas from Arianwen’s poem – the forest of knives image, Mateusz Patryka’s poem for his line the ghost of myself, Cecil Giscombe’s email - these days the sisters incoherent, unrequited, incomplete and Robert Creeley’s line happy in hell – sources that kept me going for awhile longer on the hidden road.”
Barry McKinnon.
into the blind world –
the new life – the essential tremor /refusal
of diminishment
I see in a double
space – conjunction & irony, that part blind I’m made
to see. it is not Dante’s forest exactly. More
so a sense
/a kind of open door
is beginning /closing – dark turning
- light I didn’t expect.
old flesh renews, that the dim
eye makes almost nothing matter. looks to
what I find ahead.
I believe -
fear kept
me speaking, or all would cease to be. so I spoke & the forest flew by
& city lights distorted – the cold stars of love and dark – the beginning, a journey, a descent
the ghost of myself still
alive,
to address the infected world, to stall & cease advance, to the forest one fears
to enter
sad desire/ without a mask –
to journey solely at night dark to the armies
circling themselves – the forest of knives
invisible to those who never make it
or recognize
desire: one heart to pull
the other retract - that the gap maintains its depth & distance
to hell – the hidden road & the river one dares
Gone South.
13 copies printed as a Gorse Press Chapbook for private distribution. 2014
In Process for Rob McLennan’s by above/ground press. 2020
Cascadia Poetry Festival Reading.
Arizona: 2:20-7:10 / Slab City: 8:08-12:28
