"Phantom V" by Don Paterson

Versecraft

Mea culpa re line 8: I confusedly combined both possible readings-- this is either acephalous hexameter or first foot anapest iambic pentameter.
Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Write to me about classes!

-The Error by Don Paterson

-Idealism, Nominalism, Transcendental critique

-Plato, Plotinus, Ockham, Kant

-Paterson's band, Lammas

-His many books

-Michael Donaghy

-Blank Verse by Robert B. Shaw, and the 3 Types

-Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil"

-Pseudo-Dionysius and the Via Negativa

-Plotinus's plenum meets Nagarjuna's vacuum (sunyata)

-God as Eclipse (and my episode/poem on this idea)

-Auto-martyrdom on Yggdrasil

-Beholding the Nothing That Is

Text of poem:

Phantom V

We come from nothing and return to it.

It lends us out to time, and when we lie

in silent contemplation of the void

they say we feel it contemplating us.

This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.

We are ourselves the void in contemplation.

We are its only nerve and hand and eye.

There is something vast and distant and enthroned

with which you are one and continuous,

staring through your mind, staring and staring

like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant

with neither love nor hate nor apathy

as we have no human name for its regard.

Your thought is the bright shadows that it makes

as it plays across the objects of the earth

or such icons of them as your mind has forged.

The book in sunlight or the tree in rain

bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs.

But when the mind rests and the dark light stills,

the tree will rise untethered to its station

between earth and heaven, the open book

turn runic and unreadable again,

and if a word then rises to our lips

we speak it on behalf of everything.

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My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight
Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug
List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)