Vox Populi
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Sean Sexton: Herculaneum (audio and painting email to Robert Cording)
Robert:
I’m reveling in the crystalline air of the Pacific Northwest.
Yesterday on our drive into town the four sisters (may I call them that?) were all in their places—clear as bells. I am amazed how they move around, show up suddenly somewhere, unexpected, often in strange relation to one another. Hood directly ahead in apparition as you’re driving toward some meeting place, and on another journey there, again—enormous, rocky, half snow covered as around the next grassy bluff in that countryside, Mt Adams has been lying in wait. How did it get there?
I’m reading Basho’s “Backroads to the North Country,” on my trip, an old, crumbling Penguin classics series that includes four separate journeys and a great intro. He conveys at one point how grateful he is to be on the road, Mt Fuji far away back home in Edo, so he needn’t ponder it in his life for awhile. Comes as a relief. So funny to think of him…. He is Rembrandt.
—Sean
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“Tragic loveliness called life”–I may offer this to my students as a prompt as long as they cite you, Sean, as the amazing, beloved poet who wrote it❤️
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Thanks, Sean, for this array of wonders: the way you conveyed the haziness of Mt. Hood in your painting, the seedheads brushing Saint Helens, as life arrives from death, the bell-clarity of the prose poem. Basho be praised. The mellifluous reading of Herculaneum. Four square luminosity.
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Well-said, Jim. Sean’s post is a multi-disciplinary symphony.
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Thank you Jim, I always relish your responses to everything on VP. Its a fabulous source in our world fraught with dissolution!
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So who was reading Herculaneum? Was that you, as I assumed?
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This made me think of so many things, Basho–yes, but also Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which is one of my favorite novels ever. Thank you, Sean.
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I must read…
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And how lucky I was to be the recipient. A moment of unearned grace.
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It’s nice sometimes to be the muse rather than the poet, no?
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Truth be known, I suppose all grace comes unearned!
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Grace full.
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And I, caught ‘red-handed’
Thank all of you for your indulgences.
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Thanks Sean for the wonderful words and the painting. I know exactly what you mean about the mountain appearing when you least expect it and how its appearance changes from soft to craggy.
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Thankyou cuz! That “Mountain” in your case must be Rainier. From Enumclaw it presents as a beautiful jewel against the sky!
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I think I have mentioned before arriving near Mt Hood at a coffee shop on its last day in business as people arrived from the countryside to exchange memories and pay their respects and I, as an outsider, just sat and listened for hours. I love how the beautiful poems and stories on Vox Populi can take me back to gentler times.
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Thanks, Barb.
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May we get to gentler times soon Barbara!
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This is such a delight — the prose poem, your voice, the painting, the photograph, the old Penguin book, the road & Basho: all this in such a short and completely whole poem — all those moments now NOT lost!
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And you are greatest delight of all L-ABB!
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Wow — a wonderful poem, email, painting, and photo! I’ve spent some time in Oregon and Washington. Sean, you have captured the rich landscape and a vast emotional landscape with your words and art.
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Thankyou Christine:
we’re so fortunate to have a wonderful toe-hold there with our Daughter and her family! We relish our trips to see them and revel in that landscape!
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Oh, how wonderful!
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Beautiful. Ah, the memories. Thanks Sean.
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Isn’t he great?
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