Poetry, like alchemy, is largely ignored, and is effectively marginalized from mainstream culture. Most people couldn't care less about either artform, and yet both house so much of value to humanity. Poets, like alchemists, are dwellers on the fringe; often characterized, somewhat tragically, as undesirables, freaks or lunatics. Poets are interpreters of, as A.E. Waite put it in his little-known masterpiece, Azoth; or The Star in the East, “the unrealizable beauty of That Which is behind the veil,” doing so ‘by the graciousness of the veil.”
As he so eloquently states:
“In this matter the poets are our only interpreters – that is, legitimately – because the problem is outside science, which is concerned with the veil alone; and it is outside ordinary philosophy, because ordinary philosophy has affirmed that the reality is unknowable; and the best conclusions from analogy are to be learned of the masters of analogy, of the kings of interpretation, of those who see furthest, who possess that intuition which is the deepest instrument of supersensual research, and is in fact that higher faculty, that sixth sense, at which we have already hinted, which we now openly affirm is par excellence the mystical instrument. Those only who are in touch with poetry can have part in the life to come. It is therefore eminently, and before all things necessary, that we should see after the manner of the poets, and the mystical philosophy of Nature is to be found in them.”
Writing poetry for more than ten years, I have explored poetic styles, starting with early lyrical and confessional works, and gradually drifting across the dream-sea towards less sentimental shores, to the sometimes chilly Intellectual islands of language poetry (langpo) and other post-modern, non-traditional and non-narrative forms where the reader plays the significant role of extracting – or perhaps even allocating – meaning from a poem. The ‘true’ meaning of the poem is often hidden or encoded within multi-layered, largely unpunctuated, stream-of-consciousness-esque flow of allusive words and sentences and phrases and images ... not always images, but with my own poems, I tend towards image-scapes. One might call them image-puzzles; telling some kind of exoteric 'story' on the surface, but obfuscating the true meaning. In this sense, my poems are acts of the occult, whereby I tantalize and stimulate language lovers (i.e. the mind) but shield or disguise the truth (i.e. the pearl, the heart) – a kind of poetic 'Green Language' tapping into various Traditions and lineages in contemporary Australian and North American poetics.
You also may enjoy this free books:
Sri Swami Sivananda - Thought PowerArthur Edward Waite - What Is AlchemyCharles Webster Leadbeater - Occult Chemistry
