The Bow Wood
In a dream there was a massive granite face such as you see above you from the floor of Yosemite Valley. In it, about halfway down, there was an arch-shaped ledge and tucked in and above this ledge was a patch of forest shaped like a bow. In my dream this was called the Bow Wood.
As with all things in a dream this name has several meanings, among them the wood of a bow. Bow wood must be flexible, strong, and suited to its purpose, which is to enable the acceleration and parabola of an arrow such that it strikes a target with deadly force at varied distances. Rocket science, you might say. So this bow wood will loose these poems like arrows into cyberspace and, if well aimed, strike their readers in the heart. Is that too corny?
Another meaning is the wood that makes up the bow of a ship. This wood is artfully warped with water to conform to precise specifications of the shipbuilder’s design. It must be dense, perfectly set into the ship’s hull, and shaped for maximum displacement of resistance in the form of the water it goes through. This bow wood is the totality of my poetry set with the attributes of this namesake into the multitude and glut of online poetry with strength to cut through to my place in it.
Every dream forest should have dream animals, griffins or shapeshifters or abominable snowmen arising from the shades. Here these creatures are my poems, those anyway that I began during my college days (everything before that was tossed in a mescaline-fueled moment of megalomaniacal confidence that I could reproduce them at any time). I had discovered the poetry of the world. There were Dylan Thomas, Hopkins, Sappho, Bradstreet and Whitman, Oppen and Jeffers and O’Hara, Rimbaud and Cendrars and cummings, Neruda, Garcia Lorca, Mayakovsky and Akhmatova, Seferis, Cavafy, poets from everywhere. I met an ant on a bicycle wearing a top hat (“It don’t exist! It don’t exist!”), magic realism and the subjectivity of reality in One Hundred Years of Solitude, reincarnation.
I was a student of Philip Levine who once called me “Bristow the Incomparable”. I was a student of Peter Everwine, George Lewis and Thanasis Maskaleris. I was taught that poetry is a living. 3-dimensional, magical expression of our uniquely human condition, and so that’s what I tried to write. I was taught that rhyme was the art of poetry, so I learned the terms, techniques, and conventions that enabled me to write in rhyme: I created metered and rhymed sonnets and such among other things that are mostly now lost, just for fun. The best things I did were sestinas, sadly lost as well.
My book Evans Road was chosen as one of only three published by Alcatraz Editions in 1980. My other collections see the light of day here for the first time. The infinitesimally tiny self-published run, with the help of my cousin the printer, of Give Up All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here…, probably doesn’t count…
The purpose of The Bow Wood is to contain what used to be called, in the days of paper books, my collected works. The content of Jerusalem is ongoing since it will include everything new until my death. That’s the beauty of a website of poetry, isn’t it?
To begin exploring my site, click the three lines at the top right-hand corner of this page, then click on a collection title, for example Evans Road. The top left image is a title page and table of contents. Scroll down the rows of images that will link you to the poems they illustrate. After each poem there’s a list of suggestions to read next, and below that is a set of arrows that will take you from one poem to another. This is supposed to be for the adventurous reader, so please have fun….
The Bow Wood by Mark Bristow 