The project began as a challenge to myself: Write one love poem a day, each depicting the ideas from a randomly chosen I Ching hexagram. I wanted to purge myself of my maudlin tendencies. It is so... cliche'd to have the poetry you write to be love poetry. Previously I had undertaken the task of writing poems about each of the Tarot's major arcana to force myself to write about themes OTHER than love. Here I was trying a different tact, the lock-the-kid-in-the-closet-until-he-finishes-smoking-a-pack-of-cigarrettes strategy. So, 1 poem a day for 64 days. I was looking forward to writer's block. I wanted to see what images would repeat, discovering what phrases are my crutch, how many different styles and novel approaches I would discover while desperate to come up with SOMETHING for that day. And lastly, I was very interested in the, well, magic. Each hexagram has a path to every other hexagram, a broken line here become solid, two remaining the same, another two switching from solid to broken, and viola! Hexagram X becomes Hexagram Y. Each is related to every other SOMEHOW. Each two can be compared and contrasted and they play off each other. So I was curious what/if when finished, the same could, somehow be discerned from the poems. Each a puzzle box with outcroppings and valleys that can be fitted somehow with every other. The order in reading the poems can be forever randomized. And if we read them in sequence? What story would they tell. I was curios.
So I've posted two pairs. And have been surprised a the results. The first two present opposite social experiences as I mentioned previously: A loud rave vs. a cocktail party. There is more happening beneath the surface of those (one is straight, the other queer). Gentile vs. base. These next two that I posted today are, also, opposites, or fit each other like opposites because one is about facing the truths in a relationship, as hard as that may be, and doing what needs doing to move on, on to "a new night" which shoudl be read as a definite ending. Whereas the protagonist of the othe poem beseeches the listener to help him throw away his cares. To join him in some unspecified way, even though he doesn't find her especially attractive ("my lover's eyes shine nothing like the sun"). But it is her carefree attitude that he wants to mimic or learn from her, the state he wants to reach.
At least, that is what I read.
One more word about the queer poem. I did not mean it to be queer. As a matter of fact, I had thought of sprinkling some among the 64, but, to be honest, I wasn't brave enough. Glad to see that on this re-vist of the poems, I found this one that can certainly be read as such. Love/lust can take many shapes and be expressed in a myrad of ways after all. Come to think of it, maybe I'll get the wife to record the more explicit ones of the bunch about other women to give them that twist. I've always loved female renditions of songs that were clearly written from men to women (Prince's Darling Nikki in the 90's album Austin Does Prince is a specially wonderful example of this).