Taliesin Poems [I] @ Ygdrasil

 These are the battle poems of Taliesin  written after A Calendar of Poems.  Llyfr Taliesin, Book of Taliesin of the fourteenth century, pictures its agonies in threes, of war, the love of woman, the worship of God. Heroes are measured in epithets. No incident is completely described. Descriptions are heightened with fusion from true "kindled" eulogies of an oral history unknown. It sounds like our own lives when the editor of the Facsimile text (1910), J. Gwenogbryn Evans, says none has suffered like Taliesin: "hundreds of lines have been marred in transcription. Syllables, words, clauses, sentences, lines have been dropped, prefixes, endings, and catchwords repeated or substituted for the original phrasing." The songs of Taliesin have been attributed to various authors from the sixth through the fourteenth centuries and beyond. Evidently this is still going on. PDF, p. 7-12, now at Ygdrasil here.  

There is a backstory to the ongoing publication of the Taliesin Poems that is still continuing. The first of these was composed in my head, a villanelle, on a long night trip in Texas. It was a more finished villanelle in that incarnation than when it appeared in the the TQ in 1977. In this more laconic outing of 2018 I have changed the music to break the meter and the meaning further, although the form is still recognizable with a little grace of perception. The metric of long the days, and there is a harvest however demanded their cadence from the start and could not be altered. On of them was originally dedicated to Bill lee the akido teacher who first showed me Van de Weterings two zen books and loaned them to read. He gave me some of his Van der Posts too and the last bushman lingers behind these in solidarity. Four Clocks is a tanka, or was, but in the correspondence it had its own controversy. The plant is obviously a sonnet, one of a number rendered in the worship of God offerings in the Taliessin II, to appear. 

While parts of it appeared in print, also in Latitude 30, who were eager to get them and called me on the phone to confirm, they bounced another author in Taliesin’s favor, they never appeared online till now, which means they haven’t been read as they ought, for the agonies of war can’t be forgot. In 2011 another mag loved the poems but the superstructure around them was such a problem it threw all three of its editors serially. I tried to withdraw it from the first, but they would not, so the second and third, academic people bullozed themselves into knots of editorial process. The correspondence is relevant for  the contentions taken up between the confusion of the literal and the symbolic, still a concern at least somewhere in the U.