The Next Big Thing!
My book of poetry is now available through various sources. It covers 40 years of reflection and is for me surprisingly coherent. As a statement of pragmatic spirituality, poetic theory, and personal struggle it maps out many of the elements of a ‘life well lived’. Here is one poem from the book and my Prologue.
Prologue
There are two sides to this book of poems and my friend, colleague and guide in the body-wisdom tradition of InterPlay, Cynthia Winton-Henry pointed this out. There is both the poet and the academic at play here. In order to honour both ‘voices’ or ‘selves’ I therefore offer two prefatory statements. The first is from the heart-head; the second from the head-heart. The hyphen in both represents the spirit, which in my life has always disturbed the peace whilst simultaneously grounding me both in times of darkness and light.
***
Here you have a book of my poetry and reflections. It’s strange to state this, as words for me are phantom things that hint at deeper realities and poetry has always been at the heart of my thinking. Not the mechanics of words and intentions, structure and word play, but the penumbral possibilities that lurk alongside metaphor, cultural clues and organic being. For me poetry is one of the many routes to engaging with the world. It is a powerful route and it is also a privileged route. Poetry requires time. Time to meditate; to dream; to yearn; to mourn; to return to old stories with new eyes.
Poetry is also, for me at least, a way to plumb my relationship with a sense of the divine. A Cosmic agent that is at play in the world, my world. A personal space in which I inhabit many skins. A communal space in which sharing our loves and hopes, our fears and shades rub up against wild imaginings, archetypal escapades and evolutionary forces at work all around us and in us.
The sensuality of this mix cannot be denied. I am body dancing across time, voices whispering in dreams, senses feeling into this world to discover a new set of senses that help me in the spiritual and cultural work of stepping into, and out of, frames that seek to tie us down. Memory is a sense for me, not a function of mind; Foresight too is a sense as is my own Voice — as me actively being in the world, but not of it. Optimism is also a sense in this way, as it drags me back again and again to the Work of becoming ever more than what we think we are. Yearning too is a sense as it pulls me ever on when I am getting dulled to the world as it is perceived and constructed. We humans always yearn for Greater Things.
So, in these pages you will find my heart-head in giddy moments of word play in a world of fragments. As an embodied scholar of life, I dance it, love it and live it as much as I can. For me the straight line is not the shortest distance between two points but a red herring in a world of short-cuts. There are no short-cuts in life or poetry. There is only the Work and at the heart of this travail is love. Perhaps love is the shortest distance? I have found it so.
***
Poetry is a way of understanding the world. It is a critical and disruptive inquiry beneath the surface of the assumed ‘real’. This theoretical dimension to poetry is key to its liberating and even redemptive power. In my poetry, my spiritual explorations tie in with my concern and love for the material world. This tying in, is not simply a neat meshing, it is a critical spiritual engagement in which I theorise my intimate relationship with traditions of becoming human. In this way the engagement with the world is part of a broader spiritual project in which service to and co-evolution with the world become the basis for a renewed criticality. This is my head-heart Work.
Critical spirituality offers us a poetics that challenges the present, not by denying it but by extending it. For me poetry is the expression of my inquiry into my being human and what it means to look to the future for alternatives. It is an expression of my futures voice. As such, I am deploying an anticipatory aesthetic in each poem. In fact, I see a preoccupation with the embodied nature of being, going back to my earliest poems. There I find tradition and form along with a sense of the power of dance, play and joy at work informing emergent alternatives to the closed futures being forced upon us.
The poet Fay Zwicky says this best when she observed:
“Poetry has always seemed to me a source of hope, a means of speaking against any orthodoxy, bit it religious, political, or social. It has offered a place for the dissenting imagination that hankers to encompass not only the truth of what is, what has been, but what might be or what might have been.”[1]
Reading and writing poetry is an act of resistance because a poem can make the mundane remarkable and also convey the subtle. Seeing our world in this way, accessing a dissenting imagination, lays the foundation for a transformative praxis of becoming a little freer of the conditioned being imposed on us by the habits governing heart, mind and body.
I find that relation is a common thread throughout these poems. Hence my family life links closely with my connection with the shimmering Cosmos and the many pasts and futures that are always at play. Deep traditions are also alive here linking my Western birth tradition with my engagement with India and Tantra. Thus, my guru Shrii Shrii Anandamurti is often between the lines in these poems and his presence cannot be underestimated.
Overall however, this small collection speaks to many pathways that inform my poetic odyssey to return to Home — a spiritual and embodied place where Being and Becoming are experienced in the body wisdom and yearning that underwrites our humanity and the remarkable capacity we all have within us to overturn accepted realities.
Marcus Bussey
[1] Fay Zwicky, (2000). ‘Border Crossings’ in Dougan, L and Dolan, T., eds. (2017) The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky. University of Western Australia Press, p. 24.
