| Drama, Poems, Essays |
NOTE ON
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Dictionaries list several pronunciations for the word "lazuli." In this poem please pronounce it as "LAZ-you-lie." # # # I seem to remember beginning "Eyes of Lapis Lazuli" in the fall of 1973, but my dated pages indicate it was actually about February 1974. This is one of the few poems where I remember the circumstances in which I wrote it. I was sleeping in my third floor front room at 364 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto, when I heard voices. I lay drowsy with lines coming to me in my head. After a few minutes I thought, "I should write this down." I got up and did. It was the part beginning "dying in the garden" (now part of section two of the poem). It was alittle different, but had the mixture of English and French that it has now. At the time I was heavily under the influence of the courses I was taking on Modern Poetry, especially the influence of Eliot, Joyce and Pound. (Later, I decided I preferred the more active style of Yeats, so some of the Eliotish parts moved in a Yeatsian direction.) I worked on the poem for several months. In April or May 1974 I showed it to a few of my fellow students in English. One, Barbara Winter, made a couple of very minor suggestions about what is now Section 6. I think I took them. One of the most exciting days in my life was in May 1974. I worked on the poem in my room all morning and into the afternoon, then copied the six-page version I had then on some old A.B. Dick copiers at the Robarts Library. I remember that the "paper" these copiers used was oily, slippery, shiny crap. I felt like the king of the world. I went on revising "Lapis" for years. It got to be about 25 or 26 pages long. Then I began to shorten it. For a while in the 1980s, perhaps under the influence of Nabokov's Pale Fire I conceived of the poem as a Coles Notes edition of itself by a pedantic future scholar. I imagined it as having one of those yellow and black striped covers common to Cliff's Notes and Coles Notes. I wrote surrounding matter by the professor. He was humorously incompetent. About 1984 my friend Phil Paine said I didn't need any of this. I realized he was right and chucked it. I enjoyed the poem inordinately for years -- until about 1995. Then I realized that the main thing it lacked, a strong narrative, was a major problem and defect. When I went to convert the poem to HTML, I realized that that language was poorly designed for poetry. I have made numerous attempts to get around this, but they have all been partly unsatisfactory. "Lapis" was designed for the printed paper page, as transliterated and transspaced from a typescript. My efforts so far have failed to produce a suitable transformation into XHTML. But as of today I am still trying. The poem needs compression and clarification, and, possibly, some elimination of unnecessary help to the reader. [To Be Revised] Last modified: 6:17 PM 16/09/2003 |