Areas of Interest

The following is a compendium of areas of interest I wish to continue to pursue in both teaching and writing along an interdisciplinary trajectory. I am interested in:

• Odysseus in America
• the cross section or crossroads of Poetry, Mythology, Depth- Psychology and Phenomenology of the Body Meet. Body as locus of meeting and meaning.
• Power and evocative quality of poetic image on psyche - its internal phenomenology.
• The power and dynamics of evocation, provocation, correspondence.
• Memory's ability to create myth or to be the territory from which myth is born.
• Metaphor as the mother tongue of mythos-muthos-mouthos.
• Mytho-poetics or mythopoiesis.
• Mimesis
• Poetic form, organic form, poetry's formed and informed shape.
• Power of narratives to shift, broaden, deepen, enlighten our own fictional selves.
• Poetry as a vehicle to help us carry or cross over into underworld, to be placed in under-standing, to see what the poet saw, and more.
• Finding or discovering one's own language.
• Finding or discovering one's own voice.
• To grasp in the poetic narrative the birth and growth of mytho-poiesis.
• To understand the deeper implications of literary genres - lyric, tragedy, comedy and epic - as territories of the soul.
• To grasp the above, to map them, to create something from them that is unique, new, while keeping attachments to the tradition.
• The meaning of yielding or submitting to the world of the poem - to its fullest mundus imaginalis - to then see as the poet saw.
• To sidestep the tendency to make of poetry sociology, psychology, or a cultural artifact.
• Not to see within but to see FROM within.
• To discern and articulate how poetry is a form of unique knowing, not through characters but through its archetypal ACTION.
• Poiesis as gnosis.
• To understand and recognize Aristotle's PRIMAL PLOT
• To discern the 4 levels of a poem's development, beginning with
• THE LITERAL/POLITICAL OR MYTHIC/ TROPOLOGICAL OR MORAL/THE ANAGOGICAL - the realm of spirit, final ends, some form of redemption.
• To pay attention to the poem' own HERMENEUSIS.
• To seek the deep core secret contained deep in the poem's invisible center.
• To articulate psyche's poetic nature, poetic impulse.
• To consider energy fields of genre - how the energy of Tragedy, for example, differs from that of Epic.
• The power of poetic language to work the psyche, to evoke a vision, insight, revelation, that one calls his/her own. Then to give it a form in language.
• How poetry nourishes the spiritual life of the individual