Streams

By Joseph Kent

“The poems swirl in and out of things, always bearing a spiritual presence. . . . [Kent’s] poems are hinges around which humans swing to close and open the doors of perception. . . . We come to life in these poems of greater being.”
—The Book Reader

“Joseph Kent’s second collection of poems, Stream

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Dec 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781643453200

Joseph Kent

Joseph Kent was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a graduate of the California Institute of Integral Studies, with a graduate degree from Antioch University. He lives in San Francisco, and has been published in magazines, quarterlies, journals, and anthologies, including Collaboration, Mother India, In The Company of Poets, California State Poetry Quarterly, The Irreversible Man, and New Poets Anthology. Flowers of The Sun is Joseph Kent's third published book.

Book preview

Foreword

Joseph Kent’s second collection of poems, Streams, is an advance in consciousness and perception, a further transmutation of the mundane into a poetry that leaps beyond existence and knowledge into an integral fullness of spirit. The title poem of the collection states what the journey Joseph is embarked on is about: Anywhere on earth/in lonely treks/of yearning untold/hidden streams/ colonize light . . . .

Each poem is a stream that Kent follows. A poet still rooted in this earthly world, he appropriates to himself the light, as well as delight or Ananda, of a higher world, in words he makes his own and ours. Poets before him, and poets to come, have sought, and will seek, to bridge the mundane world of our everyday existence and that other, more tenuous home of the spirit, of what is higher within us. What Joseph does is to take us from one level of consciousness to another, then back again, leaving in us, by the end of the poem, an awareness of the one transmogrified by the light of the other, thereby enriching our inner world.

Sometimes we are left with a sense of loss that, trapped in one world, we are unable to linger in the other for more than a few poetic moments of time. Yet, after all the poems have been read and digested, what is left is an anticipation that we, in this world, are capable of living in both simultaneously, that the worlds blend and harmonize, and that there is a whole, a spiritualization of flesh and a materialization of spirit and light into bone and blood.

It was just after noon

when I walked along the Charles

a glow on my original face

before I was born

(The Way)

And a silent prayer of homage

rose for the ordinance

of clouds

(Drought’s End)

dreams in eidolons of Being

and Becoming

waxes in the play of

eternal streams

…

even in the streets

and workaday world

…

or going through traffic

to Maria’s house

(Reflections)

The key poem, for me, is Your Light. Joseph quotes Sri Aurobindo to introduce the poem. The world is here to manifest the unmanifest. This poem expresses the poet’s own philosophy as we near the new millennium, as well as an aspiration that is universal in its appeal, and one, I, for instance, share. The words resound:

Cling to your dream in the waking world