Nine Poems Discussed Relating to Closure
Billy Collins, "The Dead", Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001)— all four closures
Philip Larkin, "Reason for Attendance", The Less Deceived (1989)— discursive closure
W.S. Merwin, "Going", The Shadow of Sirius— visual, syntactic, contextual closure
Jane Kenyon, "Inpatient", The Boat of Quiet Hours (2005)— discursive syntactic closure
Kenneth Rosen, "The Cold that Owns Us", Origins of Tragedy (2003)— nondiscursive closure
Tomas Transtromer, "After a Death", Robin Fulton (2006)— nondiscursive closure
Kay Ryan, "Blunt", Say Uncle (2000)— nondiscursive closure
Carol Ann Duffy, "Miles Away", Selected Poems (2009)— metaphor for holistic
Charles Simic, "The Altar", Night Picnic (2001)— metaphor for holistic
Also discussed: Eyjolfur Kjalar Emilsson, Plotinus on Intellect (2007)— "all-at-once" seeing

Cited Poems that I Like
I like Billy Collins's "The Dead"— short and simple. The dead are waiting for us "like parents, for us to close our eyes" is indeed a rich image of closure. Our parents watch us as a child falling asleep. Collins' syntax "close our eyes" is a fitting ending for the poem. Transtromer's "After a Death" appealed to me since I've seen lots of Kurosawa films on Japanese samurai. I've not realized the connection of the samurai's armor like "black dragon scales" until Transtromer used this to compare it to grief of someone we care about who has died. Merwin's "Going" made me think more about the casual word "goodbye" that's connected to "May God be with you" when we say this common word to people who leaves us after a visit or going away on a trip. Kay Ryan's "Blunt" teaches us that if we could love the blunt, we would be more satisfied with our life. The image of seaweed to conversation was a surprise but perfect for disappointments we have in life.

Emilsson's Plotinus on the Intellect
Poets present a different angle of vision on life that is a nourishment for readers. The nine poets cited in this chapter certainly offer surprising insights that made me go back and reread their poems— the meaning of poetic closure. Then out of the blue, Dobyns cites Plotinus, perhaps the greatest visionary of them all, and one of my favorite sages and spiritual mentors. Plotinus (204-270 AD) was the founder of Neoplatonism, whose writings on the soul in his Enneads influenced Saint Augustine & Saint Thomas Aquinas (medieval scholasticism), Marsilio Ficino (spearheading Italian Renaissance), Thomas Taylor (inspiring Cambridge Platonists & Romantic poets), Goethe (German romanticism & philosophy), Emerson (American Transcendentlists), and Carl Jung (modern psychology). His disciple Porphyry relates that Plotinus attained union with the One (henosis) four times during the years he knew him. Richard Bucke, lifetime friend of Walt Whitman, in his Cosmic Consciousness regards Plotinus's enlightenment equal to that of Buddha. I included Plotinus: The Enneads in the anthology of my favorite poets. Emilssson says that Plotinus wrote of the nondiscursive as wisdom communicated in its all-at-once state. In Aristotle, it is the immediate grasp of an essence." I recall reading Aristotle (Poetics, Book XXII) that a poet must "have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances." When I did research in protein structures, it was such a joy seeing the underlying architecture of helices, β-sheets, reverse turns, and random coils, that I was able to predict protein conformation from amino acid sequences at a glance without computer calculations. When I began writing poetry, Aristotle's "command of metaphor" was the goal I set for myself to see connections in everything among differences. Emilsson continues “the experience of thinking nondiscursively has about it a clarity and immediacy concerning multiple conceptual relationships that vision has about spatial ones... What Plotinus seems to be suggesting is a vision-like experience of the region of concepts... that is not structured in the manner of propositions... Its apprehension of these things is not broken up into separate components... Rather, grasping beauty is a matter of 'seeing' a lot of things, 'all together'” (Dobyns, p. 219) (Image: Emilsson's Plotinus on the Intellect)

Further Thoughts on Plotinus
For my 16-lines quatrain poem this week on "The Kiss of Bliss", I wrote about Mercedes de Acosta, the socialite who made love to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Isadora Duncan, as well as some dozen Hollywood starlets, artists, and dancers. Yet, she was not a happy person and died alone in poverty. She dedicated her autobiography Here Lies the Heart to Ramana Maharshi, the Hindu sage whom she met for three days (1938) and experienced a sense of bliss more so than all her sexual conquests. Mercedes should have read this passage from Plotinus's The Enneads, V.8.2: "The Nature, then, which creates things so lovely must be itself of a far earlier beauty; we, undisciplined in discernment of the inward, knowing nothing of it [Intellectual Beauty], run after the outer, never understanding that it is the inner which stirs us; we are in the case of one who sees his own reflection but not realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it." (Plotinus, The Enneads, Eighth Tractate: On the Intellectual Beauty", 4th Edition, 1969, p. 423). Here are my Notes to poem "Song of the Self"— I've changed Whitman's "I stop some where" to "I go everywhere" in the last line of my poem as I see the Great Spirit to be never stagnant and ever moving. It is everywhere so we need not even move anywhere to find it since It is us! I had a small satori when I realized that the name of the enlightened sage Plotinus is an anagram for "Plot in us"— the "story in us" is the Great Soul that poets have been singing all along. Whitman did this in "Song of Myself" and I've tried while writing "Song of the Self" (February 4, 2009).