Purple Chicken Presente: Imaginary poets

 Look, if RantWoman doesn't get the purple chicken image plastered onto this post, RantWoman is still trying to center down for Annual Session and for another not entirely parallel event and for, eek, entering a new decade of life TOMORROW.

RantWoman is still channeling George Fox about walking cheerfully on the earth (digressions ALWAYS available about walkability) about walk cheerfully on the earth answering that of God in everyone. RantWoman still put on her socks that say HEART on the bottom of one foot and HOPE on the bottom of the other.

 RantWoman has lined up provisions for the cat who again thie year is probably grateful she does not have to endure Strangers visiting just to be fed.

RantWoman is sitting with what really needs to be said where about many themes.

But first we celebrate Witness Wednesday, again with faces growing more familiar, again with provocative prompts.

Alicia McBride will host our time together with the following prompt and query to guide our shared reflection.  

Prompt for Reflection

I try to get rid of what I learned,
I try to forget the way I was taught to remember,
And to scrape off the paint they used to cover my senses.

~ Alberto Caeiro, “The Essential”

Query: What are you ready to get rid of, forget, or scrape off to more truly see?

RantWoman arrived late and decided she needed to consult Google to worship in greater centeredness. RantWoman does not apologize for celebrating what she found:

Who is this Alberto Caeiro?

RantWoman will refrain for now from too many literary excursions. RantWoman in worship also refrined from going off about scraping away and seeing. In RantWoman's case scraping away WILL NOT HeHEL. RantWoman does not getto repent of vision loss. RantWoman is still trying for love and Truth. dition 

From Promo for The Complete works of Alberto Caiero

Here we finally see these poems as they ought to be seen… When I read Pessoa (in his own voice and in the voices of his heteronyms), what I am left with, rather than answers, or even questions, is a feeling, the embarrassment of a genuine sensation, one I might sheepishly call love.

—Tyler Malone, Poetry Foundation

A bilingual companion to The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa

The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro

Poetry by Fernando Pessoa

Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull CostaPatricio Ferrari

Edited by Jerónimo PizarroPatricio Ferrari

Here, in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari’s splendid new translations, are the complete poems of Alberto Caeiro, the imaginary master of the “heteronym” coterie created by the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa conceived Caeiro around 1914 and may have named him loosely after his friend, the poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro. What followed was a collection of some of Fernando Pessoa’s greatest poems, grouped under the titles The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love, and Uncollected Poems. This imaginary author was a shepherd who spent most of his life in the countryside, had almost no education, and was ignorant of most literature; yet he (Pessoa) wrote some of the most beautiful and profound poems in Portuguese literature. This edition of The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro is based on the magnificent Portuguese Tinta-da-china critical edition, published in Lisbon in 2016, and contains an illuminating introduction by the editors, Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, some facsimiles of the original Portuguese texts, and prose excerpts about Caeiro and his work written by Fernando Pessoa as well as his heteronyms Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, and other fictitious authors such as Antonio Mora and I. I. Crosse.

Editions: Paperback

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