The Spirit Flies Free: The Kundalini Poems
Neil Bethell Sinclair
The Spirit Flies Free: The Kundalini Poems
Neil Bethell Sinclair
Reviewed by Araminta Matthews
I once had a great undergraduate professor for one of my myriad creative writing classes, John D’Agata, who helped foster the growth of a seed in me that otherwise would have remained cold in the shallow earth that was my post-adolescent self. I had written a short story in which I had used the line “He ripped through her like teeth through meat.” John asked, “But what does that feel like?” Blinking, I answered “Um, like teeth through meat…” He sighed, looked hard at me and said again, “But, Araminta, what does that feel like?” If I have taken anything from seven years of formal training in creativity and writing, it is this: if your reader can’t feel/sense/experience the crux of the moment, allow it to pass lightly wet over the lips and drench the mouth with flavor, then the reader can’t fathom the depths you wish to plumb. While Neil Bethell Sinclair’s audience is likely to be folks with a deeply rooted interest and understanding of Kundalini practice, his book The Spirit Flies Free is hard to chew, much less tear, through.
Poems such as “The Zen of Kindness” and “As the Sequence of Hexagrams Evolves” are riddled with heavy, lifeless words that have no feeling. The former begins with “To One’s self / The interior world / Through diet and hygiene / Exercise and stretching / Emotional moderation / Not too much nor too little / Not too hard nor too soft / Seeking the golden mean” (lines 1-8, p.47). While this poem’s start would make a great reference book for guiding one’s self through the interior world of the kundalini process, it makes for very dry poetry. The latter poem feels more pretentious when it suggests “At once yin and yang / To the detriment of the Tong / The mysterious coupling rearranges” (lines 3-6, p. 18). With words like “detriment” and “coupling”, the entire poem seems addled with “this rotten diction” of which Emerson speaks in “Language”. As a result, his work reads like stereo instructions or medical textbooks, corpse-cold and gasping. To a Kundalini n00b, these poems would be lost in the ether, disconnected from anything real. I suspect that only a Kundalini heavy-weight champion could lift these poems off the bar.
On the other hand, Sinclair does have a handful of
solid
work. “There Are No Holy Men”, for
example, turns the phrase “. . . barren / as the ribs of a ship” (line
4-5, p.
46) – a phrase that creates a kind of ache behind my reaching
fingertips. And “How Metaphors Are Formed”
churns out “peering
behind the curtain of the mind” (line 1, p. 107). Indeed,
with a little polish, I think
Sinclair could really shine if for no other reason than he demonstrates
a
devotion to the craft, a comprehension of vocabulary, and the
willingness to
tackle a subject often left out of Western literature.
After he takes a few writing classes or at least
some professional workshops, I would definitely be willing to pick up
another
Sinclair collection. Until then.