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Many noteworthy poets have wrought poetry out of their own creation myths, stories or theories. I think of Ted Hughes, and of Debora Greger, who claims that God has retired to Florida like everyone else. Well now we have V. Ulea who submitted a wonderful poem entitled 'The Shooting Star' for the last issue of Words-Myth and then sent me a copy of her book, 'About Angels, About God, About Poetry' and I should add, a
magical accompanying video. Inspired by a professor's ideas about an indeterministic, developing God, she was provoked into developing her own myth about the creation of angels. It must be contagious. Ulea's poems and ideas inspired me to write 'Creation Story for a Later Generation'. I have dared to publish it in the current issue.
The book begins with a double introduction; one by an anonymous voice, which
happens to be Horst-Jürgen Gerigk from the University of Heidleberg. He claims that she has written 'a didactic poem, a veritable Paradise Lost, but from a point of view that distinctly belongs to "our" turn-of-the-century'. The other introduction is by Ulea herself in which she begins by pointing out that in the bible there are no indications of how and when those winged creatures we know as angels, were created. Indeed the
initial premise is that God in his loneliness created angels, but because they are too
programmed, robotic, they become just a stepping stone on the road to the creation of man (and woman).
So it is about angels that we first learn; 'creatures strictly obedient and strictly
disobedient,' she writes. The two part, first section of some twenty-eight short poems is a delight. The poems' brevity helps to promote their clarity, and it is easy for the reader to invest in her clever ideas and inventiveness. She considers aspects such as the
angels' inability to reproduce, their dreams, their obsessions and politics, before
moving on to God's need for man, the birth of Eden etc. I should mention that on
almost every page, these poems are accompanied by or underlain by quite
remarkable illustrations from Irene Frenkl. The word and the drawing work
wonderfully together.
Some of my favorites lines in this initial section are from 'Extremes and the Golden Middle' (what a great title) in which she writes of angels:
They don't evolve. They simply switch
From one extreme of their life to another
Man, conversely, though a son of a bitch,
Develops, for he is from his Heavenly Father.
And I enjoyed the concepts in the following stanza from 'Cloning':
Purgatory was designed to purge the flute
From the voice. Here the soul loses weight,
For it's kept without any soulfood
And is filtered and distilled.
The second section is about God, his difficult childhood and evolution etc etc…
These concepts in themselves are tantalizing.
God's childhood was cheerless indeed.
He hung along dark nooks of the universe-
An abandoned orphan of His divine breed
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