“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

3. I’ve also suggested to Jane that she might be able to incorporate into her story about Billy and Mitzi the little poem below. It’s from a number of sketches and untitled poems she did as a birthday book for me last June:

[...] He’s also written a number of poems. [...]

Today, Jane wrote three more excellent little poems, all of which I hope to eventually see published.² I think she grumbled the whole time she was doing them, though, since she kept at herself because she wasn’t working on God of Jane.

(Yesterday Jane began writing a rather long poem, in Sumari, that she calls The Song of the Silver Brothers. [...] As the work progressed she found herself actually writing two poems together, for after each verse of Sumari she did its English counterpart. [...]

(When Jane went back to the poem this afternoon, her heightened sensations returned in a considerably intensified form. [...]

[...] His poem last night took a good full 20 minutes (with amused irony). [...] Someone could work at a poem for eight hours, and have nothing. He wrote the poem because he felt like it—scandalous behavior—and also because he had expressed his feelings and written them down.

(Jane’s poem is excellent, and concerns Jim Poett’s interview for the Village Voice.)

6. My ever-present concern for Jane would certainly have turned into outright fear had I seen at once the long, untitled poem she wrote on August 26, concurrently with her work on the second chapter for Magical Approach. She didn’t put the poem into its final form, and she didn’t show it to me. [...] Neither of us may tell or show the other everything—I just hadn’t been present when she wrote the poem, and she let it lie in her 1981 journal, where I “accidentally” came across it some time later. Even when I did find the poem I became sad, then frightened, then more hopeful as I read it, and I knew at once that I’d have to insert it here in Dreams. For Jane had been depressed when she wrote her poem. [...] In the poem I saw expressed anew her ancient fear of abandonment, along with her dilemmas over her lack of mobility—and my fright was engendered by what I thought were signs that she might choose to leave this physical reality for good. [...]

I cherished Jane’s ending for her poem, for in it she’d reaffirmed at least the possibility of her self healing itself. [...] I was left caught as we talked after I’d read her poem: suspended between despair for my wife and the hope that she would choose to go on living, in our terms.

[...] In relief, Jane wrote a short poem to accompany Seth’s message, then wrote further that she “realized that like many I’d become afraid of faith itself.” [...]

(Note: March 1, 3:05 p.m. Jane read this poem, and the one for February 29, quite easily without her glasses. [...]

(A note by R. F. B.: This is the second and last verse of a poem Jane wrote in April, 1952, when she was 23 years old. [...]

(Today Jane wrote two poems — one of them several pages long — that, she said, fit into the scheme of her potential book of poetry, Dialogues of the Speakers. See the notes prefacing the 653rd session for April 4, in Chapter Thirteen, describing how she gave birth to the original long Speaker poem while in an altered state of consciousness. [...]

(From 3:47 to 3:57 Jane dictated this poem to me.

2. We moved from our downtown apartments into the hill house almost five years ago (in March 1975), but Jane thinks she tried to write the poem Seth referred to several years before that. (She began speaking for Seth late in 1963.) I have no memory of her struggling with such a poem. [...] “But I know I didn’t throw out whatever I did on that poem,” Jane said. [...]

Ruburt glimpsed some of the principles involved when you were at [your downtown apartments] on several occasions—once when he tried to write a poem about the comprehensions that simply would not be verbalized.² I do not know how to explain some of this, but in your terms there is (underlined) light within (underlined) darkness. [...]

(We searched through If We Live Again, looking for a certain poem she’d written in January 1980, in connection with a session I’m typing for Dreams, but when we found the poem it was not the one we wanted. [...]

(Note: Jane sang this poem as she read it on March 13 — quite good. [...]

[...] I quoted a poem (on animal consciousness) from a book of sketches and untitled poetry that Jane had created for my birthday last June. These two poems from the same little book fit in well here:

[...] This led to another group of poems, The Speakers. To me this all means that there is a rich vein of creativity and knowledge available to each according to his abilities, just beneath the surface of usual consciousness. [...]

[...] Seth often refers to the poems and to the experiences that initiated them. [...]

[...] For example, the novel included many Sumari poems and portions of Speaker manuscripts; and when I sing Sumari I identify with Cyprus, who is supposed to be a fictional character. [...]

(Jane also sent two more poems on the subject to the newspaper. The first poem she sent in has been scheduled for publication. [...]

[...] I did incidentally watch Ruburt write one of his poems about the starlings, and though poetry was never one of my lines I have to admit that I was quite impressed.

(“Which poem was it?”)

[...] I always want to give this particular session a title: “The Breather and the Dreamer,” because as a result of the session, I wrote a poem with that title — one of three poems inspired by Seth’s discussion that night. [...]

[...] The next day, the session inspired me to write the following poem.

If the twenty-third session roused me to write the poem, it also impressed Rob deeply enough so that he tried a rather complicated experiment with the inner senses — without letting his conscious mind know what he was up to.

The material was received, transformed into a poem, distorted in the last two or three lines where the prerequisites of technique involved the addition of a word that added a distorted meaning. [...]

(“What was the distortive word in the Kennedy poem? [...]

(A copy of this poem will be found at the end of the session. [...]

[...] During the evening we played some tapes also, and among these was one of the recordings Jane made of G. K. Chesterton’s poem Lepanto; Jane was in a trance state while reading this, apparently in a close approximation of the voice of her now dead friend, Father Trainor. Lepanto was Father Trainor’s favorite poem. [...]

(A recount since last session reveals that the total number of poems should be revised upward, to 63, produced in the same amount of time. In giving me the first set of figures Jane counted the pages in the book of poetry, forgetting that there were two poems on some pages.

[...] It will be noted that on the four days, January 21, 24, 25, 26, Jane wrote 52 poems in the course of from 16-18 1/2 hours.

[...] The result was a nine-page poem called Dialogues of the Speakers, which may or may not continue into a book. [...]

(“As I came to the end of the long poem in mid-afternoon, I had more and more difficulty describing my feelings, and even in typing. [...]

[...] I began to sense the Speakers’ ‘massive lives,’ and I realized that I had gone beyond the poem. [...]

[...] At 11:30 she went back into the Sumari trance and delivered the balance of the poem. It isn’t included here since she has made her own copies for her Sumari notebook, of this one and the three poems that subsequently followed. My original notes contain a list of the times each poem took – only a few minutes – plus a few comments. [...]

[...] I thought her performance remarkable, and the poems of high quality. [...]