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Monday, March 15, 2010

Poem that was selected as one of the six finalists in March 2010

For what it's worth -- but I'm pleased. Only 86 people actually voted -- so that my poem came in 5th of 6th is actually not saying tooooooo much, as the voting was 20% for the first one,
and trickled down in percentages to my 9% and the 6th poem at 8%. Perhaps I should have told people to vote -- but really, what is any of this about?????

I appreciated the comments people made! Wow. People I don't even know make comments!

Janus Slipping on His Other Face

I

Our two chairs angle towards the window
each of us holding a book
his about Inland Seas
and mine about potters in the Southwest,
who before disappearing

break a hole in the center of each pot
allowing its spirit
to join them in their burial grounds.

I imagine my father falling that way
through dusky space, as he slips away
from knowing January or memory
of the god in charge of gates,
beginnings, endings.


II

Silence strokes us,
licks our surface smooth
grooming each moment.

Outside, the ice is mystery—
uncut spirals,
shards of a rose window.


III

This might be the last time
he’ll be able to connect--
follow the thread of my words.
So I turn to the piano,
the sound loud enough for him to hear
and play a piece that doesn’t want a key

but dances and trills
until it settles calypso-style
like Venus standing on her seashell.

It cascades from the highest note
to end at the lowest.
We sit with two beats of marked silence.

Poem -- Ides of March

Having seen the film "Night of the Shooting Stars", it haunted me -- and strange that Caesar and Brutus should have struggled in the same way as the men in the film -- what is friendship -- why does belief in a system interfere... and how is it, that we care for our "own" and shoot the outsider... This poem looks at wind playing the oak -- of course, we know the wind can uproot the oak, as in La Fontaine, but the Oak is also bending away from civilization (the telephone wires), its masculine trunk and branches half-clad, wearing a feminine skirt -- and a meditation on brown is not bad -- how the etymology means "dark" -- how brown is actually composite -- chestnuts, reds, golds, earthy shades... and yes, enough road kill poems have been written -- but it still hurts to see animals felled by the roadside... and how do we participate in this? you too? you too? What is betrayal as we turn our eyes away.

Ides of March, 2010

Today, the wind is playing the oak
that bends away from the telephone wires.
It tussles at the brown curls and clusters of leaf

this brisk day in March in upstate New York
where no Brutus, no war, not even an earthquake
interrupts the insistent music of wind as it shimmies

the skirt of clinging leaf. Dashes of caramel, coffee
a hint of chocolate, catch on elbows and angles
of tree as mannequin before a new change of fashion.

The tune whispers in waves of ripe wheat,
something sinister, like the scene in Night of the Shooting Stars
where countrymen, divided by allegiances,

scatter like rabbits. The film plays the word survival
strong as Mussolini, or Americani or Verdi requiem,
as peasants snake through the sepia stalks of a Tuscan field.

Ripe crowns of grain shine in the red twilight,
broken by the sound of thrashing, like rattlesnakes,
the brittle shake of men about to escape or kill.

A German face is a Sicilian face, is a brother’s face
is a lover’s face, but so quickly forgotten:
a trio of men tending a fascisti

turns to ask for water from the trio tending a partigiani
and suddenly it is not about tending
as all grope for guns to shoot perceived enemies.

Back to the oak’s tune, above the road, where to the left,
lie the mangy remains of a raccoon, to the right,
a deer whose hindquarters gape in fresh red.

The wind picks up, and spruce boughs start to heave
under the cold diamond spit of rain.
Beyond the hum of the highway the echo of a coyote

as he sounds here is my turf
it resounds And you? And you?
Et tu …

submitted to i Poetry – poem of the month 3/15/2010
and sent to Dwain and Borderlines

March 15 -- Ides of March

Hayden Carruth :

What a poet… We discussed Father’s Day, Birthday Cake, The Cows at Night, The Heaviness (from Summer with Tu Fu).

Some of his magic:
 skillful line breaks;
 using syntax to enhance the weight of a word’s meaning
 layering of metaphor
 working vowels, assonance, alliteration, rhythms to create music that supports the meaning
 keen sense of paradox: combinations like ordinary improbability; almost paleolithic/perplexities; a young woman’s poetry to an old man’s; joy and its undersides; sorrow and its oversides

Reading aloud, each person, one line, made the skillful breaks more apparent.
I don’t know what fathers are
Supposed to do

What are fathers? and what are they supposed to do? Like a hinge, the double sense increases the weight of the question.

In this poem of 27, unrhymed lines, fairly evenly stacked into a stack, Carruth guides the reader to think about days assigned a special meaning on the calendar and just what it means to a Father to reflect on a father’s day. What starts out as a tongue-in-cheek version of the “best thing fathers in their prime can do is to make daughters and/More daughters; leads to the problem of insatiable wishing: we can never have enough. The poem might well be about fathers, daughters, but harkens to the problem of our human yearning for love, relationship, which is echoed so poignantly at the end in his plea to the cat to stay with him as long as he’s here.

The repetition of daughters with different syntax assigns each one with a different meaning. Daughters are:
-- a protection against loneliness and absurd atrocities of / Foreign policy
-- involved in the mysterious failure of the speaker to be successful and yet there is no blame… (we only know that something happened)
-- a cat can become a daughter

Because we do not know that the poem starts out addressing the cat, when we learn my dear refers to the cat, five lines before the end, it both hurts to see the speaker’s need
and his pain.

Two short sentences. Yes, I did. Truly you are. provide reassurances more to the speaker than to the cat but have the effect of endearing the speaker to the reader. We have been given a portrait of a tender, but wounded father.

In Birthday Cake, we learn more about the speaker. He is finishing a birthday cake his beloved hasn’t touched for five days which provides the details of his liking stale cake,
and she opening a fresh box of cereal before the old one is finished. The scene is set in a valley in March, with patterns of melting snow and goes on about the differences in the couple – man/woman, young/old, different styles of poetry in this season of differences
articulable differences that signify/deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic/perplexities in our lives, and still/ we love one another.
I want to cheer at the words that you love me, /confident in my amazement .
I am confident at his amazement of this love. It confirms my own – amazement, and love.

The Cows at Night ambles along in tercets, developing a sense of dark: night, brown shadows of mountain-dark. What saves this from a purely descriptive, pleasant poem
is the sentence in stanza 5: the cows. Always a shock,
of course you want to know what was in the stanza before (description of driving at night the an opening where he sees… the cows.) And after. The shock is not the cows, but the memory of them as great breathings which is echoed in the last stanza by that great darkness. He plays with the adjective sad and with repetitions, and creates a mood,
enhanced by not wanting to go, yet unable to explain anything at all.

The last poem, The Heaviness is a pure delight of heavy soundplay in a haiku-feel,
where words just won’t behave, and there, chattering, the sparrow have no problem with communicating!

I am glad for Hayden. He wrote in his signed copy of Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, April 5, 2005, “Thanks so much for coming”. Copper Canyon Press quotes him this way:
“Writing is first of all a way of being in the world, a functioning nub of relatedness. Hence my happiness, that frothy feeling, is now with me almost all the time.”

“A Portable Carruth is a useful tool” – Sam Hamill “A unique and complex life lived and recorded in poetry.” -- Richard Pokora, reader response.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

More Greek... in consideration of Maxine Kumin

Now, Greek, tossed about in an interview is quite a different matter.

In the January/February 2010 issue of The American Poetry Review, Chard DeNiord interviews Maxine Kumin. He summarizes her poetic "arc" and mentions "her abiding dialectic" between elegy and pastoral; and later, "if one reads your poems as voice-finding ventures from the start, he sees a fascinating dialectic throughout your career between rebellion and conformity, your Catholic upbringing and Jewish heritage, between received forms and free verse, between your atheism and periods of agnosticism, between your CHTHONIC strength as a women with extraordinary life force and the mystery of the awaiting darkness, between your anger and resentment toward American patriarchy and your hard-won liberation from it as a successful poet with a courageous feminine foice that increases in volume with each new book.

Wow. Kumin replies: That's a very rich summation. I can't step outside myself to see it "in toto", and I don't entirely agree.

DeNiord: It's only my summary of what I consider a remarkable arc. Please take issue with me at any point if you feel I have misrepresented you.

**
What a tone to try to understand without hearing the voice.
I LIKE Maxine Kumin's poetry -- but hearing it described in dry variations of dialectic and throwing in a word like CHTHONIC (which I have to look up every time I see it: maybe I'll remember now: earthy... but of course, there's more to it than that) and referring to her "georgics" and her "AGON with religion and patriarchy" (sic: conflict) takes away from the pleasure of what she writes.

One of the three poems next to the article is entitled "The Taste of Apple".

4 stanzas (octets) of unrhymed, irregular meter which tell the story of her horse with cancer, and how she fed him apple before the pentobarb, how she poured a libation of apple juice for the earth to welcome his corpse -- how she could hardly see-- / rocking my grief back and forth over this kind death / the taste of apple wasting in his mouth.

Perhaps this is "chthonic"... perhaps this is her "horse agonistes" -- but does this change the fact of a well-wielded poem? In the first octet, she announces the tumor in a five-line sentence, imitating the come-and-go of symptoms. BANG. "Truth rose in my mouth, a slurry of gall and wormwood/and I sent for the vet and the backhoe driver/who came together like football coaches conferring." The healer and the undertaker; but they are not the ones who will tell the outcome of the struggle. The precise language allows us to see the scene with the speaker's eyes, allow the reader to be right there, witnessing.

I don't want Greek terms for this. She is a great poet and well-read. She believes in narrative, even in lyric poems. Otherwise, she says, "it is hard to invest in the language of the poem, language without meaning of emotion." She knows form and uses it when necessary.
"When a subject is too hot to handle, I use the oven mitts of form."
I don't need to wade through DeNiord's pomp and circumstance to appreciate that.

Greek... embraced by Wilbur

In Richard Wilbur's poem, "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra"
the group stumbled on his use in the 11th quatrain of the word "arete", Greek for "virtue" but as with most greek terms, loaded with cultural value.

15 quatrains, in embraced rhyme.
crown/down embrace feet/eat

breaks/makes embraces fills/spills

It is as if Wilbur has thought carefully about the tensions of antonymes, about the impact of baroque art, and paid careful attention to the emotional intensity of the trapped figures in a fountain, the disparity of a stocky faun, a cherub whose feet are nibbled by a serpent,
but the heat of the poem lies in the the music of the water, struggling upwards, "until the very wish of water is reversed" and a marvellous description of its "gnatlike shimmering, in a fine/Illumined version of itself, decline, /And patter on the stones its own applause.

gauze/applause embraces fine/decline
are/bizarre embraces display/arrete

the descent is echoed in the form with the enjambements between Q1,2,3 with a pause of semi-colon in Q4: (the goatish innocence of his babes at play;)
Q5,6,7,8, 9 with a question mark in Q10.

The next question, (echoing the last line of Q7: Are we not / More intricately expressed/)
is contained in the hypothesis "If that is what men are..."
"What of these showered fauns in their bizarre,/ (enjambment, interrupting the enumerative list of adjectives, (spangled and plunging)

comparing us to the figures in the fountain -- and this spiritual "shade of bliss" dreamland,

and this haunting last quatrain which evokes for me a grave, sprinkled with God-light of the living, as the soul leaps upwards, relinquishing earthly pleasure.

"As near and far as grass
Where eyes becomes the sunlight, and the hand
Is worthy of water: the dreamt land
Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass."


**
People may ask why he spells "saecular" in a latinate form -- which will take you to look up the differences between secular (lay) and saecular and realize the poem is about earthly and spiritual realms, with allusions to Horace...
the trefoil, Maderna, St. Peter's, evoke the architecture of the Church; St. Francis at the end is the one given the vision of the earth as a "shade of bliss".

And arete? What is the pattern of our "arete"? how do we make our goodness, virtue, excellence visible?

Perhaps knowing these levels enhances the beauty of this poem

Haiku and Tanka... March 5

A chance to meet the RAHG (Rochester Area Haiku Group) and hear from their chapbook, Five Seasons.
Opening page:
Matsuo Basho's Instructions to poetry students:
Learn about Pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamoo.
Don't follow in the footsteps of the old poets; seek what they sought.
Don't imitate me; it's as boring as two halves of a melon.

**
Actually, two halves of a melon sounds appetizingly tasty and I don't see how that could be boring, except that when one is dissected, in such a way, there is the loss of melon as part of vine, the wholeness of its fruiting...

A haiku shared by Emily which goes straight to the heart:
Just in fun, I took up mother on my back
but he was so light that I broke down and cried
before I could take three steps.

for perspective:
Crane's legs
have gotten shorter
in the spring rain

A bee
staggers out
of the peony.

**
How satisfying to allow th emind to leap to a more profound reflection about ourselves, our consciousness and our relationship to the natural world (initial subject of the poem).

Poetry exists in EVERY culture -- Haiku is the most popular form INTERNATIONALLY --
perhaps because so much is said with such compressed elegance, attention to 31 syllables of music, in the space of a breath.

**
Here is Richard Wilbur's Tanka (from his collected poems --p. 11 of the section of new ones (2004)

Tanka

Black-and-white Holsteins
Crown downfield at feeding-time,
Mingling their blotches.
It is like ice breaking up
In a dark, swollen river.

**

Monday, March 8, 2010

Mahmoud Darwish -- March 4, 2010

3 aches from my heart's drought, finding rain.

"The Butterfly's Burden" translated by Fady Joudah, Darwish warns himself that the quarrel with others produces rhetoric, the quarrel with oneself produces poetry.
How can we understand the bass line of a poet's identity when the poet describes what it is to be in exile, understanding that the "other" is sometimes personal, sometimes geographical, sometimes political?

There is this uncanny feeling of sharing the sense of a stranger stumbling upon himself in a stranger, like a cloud, that unknown painter,
Playing, drawing "on the walls of the universe... And the poets build homes with clouds/then move on."

We discussed "the butterfly's burden" -- how such a boneless, winged creature carried pollen from one place to another -- perhaps the analogy being his homelessness in exile. He admired the poetry of Israeli, Amichai, but says "his poetry is a challenge to me, because we write about the same place. He wants to use the landscape and history for his own benefit, based on my destroyed identity. So we have a competition: who is the owner of the language of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better?"


How to understand the Arabic that would form the poems in "Unfortunately, It Was Paradise",
and all the blood involved in the dismantling of one's sense of place?

If you go to wikipedia, you find out that Darwich, considered Palestine’s National Poet, uses Palestine as metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile.
Central theme : watan or homeland. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye wrote that Darwish "is the essential breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging...

Style: his earlier work follows classical Arabic form, metrics, (shi’r= poetry) but influenced by Rimbaud and Ginsburg, he developed a free verse style (shi’r hurr) which used uneven lines, emjambment, irregular rhymes so as to match the rhythm of the poem with its meaning and atmosphere.

The French translation :
Je vide l’âme de ses derniers mots. (I empty my soul of his last words.)
Dans le depart, les papillons guident nos âmes. (In departure, butterflies guide our souls.)

fi el rahil takovdov el faraschaf