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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

poems for Feb 22 and 29

The Tao of Touch by Marge Piercy
The Moose -- Elizabeth Bishop
The Snake—D.H. Lawrence
Song of a Man Who Has Come Through – D.H. Lawrence
To the Hawks
McNamara, Rusk, Bundy (by Donald Justice)

Unwise Purchases – George Bilgere

The art most attentive to pattern is poetry. For the next two weeks, we will look at
how rhythm and syntax operate in poems, and what effect this has on our response as reader. The Bishop, Lawrence, Justice poems cited above come from Ellen Bryant Voigt's book, "The Art of Syntax" (rhythm of thought, rhythm of song).

Monday, February 13, 2012

Poems for February 15 + Love in different forms!

With Valentine’s Day coming up, let’s compare different styles from different ages! We’ll compare how Jean de Sponde (Joanes Ezponda, in Basque, 1557 – 18 March 1595) a Baroque French poet, and contemporary American poet Richard Wakefield play with love’s “position”, skip back to 19th century England, for a glimpse of Dante and Petrarch provided by Christina Georgina Rossetti. One of the Valentine postcards available from Poets.org I showed last week included lines from by ee cummings somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond. Feel free to bring in one of your favorites to share. For a list of “love poems” consult the RH column at this site:
http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/389 :
The poem by Jane Kenyon is simply a different seasonal selection, which like the one by Farouk Asvat balances idealized notions Hallmark provides of Valentine’s day.
With love,
Kitty
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
by E. E. Cummings
Writing about Love – by Richard Wakefield
Monna Innominata [I wish I could remember)by Christina Rossetti
Sonnets on Love XIII by Jean de Sponde (translated by David R. Slavitt)
Bright Sun after Heavy Snow by Jane Kenyon
Often I have thought of you-- by Farouk Asvat


. ee cummings with his play on "close" as verb pronounced almost like "clothes" and close as adjective — the frail gesture entering again as intense fragility… the parentheses working like two hands cupping the voice of the eyes…
Emily was reminded of this: My Star – by Robert Browning — and recited it all by heart!
All that I know
Of a certain star,
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue,
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

And to go on to the poem by Wakefield — did you see how LOVE made a vertical column from title to last word? How two of the "love" were in quotes — as it is a poem about writing about love… How he moves the poem, in iambic pentameter, from right to left, starting with the word "Love" iambic pentameter going to the right,starting with the word "Love" and slowly moves it one foot at a time so that the poem's ultimate line (still in iambic pentameter) ends with the word love?
David Sanders (retired prof ) recently joined the group and is writing the introduction to Richard Wakefield's new book, called A Vertical Mole ...
It is great to see form in contemporary poetry which is not contrived. Love is not easy to write about — but using love as the spine of the thing, his rhymed couplets moving, so the rhyme doesn't clunk, the natural images leave us believing the stick of love for all its flowing away, will continue to surface.

Long discussion about Rosetti and looking at her sonnet, starting the Octet, with "I wish I could remember"… The sestet with "if only I could recollect" replete with more vigor, exclamations… what is it she remembers? Perhaps a feminist slant would be — I wish I could have a happier memory to work with"

The Jean de Sponde (Golden age of Spanish poetry — late 16th c.) had a positive "ooo" rating. Maura said it could fit in Lois Wyse's book, "Poems for the very married". Martin commented that in this one, it is more about Faith, than simply the importance of love — a faith that love can change the world.Do you believe that things CAN change if rooted in love ?

The Jane Kenyon poem felt negative after all these doses of love… Marcie did a great summary: It's a pissy poem, the kind you could write if you have cabin fever — and ends on that wooden pin going up and down like a (third) finger that says
f… you, or fling it, in its own clothespin language.

The last poem, I didn't say anything about any of the names mentioned — but it helped to know about Carolyn Forche, her activism, the S. American scene.
The punctuation really works in the beginning of the poem.

There is a kind of death
In the land of my birth,
Offering me another cup of sadness:

That is all there is.

Yet,
Often,
I have thought of you:

the rest of the poem follows this second colon...

One stops at the line
We give sustenance
To the memories stacked upon memories

which continues

Of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
Thinking of their dear departed
The detained
The dead
And the disappeared,
Our beloved desaparecidos.

The reader is part of this "our", even if we have not witnessed El Salvador,
or other places like it.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

discussion of poems 2/8: Stevens, Wright, Schlaifer, Mueller

What a blessing to have a group with whom to share discussion of poetry -- 16 different lenses today to view the poems.
To give a flavor of our exchange:
It was a fun session… Wallace Stevens is never easy, but it was great to have 16 minds trying to figure out "time" -- which took us all over the map --
You can't see it, know it, understand it, start/stop it, and just what is it? Stevens implies a platonic trio of good, beauty, truth, with time winding itself into it, but it is navel gazing, to wonder about time, see it as music beat, heart heat, breathing, an emptiness waiting for song. Our mind needs parameters… like having Friday — we say TGIF only if we are working and Friday means the end of the work week. What is the relationship between time and change? What is change but something that hinges between one state and another,
One place or time… time as season, as era, as hour and what is the speed of time, as light… Of course the poetics with the repetitions, beat / batters/…the echoes of hooded in book;
Walker in taut; the dark images work well… only for him to shrug and move from the spells of "inimical music" in enchantered space — perhaps what Schlaifer in her poem "Swath" was creating with the stanza w/ the Rothko and Mueller with her second sentence about the crippled lovers waiting (some shrill sign, some cry, some screaming cat that smells a sacrific and spells them thunder).

The James Wright gave us a foil for Stevens' tercets or Mueller's sonnet, with a poem that flows. The first four lines whittle to a one syllable: now. 3 views the moon's young (owlets maybe?) the slender woman (moon goddess?) and I. Whether it is anthropomorphism of a touch of American Indian that stills us — there are no questions, in this leaning to darkness, in a poem called "Beginning."
Everyone's favorite.

Swath brought forward memories of real tornados as well as discussion about the balance between destruction and yield… tension between violent and silent… how we cut to make anything— onomatopoeia — and the scythe both sliced with an em-dash. It inspired John to write a poem about a river offering, water, highway; damned by humans, so it floods, levied, it demands, taxes, or something like that.
A Brief history of time or space…

Whether the next poem by her was intended to be read with hers, we imagined a tornado drill and use of double negatives. If a poem makes us speculate too hard,
Is that good or bad?

Finally, A Prayer for Rain: beautiful metaphor for release and redemption perhaps… the walling up, and hardened stillness, as if after a bad fight, and the waiting for the repeat, only wishing this time, the mumbling of whatever will bring the rain.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Poems for Feb. 8 - prep w/ Poetry Magazine

The Pure Good of Theory -- Wallace Stevens
Beginning -- James Wright
Swath -- Stephanie E. Schlaifer
The Stimulation is an understatement -- Stephenie E. Schlaifer
A Prayer for Rain -- Lisel Mueller

Poetry (the magazine)founded in 2012, is celebrating 100 years, and part of the February issue is a selection of one poem each by Lisel Mueller, Weldon Kees, Eleanor Ross Taylor, Janet Lewis, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost and Robert Creeley.

Another section is entitled "Various" in which 14 poets chime in "One whole voice".
Let's try the "can you guess game" with who might have said what.
(Jericho Brown, Fanny Howe, Kazim Ali, Jean Valentine, G.C. Waldrep, Joy Harjo, Eleanor Wilner, Dunya Mikhail.)

-- "I've never believed that what attracts us to poems is knowing what's going on in them."
"there is a coincidence, and a slowly developing sense of a hidden structure which increases with work, experience and age. How people stay in your life. How memories are so strong and books passed along through decades, and at the same time there is no evidence of yesterday as a place."
"You can see two things at once, reflections in different directions, and both things are true."
"I am drawn to poets who allow the Other its existence."
"Most Americans compartmentalize, because it is convenient: we find our modern lives intolerable otherwise. ... Poetry is that which conveys a message to a stranger."
"Much of world poetry is incantation and chant. ... The everlasting is who we truly are, where we truly belong. It is the stuff of poetry, music and dance, of all arts. In this place, we are one person, one poem, one story and one song."
"For me, the poem is never just about experience, it IS an experience; we can't know where a poem is going, and should be surprised (and even enlightened) by what it reveals."
"With poetry, I feel I am in love. With prose, I feel I am in marriage."

Paul Celan said, "Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the human soul."

**
On Wednesday, we will look at time, at darkness, beginnning, swath, ... we'll ride horses, observe moons, trees, tornado, listen to the sound of rain.