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Thursday, October 31, 2013

Poems for Lunch -- November 6


I read the November issue of Poetry after our discussion 10/31 about Whitman's "Wound Dresser" and felt as if Tom Sleigh had been privy to it. Tom Sleigh's article starts with his return from Mogadishu, Somalia and sources of rage. And then he continues with insights about the much-neglected David Jones, the great English/Welsh/Cockney painter and poet,author of "In Parenthesis" in part about his experience in WWI.
The title of this long work perhaps can shed light on Whitman's use of parentheses. WWI was like a "curious existence in parentheses" -- but how do you make sense of the 19,000 men killed in one day in Mametz woods?
Jones makes the terror and chaos real through the accents of the voices, rhythms of vernacular and slang, and sensual detail.

Once Jones said he wanted poetry to “be incarnational” – literally “dressing the spirit in flesh”.
There are no Keatsian sound effects, no lushness of orchestration as in Owen’s “Spring Offensive” in which the soldiers experience the traditional enchantments of pastoral.
The walk across no-man’s land is described as “small, drab, bundled pawns severally make effort/moved in tenuous line.” (p. 192)

When is a poem an “alibi for thought, a lot of word-masquerading, a rhetorical jumping up and down and waving of hands... to get someone to pay attention. The marks on the page have less permanence, less vividness of effect than the henna staining the camel and goat seller’s beard in a refugee camp.

He ends with the thought that the artist in necessarily empirical rather than speculative.
The question for the artist for Jones is “Does it?” rather than “Ought it?” – and that perception can’t be faked because it’s important to be... incarnational.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/87/2#!/20585867 (The Wall)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/97/4#!/20588159 (The Tutelar of the Place)


In contrast Wilfred Owens' poem below is highly anthologized.

Sleigh The entire issue had gripping poems about experiences that leave the reader gasping about what "reality" is like in other parts of the world and other times. Vantage points of the poor, the crazy, those about to board a train for Auschwitz-Birkenau, not having chosen an injection, those who didn't thanks to mercury chloride. Poems of parts of the world rife with violence where
"Memory shrinks // until it fits in a fist
memory shrinks // without forgetting
in chiseled columns. A strange poem about kisses and a nine-tailed fox and secrets and singing sentence into stone. All in all, a sense that poets are trying to make things new just as Marianne Moore and modernists were trying. The same problem -- how do we write -- and what matters in our poems. What keeps us reading poems?


So the line up for next week:

October nor'easter by Marge Piercy
Dulce et Decorum Est -- Wilfred Owens
Bad Year Anthem by Matthew Nienow
Things by Lisel Mueller

**

So often we think in opposites: right/wrong, black/white and indeed in art, the play of light/shadow, positive/negative (whether space or syntax) is fundamental to fleshing out an idea. Piercy gives us four stanzas in which the word "hard" is repeated (although stanza 2, transformed to hardly touched-- which hints at a series of possibilities). She threads the vowels so the ear can travel through the eee-ip--eee
rip of storm, the ay-uh... uh-ay of "rain scuds" (which feels like a noun but kicks the wet off the ocean as a verb). By the third line, the water is scimitar and if you had any doubt about the power of a Nor'easter,
you will be convinced of how it strip everything down to the bone. But isn't that what happens in life as we survive yet another year, arriving at fall's shorter days? Piercy ends with a novel and beautiful luminescent stone. But it is the "If" of standing bare that allows her to see "my bones/
still shine like opals/where love rubbed sweetly,/hard, against them.

Owens' poem leaves me raw. It is interesting to me how even with a snapshot of a real scene, the conversation goes to the political exigencies behind war. It is easier to focus on "issues" as opposed to the grim reality of slaughter. I had forgotten that Vietnam was both the first and last war televised.


Comments on the Nienow poem included assessing how a young, 30-year old poet thinks and a sense that he is on the edge of saying something very wise as he lives his boat-building life. What is this duality he senses in stanza 2: "I stand aside as what is removed is whisked alongside me.
The smallest particles of what is removed thicken the air,

making a dream inside which one cannot live. All day! Accessible, clear, not overdone. The loneliness hinted at in the Nienow poem is shared in a plural "we" and our universal impulse to anthropomorphize. It came up that we add the smiley faces to machines to make them friendlier, give us a sense of connection and response. The verb tenses include two conditionals -- like invitation -- give bells tongues so we could listen... "we gave the country a heart,/the storm an eye,/the cave a mouth so we could pass into safety.



Poems for Lunch -- October 31

Cinquain by Adelaide Crapsey, (1878-1914) (on Poets Walk)
Listen!
With faint dry sound
like steps of passing ghosts
the leaves, frost-crisped break from the trees
and fall

Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I [Round about the cauldron go
Unbidden by Rae Armantrout
When I Buy Pictures by Marianne Moore
The Courtesy of the Blind -- by Wislawa Szymborska
The Wound Dresser by Walt Whitman

**

With That Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
-Hafiz

**
It may well be Halloween, but we gathered today dispensing with Shakespeare's witches, stereotypes in the stew rather quickly.
The Hafiz points out how we cannot be one without the other, what we do not say, balanced by what we long for, but rarely hear. Armantrout carries out this balancing of past, future, done/undone, plural ghosts swarming to singular voice, yet each with something undone, rather like the yellow flowers of the palo verde which bloom at the edge of the green branches in singular blossoms. We might miss the yet "unblushed" yellow, or carry the edges which cut like a scissored blade of grass. The enigmatic last sentence testifies
to our subjectivity, more curious about circumstance, provenance than in the word or thing of itself.

From there, Marianne Moore's poem which presents a tangle of phrases pinned by colons and semi-colons before arriving at the first period. We think to buy, but are "imaginary possessors" balancing "intensity of mood" with the "real" things which seem to have appeared from an antique market.
Perhaps as she said about Gertrude Stein, "Looking harder, one is abashed not to have understood instantly; as water may not seem transparent to the observer but has a perspicuous opacity in which the fish swims with ease.", it took us some time to navigate the waters of her poem.

"Where does the poem prick your interest" is one of my favorite questions. In this poem, we discussed at length this line:
the silver fence protecting Adam's grave, or Michael taking
Adam by the wrist.
first man... archangel Michael --what do we know? Noah's flood took care of any grave... or is Moore referring to the ancient barrow in England? Or an image of Archangel Michael reaching to save souls in purgatory, by Jacopo Vignali, 17th century?
The other details are puzzling as well: 6 shades of blue for artichokes (right up a surrealist's alley)
and snipe-legged 3 part hieroglyphic -- why three parts? and why snipe-legged?

She seems to chide herself, following these details with:
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or
that detracts from one's enjoyment.

Four "It" amplify the possibilities... Elaine brought up the fact that it must be "lit with piercing glances into the life of things" is in quotes -- as if borrowing from some authentic source.
Back to the "sorts" -- our mood, and the thing itself... and how it is infused with a larger sense of spirituality.

From there, to Syzborska's rather tongue in cheek look at what a poet expects to do, and how the blind will listen... The second stanza seems broad enough to go beyond the poet's experience, which is turned on its head through "the test of darkness", (and perhaps wisdom equated with seers and the blind) as if to capture the feeling of what it is to offer one's own world to someone who "visibly" has a very different one.

He reads-- since it's too late to stop now--

He's like to skip--although it can't be done--
and we as reader can consider the details given... examine our own sense of "courtesy"...

The Wound Dresser bears a complex syntax replete with parenthetical (inner) emotion to end with a question after ten lines: Of those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us?

In case the exaggerated adjectives --"unsurpassed heroes" balanced by "(was one side so brave? the other was equally brave)don't have effect on the reader's answer, he asks again:

What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics,
Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

Very different poets, who invite us even after reading, to ask, what remains --
perhaps not bones of the dead, which like names on tombstones will fade leaving no trace--
but what stays with us after reading such fine poems? For me, a sense of gratitude for such a fine group of people sharing thoughts on how to understand both words and the contexts in which they were written.

Monday, October 28, 2013

O Pen -- Poems for October 29

I had started last week's session with a poem by Hafiz, published in the Sun (October 2013 issue, p. 13, versions by Daniel Ladinsky). We didn't have time for the Galway Kinnell, "Why Regret" --
and perhaps again, this week, there are far too many poems. So, take them home, read them and enjoy.
Both Kinnell and Hafiz remind us to engage with ordinary things, common acts. Yes, even when you are the one turned away from the factory, the one whose house is burning and you see it on the news, or you are the one at the airport and thinking about what "vacation" means, there comes a time when "connecting" no matter how imperfect in our mind, is the less painful risk than folding tightly everything you are.

With That Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
-Hafiz


to hear the poem last week: Galway Kinnell, Why Regret: http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2006/12/15/20061215_kinnell28.mp3
(from Strong is your Hold)

From Jim Daniels, Places / Everyone
Mops
Factory Love
5000 Apply for 100 Jobs
Watching My Old House Burn on the News
**
Vacation by Rita Dove
Risk, by Anaïs Nin

Poems for Lunch : October 24 // O Pen October 29

From Jim Daniels, Places / Everyone
Mops
Factory Love
5000 Apply for 100 Jobs
Watching My Old House Burn on the News
**
Vacation by Rita Dove
Risk, by Anaïs Nin
Backyard by Carl Sandburg

Jim Daniels, "Places/Everyone": The into w/ Simone Weil
"Many indispensible truths, which could save men, go unspoken for reasons of this kind; those who could utter them cannot formulate them and those who could formulate them cannot utter them. If politics were taken seriously, finding a remedy for this would be one of its more urgent problems."

The Rita Dove poem was one of the ones Cathy Smith posted in her

**
We enjoyed the Jim Daniels’ poems, but unlike Li-Young Lee’s poem “Persimmons” where images wind mysteries which invite multiple layers of reflection, his more pedestrian style of observation leaves the sense of having read something interesting,
say about mops, and a chuckle at the personification of a machine, or recognition for the need for connection, but not necessarily a poem that leads to a big “wow”. I’m sure each person could summarize better, but below what I took away.

Mops has a few surprises, “each mop the obvious/ same woman’s hair” not really begging to be better understood – job and woman... then a priest and pleasure, and need for more cleaning – and the unexpected detail that a broom which tells the same story which has a stand-up comedian effect.
(Who likes to clean... who doesn't...)

Factory Love brought back a memory of working in a factory – the attachment and frustrations of machine, on the forklift hi-lo, and yet that universal need to care for someone in a committed way.
5,000 Apply for 100 jobs brought up an observation that “a bit of joy inside that big sadness” is more like relief... and the fictitious “Happy Hour at the Goodwill Store”
is the bright spot – not so much the job one has, as much as feeling momentarily connected.

Each poem was "unexpectedly expository" -- bringing various experiences together...urging us to find ways to connect...

Watching My Old House Burn on the News is indeed a catchy title – and a commentary on what deserves a 60 second spot. Time disappears as the memory of the house in which the speaker was conceived, now abandoned, returns back to what it was like
long ago, rain and crying babies now rain and a mother’s tears – the “like those flames, that fire” refers to the way the tears fall ....

The question came up if others thought the poems were authentic – or rather disingenuous. What do we want a poem to do? Dazzle us with brilliant description, as in Rita Dove’s poem? Convince us of the reality surrounding a working man or perhaps provide a glimpse into the ordinary which allows us a sense of empathy.
We know when a poem moves us to tears, compels us to spend time with it and gives us a sense of satisfaction (a huge thought in 8 simple lines, as in Nin’s poem which starts with “And” – with a whole untold backstory behind it, risk repeated in title and twice in the poem with the opposition of tight bud/blossom and the tightrope of what is painful.

Backyard, by Carl Sandburg was satisfying for the transformative power of moonlight, to turn all to silver... the magic of the moon – how some pay tribute, others ignore, lost in dream, romance in the air and “white thoughts” – and how many different ways to read the last line: shake out more and more / silver / changes.
or shake out more / and more silver changes
or shake out more and more /// silver changes.

**
For O Pen:
Perhaps again, this week, there are far too many poems to thoroughly
discuss, so, take them home, read them and enjoy.
Both Kinnell and Hafiz remind us to engage with ordinary things, common
acts. Yes, even when you are the one turned away from the factory, the one
whose house is burning and you see it on the news, or you are the one at the
airport and thinking about what "vacation" means, there comes a time when
"connecting" no matter how imperfect in our mind, is the less painful risk
than folding tightly everything you are.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

O Pen : October 21


Elegy for Muncey-- Jim Daniels
Pursuits – Heather Christle
Personally Engraved -- Alice Fulton
Why Regret – Galway Kinnell
Postscript by Seamus Heaney

Jim Daniels, like Philip Levine, comes from Detroit, champions the working class -- but what does that say about his poetry? The poem selected today gave us plenty to discuss -- from the title, "Elegy" which often is a controlled statement, to the epigraph linked to the final lines. "Anything less than death is a minor accident",
quote of the Muncey for whom this elegy is written. Looping a long sentence in short lines, where the end words are in competition for where they place their weight in the phrases, the poem falls into two sentences, the first skimming into 20 lines. Our conversation went from a description of rooster tails, memories of the Detroit river,
and the way the poem was both gruff in a "shirts-off-drunk" rowdy way, and tender. Is Muncey to be cheered,
crowd-style making a statement, calling a hero,or the last name said quietly, softly, echoing the words "blessed".
Roostertail and angel/ death dancing/... a very unusual and moving way to pay tribute to this hydroplane champion who died in an accident in Acapulco, and the impact one human being can have.

Pursuits, in the October issue of Poetry also provided a long discussion -- how "it is" has a surprising power to introduce, predict, perhaps confirm a feeling, in this case, called forth by snow, juxtaposed by that called forth by commerce. Conversation touched on Wordsworth, Keats, and the glory of what words can do.
Snow / not beginning: perhaps a touch of eternal
the difference of being "in" the snow vs. to be "of" the snow... and memories of innocent play...
It is not... It is... Everywhere... It only gets worse. What would you thread into this progression?
table: as chart as well as where one sits to be nurtured; repetition of the word "touch"...and a sense of many hungers -- that cannot satisfy as they are not yours. Wonderful poem to set one thinking about human experience, our complaints, wishes, and what it is that we do or refuse to compromise.

We would like to invite Alice Fulton to come up to Rochester and speak to us! 3 fine poems in the October issue of Poetry -- all of which embrace the idea of "new" -- which "... will benew / whether you make it new / or not.
Almost cliche, twists on expected phrases, witty "please state" which sounds like "police state"
hardscape (not landscape, seascape, city-scape, inscape) but the scraping of art to machine.
We chuckled through it, admiring the notes of sarcasm, contradictions, texture of phrases such as "all you need is
a chain saw and die grinder". And what is a dedicated ice maker / dedicated to? Visions of ice-sculpture contests, or of frosty personalities at a town meeting with Uriah Heep rubbing his hands. What is the role of you?
As for the scarf on the snowman, indeed, it separates head from heart... What is engraved? And how do you use "personally" in advertising, as if it would matter?

Buzkashi took us to a discussion of horse racing, Kipling's ballads and Afghan and British traditions!
The she-goat and woman intertwine -- the heat drives a man "in the ground like a stake" while the mountains watch, "still in the "milk broth of oblivion". Enigmatic and unsettling.

We will discuss "Why Regret" next week having spent an hour discussing just these three.
Postscript as title is intriguing: is it the words below it? What is the context? There is a touchy excitement starting a poem with "And..." -- the diction and lilt of the first 11 lines are cut short by the next sentence:
useless to think you'll park and capture it.. that "it" again -- that wildness, that opportunity not taken. The final line takes us to a here-and-now that cannot be pinned down -- a blend of familiar and strange...
"as big soft buffetings come at the car sideways / and catch the heart off guard and blow it open".
Wind, encounter, accident, the mystery is there, and for me, the urge to check the heart.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Workshop on Wonder-- Just Poets, Oct. 19

October 19, 2013

Notes and a few poems inspired by the Just Poets retreat at the Gell Center 10/19/2013

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." -- Albert Einstein (from M.J.’s collection of quotes.)

**
Workshop with M.J.
Imagine 10 pieces of paper, with duos and trios drawing images inspired by words: awe-- thought-- solitude-- puzzle-- connection-- dream-- mystery-- prediction-- hope -- city-blocks -- garden --


Worlds: 10 creations

Our mood hums as pencils etch, colors scratch, markers
slip into spirals; lines connect
thought to puzzle, unpuzzle, then puzzle again.
We reach for edges, uncharted
Escher-fish, our fins flung to wing.

Each thought ladder-leaps
up to dream, as if to catch
the murmurs in marvel.
A gypsy skirts yin-yang,
prediction softens, winds into tune.

**
"There are those much more rare people who never lose their curiosity, their almost childlike wonder
at the world; those people who continue to learn and to grow intellectually until the day they die.
And these usually are the people who make contributions, who leave some part of the world a little better off than it was before they entered it." William H. Sheldon (from M.J.’s collection of quotes.)

Inspired by John's peripatetic walk: by Thoreau's cabin.
tatatata doo-li-da, sings Niam, three years old.

What is it we are here on Earth to sing?

Come without vanity
bOw your head
gaMble faith
Pass
Around
your gIft
aNd
lifT
voice without complaint.

(note that C - O - M - P - A - I - N - T -- is complaint transformed to "com paint" -- like an invitation to paint with our voices and lives -- how easy a letter can lever meaning!)
**
I went to the woods because I wanted...
trees for company... the sound of the wind.
By the Gell Center treehouse, you see how three large pine carry the weight,
and inside, the smell of turpentine of the fourth. If you ask who lives here, an echo
will voodoo answer: you do, you do, you-ooo, and doing turns to living silence.


**
Writing prompt from Donna and Claudia's workshop on the non-narrative poem

Mischa

murmurs
in
silence
calm
halos
abound.

His red hat echoes the last of the sun,
as he walks towards the church.
It protects him from the cold.

At Vespers, every man's lapel bears a white flower
to remember the man who saved the old books slated for shredding.
He turned the words and meanings to music before he died.
Mischa murmurs in silence,
calm
halos abound.

Rivers of wings surround
Mischa, in calm.
At first flutes shape notes like icicles
and then the strings sweep the sound
of wind in summer wheat,
the horns call down autumn
halo after halo of leaves around bare trees.
And then the flutes return like Spring
birds abound.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLFX1ZWKemk
Glazunov : the seasons

(prompt from poems provided by Claudia:
Ashbery: Glazunoviana
Laura Sims, Behind her Eyes)

Friday, October 18, 2013

Poems for Lunch: October 17


Living Room by Marie Ponsot
Persimmons by Li-Young Lee
A Fantasy – Louise Glück
The Sound Of Trees – by Robert Frost

How do form and meaning work? We'll start with a "tritina" and end with a version of Robert Frost who experiments with rhyme but understands the importance of the "meter-marking argument" and function of rhyme. (The text used for discussion is that of the original versions of this poem
is as it appeared in the August, 1915, issue of The Atlantic Monthly. There are some differences between this text and the text of the poem as it appeared in later editions of Frost's poetry.)


**
We read through the Marie Ponsot poem in several ways -- stanza by stanza, as well as line by line to slow down the way the words combined and recombined. Highlights noted: the sound -- of K's, P's, M's, D's...
one conditional "if" among 3 stanzas of things at risk of breaking, aching, buckling --balanced by a positive final line using the end words, and a repeated hypenated word in each stanza. (paint-stuck; house-warm; storm-hit; wind-break) The title,then is understood not as a room in a house, perhaps with a family picture, but a "living" room, where life-space is alive... which is to say, colliding, joining, separating..."if we force it open the glass may break." How do we frame what is special to us? That is what we must put up as wind-break. Truly, a must-read.

We discovered much about persimmons, and memory in Li-Young Lee's poem, and a sense of "ripeness" which comes at a time we may or may not notice. This much longer poem winds mother, father, persimmons, into a satisfying metaphor of a fruit confused with the word "precision" and other words now forgotten. We noted the precise instructions of how to sniff, eat, chew. What gets you into trouble? fight, fright? And what comforts? birds, yarn. And did you know every persimmon has a sun inside, something golden, glowing? This is where the poem turns and loss includes blindness.
Louise said it reminded her of Wallace Stevens, "13 ways of looking at a blackbird".

Glück's "A Fantasy starts out with a vernacular "I'll tell you something:" Who would guess it would be followed by "every day/people are dying." And then, to add to the suspense: "And that's just the beginning". From there, the funeral home, the birth of widowhood, the sequence of how we cope with grief for which there really are no guidelines, only prescribed motions. The "suddenly" in the 3rd stanza underlines the arrival of people who will participate in mourning, in contrast to the sickroom, the months of isolation. The final stanza goes to the heart --
the desire to move backward -- not to perhaps the great intimacies of our back story -- but "just a little".
Powerful poem indeed.

We ended with Frost and the "sound of trees" -- what the wonder is.. the contrast of rooted trees and people who wish to "unroot"... what we say, but don't do, or what going is about... what is reckless, what needs saying, and how do the trees say it? There were as many responses to the poem as people in the room!

Another wonderful session!

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Poems for October 14

Love Is More Thicker Than Forget by E.E. Cummings
opening poem: set to music: Uta Fricke Quartett - Love Is More Thicker Than Forget
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mYEa_QMZ4c
The Hunchback in the Park by Dylan Thomas
And You, Andrew Marvell, Archibald MacLeish
Andrew Marvell (31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/andrew-marvell
The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell
May my heart always be open (on poets walk) by E.E. Cummings

I was reading James Dickey's notes on lectures and agree that the Thomas and MacLeish poems he mentioned are well worth the read…
I am curious to know if you think the music enhances the first e e cummings … and for those who have not yet discovered "Poets Walk" on University by the Memorial Art Gallery, the final Cummings poem is carved in granite on the corner of University and Prince.

Monday was the 14th and ee cummings birthday (b. 1894!) -- so of course there were several "poems of the day" as tribute -- one of which was "i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart) and on Writer's almanac "5" which is a visual delight.
The two Cummings poems for today's discussion look "traditional" in regular-looking stanzas and yet both play with syntax to tickle our imagination to think deeper. We know one doesn't say "more thicker" or more seldom,
and what could "less it shall unbe" be? Everyone's mind was set a-whirring, including an association with Corinthians (Cummings father was a minister, so a biblical reference is highly possible -- as in the prayer-like "may my heart always be open). The opposition between "mad and moonly" and "sane and sunly", the sea and the sky leaves a sense of love both as being sandwiched between, and yet, less always and less never, the least and littlest, thick and thin, where "unbeing" and forgiveness and eternal roll all about. One person quoted Sandburg: "I understood it until you explained it to me."
Indeed. For the second Cummings, "may my heart always be open" we have a return to "little" -- poised just like a bird to which the enjambment falls in the first line. The second stanza 3rd line "may i be wrong"
had varying responses: inverted syntax (parenthetical, I may be wrong) as well as a request not to be cast into
an old-man's inflexible thinking proclaiming "rightness". The final stanza has a feel of of "may" as a conditional "should" or "if" to join the "could fail" -- this impossible yet delightful metaphor of pulling "all the sky over him with one smile" with a sense of contradiction -- only a fool could do this, only a fool could fail to do this.
The playfulness invites us to stay with the poem, entertain possibilities -- encourages us to go beyond irritation or annoyance that meaning is not a straight forward shot.
The way in which he takes givens and plays with syntax, underlines the importance of "play", which has a simultaneous layer that is often quite serious.

We both read and listened to the Dylan Thomas and spoke of the problems both of how we "hear" and how a poem is read. A poem is meant to be "heard" -- but sometimes the poet is not able to read aloud to do service to the poem his imagination provided in his head. Sometimes also, as readers,we try to find signs in the poem to guide us, as we receive the words through our own filters. For me it was the "k" in the first stanza — it's a hard consonant— no tongue involved with forming it, and the air has to be forced out, not in the gluggy-"g" way but crackled and spat. The final stanza repeats the words: park, dark, but the bell is now a kennel, the lock perhaps now, a lake. The conversational "Mister, hey mister" the childhood ownership of "sailed my ship" runs parallel to this "old man sleeper". Why only two periods? Who is the woman
that might "stand in the night after the locks and chains // all night in the unmade park"? Whatever is happening, "the wild boys, innocent as strawberries" also do not know, wrapped as they are in their own imaginations, inviting us also to remember such times.


I love the idea of the "And" anaphor in MacLeish's poem as biblical and as the slant reference to Corinthians in Cummings "love is…" and "may…" As I noted, James Dickey called the MacLeish poem "one of the most beautiful poems that the English tongue has ever conceived of." Some felt the floating appreciation of the earth, even without the modern idea of being able to look down at it from an airplane. We did touch down on the 17th century's fascination with planispheres... and this idea of the shadow of the earth as it revolves, crossing all the various countries -- felt also like crossing over time. For some, the shadow of the night coming on was part of a song of joy... for some, a more sombre music. We all wondered what MacLeish was thinking of to title the poem as he did. Perhaps he was thinking of "To His Coy Mistress" -- but in Marvell's 8 stanza "Definition of Love", we have metaphysical "poles", ("though love's whole world on us doth wheel")-- cramp'd into a planisphere. It was helpful to discuss the times, the revolutionary times, uprisings, court intrigues, dictates of fate.
I'm reminded of the Mobile in front of the MAG -- where two arms sweep where the wind nudges them -- but never will meet.

How great to have a group discuss four poems, all embracing "love" in some way -- including quoting the lyrics,
"if loving you is wrong, then I don't want to be right."


Friday, October 11, 2013

Rundel: Poems for Lunch: October 10


POEMS DISCUSSED:
Words for Worry by Li-Young Lee
One Heart by Li-Young Lee
Angels of Radiators by A. Poulin, Jr. (professor, poet-translator, editor) (b. 1938-1996)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/a-poulin
Hurry by Marie Howe
Three Days of Forest, a River, Free by Rita Dove

Sunday, 9/30, Li-Young Lee was guest of BOA editions and read at the Memorial Art Gallery accompanied by sitar player, David Whetstone. The program included Words for Worry. Outside the MAG, you might have seen the tiles for “Poets Walk”: Li-Young Lee has one, as does BOA founder, A. Poulin, Marie Howe and Rita Dove. You might enjoy imagining what phrase or words you would use from the poems to put in a tile on a poets walk. For more information: (http://artdrop.democratandchronicle.com/poets-walk)

The first poem by Li-Young Lee is worth reading in different ways in order to appreciate the nuances of "Worry".
It starts "in media res" -- in the middle of things -- "Another word for father is worry" -- as if we have dropped in on a conversation. A single line. Stanza break. 3 couplets. A quatrain with hypenated words creating names and ending with five lines where the final 3-line sentence breathes. More than a catalogue, it reminds a reader of the experience as a child, providing a parent with worries... and if a parent, one thinks of one's children.
Lee shows the various facets -- the embodiment of "worry" as father, boiling water, taking care of a child --
which segues into the word "son" -- with a play on "delight" and "hidden". One person remarked on the use of indigenous people to hyphenate names, often with a verb -- so a son is also the action of leaving and returning.
The language in the quatrain adopts an elevated Biblical register, which makes me think of Father-Son as Christian relationship, although followed by a fragment which starts the final stanza: "But one word for father."
And after this exploration of words for "worry" -- the reassurance of the final sentence which flows easily,
unlike the previous choppy rhythms.


The second Li-Young Lee poem feels like a meditative breath which takes us "up" as James said, "like an out-of-body experience" -- a superior point of view... and yet freedom spirals to fasten onto each falling thing.
A good poem doesn't need to explain, postulate or pound sense into the reader. This is a perfect example
of suggestion, contradiction gathered into the unity of "love".

A. Poulin, founder of BOA and renowned teacher and figurehead in Rochester, provides a poem which creates
the sounds of old cars, regulators and the feel of angles of night, cold, and the "angels responding to blank space" which respond to "sing wild allelujahs warm as Spring". The metaphorical "furnace fails like heaven"
and work of the radiator where "The water that will turn/to steam and turn to heat/and rise as grace runs out."
requires the mortal action of going down to turn the valve to "filling up" for those angels to return...
As one person put it: here's a simple, mundane object like a radiator, given "high-flown" worth.


The poem by NY State Poet Laureate, Marie Howe, "Hurry up darling" brought a few of us to tears -- how what we do as parents, then is imitated by children, who take, tease and grow up, and hold the keys... It's so easy to recognize in the opening enumeration" We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store/
and the gas station and the green market and/ "
the pace with which we lead our lives. Howe cleverly stops this endless bustle by following "and" with
Hurry up honey, which spins the crux of the poem into orbit.


The poem by Rita Dove, US Poet Laureate, 1993–1995, recreates a gripping narrative of an escape to freedom,
which bears examination about the twisted logic of slavery. We started the discussion by examining what "duty's whistle" means, both in and out of the context of the poem. It follows the opening sentence: "The dogs have nothing better
/to do than bark;" But, isn't that what dogs do? And when do they bark -- to greet, to warn,
when they are in pain, i.e. to communicate." And dogs as a fill-in for "inferior to human", or perhaps at best,
faithful servant... and later, "Who can point out a smell/
but a dog? " -- both the dogs set to chase a fugitive -- but also the ability of a dog to point out things for what they are. The paradox in this stanza is worth noting as well: "The terror of waking is a trust/
drawn out unbearably/
until nothing, not even love,
/makes it easier, and yet
/I love this life:"
The title prepares us with the word "free" to understand more fully the final word of the poem "underground".
the river to cross, as the river Styx or the Ohio and boundary between life/death... the visible/invisible,
all these themes intricately bound up in a poem where each line bears the weight of saying one thing, but meaning yet another -- what Robert Frost calls "ulteriority". Case in point: the final sentence broken into 5 lines: Faint tongue, dry fear,

I think I lost you to the dogs,

so far off now they're no

more than a chain of bells

ringing darkly, underground.


Thank you all for coming and for the wonderful discussion and sharing!




poems for October 7


Green-Striped Melons by Jane Hirschfield
Make It New by Alice Fulton
from Mean Free Path by Ben Lerner
The Moose by Elizabeth Bishop

This week's poems are in response to a letter to the editor of Poetry Magazine, criticizing Michael Robbins' review of the Norton Anthology, Postmodern American Poetry.
You might enjoy this 2008 article about Ezra Pound who coined the term "Make it New" --
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/06/09/080609crbo_books_menand
What does "make it new" mean in 2013? Below some old, some new, some long, some short. The point is not to belabor an academic approach so much as to see how each poem is working.

**

For 10/7, I picked four poems, two of which are “old” to form a sandwich around two of which are “new”, using these terms loosely. Although the name Ezra Pound is often inseparable from his phrase, “Make it New” (the “it” meaning the culture of the past) perhaps the question is more to make artistic expression something which allows
a reader, viewer, witness to ponder on what brings vitality, meaning—and to walk away
feeling that the experience (poem, concert, art exhibit, performance, etc.) in some way underlines that life matters.

The first poet: Jane Hirschfield’s biography underlines her contributions as poet, essayist, teacher, translator, ambassador. To quote Rosanna Warren from the American Poet site,
“Hirshfield has elaborated a sensuously philosophical art that imposes a pause in our fast-forward habits of mind. Her poems appear simple, and are not. Her language, in its cleanliness and transparency, poses riddles of a quietly metaphysical nature...Clause by clause, image by image, in language at once mysterious and commonplace, Hirshfield's poems clear a space for reflection and change. They invite ethical awareness, and establish a delicate balance.” - See more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/563#sthash.cDE3eE7R.dpuf

The first poem, taken from her 2001 anthology, “Given Sugar, Given Salt”
demonstrates how she shares “riddles of a quietly metaphysical nature”.
One could read “Green-Striped Melons” as 3 stanzas (broken into two quatrains, one couplet) which have nothing to do with traditional meter. Or count syllables and admire her delicate weave of repetition:
“they lie” and a line break to “under stars” vs. “they lie under rain in a field”. vs.
the fragment. “Under sun.”
The Comparison of melons to “some” people continues the idea of something hidden, unexpected expressed by “under”. The group picked up on a play of implied homonym weight/wait for ripeness and ambiguity of “lie” as both position and how depth is deceptive, whether in melons, people or paintings. Judith recalled the concierge in “The Elegance of the Hedgehog.”

Born a year before Hirschfield (1952), the second poet, Alice Fulton, is known for her innovative use of language and her explorations of “poetry as sensual math”, “fractal poetry”etc. The poem under discussion, “Make it New” which appeared in Poetry Magazine, this October (2013) demonstrates her facility to vivify both line and cliché, to make the reader think about perception, and what it is that we really “know”. One person offered the idea of the setting of a graveyard (inscriptions on implied tombs in a blizzard), corroborated by “what I do for a dying”. The “how” of the lines play in multiple ways.
There is an injunction to avoid collective thinking, a twist on the slang for “get out of here”, and an idea of a cathedral, although “stained” glass might mean also, hoist up what we have sullied, colored rose, or altered to suit our personal agendas:

"Avoid the hive mind. Go fly a kite,
raise a stained glass window in the sky.

It’s the opposite of making love to drudgery,
what I do for a dying."

We all laughed when reading the poem sentence by sentence and Larry read with full exclamation as the punctuation demands.
“... The curiosity rover

lands on Mars! “
Curiosity as adjective, also acts as name without a capital letter and rover, points at the space between the couplets as if roving to land... The next statement, uses the 1890 word “hooligan” (note, not new slang, although echoing the vowel sound “oo”.) Again, she breaks into a stanza break – and we discussed “rests” as “remains” or “lies” or even, unassembled. The idea of video games, or an abacus for “reckoning frame” comes to mind.

“New is a hooligan.
It breaks the reckoning frame and rests


in pieces."

At this point, I hope you will want to read the whole poem, to appreciate the format, the tone. (see: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/246476 )
I often ask “which line hits you the most” – and for many of us, it was the final couplet which contains the personal expression of grief.

“Let me collect its dna
from the tears on your desk.”


We read through and admired the Ben Lerner, whose poem title,
"from Mean Free Path" evokes this bit of physics: the average distance a particle travels between collisions..., and Lucretius. Lerner, with a light dust of humor over something serious, threads musical references, repetitions, into a personal voice, caught in its sphere, desiring to connect, find a way to communicate.
What the “this” is that surrounds us on our journey? – How do we talk about it with others? He opens with:

“What if I made you hear this as music
But not how you mean that.”

(source: Paris Review, 2013: http://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/5870/from-mean-free-path-ben-lerner

The final poem, The Moose by Elizabeth Bishop we have read before – but the pleasure does not diminish. Each time we visit, revisit a poem, we are making it new.
Comments included: “It’s like seeing a movie... you don’t have to figure anything... It’s a communion-- nature—with history. We too are on the bus moving into darkness... It’s a symbolic journey where people talk about tragedies and remember and tell... but something arrested for a moment... by moose in complete innocence... reminds of something else of life. new mood. moving into sleep. wakened..."
The moose reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ Aslan – the largeness of spirit some call God,
in a visible visitation. The question of why we all feel “this sweet/
sensation of joy?” does not ask for answer, so much as remind us to take note, remember,
as it comes in the midst of our living stories.

Friday, October 4, 2013

poems for lunch! Rundel October 3

Hurray for poetry as part of lunch! Yesterday was the first of 6 sessions offering "food for thought" in form of sharing the reading of poems.

Poems:
Some Like Poetry: Wislawa Szymborska
A Monday in May: Ted Kooser
A Grandfather: Marie Thurmer (selected by Ted Kooser)
Baby Listening: Billy Collins
Happiness: Jane Kenyon

The wit of arranging a poem by repeating the title, a word at a time, on the first line reminds me that form comes in many guises. Some / like / poetry -- can be said in many ways -- suspending and threading quite different meanings. Some... like poetry.
"Some-- /thus not all.
Like / (as a verb, with a list of likes.)
Poetry/ followed by a question about what it is.

It amazes me that 7 people can discuss 3 stanzas and pick up on so many dimensions that lie in wait for the reader.
Whether it is the vernacular response to the fact of many "shaky answers" about what poetry is... the small proportion of people who like it; the other things one likes (which includes the sense of control, of having an upper hand, as well as the tenderness of stroking a dog) the "it" onto which we hold, even if we don't know...
"like to a sustaining railing."

Part of the fun is to read a short poem in many different ways. Reading the Kooser poem as three sentences,
feels differently in the mouth and mind than read line by line. Two parts, like a contrasting weather report...
the breakdown of houses, and what lies under "leaf, cobweb, feather"... the note of nostalgia with the sentimental maple... the threading of bright and somber sounds (peak/leaf/each/weep)and (our/shower/hours).

We all enjoyed the poem selected by Kooser, but noted that the "we" might be an archetype for human beings , not just one caregiver. O like "om" universal ocean, consciousness, or dying breath. the plural meaning of "response we wanted" the almost mistake of understanding the O, where both the one slipping away and the one remaining might remember each other, both say goodbye.

We chuckled at the wit of Collins -- the surreal ideas -- although Mike mentioned British vernacular -- which adds to the humor. If we called the service "baby monitor" it would lose out on some of the absurd. We all agreed that the ending had an unexpected darkness -- bathed in ambiguity.

We ended on Kenyon's poem, where the first 3 stanzas describe the haphazard nature of happiness. The final stanza feels like anything but circumstances that would allow happiness-- the indent moving from humans to inanimate infused with a sense of death, as if to echo the "unmerciful/hours of your despaire.".

What a joy to spend an hour with delightful people and give poems a chance to do their work as both prompts for the shapes of the sounds and sense.

10/4/2013
the boulder, shade of pine barrens, sea, wineglass -- what we might associate

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Poems for September 30

Wedding Cake by Naomi Shihab Nye
Sea Surface Full Of Clouds by Wallace Stevens
2 stanzas of "Man with the Blue Guitar" -- Wallace Stevens
In Love with You by Kenneth Koch

“Almost anything great that has survived the test of time has a riddle in it, a long arc between comprehension and understanding.” from interview with Ange Mlinko http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/06/17/poetry-must-still-dance-an-interview-with-ange-mlinko/

The first poem has plenty to puzzle about -- from the surprise of a mother giving a stranger her baby so she can spend an hour washing her hair and changing her clothes, to the question of whose "mother" is claimed by "my" and onward to the end line knowledge a baby knows: a small finger, funnier than the whole arm. What is layered in poem and metaphor of dress, ritual, etc. brings the reader back to a universal recognition of an alphabet coiled in baby curls, the cooing, mewling of "new, new, new" and so much to "chew", an ache associated with a nub of a dream, the proprietorship to protect innocence, the power of detail. Delightful, and yet, not transparent -- meanings layered in title, dress, dreams, not yet lived experiences to come.

By contrast, the 1923 poem by Wallace Stevens creates a symphonic painting, like a theme and variation.
John pointed out the 6/8 time of a barcarolle; we had fun with textures of umbrellas, chocolate, patterns, colors, sounds until Martin pointed out the disquieting feel of juxtapositions and negative vocabulary. Judith thought more of Raoul Dufy and his spring-like colors, as opposed to the hectic and confusing chaos of Art responding the World War I. Is it just an experiment? Is the music like the Elizabethan court musicians, who were in fact spying on the nobles for whom they performed.. Why the interpretation of the sea in French? If it is a virtuoso exercise,
it is more imaginative than contemporary ballet demonstrating correct movement. The sea IS imagination...
Judith pointed out "pistache" -- French, which could easily be mistaken for "pastiche"...
Richard explained from his sailing experience about jelly fish on the deck ("breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck") and other images... and my guess is that we could have puzzled for quite some time about the nature of change, clouds, sea, surface and what muddles what.

The two stanzas of "Man with the Blue Guitar" allowed us to continue a discussion of the imagination.
John mentioned Baudelaire and "le Mauvais Vitrier" -- persecuted by a malevolent man for not having rose-colored glass... things seen are as seen -- but the function of seeing is an act by each individual... how do our attitudes affect our vision?
Judith mentioned a purple trombone in the store next to the Little Theatre... which seemed a suitable seque for the final poem by Kenneth Koch. Part insouciant O'Hara, part "stop the world I want to get off"... part love poem to the world and wonderful images that make a reader feel alive:
O what a physical effect it has on me
To dive forever into the light blue sea
Of your acquaintance!

It's the kind of poem one wants to read over -- in different ways, allowing each line, linebreak to sink in:

It is beautiful, when October
Is over, and February is over,
To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet
Ways! As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then
Reply (to no one), "Let's go five or six blocks."

The questions are more like prompts to participate than phrases requiring answer:
Isn't the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian?
Aren't my eyes bigger than love?
Isn't this history, and aren't we a couple of ruins?

and on it goes -- as if on skates sweeping us along -- to the end which is the opposite of pinned-down, predictable, explainable -- and the exclamation point allows room for mutated, sad... breezed, revivified
"unabdicated" -- which somehow implies a choice to abdicate which falls in our own court.
Water! your tear-colored nail polish
Kisses me! and the lumberyard seems new
As a calm
On the sea, where, like pigeons,
I feel so mutated, sad, so breezed, so revivified, and still so unabdicated—
Not like an edge of land coming over the sea!







poems for September 23

To Earthward -- Robert Frost
The Waking by Theodore Roethke
Old Men Pitching Horseshoes by X J Kennedy
The World Is in Pencil by Todd Boss
The Pattern by Robert Creeley
My Personal Tornado by Jeffrey Harrison

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/poetry-isnt-as-useless-as-a-lot-of-poets-say-it-is/279539/?utm_source=Poetry+Sept+18%2C+2013

I'm not sure the above article does justice to poetry in the closing line -- the question really is not what is the "use" of an individual poem, which borders on the aesthetics and emotional needs that direct our choices.

I will miss the discussion of poems for September 23.
The first one by Robert Frost, was a favorite of Seamus Heaney -- and I think one of mine, which got me thinking about other favorites like Roethke's villanelle. I needed a bit of humor for balance and stumbled on X.J. Kennedy in a book of "old men poems". A bit of linguistic wit, is always welcome in my book, hence, Todd Boss and Robert Creeley's poems -- and back to emotion -- what other's go through, felt with empathy, to reduce a sense that things out of control, tragedy, etc. Jeffrey Harrison reminds us, this is part of the human condition, and our own experience of it is merely a minor reflection.