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Saturday, December 30, 2017

Rundel -- January 4, 2018 !!!

I hope you all have enjoyed the holidays and are filled with good spirits for the start of another year!  The Hardy poem was written on December 31, 1899… A little old, a little new.. and a note of timelessness from the nature of art… 
Father Time and Baby New Year by Michael Meyerhofer
 The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Winter Night  by Edna St. Vincent Millay
(discussed O Pen, Dec. 27)

If I Could Tell You  by W.H. Auden
Holy Pictures by Finvola Drury
blessing of the boats (at St. Mary's) – Lucille Clifton
** passage from selected prose of Robert Frost, pp. 105-7:  Letter of March 25, 1935.  "Speaking of ages, you will often hear it said that the age of the world we live in is particularly bad.  I am impatient of such talk.  … We have no way of knowing that this age is one of the worst in the world's history.  All ages of the world are bad… a great deal worse anyway than Heaven.  If they weren't the world might just as well be Heaven at once and have it over with.  One can safely say after from six to thirty thousand years of experience that the evident design is a situation here in which it will always be equally hard to save your soul.**

We had a small group after our two-week hiatus:  Kathy, Mike, Lori and eventually Jim.
The Meyerhofer poem was enjoyed for the juxtapositions, fresh language, but unlike the discussion
in O Pen two weeks ago, which commented positively on the humor, as a "New Year Poem" the Oasis group found it darker... in fact, it set the stage for a bleak sense of "new year" picked up by
Hardy and Auden.  
Tangled bine-stems, strings of broken lyres... a century's corpse in the ancient
pulse of germ and birth.... does feel quite "fervourless"... and the messenger of joy
and blessed hope, so "frail, gaunt, small"-- rather the feel of America as we start
a second year of Trump.

Winter has indeed struck hard this week with an arctic blast... and even the Edna St. Vincent Millay
which juxtaposes the day of hard work, the warmth of the fire as place of recovery,
in the company of others, spinning stores, leaves a somber tone of "end of the year reflection"...
what is life all about?  

Auden's reply, "If I could tell you, I would let you know", is scarcely reassuring. Time shakes its finger at us,
and communication seems stymied.
His villanelle does not end on the more optimistic suggestion that roses be allowed
to grow as they will... but rather on the fate of war, which perhaps seems to "run away",
as a hypothesis which time would be sure to remind you, will happen again-- crushing
any hope with "I told you so" -- and a sense of the inevitable fate of human beings,
where struggle reveals as Frost says, "all ages are bad".  We did summarize his sonnet--
looking at the questions in the sestet... 


David from O Pen says this:    DS: In the octave Frost jokes about the most unsettling things, as if the jokes might neutralize what is so unsettling.


The poet’s tendentious questions  in the sestet play with us by pretending that the unusual particulars—the actors in this drama all being white—indicate something fated, a “steering” more than a blundering set of choices and outcomes.  But I believe that the only intended design here is the poet’s and it’s a teasing one. He plays with his readers’ tendency to imagine a deity behind nature. But if this death-scene represents a deliberate design, the intentions of this designer are dark and appalling.

**
See O Pen for the discussion of the Fin Drury and Clifton...
Terri offered this understanding of the Drury by email since she couldn't be there.
"To me,  it's a moment poem.  It is obviously something that has happened many times, this finding of the church cards which are supposed to be kept in one's wallet to bring luck or have a blessing always with you and yet he finds them on the sidewalk, trampled. I find a similar feeling to his when he at least does not find them in his mail box, like the religious tracts people always find hidden away in stores or left on benches. Those are left meant to be found but the ones he picks up are meant to be kept and have some how been lost or escaped.  He contrasts that with his paper which he has signed up for and will not do so again as it arrives dusty and dirty.  These things, produced a poem although he complains of them both.  I thought it was a just a fun moment, the exact thing that happens to me and then I put into a poem some times."

We looked up "Joel Clay Brauchi" --mentioned in "Holy Pictures and found an article from 1986 about a missing 8 year old,
indeed, from Smyrna, TN.  We were stumped by the ending.
The Irish blessing effect didn't happen, although I had each person read the blessing of the boats.

It's amazing to me, how different the discussions are of the same poem... partly make up of the group, partly 
the selection, which in this case perhaps could point to a different medley of poems, and timing
of the discussion.




2018 !!!! January 3 -- O Pen



Dear Friends,
As we approach 2018, it is easy to pen good wishes, hopes— but that doesn’t change much, whether it be December 31,
and reading The Darkling Thrush, imagining Hardy writing as Jan. 1, 1900 is about to roll in, or  reading Robert Frost’s comments about age.**    I was looking for a note of humor to continue the fun of the poem by  Meyerhofer last week … but found no match.  I quote instead Mark Twain: "New Year's Day… now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. - Mark Twain

I hope the medley below will suffice in variety.  As ever, I am grateful to all who attend in person and in spirit.  
Thank you for being part of my life in 2017.
Love,
Kitty

The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul. - G.K.C.

The Rolling English Road  by - G.K. Chesterton
This first poem was chosen not to illustrate the above quote, but rather to enjoy 
the rollicking rhythms.
For the next three, see Rundel, Jan. 4, as they were also discussed there.
If I Could Tell You  by W.H. Auden
   Holy Pictures by Finvola Drury
blessing the boats (at St. Mary's) by Lucille Clifton


Woe Are You? by Don Mee Choi 
    To the New Year by W. S. Merwin
    Design by Robert Frost

Fin Drury:  I read aloud Joe Flaherty's description of this local Rochester poet who died in 2016.  She was a powerhouse
for poetry, and  political advocacy.  Her poem on the Vietnam war is in the book from which "Holy Pictures" came.
The poem as chosen for Poets Walk where poems which take place outdoors were favored.  I thought of the title in the spirit of
"Holy Smokes" -- how can a prayer card, perhaps offered at a funeral, or picked up at a mass be like common litter,
"muddied and tire-marked"...  It's not just the faithful that I wish "were a little more careful".  The subtle humor of St. Anthony "getting out", the idea of unsolicited mail-- perhaps also of mail... and those intriguing capital letters spelling out
NEVER WRITE YOUR RETURN ADDRESS AGAIN"... perhaps part of the story of the murder of an innocent boy...
or hinting at how fate can find you...

The Don Mee Choi gave rise to a rousing discussion.  The style is deliberately choppy, unpredictable, unsettling with
enjambed broken words  and isolated lonely singletons.  Her use of the word hardly-- which has 6 definitions, often at odds
with each other, reminds me of Louis Menard's article on language in the era of Trump where a word means its opposite.

Facts about the Korean war came up : 4 million killed; 1 million displaced.  The alternate name for the Korean War is ironic:  "Peace Mission"  The role of the US and the strange post-world war II focus on "making democracy safe" -- which is as appallingly anti-democratic in arrogant, political agendas... why are there
120 US bases throughout the world?  As Judith said, "a pox on  Pax Americana… "Korea, with  more priests per capita… perhaps could have solved its own North/South divide... 
Ken's story: 
Hard.  Hardly.  Hardily…  hardly done.  meanly?  difficult…  6 definitions..
scourge is also a loaded word...

We discussed the use of "white" (very different from the Frost poem, or Moby Dick...)
White as the color of mourning... of innocence...  and also "paper dresses" 

Quite a poem with quite an impact... 

We didn't spend much time on the Merwin -- wishing Kathy, our expert were there to help 
us navigate.  "You" can be both personal and universal...  His cosmic view  seems to honor  the smallest of moments as though they were utterly significant-- whether or not anyone notices... whether or not one hears (both, in the physical sense of registering and understanding.)-- there is something positive about the ending... our hopes "invisible before us
untouched and still possible".

I shared David's comments about the Frost poem.  The title, Design, "is one of the most loaded philosophical terms:  Frost loved to provide red herrings, feints, false clues in his poems.  Darwin… and natural process of selection: are the many relationships of predator and prey—creating finally an intricate and ongoing web, or design, among the living and dying. One life is always feeding on another, sustained by another’s death.

Perhaps because the poem followed Merwin's... Martin brought up the idea as  darkness being what  can't see… unknown…
Judith gave the attribute of the color of dirty pearls to the whiteness of the spider... 
The last question is troubling... But what if...
We noted how the question mark comes before the last line... separating the "what"
as if inevitable darkness is the conclusion of scientific determinism...  
David's words: "Frost plays with his readers’ tendency to imagine a deity behind nature. But if this death-scene represents a deliberate design, the intentions of this designer are dark and appalling."