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Thursday, July 25, 2019

July 17 + 24

July 17:  Jan Barber


Leaving English by Julia Alvarez
 Atlantis  by Mark Doty
Different Hours by Stephen Dunn
Returning Birds by Wislawa Szymborska
Sixty by Stephen Dunn

July 24:  back to me.

next to of course god america i, by e.e. cummings
Adios by Naomi Shihab Nye
Black Woman by Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966)
Peace by Patrick Kavanagh
On Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh
Hum for the Bolt by Jamaal May
I hope ;to God you will not ask by Esther Belin
Ode to Ironing by Pablo Neruda

How do you feel about being next to. "of course"?
Of course God.  God America.  The title announces the complexity and wit of Cummings to take patriotic songs and clichés, so easily substituted for what many people consider bona-fide and important patriotism.  No punctuation, just one unending stream of words,  jammed into a twitter-length 14 line poem.  Complete sentence:  He spoke.  One person compared the tone to starting out like a brass band in major key, increasingly sliding into an unsettling minor key that makes you doubt
the original was as bright as we believed.  War:  we rush into it "like lions to the roaring slaughter"...
it does not continue that they did not  die in vain -- but rather, instead of thinking, they died (instead)-- heroic and happy?
Just a hint of TS Eliot's Prufrock...  in the centuries that come and go  ("the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo")... leading up to a truncated beaut--(iful).

We read it line by line, repeating each line but adding the next  to more fully concentrate on the
simultaneous meanings and blends.
You could emphasize phrase such as in lines 5 + 6 "
my country 'tis of... (truncated... pause). Centuries come and go (line break) and are no more.
The poem could be re-parsed as a series of truncated, unfinished pieces that challenge sense.

Next to of course,
god, america and i love you land of the pilgrims and so forth
oh say can you see by the dawn's early my  (is dawn all about what is possesses?)
(my) country, 'tis of (centuries).                (not just one dawn, but implied centuries of them)
centuries come and go and are no more
what of it
we should worry in every language
even deafanddumb thy sons acclaim your glorious name
by gorry, by jingo, by gee by gosh by gum (read connecting line above and below
why talk of beauty
what could be more beaut/iful than these heroic happy dead ...
etc.

* I think (of the people, for the people by the people, where there is no "of" or "for" )

Whether enthusiasm for the Civil War, WW I,  before the actuality of the senseless slaughter,
the absurdity of his pronouncements makes the speaker hoarse, trying to say it all...
then wash it away with a glass of water...
Congressional puffery... patriotic self-serving blathering... how the hints of national anthems,
like the anthems themselves, stoke people up.

Adios:  like Adieu -- both of which start with an "a", God be With You...  in one word...
spelling out wishes for another at the beginning of a journey--
how one word, can roll off the tongue, be carefully considered, become something as important as a spouse to whom you vow to be faithful.  This is some word!
And look how it will serve you! Wings... guidance... and then the kernel of zen-ness:
it's not about you... but a way to rise out of sight... which directs the poem to consider things that linger. then the opposite, things that disappear... to what you love, what moves you...
Naomi guides us again and again to pay attention to words... the meanings that hold lessons...
the richness of what is sounded (as in plumbed depths, as well as spoken aloud) the meditation
on what was heard.

Now... this paraphrase is not to replicate the poem-- but I admire a poem which can stir me to
pause long enough to consider multiple angles inspired by "good bye".  That she chose Spanish,
living near Mexico, perhaps is a key point for a non-English word understood superficially by English speakers, draws the poem to the subject of understanding.

Black Woman:
We wondered when the poem was written, as Johnson was born in 1880, so it could be before her involvement with the Harlem Renaissance.  Her first collection of poems was published in 1918, (In the Heart of a Woman") and I am guessing she wrote it in 1916 as one of the poems published by MAACP's magazine Crisis. more info: https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-biography/georgia-douglas-johnson/
The soft rhythmic tone of the poem embraces deep sorrow with deep love..


Peace:  9 lines that start off as if surprised in mid-conversation.  Countryside and farming, a hint of a cemetery, battlefield... and look what peace is offering!  We do not think of peace offering such items-- nor that it would "hawk" such.  And what if it did in our daily markets?

On Raglan Road mistakenly followed with its title.   Do you consider Love, Life, Time
as tyrants?  Again, in the nostalgic setting of countryside, he wonders what fools climb up
to fight them... and launches into his first love, and loss.

Hum for the Bolt is a wonderful title... with loaded words... what kind of bolt?  why hum?
The poem comes from his book, Hum whose poems explore machines, technology, obsolescence, and community. In an interview, May stated of his first book, “Ultimately, I’m trying to say something about dichotomy, the uneasy spaces between disparate emotions, and by extension, the uneasy spaces between human connection.”

I hope to God you will not ask. The title of the poem by this Navaho poet comes from the words of the 19th century Navaho hero, Barboncito (1821-71).  I feel as if Esther is shadowing his words,
as a propos today as over a century ago.

Ode for Ironing: You can actually read the poem backwards and it is just as satisfying with its surprises, leaps.  David reminded us of Wallace Stevens words, "a poem must resist intelligence almost successfully."  This one smooths out possibilities of poetry, what "comes out" of the wrinkles,

Here is Mitchell's translation with Neruda's original
Ode to Ironing                                                           ODA PARA PLANCHAR

Poetry is white:                                                             La poesía es blanca:
it comes from the water covered with drops,                sale del agua envuelta en gotas,
it wrinkles and piles up,                                                se arruga, y se amontona,
the skin of this planet must be stretched,                      hay que extender la piel de este planeta,
the sea of its whiteness must be ironed,                        hay que planchar el mar de su blancura
and the hands move and move,                                     y van y van las manos,
the holy surfaces are smoothed out,                              se alisan las sagradas superficies
and that is how things are made:                                   y así se hacen las cosas:
hands make the world each day,                                    las manos hacen cada día el mundo,
fire becomes one with steel,                                          se une el fuego al acero,
linen, canvas, and cotton arrive                                     llegan el lino, el lienzo y el tocuyo
from the combat of the laundries,                                 del combate de las lavanderías
and out of light a dove is born:                                      y nace de la luz una paloma:
chastity returns from the foam.                                      la castidad regresa de la espuma.








July 10,

July 10:  Bernie's picks
Noctis Oceanus - Ursula K Le Guin (UKLG for the rest)
The Fine Arts - UKLG
The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House - UKLG
The Elders at the Falls - UKLG *
From UKLG’s “rendering” of the Tao Te Ching, Ch. 19

note:     ————-——————————————-
…”Raw silk” and “uncut wood” are images traditionally associated with the characters su (simple, plain) and p’u (natural, honest).

What a summary in 4 lines of the Fine Arts:  Beauty and truth... perceived through
sight, emotion, intellectual or animal-sensual?
Eye and heart, win the prize... vs. blind and misjudged by the mind.


Judging beauty, which is keenest,
Eye or heart or mind or penis?
Lust is blindest, feeling kindest
Sight is strongest, thought goes wrongest.
===================================
Leguin Resources and Bibliography
Her website:  https://www.ursulakleguin.com/home
     One link in it includes some past speeches for a flavor of her wit, down to earth
     practicality and passions:   https://www.ursulakleguin.com/speeches
 
               
-  A Left-Handed Commencement Address, Mills College, 1983 - On being a writer, &    
          therefore a man (text only: http://www.pacifict.com/ron/Mills.html )
 -  Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award Speech, Ursula
        Le Guin December 2014- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk       

        (Her fierce defense of art vs. its commodification)
 -  The Emperor Has No Clothes Award, 2009 - An interesting retelling and consideration
        of the familiar story, shifting into comments on religion, text only at:
           https://ffrf.org/outreach/awards/emperor-has-no-clothes-award/item/11980- ursula-k-le-guin-       
    - Aussiecon 1974 Guest of Honor speech - Australian SF conference airing
          her strong opinions about “genre” writing, its categorization and literary value judgments
Some selected books of poetry, essays, interviews:
- FInding My Elegy, New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010, 2012
So Far So good, Final Poems: 2014-2018, 2018
Conversations on Writing, with David Naimon, 2018
Words are My Matter, Writings about Life and Books, 2000-2016, with A Journal                of a Writer's Week, 2016
the wave of the mind, Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the                 Imagination, 2004
Steering the Craft, A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, 1998, 2015
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, A new
               English Version by UKLG
,1997 [A wonderful “rendering”, elegantly simple,
               with comments, annotations & chapter notes]
-  The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories of Ursula Le Guin, Vol’s 1 (Where on
               Earth) and 2 (Outer Space, Inner Lands)
, 2012

“NON-LEGUIN-ETRY”  - All these next poems taken from Poetry of Presence, An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Ed. Cole-Day, P. and Wilson, R.R, 2017

Visiting Mountains - Ted Kooser
The plains ignore us,
but these mountains listen,
an audience of thousands
holding its breath
in each rock. Climbing,
we pick our way
over the skulls of small talk.
On the prairies bellows,
the grass leans this way and that
in discussion;
words fly away like corn shucks
over the fields.
Here, lost in a mountain’s
attention, there’s nothing to say.
==================================

A Gift - Denise Levertov
Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.
=========================

One Heart - Li-Young Lee
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open

at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
========================

a song with no end - Charles Bukowski
when Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric”

I know what he
meant
I know what he wanted:

to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable

we can’t cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us

it will have known a victory just as
perfect as ours.

July 3,


July 3
American Towns by Laura Da’/var/folders/nd/cfnlczwx4sq494h93vjwkdxr0000gn/T/com.microsoft.Word/WebArchiveCopyPasteTempFiles/collection.svg
Kiss of the Sun by Mary Ruefle
America by Tony Hoagland
Rooms by Billy Collins
There was a child went forth every day by Walt Whitman - 1819-1892
The Road to Hateby Patrick Kavanaugh
Fear And Love by  JIM MOORE

Laura Da's poem is masterful--the difficult syntax echoes with powerful ideas. Indeed, her "ink bellows"... the images are compelling, as is the use of language as she paints a picture of what once was Shawnee, and the meaning of  homeland as something "conjured"... moved to yet another "conjured homeland".  What "America" is, in 2019,
with its department of "Homeland Security" is not part of the poem... but I think of what America has become and just what "homeland" means to those living in a country that used to promise to shelter those who leave one.  The paradox of destroying the original people living here, to found a country offering refuge is amplified by the "tightened fist of connotation"-- how the lyric description "limpid sashay of corn tassles along the byway",  like "Amber waves of grain" is ground into the verb "grits", in "what is owed grits in congress", along with burned council houses.
A must-read in every classroom, every home. Discussion brought up our local Seneca Village Ganondagan;  Civil War locations... how in Franklin, TN, the floors are still stained… 

Mary Ruefle "gives us an orange" -- a sunkist message... as she contemplates 
how something might remain despite  our disappearance… that reassurance that poetry provides,
that rescues us from a sense of chaos.

Tony Hoagland, with his perfect blend of sincerity and irony, captures contemporary speech in  the observations of the kids he teaches, suffocating in  the "satin quilt" of the consumer-run complexity 
of fast-food America, 24/7 news America, plastic veneer America.   The voices feel real... even
 his Dad's which you realize is a tongue-in-cheek, but highly effective use of a rhymed couplets , which of course, Hoagland tells us, l would only happen in a nightmare, and sets us up to believe
the father's totally surreal and unrealistic response to vomiting Ben Franklins... 

Tony offers us a deft (hence,  enjoyable, but simultaneously unsettling) portrait of modern America where we’re all guilty… 


I shared the Billy Collins because a video was made of it in the Finger Lakes Exhibit at the MAG.
I don't recommend the video, but the poem offers a tongue-in-cheek approach to the power of
the poetic imagination to deal with what might  start our to be a gloomy physicality of dark rooms, on repeatingly rainy days.

As for the E.E. Cummings... The syntax is delightful and impossible if wearing a grammarian hat.
Since Collins ended with a mouse, why not see what Cummings "up at does"-- how if it's a poisoned mouse... how then he makes it still alive, and like the reader.  Now how do you feel about setting traps for innocent people, or genocide for that matter.

We leave cynicism with Whitman who keeps  eyes and heart open… not imposing, like Hoagland's bombardment... but mindfully observing how ordinary life has changed so much... 
with the fine-grained detail of transcendental flavor in a long list of bucolic surroundings… unlike Ruefle's  short list  wheat and evil and insects and love),

In closing, the Kavanagh... and the Jim Moore...
a little too much to end on... what leads us to follow the road to hate?  A good question to ponder...
along with the relationship between love and fear.

As ever, poems are such consoling companions, especially shared with others-- as we enter
their rooms and ponder what we understand. 






O Pen: Elaine's picks June 19, 2019// Carmin's picks June 26



Elaine Olsson kindly offered to curate the poems for 6/19.  She also was considering
"Insomnia" by Billy Collins... however,  the poems above came to 6 pages, so I sent it as
an extra attachment.  I copied the formatting of the photocopies of poems she made from
books in the library.


The River Merchant’s Wife: a Letter by Ezra Pound 
Directions by Billy Collins  

On the Screened Porch by Elizabeth Biller Chapman
Sure by Naomi Shihab Nye
A Black Kite by W.S. Merwin
Permanently  by Kenneth Koch
Forgetfulnessby Billy Collins 
Brainstorm by Howard Nemerov

Carmin Rosebrough kind offered to curate the poems for 6/26:
She had a thought of doing the Lovesong of Alfred J. Prufrock, along with a friends take-off of it...
which sound fascinating, but perhaps for another time...  Here are the titles of her choices.

4 Haiku
 THE GHOST by Richard Wehrman
WHAT DOES YOUR HEART SAY by Richard Wehrman
LA MIGRA  by Pat Mora
 GROWING APPLES  by Nancy Miller Gomez
GREAT ASO by Tatsuji Miyoshi
 from THE SOUND OF WATER'S FOOTSTEPS   by Sohrab Sepehri(Persian poet)
THE PRISON CELL by Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine)


[1] Great Aso is the name of a volcanic crater in Japan