To be of use by Marge Piercy
The Hands and the Clock by Dierdre O’Connor
Living Room by Marie Ponsot
Pileated Woodpecker Barbara Loots
The Pleasure of Working Slowly to Meet Challenges Kitty Jospé
One Gold-Rush Evening by Taylor Graham
Encouragement Kitty Jospé
Everyone loved the Marge Piercy. Who are the people you love the best? She tells us in the first two stanzas -- the ones who don't dally, do their work, do what has to be done again and again.
The images which "illustrate" such people... black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls... oxen who pull like water buffalo straining in the mud and muck...
And with whom do you want to be? and with whom not?
About craft: reading the poem aloud, one realizes how the sounds and repetitions do a lovely weaving with the pleasure of the language... dallying in the shallows... rhythm and sound... the sibilance, the mmm's of massive, mud, muck, museums, and submerge and smears... amphoras... The repeat of the verb "submerge", the noun, mud now the common work of the world...
which leads to the form and function of the Greek amphora, Hopi vases... the poem becomes a container…
the ending idea of people like pitchers carrying water... each of us with a use to do "real work".
Now... where do you go to define that?
Just because old... don't put on a shelf...
The poem was first published in 1982; appeared in the Dec. 2019 issue of the Sun.
See this article: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/528/the-world-we-still-have
Now for the pleasure of the language... dallying in the shallows... rhythm and sound... the sibilance, the mmm's of massive, mud, muck, museums, and submerge and smears... amphoras...
comments: reminded of Philip Levine. What Work is.
A job worth doing is worth doing well… MENIAL… given place.
If swab a deck, swab as if Davy Jones after you…
James Thurber. + story of Wash on the Line
our yearning for meaning.
The small Indian pestle + Piercy: throw into river of life and work.
the system behind a job.
what makes us "of use" if retire… ?
The next poem with two news citations works a double thread -- white/winter; black/August; attention given to the little white toddler; the black body of Michael Brown ignored; pumping of CPR and bullets...
Comments: Without the epigraph, we may have missed the clues. One person was reminded of The Shipping News where the character wakes up at his wake. How could there have been a "hero" in the case of Michael? Two versions of innocence, yet one demands a hero, the other ignored...
We noted the importance of U’… in both poems, the ending rat-a-tat if short i -- single finger, six...
to the long I of times.
Back to the title, the clock, the hands...
clock: how long are we doing to accept the times?
The Ponsot poem is a tritina-- a half a sestina. Frame, break, cold woven in repeats.
Each tercet had a compound figure: "old & paint-stuck"; "house-warm"; "storm hit".
Two of the ampersands compounded the adjectives (wet & dangling) the middle tercet an extension of the work of the cold.
What is the metaphor of living room? Frame of window, house; picture... all at risk for breaking...
yet, framed, a "wind-break"... which averts the cold. That family picture allows room for living.
The Pileated woodpecker:
comments included reference to Da Vinci who apparently commented on how the woodpecker can survive: the tongue absorbs sound; size of crow. The author, Barbara Loots worked for Hallmark for 40 years. “At Hallmark, the bunnies do not have fangs.”
Coot and loon. Why only the woodpeckers making noise! She points out we don’t have silence.
Judith wants to choreograph… Indian Kata.. Gamalan… Monkey Chat…
nice for a zen-do. Why the title.. about silence… just nice observations… economic.The next poem, by yours truly, was not to self-aggrandize, but to introduce the form, "Clogyrnach", a Welsh form. Paul kindly provided a scholarly explanation of the six lines and rhymes. My 8 tercets follow independent embraced rhyme with no link... \
The Gold-rush evening demonstrates how it should be done.
Everyone enjoyed the scene -- the "mind's sleight" where gold dust settles with a darker side to be mined.
"the dark stone hollows delved between p
wishing and getting. "Judith's comment was that she was "Gobsmacked" by the amount of skill and taste involved…
Pay attention to the unseen. meaning is mysterious. Many people had associations, for instance
Jan’s grandfather was mining engineer and she brought up the culture of mining… Panning for gold… lawless place. Taylor (feminine) presents the paradox of hidden glint and dust... "each ghost shapes into dark, each question-mark a small spark glittering."
Indeed brilliant.
The last poem was a "golden Shovel..." using The line “You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return”. It comes from
Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul5fVXH7Ur4
she believes that poems are houses for spirits. Her poem starts at 1:49
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