The Untied Stales by Paul Hostovsky
Pomegranate Means Grenade by Jamaal May
For the Sake of Strangers — Dorianne Laux[1]
I Will Love You Most When I Can Barely Remember Anything by William Evans**
Wake Up by Carl Phillips**
Weight by John Freeman **
The Clock by Victoria Chang**
This Paper Boat by Ted Kooser
The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel**
** these poems taken from Tracy K. Smith's site, The Slow Down https://www.slowdownshow.org/episodes/year/2020
** these poems taken from Tracy K. Smith's site, The Slow Down https://www.slowdownshow.org/episodes/year/2020
The first one: Yes, we live in a staleness of what was conceived in 1776 as a glorious assemblage of states each supporting equal "liberty, justice, freedom" for all. Why cross the l of the lie to sum things up in a tidy T? How easy to read “united” for untied… usually things spill out.. but here,
the dark crayon, like a storm sweeps past any borders. Two sentences...
How perfect... the careless label, the darkness... as if the child understands what the father knows.
Pomegranate: (Granada) another child enters, more black crayons... darkening the sun as there are few colors in the picked-over box ... Ashen lines... and in the poem, an older man instructs Jontae, 11 years old, wanting him to know men who prefer to see him pull a pin from a grenade than pull a pen, are afraid. There is a gentleness in the voice of this poet from Detroit-- but the poem could be from anywhere in the world.
For the Sake of Strangers: depending on how one views the world... the last stanza could be positive or negative. However, the discussion revolved around the amazing way a kindness will change
one's attitude about life. The weight of grief... yet one is empty... and how to understand -- how a kindness keeps you from the temptation to fall weightless from the world...
I will love you... The next poem combines humor and the sadness of dementia... how time / flies when you begin
to remember less of it... -- the example in the same couplet, both told in the present of dropping off a daughter... and decades later, being pulled out of a car by an officer as "the sun goes down."
Clever... the only thing that is agile... as we age... is time... How we, like Babylonians invent systems as if to contain it... as if to deny "a worst day never ending" --
Wake up by Carl Phillips offers another vision of aging... the weight of grief over what's lost...
the dark crayon, like a storm sweeps past any borders. Two sentences...
How perfect... the careless label, the darkness... as if the child understands what the father knows.
Pomegranate: (Granada) another child enters, more black crayons... darkening the sun as there are few colors in the picked-over box ... Ashen lines... and in the poem, an older man instructs Jontae, 11 years old, wanting him to know men who prefer to see him pull a pin from a grenade than pull a pen, are afraid. There is a gentleness in the voice of this poet from Detroit-- but the poem could be from anywhere in the world.
For the Sake of Strangers: depending on how one views the world... the last stanza could be positive or negative. However, the discussion revolved around the amazing way a kindness will change
one's attitude about life. The weight of grief... yet one is empty... and how to understand -- how a kindness keeps you from the temptation to fall weightless from the world...
I will love you... The next poem combines humor and the sadness of dementia... how time / flies when you begin
to remember less of it... -- the example in the same couplet, both told in the present of dropping off a daughter... and decades later, being pulled out of a car by an officer as "the sun goes down."
Clever... the only thing that is agile... as we age... is time... How we, like Babylonians invent systems as if to contain it... as if to deny "a worst day never ending" --
Wake up by Carl Phillips offers another vision of aging... the weight of grief over what's lost...
Like reading a dream. Wake up… beginning and end…
images picked up and dropped..
transitions… seamless with things that don’t make sense.
Get ready for the work ahead. The Second Coming + Yeats. world turned upside down.
Weight by John Freeman : a reminder of how we may cause pain... how self-doubt... how convenient to hear people with noisy pockets and know to avoid them.
The Clock: A meditation of sorts...
An elegy for the poet's father who has dementia... There are no stanza breaks in this thin, single, column. One person commented on the NPR interview about a physicist telling difficulty of clock test knowing he had dementia, describing his experience while he could still tell time.
Now that the clock is going out of use we wondered what kind of "clock test" will be used when we have no more clocks.
A meditation of sorts... Enough to want to quote all the details... playing on the expression "to do something without second thought", the author's father cannot find the first most important thought, as every thought a 2nd, 3rd, 4th thought"; is the paper sad, once folded because it has seen the shape of an origami swan... or does it aspire
to flatness? a life without creases?"
How "our brains allow language/to wander without looking back but/knowing where the pier is."
Words dealing with "fish"... like fishing for words... When they're gone, they're gone.
I used the Ted Kooser poem for a valentine. A perfect metaphor...
It reminded one person of the Day of remembering the dead. What Valentine do you have ready, floating in the future...
The last poem had a lovely preamble... 32 times of "I love you"... and the imaginative setting of
a time a government would allot 167 words a day.
The idea of a "broken record" played invisibly of "I love you"...played in the silent breathing
when they have used up their allotment.
[1] From Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry – column 777” posted 2/10/20; prefaced with a quote from Tolstoy: "Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
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