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Wednesday, September 23, 2020

September 23, 2020

 Say Thank You Say I'm Sorry by Jericho Brown: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/books/review/jericho-brown-say-thank-you-say-im-sorry-poem-coronavirus.html

Venus & Serena Play Doubles On Center Court  by Kate Rushin https://dcs.megaphone.fm/POETS5794638452.mp3?key=0705ab06c9cffb25d0a07d6fa9f9922d


Today God  by Starr Davis

Morning Song of Senlin  by Conrad Aiken (1889–1973)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk1EM7YNLW4  (Tom O'Bedlam reading)

Two Countries by Naomi Shihab Nye

The Breathing Field by Wyatt Townley



Nutshell:


Say Thank you  Say I'm Sorry: these two expressions... of gratitude and apology introduced in the title  shadow the unspoken thanks for those who toil for us, whether in hospitals, service industries, grocery stores.

The discussion picked up on a tone of controlled anger... the unspoken references to racism, pandemic. ex. Surprising line breaksfor my big black/Car to quit; 

surprising combinations --at least one field trip /To a slaughterhouse. 
juxtapositions of high class touches, like gnocchi with those who wash their hands for us, return home on the bus.
What is it that any of us want in that "little"?  It doesn't have to be the  fancy items like the leather bound
Book, gimlet,  and real bread...  The humor and cynicism in having "PTSD of the Lord" -- PTSD meaning, a long term and recurring condition, coupled with  biblical plagues, floods.  The strength of the clipped speech, the theatrical pauses indeed makes it seem like an introduction to a complex play with many moods.  Many allusions, such as "who wears the mask".  Have we forgotten to say thank you? I'm sorry?  Inserted in the jumble, a request, " I’d like us to rethink
What it is to be a nation."  

Venus & Serena:  Although we didn't listen to Kate read her poem, the link is above.  The "about this poem" sums it up: "there you are, enjoying yourself, living your life, going about your business, and then, when you least expect it, someone is trying to put you in a color box, a gender box, a femininity box with their assumptions and limitations.”
Can't a tennis match just be a tennis match?
Thank you Kate for celebrating two classy sisters, " pounding history".

Today God: I only printed two lines of the longer poem, but they do stand by themselves. to read: https://poets.org/poem/today-god
It brought up discussion about how things have changed since 2016, both good and bad.  


Morning Song of Senlin: This is part 2 of the second section of Senlin: a Biography

Part 1:  His Dark Origins (8 sections )

Part 2: Futile Preoccupations. (10 sections)

PART 3: Cloudy Destiny ( 3 sections)

about the reader: an anonymous fellow one person believes is from Australia but has adopted a "received pronunciation" actor's style.   I love that he takes his name from the 1620 poem, rather of the same lilting sort as Aiken's style here.


Discussion involved admiring the music of the poem, as one critic says, "shimmering with ambivalences and ambiguities";  a certain sentimentality, Rosetti style;

 a "Chagall-esque" mystical upside-down-ness, and overtones of Eliot's Prufrock.

Perhaps one aspect of Aiken's persona... Senlin is held together by his routine... Echoes in Madeleine l'Engle's children's book, Swiftly Tilting Planet; Beatles' Fool on the Hill;


Two Countries :  I love that a poem can mean in such a variety of ways!  Knowing Naomi has a father from Palestine, it was helpful to hear Elaine's application of skin as border, and the many losses

as those suffered by Palestine.  What imagination to use skin as character -- the largest "organ" of our body... the separation of inside/outside; visible/invisible... and the remembering of "something larger" and people go places, "larger than themselves" -- which is not as straightforward as you might think.

Both Lori and Martin though of two countries as a man and woman;  we all felt the human need for touch...


Breathing Field: lovely "fields" of stanzas enjambed like connected pieces of a vertebrae... 

Yoga allusions... the pacing cannot be fast, like a walking meditation... the double-entendres

of "So much is still /. So much is still to be seen".  One idea behind final sentence:  a question for

guided meditation:  "What was your face before your grandmother was born?"



Monday, September 21, 2020

September 16

The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Indispensable Lessons by Saad Ali

Human Habitat by Alison Hawthorne Deming 

If Covid-19 Wasn’t a Stain in the Wind, Would the Earth Bleed Any Less? by Anthony Okpunor

The Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire by Sarah Kay




No Nutshell discussion this week.  Please feel free to comment on the poems!


 Elaine mentioned “Indispensable Lessons” generated a lot fo good conversation without any reference to the fact it was an ekphrastic response.   Her research into the poem: 
The ekphrastic challenge using the painting “Potato Theatre” by To Yen.https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/ekphrastic-challenge-responses-toyen


Marna wanted to share this poem by Verlaine, The Exquisite Hour she heard on public radio,  The YouTube of the song is called, Renaldo Hahn L’Heure Exquise The Exquisite Hour.translated,  I’m not sure it was this, but you can hear the music and English subtitles here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl22CLqxwus

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

September 9

Today, When I Could Do Nothing by Jane Hirshfield

The Check In by Nandi Comer

To be of use by Marge Piercy

Boarding a Bus by Steve Huff

Dying Towns by Joshua Martin

Of the Surface of Things  by Wallace Steven

 Today, When I could do nothing: thank you Marna for suggesting this poem.  

It was clear from the wealth of angles brought up, that this is one of those “good poems”, that happily increases possibilities of meanings— as David S. put it so poetically, “its palette of possibilities”.  Written at the beginning of the pandemic, (this first day when I could do nothing), the title and juxtaposition of the 4 words “I saved an ant”, could also be about any day, as well as the first day of some major change that forces one to re-think what  can be done.

It appeared in an article in Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/one-true-thing/202004/poet-jane-hirshfield-today-when-i-could-do-nothing

The poem is filled with small twists of humor, such as the ant as "the loosened ink taking the shape of the ant).  A small chuckle at the sentence arises (or a small glub) reading “I am not an essential service”… also invites us to think about what is… (all the while enabling us to face fear our diminishment more easily…) The “silence enough to fill cisterns” takes me to a Cistercian abby (for Trappist monks… more rigorous in practice than Benedictines)-- back in (unspoken) time, and a chance for deep meditation. The details, observations, seem offered with gratitude, an appreciation of and compassion for the ordinary;

To quote Hirschfield https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-seekers-forum/202006/the-perfection-things-they-are

"What a reader finds in a poem is often a mirror, both of the person who is looking and listening and of the particular weather of that particular moment of listening."

Ants are fascinating to observe… fast climbers, intrepid… To elaborate on the question, “what good does it do”,  Bernie shared the Starfish Story: https://www.countryschool.net/news-detail?pk=1250796 (the link includes a few words of advice about “catching kindness from the headmistress).

The final line, “I did this” is both self-referential, “I wrote this”, as well as referring to “saving the ant”.  You do not need to be convinced that the ant might have been able to survive without her help, or readily finds comrades… the idea of a small act of kind attention… the comparison of ant to human, lends to meditating on the worth of all life… 

The question, “What then did I save” can easily extend to saving perhaps a part of herself—ah…but I see many more paragraphs ensuing and will stop here.

 

The Check-In:  

We remarked on the form which reflects different modes of anger. The last two sentences deal a real punch.  The “helplessness” in the flimsy  “I am so so sorry”, (akin to the uselessness of changing anything by saying I’ll pray for you) seizes the “so”…hurls it to so white… and three times, so late.

Nandi Comer writes in “about this poem”: “I wrote ‘The Check In’ as a response to a strange phenomenon I was noticing during the pandemic. After the murder of George Floyd and the uprisings that followed, I and other Black friends began receiving calls, texts, and emails from white people that weren’t necessarily close friends. Their attempts to connect with me really felt as if they were seeking an explanation or comfort for their own anxieties. Isn’t it always the case that Black people end up caring for white fragility? For me these messages felt like another kind of violence to endure. They made me anxious. I could not answer them, so I wrote this reply.”

To be of Use  by Marge Piercy

This is a wonderful poem to discuss “what work is”, what kinds of work bring out desire to “jump in head first”, “do what has to be done to move things forward”, do those things “worth doing well.”  Her metaphors for meaningful work can be used for all types of “work” — whether chasing a sunset, and recording it in music or painting,  writing, teaching,  as a way to increase a student’s confidence, develop clarity in thinking;  Preaching as ministry like speakers, hoping to inspire, participate in work for social justice.  Elaine brought up Levine’s poem as contrast— https://ariegr1.edublogs.org/2009/03/19/poem-analysis-what-work-is-by-philip-levine/

The ending two lines are memorable — and invite us to continue the possibilities of the circumstances— The pitcher cries for water to carry/and a person for work that is real”.  what do we make… and how can it be used? Yes, we cry for work like the pitcher, the work without which leaves us feeling empty. 

Boarding a Bus: It is wonderful to hear Steve’s voice reading his poem.  What is it we can’t afford NOT to do?  David quoted Cesare Pavese, “Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.”

Dying Towns:  The 14 couplets deliver a fabulous word painting of the disappearance of towns… and then, the kapow of the last line — "nobody asking, who the hell I was, where the hell I was going.”  Clever line breaks, the play of “where the living went” as both the way to make a living, as well as living people; the poetic names of towns (with possible undertones of  puns on bluff, ash, popular, may), which contrasts with the harsh fact of bulldozer and inconceivable idea of a father forgetting the color of his daughter’s eyes. Susan brought up the image of a rorschach presentation…

What are the towns we carry with us from childhood?  Who were we? 

On the Surface of Things:  it was wonderful to have a personable account of Wallace Stevens, and his daughter “ready to get out of this daughter business” of handling his posthumous work and affairs.

Estranged from his family, going upstairs after dinner to his study,  his observations understand that our perception can invite the imagination.  Carolyn quoted from The Great Modern Poets in their own words edited by Michael Schmidt.

“It is possible to read Stevens for years with intense pleasure and never to care what the poems means because the sense of sense is so strong and the movement of feeling so assured.  If we do question his meanings and try to tie the poems in to them, we may displace the poetry itself.  The subtlety of his thought is less compelling than the magic of his effects on the ear and eye, his ability to rouse the ‘intellectual emotions.”

The three stanzas have a sense of “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (last line of The Snow Man).  His imagination creates worlds for us… and I love that he tucks in what seems to be “a looking out” to reveal he is  actually “looking in”, reading what he has written — both act and the words describing “The spring is like a belle undressing” .  

 **

As ever, thank you to all.  I hope I have done justice to the lively conversation.  Martin, I invite you to add your comments, please!  You always have valuable insights, and although it was easier to hear you without the image, I know I missed your “hand” wanting to add.  This goes for everyone who “attends as a black box”.

We are all learning new lessons in patience.  Hence, these nutshells — to allow those who want to say more to be able to.  

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

September 2

In Envy of Cows by Joseph Auslander - 1897-1965

When the Virus Comes by Angelo Geter

The Children of Beslan (To My Children) by Irakli Kakabadze

Nostalgia  by Joyce Carol Oates

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by Amiri Baraka 

Choose by Carl Sandburg 

By the Stream by Paul Laurence Dunbar - 1872-1906

we did not discuss: Climbing China’s Great Wall by Afaa M. Weaver

Nutshell summary:

In Envy of Cows: Joseph Auslander

Written in 1923, hence, at the age of 26.  We remarked the lush sounds, the variable line length which helps disguise the end-rhyme, the complexity of image and the fun of “poetic register” with words like kine (archaic word referring to cows collectively) and pellucid, and poplar trees referred to as frieze.  It is a healing poem both in subject and sound. Ah! Cows!  From the first line, we feel each movement— as if we too are cow, swinging our head, plunging into a decadent Roman feast which in 5 lines swells from “web-washed grass” to wine…   David S. prompted us to think of Keats, Ode to Autumn — commenting on the “substance in syllables” (density of sensory detail)…Indeed —the delight of the poem is that a Cow is the subject written  in the elevated style of an ode!

David H. shares this thought and Lazy Afternoon: "The poem  "Envy of Cows"  immediately brought to mind the exquisite lyrics below to a ballad called "Lazy Afternoon," from the 1954 Broadway musical "The Golden Apple."  The lyrics were by John LaTouche (with music by Jerome Moross). The imagery in the lyrics captures the same relaxing feeling as those in "Envy of Cows." The song has become a standard in the Great American Songbook. 

Song lyrics are often simpler than poems, relying on the music to elevate them, but I believe that these lyrics stand on their own. Many of the most famous popular singers have recorded "Lazy Afternoon,"  including Barbra Streisand Shirley Horn, and Tony Bennett."

It's a lazy afternoon

And the beetle bugs are zooming

And the tulip trees are blooming

And there's not another human in view

But us two

It's a lazy afternoon

And the farmer leaves his reaping

And the meadow cows are sleeping

And the speckled trouts stop leaping up stream

As we dream

A far pink cloud hangs over the hill

Unfolding like a rose

If you hold my hand and sit real still

You can hear the grass as it

Many people have sung this tune : Tony Bennett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8syJ9kwje4

Shirley Horn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh5yakbQXLQ

Barbara Streisand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nmeiWp2OpU

 

When the Virus Comes  by Angelo Peter

On the surface, the poem allows us to consider what we have been experiencing for 5+ months…yet plays between present and future which indeed could contain a “last time”.  I wish we had a “spoken word” delivery of the poem for if we could hear his voice, perhaps that would confirm the level of satire we detect in the style, the linebreaks, the “cleverness” factor in 2nd and 3rd stanzas… the implied play on empty shelves/emptying shelves; empty selves.  Perhaps the most enigmatic part of the poem is the lacing of things that should be good— a lover’s kiss; dancing, singing, laughing — not frivolous laughter— but the laughter that understands the depth of joy.  I hope he is not toying with “who has the last laugh”… at the end… but I prefer that than to think, knowing what joy feels like, this is the last time to feel it. 

If anyone can help with the last line, I’m all ears!

The Children of Beslan (to my Children)  by Irakli Kakabadze Translated from the Georgian by Mary Childs

I wish I could read the original to doublecheck the tense.  Why the switch from present tense to past (16th line: “We left toys…”) then return to present until the penultimate line —?

I like that people found parallels between how the Russian government dealt with the 2004 massacre and how governments (especially ours)  now are dealing with multiple issues of unexplainable murders coupled with a resurgence of racism, the pandemic, not to mention ignoring ecological causes of natural catastrophes.  I appreciate also that Rose brought up how easy it is to forget… and that if without knowing the time or place of the poem, one could read it in a much different light.   

Wilted smiles…flowers for the dead… the children who “were supposed to open the door of life’s wisdom”— not for them — but for us — as if the older generations in charge have not learned the necessary wisdom to carry on… join with the  ironic “flowers have chosen a better fate” .  Yesterday was September 1st.  I am haunted by this poem to ask myself, just as a date, September 1, starting the traditional school year, the month of the Jewish New Year… (and a few days before my birthday, so yet another yearly anniversary) what is it I hide behind— and those in my culture?

Nostalgia by Joyce Carol Oates. The Poem we heard included two lines that are not in the July 27, 1998 published version of Nostalgia in The New Yorker.The printed copy does however, have a different spacing, which changes how you might read it, although the reader did seem to pause … Here is how it looked judging from the New Yorker ( I couldn’t copy it) with the additional 2 lines:

Nostalgia  by Joyce Carol Oates (rural district school #7, Ransomville, New York)

Crumbling stone steps of the old schoolhouse

Boarded-up windows   shards of winking glass

Built 1898, numerals faint in stone as shadow

Through a window, obedient rows of desks    mute

Only a droning of hornets beneath the eaves,

The cries of red wing blackbirds by the creek.

  

How many generations of this rocky countryside grown & gone

How many memories     & all forgotten

& soon to be razed.       & goodbye America

The flagless pole,         what relief!

I love it, the eye lifting skyward      to nothing

 

Thank you Elaine for mentioning FOXFIRE. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/193917311.pdf

She is a prolific poet and complex for sure.  In the above link the idea of nostalgia proposed by Svetlana Boym is different than the desire to recreate a (usually positive, often sentimental) version of the past.  It is an interrogation of the notion of truth.  I am fascinated by all the levels and tones we could find in the second part of the poem.  Indeed… just like a haiku technique of turn as Marna pointed out… “an ironic twist” of multiple  turns… different types of punches.  

How many ways can you understand the “hand over my heart, as if I had one”?  A critique of those who do the gesture when saying the pledge, or a personal statement?  And “lifting skyward— to nothing…

The razing of America, as in removing all traces of old towns and ways of life to make room for new suburbs and replacement of community with shopping strips comes to my mind.

 

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by Amiri Baraka (former) LeRoi Jones)

 The title itself deserves volumes!  If writing a preface to something so large, which will end in death — indeed, one feels the ground open… and the desire to count stars… just to get some fact in the enormity of what is dismissed as countable… and count the holes they leave when you can’t… leaves me exhausted…

I’m glad I wasn’t the only one to see the ending line as not the same kind of despair… There might not be answer for the daughter… but she is finding her way to cope…Of course, the isolation, the possible futility of praying, peeking into one’s own clasped hands is scarcely uplifting.


Choose by Carl Sandburg (skipped discussion)


By the Stream by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Such a beautiful, formal poem, but as David S. pointed out… knowing who wrote it and when, helps to understand the layers and see actually two very different poems.   If we read it as a timeless “White Western Canon” poem, we might come to some sad social truth… but reading it as an expression of a  young black in turn of the century America changes our lens.   Snowy-hued… white-robed… even the armored knights with silver helmets… are part of the Western White way of reading clouds.   So what sparkles (verb used twice)… and what things are mirrored?