POEMS.
No matter which side of the divide
you find yourself on, come closer.
There is more of me in you than I thought
and, I'll venture, vice-versa.
A Tree Design by Arna Bontemps
The Speakng Tree by Joy Harjo
Fana al Fana by William Heyen (read on 4/23 at the Little)
Time by William Heyen (not discussed)
The Candle by William Heyen (from Falling from Heaven, 1991; and The Candle, 2016)
Elegy by William Heyen (from The Shoah Train, 2003;and The Candle, 2016)
Redwings by William Heyen (read on 4/23 by Bart white at the Little)
read but not distributed
Flying at Night by Ted Kooser (discussion: light!!! brilliant gem of a poem)
https://poets.org/poem/flying-night
With That Moon Language -- Hafiz http://www.theprovinceofjoy.com/?p=427 (discussion: Ah... all the ear cannot see, the eye cannot hear! Like Bottom in "A Midsummer's Night Dream wanting to play all the roles! )
Nutshell:
A Tree Design
I started by asking people to share associations with the word tree: Immediately, some thought of poems, such as Joyce Kilmer, or Ogden Nash; others thought of adjectives... dignified, enduring, or associations such as the Cedar of Lebanon, geneology, a painting in the MoMA of a tree in blossom, where a face was in each flower... We then moved on to the other noun in the title, design. Here, patterns, textures, grand designs of purpose, came up.
So much association in just two words -- and then put them together and a new wave of possibilities appears. After reading the poem, and the "tree" seems to be the poet, and one idea was to see the poem as a cycle of life, moving from Spring to Winter. Knowing the time period, the idea of a tree as what was used for hangings, also came up. Knowing that Arna Bontemps was part of the Harlem Renaissance, but never felt completely or fully recognized speaks to the last line, where he is a still, lonely tree.
Judith brought up Ursula LeGuin and her writing about humans from the point of view of a tree, hard to do. The Gaelic tree alphabet came up... where each letter of the alphabet is drawn like the tree that starts with its name. The White Goddess came up...
9 lines of poetry... the echoed rhyme of shadow, bough... now.
the sky, floating by. The "used to be" struck us as being of primary importance... a commentary on
"a tree is something in me".
Admirable poem that keeps on growing.
Speaking Tree: in contrast, this poem starts with an epigraph which doesn't really fit with the poem, aside from evoking a personnification of a tree as a living entity that dances, sings, dreams, talks, until the end,
when it is the tree imagining dancing close together. But is that with other trees? or something else?
It feels there are several parts, none of which quite connect. Some things are indeed unspeakable,
and indeed, there is a long geneology of the broken. The wind threading leaves after a massacre, also feeds the singing of the tree.
Part II. A woman longing, yearning wondering what to do with heartache (implied massacre, brokenness).
Does longing to be a tree help this?
Now disbelief enters (for many of us readers): Is the deepest-rooted dream of a tree to walk?
to drink deep what is undrinkable?
What does that mean? One idea was that undrinkable means something one is not allowed to taste--
could be something good. Another idea is that a tree can filter out poisons that make water undrinkable,
continue doing the good a tree does to help the environment?
Discussion included Ents, whether trees should have legal standing; the importance of protecting the land;
Richard Powers, The Overstory, the walking trees in Ecuador who indeed, moved 20 meters from arid land to more fertile soil... forest bathing, communion with trees, Greek myths about trees.
Unlike Bontemps, we were left without guidelines, visible crafting and a sense of puzzlement.
Fana al-Fana: a beautiful older couple love poem. Fear of passing away passes away.
One person put it this way. Nice poem, but I feel too lazy to want to delve into it.
It's quite the call to think about "rootless light from dead stars"... but I love that this line haunts me to
want to re-read the poem several times, and feel the passing away in a quiet gentleness.
See below for the poem we didn't get to: Time. It works perfectly to supplement this one.
The Candle: powerful poem about the holocaust. It comes from a book of the same name which has
poems from previous collections as well as a section of new poems:
The Swastika Poems(1977)
Erika ( 1984)
Falling from Heaven (1991)
Ribbons: The Gulf War (1991)
The Angel Voices: A Poem (1997-98/2010)
Shoah Train (2003) (I have a note that we discussed the poem Catbird)
A Poetics of Hiroshima (2008)
The Candle: New Poems (2016)
the epigraphs to this book:
Und Zeit geht hin, und Zeit nimmt zu, und Zeit
ist vie ein Rückfall einer langen Krankheit.
(& Time passes, & Time adds to itself, & Time
is like a falling back into abiding sickness.)
Rainer Maria Rilke (Requiem for a Friend)
October: grapes hung like the fists of a girl
gassed in her prayer. Memory,
I whisper, stay awake.
Ilya Kaminsky, "A Toast"
The repetition, "it would do (me, the dead, God, anyone alive or dead) no good"
works into the whisper even of a votive candle flame. Then the pitch aura, the pitch light, the pitch luminescence and the heart beating black-black. The double negatives: didn't he not (the survivor) haven't we not met him? All this seems to confirm in the final stanza:
It does the dead no good nor any of us any good, doesn't it not,
but keeps, black-black, its watch of pitch light
and will.
And yet... the next words are fragments: Any good at all. Followed by that haunting question, of all we might have and might still do, Wouldn't we not? The title repeats as final word: The Candle.
So... this poem, from 1991, is quite different from the more recent poem of the same title published in 2016 (p. 301) which explains how he was reading a survivor's words translated from the German. The metaphor of what melts in the flame, drawn upwards from the wick as he too looks at a candle before him compares the words of the survivor who does not feel vengeful, with his feelings.
... but I who was not there,
who did not suffer, lust to resurrect those maniacs
to kill them. And you, my listener, don't speak
of forgiving the Devil, not while I'm
writing by candlelight in the scheme
of candled time. May the survivor,
who has since died, candle us, her testimony
a flame of dread that keeps readers
companionable company. Let this votive
burn down to night.
Let us inhale curls of translated smoke.
Elegy: also in this collection, The Candle: and in Heyen's 2003 The Shoah Train)
We discussed the poem, Wooden Heart by Primo Levi May 25, 2017.
It is a good exercise to put Heyen's Elegy side-by-side with Levi's "Wooden Heart".
What indeed happens to a man's heart when it is turned to arsenic?
In Elegy the trees remind us, no matter the insult added to injury (streetcars crushing the roots,
receiving urined rain, deafening noise, leaves clogged with dust), in its wooden heart, it savor's
seasons' return. But Heyen pushes deeper. What about the survivor who no longer could bear
what he survived? Does the comparison with a tree still hold true? Is there for us, a reminder
to reach down into some unspoken covenant, see it working in memory? Is there hope
as those horse chestnut blossoms continue to burst every May with their red-streaks ?
Redwings: A different spin on red. How a blackbird hides it, sometimes under a yellow ribbon
of wingbar... the wonderful astonishment when they lift off in flight! We loved how beautifully
he recounted this sense of flare, "disembodied"... which brings us to our finite existence, how we too
will "flare and vanish". His pun on "assume" -- to put on, take up again... and our assumption, that
once dead, perhaps life will continue on with Redwinged Blackbirds, providing such unexpected flame.
**
In the poem's packets I had included Heyen's poem: Time:
Time by William Heyen
I phoned forward from my childhood—
my wife lifted up—her voice muted.
How on earth did you answer? I asked her.
"I'm here with you", my dear love said,
"and with our parents and children,
our grandparents are in their prime."
Then my dream was blur and dial tone
my life a palimpsest of time.
She had been my wife before we met.
Our grandchildren born before we courted.
She'd received my call to our eventual world.
"I'm here with you," my dear love said.
It works perfectly with Fana al-Fana. Why not play around with time, space... not just point of view?
