So good to be back and see everyone! Wonderful discussion per usual, especially meeting the challenge of Jane Hirshfield's poems!
A note from Ken: Several tackle the question What is Human Freedom. Am I really free to do what I want when I want? We had a nice sharing of individual personal “habits" we have but don’t even know we that we have them.
Habit by Jane Hirshfield
Poem Holding Its Heart In One Fist by Jane Hirshfield
A Cedary Fragrance by Jane Hirshfield
Rock by Jane Hirshfield
You're from Nowhere by Abby Murray
October by Helen Hunt Jackson
Speech — is a prank of parliament-- by Emily Dickinson
Nutshell of discussion:
Habit: How reassuring to read a poem which offers examples of habits without judgement and asks how it is we believe "these small rituals' promise /that we are today the selves we yesterday knew,/tomorrow will be". The scrambled syntax of these words in the 4th stanza requires re-reading. It has an otherworldly feel of something true that needs to be wrung out into view. In all of the poems, we remarked on Hirshfield's way of challenging us to investigate more deeply the discomfort of what we often shrug off -- and try like her, to "make the unwanted wanted".
The benefits of uncertainty, or surprise, of what might at first seem unbearable, is juxtaposed with habits-- "to acknowledge/how much they are themselves our fated life." The final stanza holds up a mirror so we look at ourselves, and how habit chooses, and we, "its good horse, open our mouth at even the sight of the bit."
Our discussion revolved around how rituals and habits can be helpful, as well as be a defense. Habits as both inhibitors and expanders. Some felt the first examples were stern, or don't apply to us, or wondered about how we relate to those we love in spite of their habits, or wonder how she could possibly know how we have a habit of "touching our pockets for wallet, keys before leaving". This allows the universality of habits to be placed on the table. How do we re-examine them? examine our yearning for positive habits? find a non-judgmental stance as we look at how a habit has become a habit?
Poem Holding Its Heart In One Fist: How to understand this title? What is the "heart of a poem", and how is a heart held in a fist... is it clenched in a protective way? It could be the poem, personnified is sharing what it is like to explore what is hidden... the uncertain. Even though at the end, the poem is described washing its breasts, hence, exposed, with trembling hands, "disguising nothing" we do not know what it really reveals. It is up to each reader to complete. Hirshfield seems to deliver a truth in the first stanza. How do you understand "Each pebble in this world keeps/its own counsel" ? Do pronouns make a difference to each pebble? When she says, The concealment plainly delights, "plainly" could be understood to mean "simply" or "clearly". How so? How to understand the leap from pronouns, to half-crumpled papers, to olives to potatoes? (We all loved the olive image, "adrift in the altering brine-bath/etch onto their innermost pits/a few furrowed salts that will never be found by the tongue". WOW.)
"Yet" arrives with three examples of a comfortable usual. You might not cook potatoes with butter and parsley, but someone does, and finds it delicious; we all know the usefulness of buttons, the reassurance that a dinner guest will have the civility and manners not to stay all night.
She does not tell us what the poem is revealing... what it is she could reveal about herself... just the idea that the poem, started perhaps, thinking why it is so hard to let go of concealing, and yet, it seems to be part of nature.
A Cedary Fragrance: Starting with the adjective "cedary" allowed a sharing of associations with cedar chests (which safely preserve and store away woolens), its strong and lasting scent, association with healing as well as use in cedar soap, and imagining the very primitive setting of a zen center all set about with cedar trees. Bernie brought up an interview with Ezra Klein and Jane Hirshfield in which they talk about the difficulty of the training-- including "hating" the icy slap of cold water, and how the practice is to try not to be bound by discomfort.
The "unwanted" is a large territory. I find it paradoxical to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted when this is usually to protect us. How can you possibly want murder? injustice? disrespect? Those are not desirable things. And yet, what she is doing, from title on, is to look at what we "store". She invites us to think about what "wanting" is, what makes us shirk away from something because it is unwanted.
Yes, it is huge territory to let go of the parameters of a self, and as in the preceding poem, to examine how it keeps "its own counsel".
Rock: One could spend an afternoon easily talking about all the possible associations and metaphors we attach to "rock". A compliment for the one who is "rock solid" and dependable; the translation Pierre in French, which leads me to think of St. Peter as the foundation rock in the Catholic church, or precious gem; There is the rock to climb, against which one is stuck, or blocked and then the verb rocking, positive in the case of lullabies, and unsettling used with a boat.
I doubt I could say with such assurance such words that at first seem to imply that a rock has only one thought and is happy with its privacy to keep it. The art of Hirshfield is to make it look that way... just as a rock can appear to have qualities of stubbornness, refusal, interruption...
I love how she carries on in the next stanza adding mosses and lichen "listening outside the locked door"! We're back to that "delight of concealment" -- something about our curiosity sparked about the nature of things and how they are in the world perhaps.
How can she say these statements about rocks "filling their own shadows without hesitation", or not "questioning silence" or "experiencing discomfort"? It feels as if she is putting herself into the rock's position. It is her work to "ponder whatever is"-- and pondering looks "singly" (only, uniquely) like prayer but (of course) is not. She carries on with a boulder whose "meditations are slow but complete", and that one day "its thinking will be worn out." A sort of amusing fable about that ant carrying it away.
The discussion centered around change, shape-shifting, how we honor the earth and all it supports by paying attention to it. We want to believe in permanence, and try to make things matter. Again, Hirshfield is inviting us to do difficult work: in short, with concise slaps, she presents an idea, a thought that at first seems jarring, but if you stay with it, you find, like a moment of meditation, your mind feels lighter by dwelling on it.
Rock, paper scissors came up -- how we have these conceived notions of each, until we see how what is victor in one case, is victim as circumstances change. The film "Everywhere, everyone, all at once" came up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Everywhere_All_at_Once
You're from Nowhere: Back to recognizable form... the relief of following the anaphor of "if" to describe what being from a place means by describing what it means not to. Abby opens the door on what it means to be "long" enough in a place so one has a sense of belonging. I love poems that push beyond the original conceit like this one. What is that flavor, how do we taste it, that sense of "knowing where you are"-- and what goes into knowing how to leave it?
October: perhaps one of the best poems I know about Fall that totally refreshes, intrigues, paints the glory of this season without tedium, over-sentimentality. This little sonnet from 1870, skillfully uses enjambment to conceal the rhyme... the adjective choices... "spicy" for woods, "arch" for skies, "freighted" for river-ways-- indeed "freighted with color"... Without using the word "amaze", she creates amazement with words that end-rhyme with it in the first 8 lines, alternating with with sun/run/one/done, and delightful textures of long O's for gold, fo-rest, slow, clicking chestnuts, the long A of escApe burning with that of blAze, mAze, wAys.The alternating rhyme (chance/assail) flows into embraced rhyme in the final four lines.
Judith filled us in on Helen Hunt Jackson and her work as Novelist and activist, her book Ramona, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona A thank you to Kathleen who brought her personal memory of this poem she recited at her father's funeral.
Because Helen Hunt Jackson went to school with Emily Dickinson, it only seemed right to add Emily's witty commentary that would seem to compliment the Hirshfield poems. Speech? You think you know what your words are saying? (I love the pp, alliteration of prank of parliament, as if to poo-poo those who think they know!) And Tears? indeed, a trick. The motion of the 3rd line, "heart with the heaviest freight on" moves like a speeding locomotive, then is slowed down with large spaces and em-dashes ---
Over to you dear reader, to tell me what you make of all this!
Thanks to all for a wonderful romp with these poems!
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