October 9 -- a note on Poem a Day in October + Bernie's supplement for Oct. 9

 Bernie kindly offered to MC

Please Call Me by My True Names – Thich Nhat Hanh;*; Junk  by Richard Wilbur; Empty Words  by Taha Muhammad Ali; Refrigerator, 1957 by Thomas Lux; Acceptance by Robert Frost

   We had discussed earlier in the summer Interrelationship – poem by Thich Nhat Hanh

Just a note about "Poem a Day" -- I won't be selecting poems from them to share -- as I wanted to pre-select poems for my 7 week time away.  Perhaps Oct. 30, I can dedicate the 4 pages to poems presented.   The American Academy says this:

Each morning of this month of October, Poem-a-Day readers around the world will open their inboxes to poetry curated by Sarah Gambito, our Guest Editor for October. Gambito is a poet in her own right, known for including elements like recipes and menus in her work, particularly in her latest collection Loves You. This month she offers you, our readers, a delightful palette of autumnal readings from poets who may be new to you as well as some who are undoubtedly well-known.

Here at the Academy, we often talk about Poem-a-Day less as a literary magazine and more as a public poetry project: what does it look like to publish poetry in the town square? What does it mean to ask readers to give their attention to a single poem? Along those same lines of thought, in her interview about her curation and work, Gambito asks “How can we hold shelter for one another?,” a question, I think, the best poetry always asks us.

Bernie sent this information out as supplement:

This explanation of Tom Lux's poem Refrigerator: https://onbeing.org/programs/thomas-lux-refrigerator-1957/#transcript Also gives some background of this poet. I particularly like this interview because it starts with my Mentor, Ellen Bass, who during covid, would read poems aloud and memorize them with her wife, Janet -- and they picked this one.  

The gift of a poet to give panache to something most people consider ordinary is part of the goal of a good poem.  I love how Lux puts it:  That he "tries to make the reader laugh and then steal that laugh right out of the poem by the throat.  In Refrigerator, there are lessons and Padraig emphasises what this romp with a cherry provides:  :"you do not eat that which rips the heart with joy.  "  How many ways can you understand THAT? 

Another Tom Lux Poem: Tarantulas on the Life Buoy: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48483/tarantulas-on-the-lifebuoy

https://onbeing.org/programs/thomas-lux-refrigerator-1957/#transcript

Another Taha Muhammad Ali poem, Exodus, also from his 2006 book So What, which I highly recommend. (see below).  In Exodus "the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali traces the hollow rhythms of a town being emptied of its people. The poem is a meditation on another painful chapter in the ongoing Nakba — the 1982 massacre of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians by Israeli-backed militia in Beirut."

Bernie shares his talent and quotes Paul in Descartes’ Minor Error 

            (je pense, donc je suis - R. Descartes, 1637

            You shouldn’t believe everything you think - P. Brennan, 2016)

and a poetry quiz!

Who can guess who wrote : I Wanted to Share my Father’s World and The County Boss Explains How It Is

Exodus

The street is empty
as a monk’s memory,
and faces explode in the flames
like acorns—
and the dead crowd the horizon
and doorways.
No vein can bleed
more than it already has,
no scream will rise
higher than it’s already risen.
We will not leave!

Everyone outside is waiting
for the trucks and the cars
loaded with honey and hostages.
We will not leave!
The shields of light are breaking apart
before the rout and the siege;
outside, everyone wants us to leave.
But we will not leave!

Ivory white brides
behind their veils
slowly walk in captivity’s glare, waiting,
and everyone outside wants us to leave,
but we will not leave!

The big guns pound the jujube groves,
destroying the dreams of the violets,
extinguishing bread, killing the salt,
unleashing thirst
and parching lips and souls.
And everyone outside is saying:
“What are we waiting for?
Warmth we’re denied,
the air itself has been seized!
Why aren’t we leaving?”
Masks fill the pulpits and brothels,
the places of ablution.
Masks cross-eyed with utter amazement;
they do not believe what is now so clear,
and fall, astonished,
writhing like worms, or tongues.
We will not leave!

Are we in the inside only to leave?
Leaving is just for the masks,
for pulpits and conventions.
Leaving is just
for the siege-that-comes-from-within,
the siege that comes from the Bedouin’s loins,
the siege of the brethren
tarnished by the taste of the blade
and the stink of crows.
We will not leave!

Outside they’re blocking the exits
and offering their blessings to the impostor,
praying, petitioning
Almighty God for our deaths.

From: So What

**

Bernie also shares this: " I looked a bit more closely at a book recommendation Elaine Olson had passed me a few weeks ago titled An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us -Ed Yong. I wondered if it might shed some light for anyone interested in the question of Frost's (in "Acceptance") imagining birds' words or thoughts, versus anthropomorphizing them. Or at least leaven the discussion with a little scientific fact.

I haven't read it yet but I did read this segment of a book review: 

"One touchstone is of course Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 essay but the lodestar of this book is a concept defined in 1909 by the Estonian-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll: that of an animal’s “Umwelt” (literally translated its “environment”). Whereas the previously reviewed Sentient introduced this concept belatedly in its epilogue, Yong sensibly opens with it and offers a crisp definition: every animal “is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world” (p. 5)."

I expect he goes into it a bit more deeply as the book goes on...