Poems for Aug. 13

 The Peninsula  by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013); The Hourglass by Ben Jonson; If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda; 38. Shedding the Old by Samantha Thornhill; Mindful by Mary Oliver; Words Ends  by Alfred Starr Hamilton

It takes a group and a handful of poems adding their voices to make for a spirited discussion!  We had voices from Ireland, Renaissance England, Chile, contemporary Trinidad/Tobago the universality of Mary Oliver and the dark dreambox words of a poet born in Montclair, NJ 1914.

The Peninsula: Paul tells us Ards means "High Place", but in this poem, it is specifically the Ard Penisula in NE Ireland. He then read the poem aloud, adding just the right touch of Irish flavor.  

 Although one could interpret "nothing more to say" as writer's block, our discussion didn't talk about the cure for it to take a drive.  Instead we reveled in the rich imagery, the beautiful personification of "horizons drinking down sea and hill"; the ploughed field swallowing, the rock where breakers are shredded into rags.  Indeed, why would you not chose the natural wildness as opposed to the urban, human world which can be stifling and detrimental -- not just to writers, but to us all. 

The pleasure of reading perfect iambic pentameter and end rhymes perhaps is a parallel example of how form coaxes words worthy of  spending time with them.  Paul made us all want to go to the fjords of North Ireland and watch the whales spouting in their pods!  Bernie pointed out the key of "uncoding landscapes"-- stripping ourselves of everything, and open to nature to receive what we have unwittingly ignored.

Everyone enjoyed this poem, especially for the flow and musicality.  We did not comment on the opening line, or the repeat in the final stanza.... "still with nothing to say".  Perhaps it is an invitation or a permission to enjoy in silence, all that is around you.

The first  enjambed stanza break accentuates the feel of "passing through"; the second gives us space to "recall" as if the reader would know the images.  

 

The Hourglass:  Ben Jonson, (1572-1637) known as second to Shakespeare for his wit provides us 9 lines

of rhymed commentary on life, love, death.  I don't know if was custom to make an hourglass of someone's ashes, but if poetic license it certainly is highly effective!!!

If You Forget Me:  I gave the note about how beautifully this poem balances feeling and control.  Love is not endless or helpless, but moves in a novel direction of looking to the future, with realistic conditions.

We appreciated how this  love poem starts in the honeymoon period.  The pull between distance and intimacy with the image of little boats, sailing towards islands, is beautifully tender. The response to his outline of what would happen if love were to end, ranged from understanding it as "tit for tat"  to realistic abandonment of a pointless pursuit.   It was interesting to discuss how we might receive the poem if we didn't know the gender of the speaker.  Is it Neruda?  Is he adopting the persona of a woman or a different man?  We discussed his name, and pseudonyms in general.  Axel found that he changed it to be able to  write poetry and defy his father. What usually pops up first is his active political resistance. If the speaker of the poem is not Neruda, how does that change your reading?  Some felt, if it were written by a woman, one would feel she has a sense of agency more so than a man who might be a bit macho.  Given the time he lived in, and knowing some of his biography, we still are in a place of conjecture.  Axel offered that the situation might seen unbelievable for a woman to be in, but if it were to happen, we might be more supportive of a woman.  Curious that the group was divided precisely into 50% male and 50% female. 

38. Shedding the Old:    It would be hard not to love this poem filled as it is with epigrams, like a fortune cookie filled with curious predictions.  Apparently 38 is the number that corresponds with a book of Oracles, in this case, the title, Shedding the Old.  The sensuous imagery, makes you want indeed to "unbox yourself" and "wild yourself" with the unusual nuggets of each line.  Many of them seem perfect for a motivational poster!  "Summon surprise!" /"Take Soul" (as opposed to "Take heart").  "Your joy is your job and yours alone."  It seems the poet is unleashing an inner oracle brought about with language play.  The line, "Something whim-/sical this way comes" perhaps was a nod to Ray Bradbury.  

for a little more about the poet (missed sending this...)

https://fightandfiddle.com/2024/09/01/perfectly-imperfect-an-interview-with-samantha-thornhill/

Mindful:  

A rival poem to Wild Geese and Summer Day with the famous last two lines, " Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ With your one wild and precious life?"  I love her way of embracing duality with the linebreaks:  "something /that more or less/kills me --

and then SURPRISE, with delight, continued by comparing it with the needle in the haystack (proverbially unfindable) of light. She knows how to convince, using rhetorical devices that explain what she is not doing... pokes fun at herself (kindly) and then repeats light but with the adjective untrimmable, i.e., no trimmed wicks or proscribed rituals.  As Polly put it, "everything grows and is, in spite of" -- how can you not want to embrace an outlook that finds joy in the "very drab", that obeys an inner command to "lose yourself/inside this soft world"... where prayers are made of grass. 

Words Ends

Carolyn was not present to explain how she had heard about this poet on NPR, and was convinced to buy his book, A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind .  Born June 14, 1914 – 2005

in Montclair, NJ where he lived his whole life, he never graduated from HS, was dismissed by the US Army when enlisted and seemed to be rather a recluse.  The editors of his book note that “Hamilton’s is an extremely gentle language cultured in loneliness, the product of encountering a world while staying away from it.”  

 

Bernie gave a stab at trying to understand starting with the title.  He does not use punctuation.  Perhaps he meant a possessive Word's ...  maybe he made a typo and meant Words End. Or dropped an L, and meant world.  Already we are plunged into a world unlike anything recognizable.  The "eth" on walk, talk, think works to throw us back into time and the King James version of the Bible.  Perhaps the city is a metaphor for "everything".  How does a place define you -- the culture, the people, the circumstances.  For sure, puzzling and catches us off balance. 

Poems for Aug. 6

What the War Has Taught Us  by Bunkong Tuon; Accessory to War by Kim Stafford; What Holds the Sky by Oladosu Michael Emerald;  How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River by Barbara Crooker; Etta’s Elegy by Maureen Seaton (for Etta Silver 1913-2013); Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower  by Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Joanna Macy;  Opening by Tess Gallagher

 ‘Poetry cannot, under pain of death or of failure, become assimilated to science or to morality; it does not have Truth as its goal. It only has itself. The methods of demonstrating temperament thrusts aside the diamonds and the flowers of the muse; it is therefore absolutely the inverse of the poetical temperament. The artifices involved in rhythm are an insurmountable obstacle to that meticulous development of thoughts and expressions whose goal is the truth.’-- Charles Baudelaire

Nutshell:  Aug. 6 and the 80th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bomb  : And poets carry on singing, as in Virgil's opening lines, I sing of Arms and Men.    

  What the War has Taught Us, is written by a Cambodian American... How to deal with despair, a sense of futility? August 6 was the very day 80 years ago the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  What happens then?  "A poet is made when a bomb is dropped".  Yes, this poet repeats in different ways,  futility, futility, futility over and over, but as Axel put it, with a wry smile on her face,  "and yet he writes a poem".  Wondering whether a life matters, or how to make a life matter, asking if any effort to help the world be better matters, perhaps leads to a conclusion that there will always be monstrous men, demanding monstrous wars, sowing hatred and fear.  It may well be the way of the world.  Buddhists remind us that life is suffering.   

What keeps us going is art, poetry, music.  And knowing this keeps others alive gives us the courage to keep on engaging in it.

Whether this is a poem or rather a polemic, we agreed that it carries a strong message that hopefully those who don't read poetry, might pick up and ponder. 

Accessory to War:  written by the son of William Stafford, who was not only a fine poet from the Northwest, but also an anti-war activist.  You can see the "apple does not fall far from the tree".   What is cool about this poem, is the shape -- it looks like each stanza is a bomb.  The first stanza has the brother singing his brother to sleep, and  the comfort of lullabies and stories which seem to come from the Bible.  The second stanza has a brother who will become filled with hatred and desire for revenge (I think of those who joined Hamas) because of the horror inflicted by an enemy.  The title is multi-layered.  What is accessory to war? 

1)  the weapons, but also the society which convinces its citizens that they are needed, must be used to used, with demands to pay taxes to create and deploy them. 2) people are accessories also to wars.  Whether decision and policy makers, or as pointed out in the poem, tax payers.   Polly  suggested we  add a note when we pay taxes: "I am paying taxes under protest that they be used for war, detention centers, harassment of lawful immigrants, etc."  I have calculated that x% is used for (and make a list) and therefore have deducted x%."

The juxtaposition of earning money teaching, writing, modeling peace, and having that turn into "dirty money" of taxes that deliver bombs, enforces the irony.  The ending  is brilliant... those taxes bought the rivet on the shoulder of the bomb this poem sent. Stafford joins Bunkong Tuon, "we are telling you this"-- his poem delivers a different kind of bomb.  

As one Jewish friend of ours shared what his father said about Israel: did it take a holocaust and destruction of 6 million souls in order to establish a homeland?   The irony is to see that  new "homeland" consciously destroy the previous homeland of those who had lived there peacefully before them.  This only promotes an on-going sense of injustice and "need" for war to "solve" it.  Of course, we know war has never been the answer.  The shifting of "national lines", empires, then declaring wars to maintain them, perpetrating lies about who needs to be "eliminated" as enemy is nothing new.  But that cannot stop us from writing. 

"What Holds the Sky" was written by a Nigerian multi-talented artist.  I loved that in the discussion, Judith  brought her dance background and shared the concept of "contact improvisation".

When dancing with another, if one falls, there is a trust that the other will be there, and will not only protect the falling one, but use the momentum to continue the dance, necessarily, improvised in a different direction.

How can you make times more bearable?  First, face what is with all your attention and trust.  We are living in times that "assault our psyche".  Perhaps it is a "shared fall" -- one we can only survive by interacting, interconnecting.  The 3rd poem uses faith, prayer, grace, hymn in unusual ways -- with this metaphor of a kite and the tension of pulling at the string -- each tug, a prayer/to the wind, etc. The boy in the field with the kite is near the edge of a city -- which echoes "a hymn of glass/&steel" with echoes of the sky's light like an unspoken promise.  What an infusion of faith, that nature, our sun, is there as if to balance our manmade efforts.  

How do we "weigh in" a situation, balance, share the fall?

How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River:

This poem quotes Apollinaire:  "What isn't given to love is so much wasted.".  He wrote during WW1 about the horrors of that war, loss of love whether sweethearts killed, or humankind's loss of compassion which has no place in war.  Without this vital element of love, one would feel a sense of loss or incompleteness.

I love, love, love, love Apollinaire's poem "Le Pont Mirabeau" for the flow and rhythm of the Seine, under the bridge, carrying loves and losses, this continual flow again and again, echoed in the repeats of the poem. I gave a link to original and translation  in the footnote of the poems.

Barbara Crooker, in her title, suggests the flow of the river... everything reflected in it... like the poem before, where everything is "tethered to a gravity" one can't name.  Gravity as physical force and metaphorical quality.  I love that the poet wonders what she hasn't yet given to love.  It's a great question!   

She looks up at a "comma moon" -- a sweet slice of melon...  a pause in the flow of things that invites us to "give to love".  What a great metaphor for pausing, for realizing the dark contains dusky wings, and stealing again from the poem before, the dark allows us to see stars, and imagine them "leaning in to each other." 

Etta's Elegy: this poem then sums it up!  I don't know the relationship of the poet to  Etta.  The poem holds the unsayable, the dark.  As Judith remarked, it is in the style of a nursery rhyme:  "This is the house that Jack built".  This is where... this is... this is...   6 times!  The repeat of the "usable truth" (we didn't discuss what that means) is followed by the repeat of the first line introduced by AND (this is where the poem holds its breath).

There is one fragment:  This is where tumult, this is where prophecy.  These two interrupted, incomplete thoughts jostle a different way for the poem to hold its breath.  The sky "wild with sound",  is now "it" -- perhaps the poem, or perhaps the dark, "wild about the child." The final two lines powerfully express an old theme of the "crack that lets the light in".  Most of us would agree gratitude for life lived helps us in the time of loss.

Let this Darkness Be a Bell Tower:  The Joanne Macy and Anita Barrows' translation of the Rilke, picks up this darkness, asks us to be the bell.  This is in keeping with the philosophy of Joanna Macy, a Buddhist, activist and well known poet who recently passed away.  She looks at our world and calls on us to "Stand Afresh" even in the midst of great crisis.  Joanna's work came up discussing her translation of the Rilke poem. Bernie suggests these links of Joanna Macy's "Works that Reconnects." In these "kitchen table talks" Joanna Macy and her student Jessica Serrante look at what it is like to live on Earth at this moment, looking at climate crisis, injustice, war and embrace the difficult feelings that arise.   

We Are The Great Turning Podcast episode 1, about a half hour

Ep 1: Love and Loss - We Are The Great Turning | Podcast on Spotify

Back to the poem:   Judith brought up the happy coincidence of the word "change" in the second stanza which could mean also the "ringing of the changes" in terms of campagnology or bell ringing -- apparently Dorothy Sayers wrote a splendid account of it in Nine Sailors.  It brought back the old nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of St. Clements" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oranges_and_Lemons

The opening:  We did not so much discuss this poem as read it as conclusion...