Poems for Jan. 28-9

 Atlantic: Hopeful images: https://www.theatlantic.com/photography/2025/12/hopeful-images-2025/685223/

How to read a poem:  who's the intended audience, the poem's function, its significance, truth and beauty of it... the bricks and windows are form, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, but it's nice to have a picture of the whole building first! Graeme shared his appreciation of the poem "The Bassoonist".

Judith encouraged us to keep up our spirits with some humor introducing us to the concepts of Pastafarianism as a means to cultivate a sense of humor with about Pasta-ors, and concluding prayers with r'Amen. 

Snow  by Naomi Shihab Nye; Snow Falling by Marianne Boruch; When the Fine Days by Donald Hall; Sherbet  by Cornelius Eady; God Could Not Make Her a Poet  by Cornelius Eady; New Year by Kate Baer

Nutshell

Snow  by Naomi Shihab Nye: This poem hints at a painful backstory, wound in a vignette about a brother and sister sledding.  One person was reminded of the film Stand by Me.

The word choices for this winter scene underline the intertwining of snow and its metaphorical applications starting with impossibility to speak with the scarf knotted over my mouth,  for grief, raging blizzard of sobs, the repeated Ho! Look at him go! pretending to have a good time, and twist of meaning after the isolated couplet "How there can be a place/so cold any movement saves you."  The urgency of the Ho! is accentuated with the banging of the hands, stomping of the feet in the final stanza with the italics:  The father could die!  The Son!  and the abrupt unfinished sentence. The ambiguous nature of possibility, is confirmed in the last fragment: "Before the weather changes". 

 

The telling is poignantly genuine, tapping into universals of distressing relationships wrapped in "a storm of snow".   

 

Snow Falling  by Marianne Boruch:   Poetry, like snow, follows its own weather patterns and contradictions.  The bold opening line opening with what sounds like Hamlet's famous existential question goes deeper stated as the "history of is or is not" followed by three nouns in italics that start with d: dread, darkness, the third, dawn, softened by the poet's "guess" that snow indeed "morphs" into "hardship, delight, mindless over and over".  This  in turn reminds me of Wallace Stevens and his poem the Snowman, and how one "must have a mind of winter."  Boruch embraces contradiction as she considers the choice of snow: freeze or melt and flood.  The syntax is tricky: one possibility in the line and stanza break to the 3rd stanza  could be the contraction of Snow's (Snow is)// only choice:  Subject/Verb.  One could stop there. Snow is only choice.  Or isn't.   

The other possibility is the use of the apostrophe as possessive as in the  "Only choice of snow: freeze."  And then the other choice presented as a fragment.  "Or melt with the consequence of flooding."

Since "choice" is singular perhaps the first interpretation echoes the paradoxical choice: freeze/melt, echoing the single flake in stanza two and its "big/little" fate.

 

She then applies the  meaning of the verb falling with another contradiction: both right now (in italics) and  before human, (so, before the Bible, or the Fall) before glass whose beginning is thanks to fire.  It is as if she preparing the stage for absolute mindfulness of the entrance of Genius, like  a Greek God of inspiration.   A cousin of genesis?  Finally in the 6th stanza, we see her creativity and imagination at work, 

although she tries to deny it in the penultimate stanza.  Is Imagination a question of prophecy or memory?

Tracing the word, snow , we see it followed by falling,morphing; see snow's only choice, snow-in-July, snow as possibly it something we can't see. It falls and the mind mute with it.

 

Her mention of pointillism seems another way to illustrate contradiction as it is a technique of making dots of opposite colors close together.  

When the Fine Days by Donald Hall: After the challenge of Boruch, it was refreshing to enjoy the unfolding of this poem with its staggered lines, mellifluous rhythms, with only Max the dog, named.  

The Camilla mentioned in the penultimate stanza is probably a reference to Alexander Pope's poem about poetry,  Sound and Sense where she is described by Virgil as being so fast that she could run over a cornfield without bending the stalks.

It would seem a fitting reference to his poet wife, Jane Kenyon  and the practice of their art, to capture in words their love of poetry and walking together in this landscape.  There is only slant reference to the fact  that Jane had leukemia and was dying.  Not today those worries.  One goes back to the title which hangs, incomplete, until the mention of the couple on the 6th line with their dog leading the way.  He records one of the fine days -- and the reader sense the fortuitous joy.  No snakes, and free to "fill/with the fullness of the valley's throat".  

Cornelius Eady: two poems.  I was delighted to read tonight that he has been elected as one of the new Chancellors of the American Academy of Poets.  

As poet June Jordan has said,

Cornelius Eady leads and then cuts a line like no one else: following the laughter and the compassionate pith of a dauntless imagination, these poems beeline or zig-zag always to the jugular, the dramatic and unarguable revelation of the heart.

Sherbet:  We all remarked the brilliant restraint of emotion, which only heightens a sense of anger at the racist treatment of a mixed couple in Richmond, VA.  For those who don't know this capital of Virginia, in the 1920's large statues of Confederate heroes were erected on Monument Avenue.  They were pulled down in 2020 at the beginning of  the Black Lives Matter movement.  Eady threads his questions... What poetry could describe ... He slips in the image of the waitress, "mapping the room off/like the end of a/Border dispute-- which metaphor could turn the room more perfectly into a group of islands?  What language to translate the unsaid?  To crown it all, the arrival of the sherbet, as if to say, "we have no problem here, it's you"... What do you call such rich, sweet taste of frozen oranges?  And the final question -- What do we call a weight that doesn't fingerprint, won't shift... line break... and can't explode.

Many knew the law suit of Loving (the ironic surname)  vs. Virginia,  one of the States which forbade mixed marriages. 

God Could not Make her a poet:  here, Cornelius condemns Jefferson, who actually pronounced the title. The reference to Monticello brought up the mention of Benjamin Banneker - the black architect responsible for the design of Washington D.C.   

Several people knew Phillis Wheatley's poetry, which may well have been carefully masking her true sentiments as she imitated the style of the acceptable white elite.  Click on the hyperlink for more information about her.  Below is one of her poems which perhaps hints as how it felt to be known in 2 continents, and yet be treated with the condescension Eady captures.

On Being Brought from Africa to America  by Phillis Wheatley

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, 

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

"Their colour is a diabolic die."

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

New Year by Kate Baer: 

It's good to call a spade a spade about the hype of promises and resolutions.  Not sure  anyone was clear on the 4th line image,"thumbed through rusted nails just to /stand for its birth"-- like going through old inventory... going through motions?  I do like that the reader is asked indirectly just how to live with the new baby, who, like us, just wants to live.