Inklings by John Olson from Seattle’s “Lines on a Spine” 2007 National Poetry Month
Don’t Let That Horse . . . by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born March 24, 1919)
Venice Beach by Michael Hofmann
The Garden by Andrew Marvell: (1621–1678) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/andrew-marvell
Poetry Month... so many sources, so many poems -- and for me, a time of shifting, getting ready to leave our home of 15 years for a smaller place. Inklings, ending with "Where do we go from here" reminded me of beat poet, Ferlinghetti -- we had enjoyed "Dog" and "Constantly Risking Absurdity". Hofmann's poem in Poetry, March, was inspired by Marvell's Garden over 3 centuries ago...
Friday, April 26, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Poems for April 21
Notes From a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition — by Wislawa Szymborska
My Ears Aren’t Right by Marianne Boruch
3 poems by Mari L’Esperance (from Gwarlingo, Sunday poem 4/14/2013)
Grief Is Deep Green
As Told by Three Rivers
The Choices Not Made
My Ears Aren’t Right by Marianne Boruch
3 poems by Mari L’Esperance (from Gwarlingo, Sunday poem 4/14/2013)
Grief Is Deep Green
As Told by Three Rivers
The Choices Not Made
Thursday, April 11, 2013
poems for April 15
The Present -- by Jane Hirschfield
Ulysses -- Alfred,Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) 1833
A Paris Blackbird by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Soul Search in Mexico by Carmen Calatayud
The Plain Sense of Things -- by Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955)
The Poem that Took the Place of The Mountain-- Wallace Stevens
The group enjoyed the challenges of these poems, and will have the added pleasure of hearing Al Filreis and his panel discuss the two Wallace Stevens poems on April 18 at noon.
Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again.
http://jacket2.org/commentary/live-webcast-discussion-two-late-poems-wallace-stevens
**
The selection: a short poem whose last line catches us unawares, a long poem written almost 200 years ago, a surrealist poem, an poem in musical tercets, and two formal poems, and yet each one pondered a different aspect of immortality.
For Hirschfield, the title can mean both a gift, but also refer to time, and reappears in the last line of the poem to work both meanings. What divides the living from the dead? The poem offers a meditation by the living told in the past tense. Repetitions of the words,
"offered" and "memory", the thwarted desire to be able to give "edible leaf"/fragrance,(flower), or share the emotions that rise in the stages of grief. There is a sadness in this poem coupled with a peaceful reckoning. We think by writing, we can keep memory, but the problem with writing, is its one-sidedness. The Dying do not want to hear the troubles of the living. But Hirschfield is more delicate-- she would never write "why bother" or dismiss,
or expect, but rather, she alludes to the writing done, and the question that allows a shadow of mystery, "but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?". How do we understand "fine" (musical term for "end" adjective for delicate and "all right") applied to the "mesh"
of death. This is a poem to read again and again, and prompted a discussion about how in our culture, we have little preparation for conversations with the dying.
Tennyson, could well provide a commencement address with his closing line which reminded some of the Dr. Seuss "Oh the Places you will Go".
A quite different meditation on life, what we have been, and the essence of who we are, in the voice of a hero speaking in long lines. "Come, my friends,/'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." Does hubris play a role in Ulysses' desire to be recognized? "How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!" Juxtaposed next to: "As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life..." makes us look again. David gave us a good background of Ulysses, how it starts with his shipwreck on the enchantress Calypso's island (whose name means hidden)and how the ending of the original Homer was lost in the Renaissance so that readers would not know of Ulysses' return, but rather have the vision of him pining away under the spell of Calypso who gave him immortality. He referred as well to Dante, where Ulysses is damned and does not return.
The lofty tone contains a quite human flavor in the last 9 line sentence, stopped first by a colon, "It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:" stopped three times by a semi colon:
"Though much is taken, much abides;
"We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven;
that which we are, we are;
and the final three lines leading to the final line "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".
Bosselaer brings us back to the present, with overtones of the past contained in the Louvre, and perhaps also the "blackbird" in the title, which I associate with Jacques Villon, who wrote ballads which give voice to the criminal. The poem is filled with weavings of sound,opening with "ch" of chant (French for song),chestnut, enchanting (some bronze-breasted female". Bird to anonymous woman, given a "bronze throat", although I think of a statue from 11 BC as stone, not metal, and bronze a symbolic "memorializing", which links living bird to representation of once was living. The magic of this poem is heightened
by the overlay of meanings: "She looks at me: weary,
terrible with banality" -- "me" could be both the statue and the speaker. The final stanza moves to the crowds milling towards the "Venus de Milo" but the speaker returns to "look at this nameless woman, as I did the scruffy blackbird." How do we look at what surrounds us? How to we imagine the cry caught in a "bronze throat".
Soul Search in Mexico offers a different dialogue between past and present with overtones of Aztec sacrifices and temple ruins, in a vivid surreality, created by phrases that ought to make sense, but don't. How to make sense of this poem? The reader is commanded to be present but many found it difficult to join in the atmosphere created in this stanza: "Vapors rise, and statues grow/ like shadows of the town insomniac/ who wrestles with diamonds at night. Here ambiguity confuses unlike the Hirschfield poem which has a gentle welcome.
The two Wallace Stevens poems, the first, set in a wintergarden, the second wherever a poet might be at work, left us with a respect for the poetry's power of transformation.
The five stanzas of "The Plain Sense of Things" start out with with setting of inertia,
an empty sadness, leading up to the conclusion: " A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition / In a repetitiousness of men and flies. The final two stanzas are linked by a superb enjambment where the end word of the 4th stanza, "silence" falls to the final stanza beginning with
"Of a sort,--
which mirrors the beginning "as if" entertaining the idea of the end of imagination, (and perceiver's death). However, the "plain sense of things" at the end of the poem is reflected in the pond, and the creative act of the imagination of the inescapable fact of repetition of "things being things, mirrored in things" now requires that initial savoir "required, as a necessity requires" --
Such a brilliant intertwining of craft and philosophy indeed needs repeated readings.
The meanings slide around life and death; fact and imagination, giving me a sense of "Oh I get it!" only to wonder if indeed I have begun to understand the unadorned pith that generated the poem.
The second Stevens "The Poem that Took the Place of The Mountain" was more accessible,
albeit an alchemy that would complete "... the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:" explained in two more stanzas,
like a cubist painting where boundary dissolves in a simultaneous, multifaceted, two-dimensionality that refuses to declare space or time:
The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
The poem gave a possibility to create such a mountain... in seven couplets, perhaps like the Biblical creation,
or... the actual mountain he sees, becomes a poem.
Perhaps a different iteration of the necessity of the imagination to conjure up the words to reflect thought in things.
How fortunate to have 16 minds reading these poems outloud together, discussing different viewpoints, understandings, to allow time to think deeply on poems that challenge us to think
about complexity in our own lives.
poem to mountain,
Ulysses -- Alfred,Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) 1833
A Paris Blackbird by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Soul Search in Mexico by Carmen Calatayud
The Plain Sense of Things -- by Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955)
The Poem that Took the Place of The Mountain-- Wallace Stevens
The group enjoyed the challenges of these poems, and will have the added pleasure of hearing Al Filreis and his panel discuss the two Wallace Stevens poems on April 18 at noon.
Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again.
http://jacket2.org/commentary/live-webcast-discussion-two-late-poems-wallace-stevens
**
The selection: a short poem whose last line catches us unawares, a long poem written almost 200 years ago, a surrealist poem, an poem in musical tercets, and two formal poems, and yet each one pondered a different aspect of immortality.
For Hirschfield, the title can mean both a gift, but also refer to time, and reappears in the last line of the poem to work both meanings. What divides the living from the dead? The poem offers a meditation by the living told in the past tense. Repetitions of the words,
"offered" and "memory", the thwarted desire to be able to give "edible leaf"/fragrance,(flower), or share the emotions that rise in the stages of grief. There is a sadness in this poem coupled with a peaceful reckoning. We think by writing, we can keep memory, but the problem with writing, is its one-sidedness. The Dying do not want to hear the troubles of the living. But Hirschfield is more delicate-- she would never write "why bother" or dismiss,
or expect, but rather, she alludes to the writing done, and the question that allows a shadow of mystery, "but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?". How do we understand "fine" (musical term for "end" adjective for delicate and "all right") applied to the "mesh"
of death. This is a poem to read again and again, and prompted a discussion about how in our culture, we have little preparation for conversations with the dying.
Tennyson, could well provide a commencement address with his closing line which reminded some of the Dr. Seuss "Oh the Places you will Go".
A quite different meditation on life, what we have been, and the essence of who we are, in the voice of a hero speaking in long lines. "Come, my friends,/'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." Does hubris play a role in Ulysses' desire to be recognized? "How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!" Juxtaposed next to: "As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life..." makes us look again. David gave us a good background of Ulysses, how it starts with his shipwreck on the enchantress Calypso's island (whose name means hidden)and how the ending of the original Homer was lost in the Renaissance so that readers would not know of Ulysses' return, but rather have the vision of him pining away under the spell of Calypso who gave him immortality. He referred as well to Dante, where Ulysses is damned and does not return.
The lofty tone contains a quite human flavor in the last 9 line sentence, stopped first by a colon, "It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:" stopped three times by a semi colon:
"Though much is taken, much abides;
"We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven;
that which we are, we are;
and the final three lines leading to the final line "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".
Bosselaer brings us back to the present, with overtones of the past contained in the Louvre, and perhaps also the "blackbird" in the title, which I associate with Jacques Villon, who wrote ballads which give voice to the criminal. The poem is filled with weavings of sound,opening with "ch" of chant (French for song),chestnut, enchanting (some bronze-breasted female". Bird to anonymous woman, given a "bronze throat", although I think of a statue from 11 BC as stone, not metal, and bronze a symbolic "memorializing", which links living bird to representation of once was living. The magic of this poem is heightened
by the overlay of meanings: "She looks at me: weary,
terrible with banality" -- "me" could be both the statue and the speaker. The final stanza moves to the crowds milling towards the "Venus de Milo" but the speaker returns to "look at this nameless woman, as I did the scruffy blackbird." How do we look at what surrounds us? How to we imagine the cry caught in a "bronze throat".
Soul Search in Mexico offers a different dialogue between past and present with overtones of Aztec sacrifices and temple ruins, in a vivid surreality, created by phrases that ought to make sense, but don't. How to make sense of this poem? The reader is commanded to be present but many found it difficult to join in the atmosphere created in this stanza: "Vapors rise, and statues grow/ like shadows of the town insomniac/ who wrestles with diamonds at night. Here ambiguity confuses unlike the Hirschfield poem which has a gentle welcome.
The two Wallace Stevens poems, the first, set in a wintergarden, the second wherever a poet might be at work, left us with a respect for the poetry's power of transformation.
The five stanzas of "The Plain Sense of Things" start out with with setting of inertia,
an empty sadness, leading up to the conclusion: " A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition / In a repetitiousness of men and flies. The final two stanzas are linked by a superb enjambment where the end word of the 4th stanza, "silence" falls to the final stanza beginning with
"Of a sort,--
which mirrors the beginning "as if" entertaining the idea of the end of imagination, (and perceiver's death). However, the "plain sense of things" at the end of the poem is reflected in the pond, and the creative act of the imagination of the inescapable fact of repetition of "things being things, mirrored in things" now requires that initial savoir "required, as a necessity requires" --
Such a brilliant intertwining of craft and philosophy indeed needs repeated readings.
The meanings slide around life and death; fact and imagination, giving me a sense of "Oh I get it!" only to wonder if indeed I have begun to understand the unadorned pith that generated the poem.
The second Stevens "The Poem that Took the Place of The Mountain" was more accessible,
albeit an alchemy that would complete "... the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:" explained in two more stanzas,
like a cubist painting where boundary dissolves in a simultaneous, multifaceted, two-dimensionality that refuses to declare space or time:
The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
The poem gave a possibility to create such a mountain... in seven couplets, perhaps like the Biblical creation,
or... the actual mountain he sees, becomes a poem.
Perhaps a different iteration of the necessity of the imagination to conjure up the words to reflect thought in things.
How fortunate to have 16 minds reading these poems outloud together, discussing different viewpoints, understandings, to allow time to think deeply on poems that challenge us to think
about complexity in our own lives.
poem to mountain,
Sunday, April 7, 2013
April 1
Poems:
April Fools’ Day makes me think of the “trickster” – and what better realm than poetry to find him/her at work! Truth is often better understood through artifice, Dickinson's "tell it slant" and we will see, it never is "simple" in poetry -- and yet, it is so gratifying when we feel the "silent, intense,/mimetic pattern of perfect sense."
April Fools' Day by Lawrence S. Pertillar** (contemporary)
The Poem – by Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
Poem by Forrest Gander
A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum by Margaret Atwood
The Simple Truth -- Philip Levine
April Fools' Day: comments included an appreciation of pegging cultural foolishness,
where we roast in our own juices... ideas in mass culture spread like illness... and we discussed the subtle ways in which rumors start...
Without pegging the sickness, we understand, "To feast on the remainder of sensibility!"
is the celebration of fools who have already done much damage.
Pertillar uses end-rhyme in the opening stanza (for 1854) he then launches into an exclamation-pocked (5 !) series of irregular lines, that probably would deliver well at a slam reading.
Nabokov uses ear-rhyme, such as bare/there; rhyme/time;/unknown/stone; words/birds
and even double rhymes with think.../ aloud, and pink... cloud, in three stanzas to describe the poem by what it is not: sunset, mirror, lyrical click, cacodemons (bad daimons)and two stanzas to demonstrate the process of what it is: the thundering mystical poem.
The last stanza reminded Marcie of a Rousseau-like painting. Each stanza uses visual and aural imagery. A delightful sense of humor appears in the 13 syllabled, longest line "not the things you can say so much better in plain prose." What works in poetry we concur with Nabokov's demonstration -- is what pleases our ear, compresses the image, awakens the heart.
Forrest Gander's poem does that indeed: The form takes the shape of a mummie, where head, shoulders, torso, legs are swaddled... Forrest responded to my email asking him about the poem this way:
"The form-- with the close rhymes is also part of the elegy since I wrote
it for Robert Creeley. Yes, I want the indication that a person (who dies, for instance) might be said to "go dark" like a window goes dark. And then, what is there to
say? And then the ending has several ambiguities as you all have noted.
The dead leave us what we call them-- to wit, their names.
And also, they-- whatever we call them-- simply leave us."
We might complain that we can’t identify "meaning", but at the same time we don’t want to. The real poem is about discovery. Frost. This poem, with the lines coming back to center to land on 4 letter words, can be read in many different way -- so several people gave it a whirl: Here is one rendition:
Some (we say we know)
go (like a window)
dark.
Pathetic any remark
then.
They leave us
what we
(we) call them.
He captures the relationship of "some" and "us" -- how we determine the other-- with a hint that the "us" has been touched, and has become as much "them" as "they" are. This is not called "The Poem" (to explain/demonstrate) or "A Poem" (to hint at a specific meaning),
but simply "Poem" reminiscent of the style of Robert Creeley.
It reminds me of the Cid Corman poem below:
It isn’t for want
of something to say
something to tell you
something you should know
but to detain you
keep you from going
as long as YOU are,
as long as you ARE.
here in the space of the poem, the words open up, invite
linguistic imagination... but the conditional hinge, "as long as" repeated twice with shifting emphasis on "you" and "being" emphasizes the poet will end... one-ness... I can only be here, if you are here.
subject-subject relationship.
To contrast, Margaret Atwood's "A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum" plunks the reader
into the after hours of a museum and all the history it contains only to invite the imagination to enter in. It was uncanny to have almost everyone feel they understood exactly this imagined situation, and the atmosphere of being trapped, lost... We all laughed at the appearance in capitals of the signs "NO EXIT" and "YOU ARE HERE". Sandra remarked the chronology of history, David, the dissolution back to our component elements... and we also discussed why this poem would be a favorite of my 86 year old poet friend who no longer gets out and about. Perhaps we too create those "idiot voices" that repeat canned information someone has contrived about what is seen, has been:
"...idiot
voice jogged by a pushed
button, repeats its memories
and I am dragged to the mind's
deadend, the roar of the bone-
yard,
We are lost, figuratively, inside "a man-made stone brain". Perhaps one can think of Yeats and sailing to Byzantium... where art is the keeper of culture, passed on to future generations.
The last poem, by Philip Levine, captures the irony of "truth" which can never be simple.
It takes a long "ramp" to the heart of the poem containing a compressed narrative:
"My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love."
The rest is about the fact of truth -- the important things do not need fancy elaboration,
we know them... After this 3 line sentence, the poem asks the reader to "taste" what he's saying -- although we don't know any more of the story. One would be hard-pressed to "explain metaphor" : a question: "is it onions or potatoes", "simple salt" "wealth of melting butter" -- our choice, unswallowed, like truth stuck in the back of the throat, silent, which no words can express.
April Fools’ Day makes me think of the “trickster” – and what better realm than poetry to find him/her at work! Truth is often better understood through artifice, Dickinson's "tell it slant" and we will see, it never is "simple" in poetry -- and yet, it is so gratifying when we feel the "silent, intense,/mimetic pattern of perfect sense."
April Fools' Day by Lawrence S. Pertillar** (contemporary)
The Poem – by Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
Poem by Forrest Gander
A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum by Margaret Atwood
The Simple Truth -- Philip Levine
April Fools' Day: comments included an appreciation of pegging cultural foolishness,
where we roast in our own juices... ideas in mass culture spread like illness... and we discussed the subtle ways in which rumors start...
Without pegging the sickness, we understand, "To feast on the remainder of sensibility!"
is the celebration of fools who have already done much damage.
Pertillar uses end-rhyme in the opening stanza (for 1854) he then launches into an exclamation-pocked (5 !) series of irregular lines, that probably would deliver well at a slam reading.
Nabokov uses ear-rhyme, such as bare/there; rhyme/time;/unknown/stone; words/birds
and even double rhymes with think.../ aloud, and pink... cloud, in three stanzas to describe the poem by what it is not: sunset, mirror, lyrical click, cacodemons (bad daimons)and two stanzas to demonstrate the process of what it is: the thundering mystical poem.
The last stanza reminded Marcie of a Rousseau-like painting. Each stanza uses visual and aural imagery. A delightful sense of humor appears in the 13 syllabled, longest line "not the things you can say so much better in plain prose." What works in poetry we concur with Nabokov's demonstration -- is what pleases our ear, compresses the image, awakens the heart.
Forrest Gander's poem does that indeed: The form takes the shape of a mummie, where head, shoulders, torso, legs are swaddled... Forrest responded to my email asking him about the poem this way:
"The form-- with the close rhymes is also part of the elegy since I wrote
it for Robert Creeley. Yes, I want the indication that a person (who dies, for instance) might be said to "go dark" like a window goes dark. And then, what is there to
say? And then the ending has several ambiguities as you all have noted.
The dead leave us what we call them-- to wit, their names.
And also, they-- whatever we call them-- simply leave us."
We might complain that we can’t identify "meaning", but at the same time we don’t want to. The real poem is about discovery. Frost. This poem, with the lines coming back to center to land on 4 letter words, can be read in many different way -- so several people gave it a whirl: Here is one rendition:
Some (we say we know)
go (like a window)
dark.
Pathetic any remark
then.
They leave us
what we
(we) call them.
He captures the relationship of "some" and "us" -- how we determine the other-- with a hint that the "us" has been touched, and has become as much "them" as "they" are. This is not called "The Poem" (to explain/demonstrate) or "A Poem" (to hint at a specific meaning),
but simply "Poem" reminiscent of the style of Robert Creeley.
It reminds me of the Cid Corman poem below:
It isn’t for want
of something to say
something to tell you
something you should know
but to detain you
keep you from going
as long as YOU are,
as long as you ARE.
here in the space of the poem, the words open up, invite
linguistic imagination... but the conditional hinge, "as long as" repeated twice with shifting emphasis on "you" and "being" emphasizes the poet will end... one-ness... I can only be here, if you are here.
subject-subject relationship.
To contrast, Margaret Atwood's "A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum" plunks the reader
into the after hours of a museum and all the history it contains only to invite the imagination to enter in. It was uncanny to have almost everyone feel they understood exactly this imagined situation, and the atmosphere of being trapped, lost... We all laughed at the appearance in capitals of the signs "NO EXIT" and "YOU ARE HERE". Sandra remarked the chronology of history, David, the dissolution back to our component elements... and we also discussed why this poem would be a favorite of my 86 year old poet friend who no longer gets out and about. Perhaps we too create those "idiot voices" that repeat canned information someone has contrived about what is seen, has been:
"...idiot
voice jogged by a pushed
button, repeats its memories
and I am dragged to the mind's
deadend, the roar of the bone-
yard,
We are lost, figuratively, inside "a man-made stone brain". Perhaps one can think of Yeats and sailing to Byzantium... where art is the keeper of culture, passed on to future generations.
The last poem, by Philip Levine, captures the irony of "truth" which can never be simple.
It takes a long "ramp" to the heart of the poem containing a compressed narrative:
"My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love."
The rest is about the fact of truth -- the important things do not need fancy elaboration,
we know them... After this 3 line sentence, the poem asks the reader to "taste" what he's saying -- although we don't know any more of the story. One would be hard-pressed to "explain metaphor" : a question: "is it onions or potatoes", "simple salt" "wealth of melting butter" -- our choice, unswallowed, like truth stuck in the back of the throat, silent, which no words can express.
Friday, April 5, 2013
poems for April 8
Prayer in My Boot by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Trees -- Philip Larkin
A Boundless Moment -- Robert Frost
three poems by Cavafy offered by Knopf:Aboard the Ship; Birth of a Poem
and Ithaka: Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard
A week flies by and I think, yes, I could use a prayer to pull out of my boot,
and then laugh at such a self-serving thought and start to reflect on what prayer is.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the sort of poet who will help such a reflection. The juxtaposition of "prayer" and "boot" is not carried further than the title, but allows a generous scaffold for
many directions, including association with Crocodile Dundee pulling a knife out of his boot. The anaphor of the object of the prayer, starting with "for wind... including a world view and ending with the specific "for every hopeful morning/given and given"
contains an undercoat of praise, infused with meditative reflection on the entire
spectrum of human condition... A wonderful poem to read again and again.
Larkin's trees rustle with rhyme that is not dull or expected. The "something almost being said" is worthy of wonder, the questions, the way we attach our subjective understanding of
new leaves in spring, as if they SEEM to say, "begin again afresh." David reminded us of Frost "Nature's first green is bold... which ends with "nothing gold can stay."
The Frost example though, was a different type of tree experience with the paradoxical title: "A Boundless Moment" -- which defies any containment of time -- as if to prove Frost's dictum: "Poetry is one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another." The fact of March and imagination of May hang in a twilight of timelessness.
We ended with three poems by Cavafy.
The first, "Aboard the Ship" conveys specific memory of a friend in a sideways fashion rather like Frost's boundless moment... He is still alive in the sketch but very gone. The repetition of "out of Time" refers both to the timelessness, accessible through the soul, and the actual physical "Out of Time. All these things, they're very old—/
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon."
I do not know enough about the original, but suspect this is a very fine translation.
The second, six-line "Birth of a Poem" provided lots of discussion! How simple -- (tongue in cheek!): imagination captures a slight thing, then renders it in sensual form: tactile, aural, visual, evoking fragrance, taste. Don recommended "Man and his Gods", by Smith with an intro by Einstein which talks about impulse towards religions, how Egyptians had many names for self: you, your shadow who goes on adventures at night; etc.
Ithaka invites the reader to come up with a "life philosophy" such as:
Unless we are primed for finding something inside... we won’t find it...
wealth is the experience you have...
the road should not deceive us...
We started with a prayer in the boot, and ended with metaphorical boots walking as if reciting a meditative prayer.
Kathy encouraged us to listen to Sean Connery reading it on this utube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n3n2Ox4Yfk
The Trees -- Philip Larkin
A Boundless Moment -- Robert Frost
three poems by Cavafy offered by Knopf:Aboard the Ship; Birth of a Poem
and Ithaka: Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard
A week flies by and I think, yes, I could use a prayer to pull out of my boot,
and then laugh at such a self-serving thought and start to reflect on what prayer is.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the sort of poet who will help such a reflection. The juxtaposition of "prayer" and "boot" is not carried further than the title, but allows a generous scaffold for
many directions, including association with Crocodile Dundee pulling a knife out of his boot. The anaphor of the object of the prayer, starting with "for wind... including a world view and ending with the specific "for every hopeful morning/given and given"
contains an undercoat of praise, infused with meditative reflection on the entire
spectrum of human condition... A wonderful poem to read again and again.
Larkin's trees rustle with rhyme that is not dull or expected. The "something almost being said" is worthy of wonder, the questions, the way we attach our subjective understanding of
new leaves in spring, as if they SEEM to say, "begin again afresh." David reminded us of Frost "Nature's first green is bold... which ends with "nothing gold can stay."
The Frost example though, was a different type of tree experience with the paradoxical title: "A Boundless Moment" -- which defies any containment of time -- as if to prove Frost's dictum: "Poetry is one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another." The fact of March and imagination of May hang in a twilight of timelessness.
We ended with three poems by Cavafy.
The first, "Aboard the Ship" conveys specific memory of a friend in a sideways fashion rather like Frost's boundless moment... He is still alive in the sketch but very gone. The repetition of "out of Time" refers both to the timelessness, accessible through the soul, and the actual physical "Out of Time. All these things, they're very old—/
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon."
I do not know enough about the original, but suspect this is a very fine translation.
The second, six-line "Birth of a Poem" provided lots of discussion! How simple -- (tongue in cheek!): imagination captures a slight thing, then renders it in sensual form: tactile, aural, visual, evoking fragrance, taste. Don recommended "Man and his Gods", by Smith with an intro by Einstein which talks about impulse towards religions, how Egyptians had many names for self: you, your shadow who goes on adventures at night; etc.
Ithaka invites the reader to come up with a "life philosophy" such as:
Unless we are primed for finding something inside... we won’t find it...
wealth is the experience you have...
the road should not deceive us...
We started with a prayer in the boot, and ended with metaphorical boots walking as if reciting a meditative prayer.
Kathy encouraged us to listen to Sean Connery reading it on this utube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n3n2Ox4Yfk
Monday, March 25, 2013
Poems for March 25 - discussion
A good poem for me, acts like Luis Alberto Urrea’s books: he says they are “ ways to toss a love note over the fence.” In this case, snapshots of the everyday, playing tennis with art...
Days of Future Dwell by Samuel Amadon (contemporary poet, lives/works in Houston)
String Quartet by Carl Dennis
Abstract Expressionism -- by Tony Hoagland
Homeland Security – by Patrick Cotter
Of the Divine as Absence and Single Letter by Idra Novey
Each one of the poems addressed in some form the viewer/reader's experience in front of a work of art -- whether it be a poem, music, a painting. Week after week, our discussions allow 18-25 "live" participants to share how a poem touches them, drawing on a variety of work and life experiences including retired teacher, social worker, psychologist, environmentalist, accountant, musician, artist, and many more.
Days of Future Dwell:
What does the title "associate" ? Days of Future is not usually followed by the biblical, prayer-tone of "Dwell" -- and how does this poet use the quatrains to his advantage,
and repeating "ell" sound.
David suggested that we read it twice, in a row, to hear the words spoken by different people.
One person was reminded of refrigerator art...Martin commended the poem for reproducing the way the mind stumbles over things...David appreciated how random detail turned metaphorical...
and the more we discussed, the more layers appeared to what ostensibly is a story of selling a house in which one used to dwell, but which will only linger to what is "tied to its bell". Could be cowbells, so one doesn't lose them; bells as warning -- or doorbells... or the sounds that fill a house, the voices that identify the people who live there.
In the first stanza, "windowed, countered,/ surfaced" act both as adjectives and multiple-meanings of verbs -- perhaps like an offer/counter offer; what's put on the table; seen/passed through the window, and all that is revealed when suddenly the physical shell will change hands.
For Marcie, it addressed unreadinesss that’s going to happen anyway which started a discussion about our individual smallness in face of life. That reminds me of ee cummings
and his Impressions VII from Tulips and Chimneys where he breaks down in-
fin-
i
tes-
i
mal-
ly
into a long column with two small i's.
**
Carl Dennis starts out Quartet with this line: "Art and life, I wouldn't want to confuse them." And then proceeds to compare listening to a quartet with a conversation. We all immediately recognized the flow -- or the person who has to play the "solo" part, the cello playing (Don thinks Pachelbel's canon) the same plodding line over and over. Favorite line:"voices of the quartet/In resisting the plots time hatches to make them unequal,
He returns to the crux of the matter here with a five line stanza question: "Would I be moved if I thought the music/Belonged to a world remote from this one,/If it didn't seem instead to be making the point/That conversation like this is available/At moments sufficiently free and self-forgetful?
We are moved when we make connection -- enriched when art enables us to do so.
**
On the same subject, Tony Hoagland's poem, Abstract Expressionism, gave rise to peals of laughter as we recognized ourselves in various personalities in front of a painting:
the amateur, naively going with associations/suggestions he tries to imagine as existing, the academic, the painterly painter. But really, standing in front of abstract expressionism is like standing in front of our own lives... paying attention to what is evoked in us.
Also from the Cortland Review is Patrick Cotter's poem which also has a dog. Unlike Hoagland's dog who has missed the boat, yet was there before it, Cotter's dog can "morse his message" which brings the speaker to wonder about how we decode messages -- whether in raindrops or barks. "If there are rules to this game/ I don't know what they are"
It is refreshing to laugh -- to have fresh and delightful ways of thinking about communication, art, how we are. The poem which had no artifice at all came at the end.
Idra Novey paints a perfect picture, as Marcie put it, of "hopeful expression of hopelessness." Re-read the title, "Of the Divine as Absence and Single Letter" and more appears as mystery. A suggestion, a hint, a real-ness in what is not.
Indeed, the details are real, oppositions of Holiday Inn and green; a beautiful flower called Joe Pye weed and peeling plaster; In the third stanza, the O sounds appear, a small tick of D on wind (hidden perhaps), owl, silo sliding to sticking, the doubled O in sorrow.
I’m listening to G now
but mean the owl, a wind playing the silo,
a sticking sorrow,
which then leaps to the actual snore of the visitor... and almost a prayer:
"make me kinder "-- and the double negative of "I’m not far from unfathoming it all."
Just as we cannot say the name of God, Yahweh, cannot fathom and cannot unfathom, if such a thing could be-- but there lies the confirmation of the mystery.
Days of Future Dwell by Samuel Amadon (contemporary poet, lives/works in Houston)
String Quartet by Carl Dennis
Abstract Expressionism -- by Tony Hoagland
Homeland Security – by Patrick Cotter
Of the Divine as Absence and Single Letter by Idra Novey
Each one of the poems addressed in some form the viewer/reader's experience in front of a work of art -- whether it be a poem, music, a painting. Week after week, our discussions allow 18-25 "live" participants to share how a poem touches them, drawing on a variety of work and life experiences including retired teacher, social worker, psychologist, environmentalist, accountant, musician, artist, and many more.
Days of Future Dwell:
What does the title "associate" ? Days of Future is not usually followed by the biblical, prayer-tone of "Dwell" -- and how does this poet use the quatrains to his advantage,
and repeating "ell" sound.
David suggested that we read it twice, in a row, to hear the words spoken by different people.
One person was reminded of refrigerator art...Martin commended the poem for reproducing the way the mind stumbles over things...David appreciated how random detail turned metaphorical...
and the more we discussed, the more layers appeared to what ostensibly is a story of selling a house in which one used to dwell, but which will only linger to what is "tied to its bell". Could be cowbells, so one doesn't lose them; bells as warning -- or doorbells... or the sounds that fill a house, the voices that identify the people who live there.
In the first stanza, "windowed, countered,/ surfaced" act both as adjectives and multiple-meanings of verbs -- perhaps like an offer/counter offer; what's put on the table; seen/passed through the window, and all that is revealed when suddenly the physical shell will change hands.
For Marcie, it addressed unreadinesss that’s going to happen anyway which started a discussion about our individual smallness in face of life. That reminds me of ee cummings
and his Impressions VII from Tulips and Chimneys where he breaks down in-
fin-
i
tes-
i
mal-
ly
into a long column with two small i's.
**
Carl Dennis starts out Quartet with this line: "Art and life, I wouldn't want to confuse them." And then proceeds to compare listening to a quartet with a conversation. We all immediately recognized the flow -- or the person who has to play the "solo" part, the cello playing (Don thinks Pachelbel's canon) the same plodding line over and over. Favorite line:"voices of the quartet/In resisting the plots time hatches to make them unequal,
He returns to the crux of the matter here with a five line stanza question: "Would I be moved if I thought the music/Belonged to a world remote from this one,/If it didn't seem instead to be making the point/That conversation like this is available/At moments sufficiently free and self-forgetful?
We are moved when we make connection -- enriched when art enables us to do so.
**
On the same subject, Tony Hoagland's poem, Abstract Expressionism, gave rise to peals of laughter as we recognized ourselves in various personalities in front of a painting:
the amateur, naively going with associations/suggestions he tries to imagine as existing, the academic, the painterly painter. But really, standing in front of abstract expressionism is like standing in front of our own lives... paying attention to what is evoked in us.
Also from the Cortland Review is Patrick Cotter's poem which also has a dog. Unlike Hoagland's dog who has missed the boat, yet was there before it, Cotter's dog can "morse his message" which brings the speaker to wonder about how we decode messages -- whether in raindrops or barks. "If there are rules to this game/ I don't know what they are"
It is refreshing to laugh -- to have fresh and delightful ways of thinking about communication, art, how we are. The poem which had no artifice at all came at the end.
Idra Novey paints a perfect picture, as Marcie put it, of "hopeful expression of hopelessness." Re-read the title, "Of the Divine as Absence and Single Letter" and more appears as mystery. A suggestion, a hint, a real-ness in what is not.
Indeed, the details are real, oppositions of Holiday Inn and green; a beautiful flower called Joe Pye weed and peeling plaster; In the third stanza, the O sounds appear, a small tick of D on wind (hidden perhaps), owl, silo sliding to sticking, the doubled O in sorrow.
I’m listening to G now
but mean the owl, a wind playing the silo,
a sticking sorrow,
which then leaps to the actual snore of the visitor... and almost a prayer:
"make me kinder "-- and the double negative of "I’m not far from unfathoming it all."
Just as we cannot say the name of God, Yahweh, cannot fathom and cannot unfathom, if such a thing could be-- but there lies the confirmation of the mystery.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
commentary on March 18: mystical writing
commentary on poems for March 18.
I love the synchronicity of hearing a Cornelius Eady sing, (see the link to his group “Rough Magic” http://www.reverbnation.com/corneliuseady/song/16559714-last-stop-ny-studio-version?1336410755 ) and then look up his poem on the poet walk and find that it resonates with the first poem presented by Rumi. “Love” says Eady... no matter the circumstances,
especially since things you think “weren’t supposed to occur/have happened,(anyway). Eady then finds the ease of breathing, like Rumi asking God to absorb him, his words, leaving only the silence of union...
What is it about mystic writing that moves us? “The quintessential somewhere; The mystical nowhere: The enigmatic anywhere ; My gift to you - the key to everywhere.
Place becomes a play of light and shadow where the mortal will find itself lost while the soul knows the way. Whether it is St. John of the Cross contemplating “The Dark Night of the Soul”, Wang Wei or Hayden Carruth meditating in twilight, or dreamlike state, the reader is invited to put on a new pair of eyes. Poems cast our words, our stories, what we choose, such as smiling, in the Carruth poem, for the simple reason we can (and how does that mean to him? or to you as reader?). If we agree with Weng Wei, then we too “watch the flow of clear water,/ dream of sitting on the uncarved rock (Tao)/
casting a line on the endless stream.(Tao).
Paul Muldoon has a different approach: unlike Rumi, Weng Wei, and Carruth whose measured, deliberate slow pace matches the softness of the scene, he seems to unwind ballads. In “Tell” it could be a rhymed story of a boy combining William Tell and Cowboys and Indians. What is the sound of an apple splitting above your head in such a childhood memory? I love that as readers we could think of 1916 and the troubles, think of father/son, the stakes of William Tell, and all that can be associated with the unknown.
In the “Mirror” his poem translates a story http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25580591?uid=3739832&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102026948817
by Michael Davitt (1846-1906), Irish hero for tenant protection from absentee landlords. but it would well be re-told by the Irish “Bob Dylan”, Michael Davitt who founded in 1970 the Irish-language literary journal Innti. (More than a poetry magazine, the Innti 'movement', akin to that of the Beats in the United States, revitalised poetry in the Irish language with its emphasis on contemporary concerns and sharp vernacular wit. By staging public readings across Ireland and literally bringing poetry back to the streets, a sense of excitement was generated in the Seventies and Eighties poetry scene which resembled that of the San Francisco renaissance during the previous two decades.)
But I digress. Consult http://www.complete-review.com/authors/muldoonp.htm to find out more about Muldoon. There you will read “gamesman, then, is another name for poet in Paul Muldoon's practice."
However it is, the three part story, which starts out at a wake, goes into the reason for the father’s death, and ends with the son putting the mirror in position, brought out much discussion. The “cold Paradox” of someone dead – “he was no longer my father, but I was his son” – what living is – what the next world is – how the mirror swallows one,
allows ghosts, transcendence from one world to the next – in a rather haunting “St. John of the Cross” tone. I think of Seamus Heaney and “The Spirit Level”. Which brings us to the poem, “The Frog” where the speaker is in the same “spirit level”...
The final poem This much I know.
In “Hay” Muldoon starts off with “This much I know”—and then remarks his observation of the hay, the raw itching hands, the light, and the “one” when one bursts,
can be both one of the hay accordions, (although for a fraction of a second, “one” seems to refer to a universal “you”) something takes flight/
from those hot and heavy box-pleats. This much, at least,/
I know.
And what is it that takes flight – and what is it then, we know? And does that alter,
like circumstances over which we have no control, anything? Keep breathing; love.
I love the synchronicity of hearing a Cornelius Eady sing, (see the link to his group “Rough Magic” http://www.reverbnation.com/corneliuseady/song/16559714-last-stop-ny-studio-version?1336410755 ) and then look up his poem on the poet walk and find that it resonates with the first poem presented by Rumi. “Love” says Eady... no matter the circumstances,
especially since things you think “weren’t supposed to occur/have happened,(anyway). Eady then finds the ease of breathing, like Rumi asking God to absorb him, his words, leaving only the silence of union...
What is it about mystic writing that moves us? “The quintessential somewhere; The mystical nowhere: The enigmatic anywhere ; My gift to you - the key to everywhere.
Place becomes a play of light and shadow where the mortal will find itself lost while the soul knows the way. Whether it is St. John of the Cross contemplating “The Dark Night of the Soul”, Wang Wei or Hayden Carruth meditating in twilight, or dreamlike state, the reader is invited to put on a new pair of eyes. Poems cast our words, our stories, what we choose, such as smiling, in the Carruth poem, for the simple reason we can (and how does that mean to him? or to you as reader?). If we agree with Weng Wei, then we too “watch the flow of clear water,/ dream of sitting on the uncarved rock (Tao)/
casting a line on the endless stream.(Tao).
Paul Muldoon has a different approach: unlike Rumi, Weng Wei, and Carruth whose measured, deliberate slow pace matches the softness of the scene, he seems to unwind ballads. In “Tell” it could be a rhymed story of a boy combining William Tell and Cowboys and Indians. What is the sound of an apple splitting above your head in such a childhood memory? I love that as readers we could think of 1916 and the troubles, think of father/son, the stakes of William Tell, and all that can be associated with the unknown.
In the “Mirror” his poem translates a story http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25580591?uid=3739832&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102026948817
by Michael Davitt (1846-1906), Irish hero for tenant protection from absentee landlords. but it would well be re-told by the Irish “Bob Dylan”, Michael Davitt who founded in 1970 the Irish-language literary journal Innti. (More than a poetry magazine, the Innti 'movement', akin to that of the Beats in the United States, revitalised poetry in the Irish language with its emphasis on contemporary concerns and sharp vernacular wit. By staging public readings across Ireland and literally bringing poetry back to the streets, a sense of excitement was generated in the Seventies and Eighties poetry scene which resembled that of the San Francisco renaissance during the previous two decades.)
But I digress. Consult http://www.complete-review.com/authors/muldoonp.htm to find out more about Muldoon. There you will read “gamesman, then, is another name for poet in Paul Muldoon's practice."
However it is, the three part story, which starts out at a wake, goes into the reason for the father’s death, and ends with the son putting the mirror in position, brought out much discussion. The “cold Paradox” of someone dead – “he was no longer my father, but I was his son” – what living is – what the next world is – how the mirror swallows one,
allows ghosts, transcendence from one world to the next – in a rather haunting “St. John of the Cross” tone. I think of Seamus Heaney and “The Spirit Level”. Which brings us to the poem, “The Frog” where the speaker is in the same “spirit level”...
The final poem This much I know.
In “Hay” Muldoon starts off with “This much I know”—and then remarks his observation of the hay, the raw itching hands, the light, and the “one” when one bursts,
can be both one of the hay accordions, (although for a fraction of a second, “one” seems to refer to a universal “you”) something takes flight/
from those hot and heavy box-pleats. This much, at least,/
I know.
And what is it that takes flight – and what is it then, we know? And does that alter,
like circumstances over which we have no control, anything? Keep breathing; love.
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