poems for Dec 9

Poems for December 9
No Option by Byron Hoot
Applesauce by Ted Kooser (W.A. 12/3)
Days -- -- Billy Collins
Cave — by Mark Levine
The Dead – William Helen
Untitled by Ryan Van Winkle

I had a chuckle looking at the last names of the authors of the first and last poems-- but what is in a name is quickly dispelled by a title, or clever refusal of one. "No Option" starts with a limited choice of breads, which if used to teach ESOL might well be confusing. Why are choices limited to White or Wheat? The discussion brought up all the "might have beens" locked into childhood and how the poem elicits both things and people that may have been lost, as well as how our experiences are "ingrained".
Kooser's poem about apples also allows access to memory, and then develops both an inside/outside, kitchen apron with sailboats to sailing the world that brings a sense of "fractal" lines tracing a person in more than one scene. Perhaps my favorite part is the delightful anthropomorphism
"as if all
the apples were talking at once,
as if they'd come cold and sour from chores in the orchard,
and were trying to shoulder in close to the fire.

Mark Levine's "Cave" provided many levels, perhaps an association with Plato's cave, and how memory shadows what we want to remember and truth... Is the boy the younger version of the speaker of the poem, the "echo" the equivalent of walking into a telescope backwards, equally distorted?
The diction of the second stanza mimics a difficult passage, to some metaphorical woods
We wended through a half-formed unintelligible
brushy wood to a place I knew called "cave"

and the final sentence has an contorted syntax equally enigmatic:

I wanted one, back then, when I had something to offer,
when I wasn't in this place, where light passes through me,
when I wasn't like this,
which is what,
when I wanted one,
as he, poor boy, wanted me.

I wanted what? a boyhood? a chance at something missed by wanting to be so grown up.

If not a sense of failure, certainly a sense of great sadness, emptiness.
*
The Dead gave rise as well to much discussion: Indisputable details of the Holocaust followed by clouds, reassurance of memory -- THERE you are... but also perhaps a sense of desperation in the "HERE I am", unable to join those who have passed on. He sees them "for the rest of his life,
doing all they possibly could—
forming, obeying the wind."
The ending reminds us we do not have control.


Billy Collins gentle irony was a good antidote, and we ended with the "Untitled" which is a style the poet has adopted where the epigram will create a portrait -- and the words in the epigram will appear in the poem
-- calling it "untitled" leaves a sense of anonymity, and yet, there is a vastness in remembering living connection where time is not in short supply.

As ever, these short notes do not do justice to a rich discussion -- pondering the ways words can pull
associations and details of our lives, experiences, and shared with others.

poems for lunch -- Dec. 5

Folklore – Dean Young
Symposium – Paul Muldoon
Betty Friedan’s Final Advice – Stephen Dunn
Tanager – Billy Collins
Concerning Essential Existence by Mary Ruefle
Untitled (Marie Howe) by Ryan Van Winkle
Untitled (Abraham Lincoln) by Ryan Van Winkle (tbd Dec. 12)



What truth is handed down through tales, proverbs, or even cliches?
Dean Young makes a provocative collage of "almost" sayings -- that follow the rhythm
and syntax of something familiar, but yet provide an eerie sense of something not being
quite right. "Feeding stray shadows/ only attracts more shadows."
Starve a fever,/ shatter a glass house".
There is an affable tone in sentences like "People often mistake/thirst for hunger so first take a big glug"followed by an anti-war "almost slogan" and a personal comment "I don't want you to be wasted on me" with a totally out-of-context "even though/all summer the pool was, I didn't/get in it once.
And then the game is rolling with repeat of wasted... more proverbs, details of hospitals, TVs, Civil War, until "Your turning point/may be lying crying on the floor."

What is folklore, but shared lessons to help all humanity... but leaving us, after a wild romp, still with the problem of coping with whatever comes down the road.


The next poem, called Symposium, shares a similar technique of borrowing from proverbs. Why Symposium?
Yes, it basically was a Greek drinking party, and perhaps this could be a fun party game. Wiki describes it as a "key Hellenic social institution. It was a forum for men of good family to debate, plot, boast, or simply to revel with others. They were frequently held to celebrate the introduction of young men into aristocratic society. Symposia were also held by aristocrats to celebrate other special occasions, such as victories in athletic and poetic contests."
No only a title with a long history behind it, but the form is a rhymed sonnet. The last two sentences,
conclude like he who has "shot his bolt" ( to have already achieved all that you have the power, ability, or strength to do and to be unable to do more). Instead of "where there is smoke, there is fire"
"there's no smoke after the horse is gone." I love how clever Muldoon says so much nonsense which we can understand without needing paraphrase.


In reading Stephen Dunn's poem, I was glad to hear elucidation about both Betty Friedan, but also a reference
to how to deal with "unintelligible". Why three stanzas? Does "serious fun" deserve a breath after one stanza before plunging into "After the ceremony" -- have you forgotten dear reader, the slant reference to the ship's captain not to marry? But which ceremony, for whom, and why the advice in the next two stanzas.
The tone seems playful, a gentle irony which may or may not include the Shakespearian reference to "heaven" as "vagina". Jim was reminded of Joseph Campbell's "Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake" (known as the greatest book that nobody's read). Apparently Campbell's critique provided material for his later, Hero with 1,000 faces).

A different sort of irony is presented in Billy Collin's Tanager, balancing realities. He reminds us of how conditional perception really is.

Mary Ruefle uses parallel syntax to drive her point home -- perhaps her horse joining Muldoon's.

The Van Winkle poem merits more discussion -- but we enjoyed the wave form, the sense of tide coming in and out, sounds, rhythms, and sense of loss of language... "all I ever got from the sea" sounds like a metaphor... and the final newspaper "say" should wake up radar...

O Pen : December 2

November for Beginners by Rita Dove
Remembrance Day by Evelyn Lau
Advent by Mary Jo Salter
After Pisarro – by Byron Beynon
if the night is long, remember your unimportance by Grace Marie Grafton
Teacher W.S. Merwin


In today's discussion we focussed on titles: What does "Beginner" evoke, or "Remembrance" or "Advent"?
Something about beginnings, brings a sense of hope, as we remember the past and move forward. What is new,
for architecture? I think of the currently oldest standing bridge in Paris called "Le Pont Neuf". Certainly the poem "After Pisarro" could mean the traditional, "In the style of", but how does the perfectly aligned
right margin correspond to that? This 17 line poem brushstrokes a present moment long past, with the
long, final fragment, "His early canvas/for a new, tragic century, created from observation through "rented" panes. (I apologize for bad typos: 5th line: strength; of course 15th line, umbrellas; no period, line 16 after day; of course only one s on observed.
The two poems by Grafton and Merwin are similar: one created "after a line", although with a completely different tone, reflecting quite different times. Merwin's poem, from the Miner's Pale Children, was created in 1970, addressing what seems to be quite real pain, played like a record at the close of a year.
The parallel construction:

What I live for I can seldom believe in
Who I love I cannot go to
What I hope is always divided

supports an image of acute emotional pain, followed by "but" which changes perspectives, that do not rely on justifying, or sure promises, and "yet" this too is part of learning.
Grafton's poem, taking the line "if the night is long remember your unimportance" adopts a flippant tone,
with delightful details of play-acting including "no one wants to be the bramble. "Oh me."
The speaker of the poem goes on to ruminate on the role of the wraith, whose only strength is time
to ruminate on self-improvement courses. Cheeky, fun, but self-absorbed without letting the reader in.


But to return to the opening poem, the enjambed lines, the braiding of mood with a hint of King Lear,
We sit down
in the smell of the past
and rise in a light
that is already leaving.
We ache in secret,
memorizing

What is it that aches in us, that we keep in secret, what is it we memorize before leaping into a stanza
beginning with a gloomy line, yet which ends with Zithers? The titles is intriguing -- as we review the year, start with November -- the softness of snow... and end with promising to play the fool in Spring. It is not a primer, but more "where to start", November, which doesn't necessarily have the "easy way out" with snow-- but rather is a pre-advent advent season, to prepare us for celebration, born in Spring.

Remembrance day probes beyond "armistice" day. What is time when shopping on a dismal November 11th is interrupted by 60 seconds of remembrance? The poet doesn't make a break from that experience to recounting her friend's memory of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, including horrifying details of a street urchin's head in a bucket, the rest of him used for food. Bunkers provide relief -- and you realize, the speaker of the poem is still in the store, the 60 seconds of remembrance over, and back to the poem goes on to search for the perfect dress, and the store a relief from remembering.


Mary Jo Salter's poem, "Advent", in 20 tercets combines weather, building a gingerbread house five days before Christmas, and the Advent calendar with windows so carefully coaxed open to reveal the old masters who painted the Christmas story. All this while the gingerbread house receives shingled peppermints, and the shutter, snapped off, retrieved... with a mysterious last stanza "a page torn from a book/still blank for the two of us,/a mother and her child." Comments included making Mary real... the sense of vulnerability, with the future waiting to be written.

O Pen November 25

Morning Prayer – Kazim Ali
Chorus by Catherine Barnett
Variations on a Theme by W.S. Merwin
I Am Vocal and the Salt -- by Alice Notley
Epilogue by Robert Lowell

In the APR (Sept/Oct. 2013) Kazim Ali has five poems followed by an interview with Christopher Hennessy.
He stresses that poetry traffics in the unsayable, not communication. Ali speaks of Emily Dickinson as a "totem poet" (for her penchant for mixing dictions, her breathtaking fearlessness and focus on the soul."
He further stresses that he works in breath "which is to say a sentence that moved through a poem, held by an idea." Language is material we use to create experience, and create a sense of self which is only perception.

For Ali, his love of syllables and vowels "could tolerate words and consonants because they came along with the package", but he works in breath, "how a sentence moves through the poem, held by an idea."
In Morning Prayer, four couplets, held at the waist by the single line "season to season" divide a setting of resonance from two questions. The first, about what it is in us that reaches to know what's after...
the second, an almost meditation on spirit -- is the function to give light, or to hold it.

The discussion of the poem included the feeling of sound as resonance, the idea that a potter can hear when the form of the pot is right from the sound, the image of the Grail, the idea of an autistic child (created by Elizabeth Moon, author) who states, "if light has speed, dark must too."
I enjoyed this poem more than the ones in the APR, partly because the words couched in so much white space,
allow the connection of thought and word, in a changing vibration that does not stay dark or light, contain or give.

The second poem brought to mind the function of the Greek Chorus, to comment on the action. The metaphor of the "elephant in the room" extended to the elephant squeezed into a church is both delightful and effective. I love the anthropomorphizing, the abstract "curtain of light" and metonym in a dirty gown of wrinkles,the whole galaxy shivering! The opening provided by elephant, opens the room up to the larger idea of church, not as building but gathering of spirits in a grand "all of it".

Merwin's poem brought up the musical idea of "fortspinung" -- a musical motif-- a spinning out of thanks,
with an opening, amplification and conclusion. Because of Merwin's style where each line suspends, able to
resonate both with what comes before and after, the theme of "blind gratitude" becomes a thread to life itself and the unknown that guides us. (The blind seer, and idea of the Dog Star, Sirius)

These lines
homesickness that guides the plovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it

remind me of Ali's question of what it is "in us" that reaches to know... in this case not what is "after" -- but "before" -- unknowns that have no beginning or end -- and the opportunity to see, visit, revisit them.


The Notley poem addresses so much in the words, "Salt" both by itself (Lot, salt of the Earth) -- and coupled with "voice" and use of first person gave rise to a lengthy discussion. Above the salt, below the Salt and Aethel as lords, and athel as salt cedar that sucks up salt...
Martin understood a psychotic divided into several personalities and voices... but the question remains -- why ARE we here? Which elephants are in the room? How do we reconcile our complexity. Certainly a poem to revisit.

The final poem, rather like a epilogue to the poems gathered picks up Notley's concerns,
"All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?"

John provided the Vermeer painting reference with the map. I was reminded of this quote about photography by Susan Sontag:
"As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure."
-- from Susan Sontag, On Photography

The coupling of 4 adjectives, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
for the snapshot intrigues me. Why LURID, which implies anything but "threadbare" (bright, brilliant, vivid, glaring, shocking, fluorescent, flaming, dazzling, intense;)
Knowing that this is the last poem of Lowell's last book is paradoxically reassuring. The first line which scans so nicely, "Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme"
no matter which tone attached to it (paying homage, shaking fists at form, at writing itself) remain insufficient to create something unique... Is the question "why are they no help to me now" perhaps recognition that something in the speaker has changed, as if understanding whatever "help" they had provided is also insufficient for the stage he is in. How do we give "living name" to each figure captured?

I love questions that prod us to open up our experience...

poems for November 18 and 21

In November by Lisel Mueller
Furniture Stephen Dobyns
My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell by Gwendolyn Brooks
Cellophane: An Assay by Jane Hirschfield
The Envoy by Jane Hirschfield
Hirschfield’s translation of a poem by Izumi Shikibu


The poems for this week of November have somewhat of a thread addressing the role of time, and rewards of metaphors and looking at things from different perspectives.

For Mueller, she gives us the Hansel and” Gretl feel of fairy tale, or others commented,
a Rip Van Winkle-esque experience of waking up in the present, where a past life
100 years ago, is over, dreamt. "If I die before I wake" in the children’s lullaby
is replaced by waking to a present filled with coffee and sunlight. The longest line of the 19 line poem, “But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.” follows the line that “bad news is in distant places.” The Old Story and the personal “my” story point the reader to empathize with someone else living what could have been your life. It makes sense that Mueller escaped from Nazi Germany, and indeed, what might have been her story, was directed to others not as lucky.

I am reminded of Mueller’s poem “Things” in Dobyns’ poem “Furniture”, which provides metaphors on a meditation both perception of speed. The poem’s irony regarding perspectives on speed and our human tendency to rush into things (often missing the boat) and our view of the "stationary nature" of chairs, tables, is delightful. Ex. Facial movements and gestures, quarrels of chairs... and the fact that "They move
a little quicker than raindrops sculpt a rock."

The discussion focussed not on the cleverness, the contrast of our "persistent thought" and their inflexible humility, but the end:
"... Humbly, they allow

themselves to be pushed around, piled
in a corner, sold from an auction block.
Yet they always offer us the other cheek.

Let us crouch before them to gather up
the rich bounty of their wisdom. But no,"

Very tongue-in-cheek, with an enjambment/stanza break "they allow / themselves" which seems reluctant.
Martin offered the comment about turning the other cheek: if a nobleman struck a peasant, he used the back of his hand. So to turn the other cheek would force the noble to strike again, but use the palm of his hand,
thus putting the aggressor in the wrong. We would expect the a different last line after "But no,"...
not crouch, not gather up wisdom, but this:

"they don’t like us; they have never liked us."
I love the irony of the assumption -- which in a way opens the possibilities of examining relationship.

Going back to the "they / us" situation -- the enjambment for humans lies in the rushing:
"...as we rush and

rush and then arrive at our end. They see us
as we might see a speeding bullet. You ask
what has persistent thought brought them?"

Here, the human tries to explain what the non-human is about, in a way reminiscent of how each individual projects his worldview on others. Without ever saying how much we want to be "liked", or accepted,
or the problem of rushing about which interferes with creating opportunities for others to get to know us,
we end up with the world view of the non-human who has no use for us, much as we might need to sit on the fact.


Understanding the time period of poem delivers important context, as in the Brooks 14 line poem, written in 1963.
The hell mentioned in the title could be understood in a general sense, or the hell created by racial prejudice, and assassination of Martin Luther King, whose dream lies in "the puny light" of "wait". Note that the sentence continues with a semi-colon followed by eight lines introduced by "hoping"with the delayed object of what lies inward in little boxes of her will. The delay, the wait is drawn out, and she returns to the honey and bread of the beginning lines, but with a new twist --
Hoping...
"My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love."
What is "old purity"... what land of milk and honey keeps us going...is at risk?

The two clipped sentences on line five hint at hell: "I am hungry. I am incomplete." -- with no promise, guarantee of food, only the slim hope of "wait". The risk that inner "food" can survive outer "starvation" is great.
See APR Nov/Dec issue for Jane Hirschfield's discussion of this poem in her article about transformation.

The Hirshfield poem brought up quite a bit of discussion about cellophane/saran wrap, transparency,
promise of sealing (in freshness,) and the cost of transformation from "noble tree" to weightlessness.
What protects, yet reveals is not so simple: we struggled with the lines:
"Your art is audible. immodest:
to preserve against time."

and image of the flute, and old words in translation, "seen through".
This yearning for an "I" to be such a "you".

O Pen -- poems for Nov. 11 (Armistice Day)

Droplets by C.K. Williams
The Letter by Dana Gioia
Seeing for a Moment by Denise Levertov
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
Radishes in War Time by Stan Sanvel Rubin
Apples in War Time by Stan Sanvel Rubin
Noise by Alicia Hoffman

11/11 when day and month match, and eleven marches like two soldiers lined up to remember
those who died in battle -- and might-have-beens layer, pocked with pauses remind us that no matter what experience, the well-crafted poem "unfastens the psyche's fortifications" to quote Jane Hirschfield somewhat out of context. If we steel ourselves against pain, we lose sight of the constant shifting involved with living that has nothing to do with "finding solutions once and for all".

The first poem by C.K. Williams threads one sentence into four stanzas filled with commas, hesitancies,
on a rainy day in fall. The sounds, particularly the "f"s have a tremulous quality played against
the relatively hard "d"s (din and downpour) "g"s (gush, gutters)and final nasal of the first and last words (Even / again), rain, not, note, nocturne, own. Interior "n"s, (planted, piano, constant, inside, mingling, intensity, wondering, longing, anymore, never, instant repeating "ings" push the "faltering, fading" into its own radiant passing. The intimacy of an "I and you" allows the reader insight into the thought of endings, in seasons, in storms, in living, juxtaposed by the practice of notes.

Whether stillness is the white space, the curved breath of a comma, the way consonants embrace vowels,
each of the poems present a texture of "moments" that allows objects of the world to change.

**
Hirschfield remarks “A good poem turns fresh ground inside us, to meet fresh need. Gioia addresses the universal nature of expectation, which drives our desire, attitudes. Where is that letter that contained "life instructions"? Surely it went astray... and we laugh at the irony. Martin pointed out how expectations have changed looking at pre and post world war II; Judith quoted from As You Like It,
and it seemed the poem succeeded in "ploughing" us to identify new ways of recognizing need.

The Levertov poem: One comment was that it had to be written in first person, as it was addressing something quite impenetrable. "It" is repeated 4 times: It was... three times. It was a cocoon; it was deep water; it IS first things -- foiled against the word, eschatology, learned as a child:
( "The department of theological science concerned with ‘the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell’.) Kathy thought of Merwin's poem, "The Old Ones" -- they have come the whole way.
Dogs as Cerberus or plural watch dogs roused from sleep... Levertov takes "Seeing" as understanding in glimmers of things -- something that happens "for a moment" if we are there to perceive it.



The "war poems" roused much discussion -- Abraham/Isaac, and what didn't need to be; the short history of human kind and how Neanderthals acted (only able to cooperate in small groups) vs. Homo Sapiens ; the lie next to the cud... corrosion of tissues... analogous to corrosion of truth.
corruption... collusion of profits...

The two Rubin poems at first blush seemed "slight" -- which the discussion seemed to discount. Wartime brings us to a certain way of thinking... so a "distant" war as metaphor is less powerful than the images Owens provides us. Comments: heart of the radish lies on the red surface, bleeding...
apple ... no one tending the orchard. // Apple as reminder of back home. Forbidden fruit... Greek legend.

We concluded with Hoffman's poem, the final one in her book, "Like Stardust in the Peat Moss".
What is noisome... and what is it we say we do, tell about, as opposed to the silent unfurling being of a fern.

Poems for Nov. 4 -- O Pen

From the Poetry Foundation -- Poems for Halloween
"Thomas Moore, Edgar Allan Poe, and Christina Rossetti tell rhyming tales perfect for chilling spines around the campfire. Shakespeare’s singing charmers from Macbeth and Sexton’s “lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind” are some of poetry’s most infamous witches. We’ll never look at tree branches with an innocent eye again, thanks to Paul Laurence Dunbar and Louise Glück; Adelaide Crapsey and Mary Karr ensure the same for darkened windows. Michael Collier and Michael Waters mischievously depict the gender play and genial debauchery of costumes, while W.S. Di Piero and Carl Sandburg warn us that Halloween is a day when real danger might look fake, and vice versa. We get a peek into the demons and spirits of other cultures via Annie Finch and Rae Armantrout: whether you say ghost, genie, or djinn, the tingle in the spine is universal.
“Djinn” by Rae Armantrout
“All Souls” by Michael Collier: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178287
“To the Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window” by Adelaide Crapsey: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175531
“The Haunted Oak” by Paul Laurence Dunbar: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173459
“Field of Skulls” by Mary Karr: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171884
“A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” by Thomas Moore: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174046
“To -- -- --. Ulalume: A Ballad” by Edgar Allan Poe: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174155
“Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174262
“Her Kind” by Anne Sexton: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171268
“Song of the Witches” by William Shakespeare: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171942

I picked three from here: What is real, and what spirits lurk in trees... followed by three poems


Samhain BY ANNIE FINCH
All Hallows BY LOUISE GLÜCK
Theme in Yellow BY CARL SANDBURG
*
and

Ordinary Life by Barbara Crooker
Study by Alicia Hoffman
The Lost Garden by Dana Gioia

**
DISCUSSION

I love this group! I love that Judith, as the walking memory, will pull out the pronunciation of Samhain (don't pronounce the M) and Rich picks up her invitation to set All Hallows by GLÜCK to music, and the wonderful interactions as we all strive in our way to understand the threads pulled up by the poems.

Annie Finch seduces the reader with sound, stiching past/present, neolithic amber, ancestors and dual meanings (veil, leave). What hedge of memory do we peep through, peel away, preserve, we who "die ourselves". This poem is satisfying, and a perfect meditative trigger for All Soul's.

I didn't know that the superstition of looking at the moon through tree branches will bring trouble, but Gluck certainly brings a chill with her "toothed moon" (optimists see a smile, pessimists see a threat)
like the choice of seeing "...barrenness/
of harvest or pestilence." "Come here little one... and the soul creeps out of the tree" transcends the sense of eerie vacancy, perhaps like Demeter longing for the return of Spring and her daughter. I loved the story of believing that Jesus lived in the knothole of a family's magnolia tree! But is such childlike thinking not the realm of poetry -- where truth relies on an army of lies ?(to quote Winston Churchill).

The delight of anthropomorphizing a pumpkin who speaks in the first person in Sandburg's poem reminded some of his children's stories (Rutabaga Tales) set in the land of Liver and Onions.


I had read the Barbara Crooker poem "All Saints" in the beginning -- and we enjoyed yet another way of looking at "ordinary" -- where the usual accidents didn't seem to happen. The sounds (alliterative B, L, P, SK's) the rounding of edges from "squares of light" to "circles of sunlight", the chuckle elicited by the line "I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb" the magic of the baby's roadways made in the "sofa's ridges and hills" paint a magic that we often forget to tap into.
The final 10-line, comma-stuffed sentence, speaks of the meal consumed only to illustrate the pause of a different kind of light:

The chicken's diminished to skin & skeleton,
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves
into the winter night.

We are not the ones in charge of the stars turning on. But are left with an example of how to unwrap a day like a gift.

Alicia Hoffman's opening poem from her new book, "Starlight in the Peat Moss" works on the same theme. She picks an artist’s word, Study, and like Michelangelo, carving away stone to find what is revealed, calls on Light to help us see beyond the ordinary.
X-ray leads to the reassurance that “It’s not a far stretch, this dark/room of ourselves.”
But Study might also be the location, or the continuing verb of what we do to render
into art and word what is so close to us, and yet not known.

Finally, the Dana Gioia poem, the Lost Garden, gave rise to a long discussion about desire --
how he treats the "subtraction of desire..." as a quality. What is loss? Why is "cool" for something normally hot, something positive?
We brought up stages of grieving and how it is a blessing to be reminded of the
image of who we are inside oneself... "Oh I still have that inside me."
We don’t wish for what is not... the game of "if only" or "I wish, which impoverishes the present.
We better understand the "I want" of the way we were, still can glimpse the possible "perfect Eden"--
Luscious language, beguiling with an old-fashioned flavor, yet avoiding cliche.

All these poems ask to be read again, pondered again.