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

 Bernie kindly offered to MC

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

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

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

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

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

Bernie sent this information out as supplement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and a poetry quiz!

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

Exodus

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

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

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

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

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

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

From: So What

**

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

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

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

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

October 2

 Barb agreed to MC another session!  thank you Barb. 

Sight will Sharpen by S. Thomas Summers; Halley's Comet  by Stanley Kunitz; Day Star  by Rita Dove; Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri  by Mona Van Duyn; Crossing Over  by William Meredith; Echo by James Richardson;  Warning To Children by Robert Graves .

In my note to send out poems, I share this:  I am writing you this just before sunrise in a small town, as yet unspoiled by modern tourism, in the heart of the Engadine mountains in Switzerland, where you will not find anyone who speaks English, or even Italian for that matter, only German, as just over the border will be Austria.  I thought you all might appreciate this quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson on friendship (thanks to Maria Popova's blog):The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks friendship out of the desire to realize a home here… The friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts. My friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He trusts me as I trust myself. We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.

  

September 25

Paul was kind enough to offer to MC.  Poems drawn from the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, "Beloved and Influential Poems 2011" + one by Thomas Lux Ode to the Unbroken World, Which Is Coming 

The Poem by George Oppen; (picked by C.D. Wright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_D._Wright); ;Sonnet XXIX by William Shakespeare; (chosen by Ellen Bryant Voigt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Bryant_Voigt  To Awaken an Old Lady  by W.C. Williams:  (chosen by Alan Shapiro: https://poets.org/poet/alan-shapiro) Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas: (chosen by Vijay Seshadri: https://poets.org/poet/vijay-seshadri The Waking by Theodore Roethke: chosen by Thomas Lux for its music, passion, simplicity and technical achievement of the villanelle. : https://poets.org/poet/thomas-lux Although the wind by Izumi Shikibu  (ca 1000) and The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W.B. Yeats chosen by Jane Hirschfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Hirshfield

September 18

 Barb will be MC and has chosen: On the Grasshopper and Cricket, John Keats, 1817;  Jack by Maxine Kumin;  Enter the Dragon, John Murillo; a poem by Sharon Olds, from Odes;  An Old Story, Tracey Smith; For the Children by Gary Snyder.

Thank you Barb!

September 4

In the Community Garden by Mark Doty; The Gardener 85  by Rabindranath Tagore; Better Yet  and The Need Is So Great  by Jim Moore;  A Voice I Heard Not Too Late to Make a Difference  by Martin Willitts, Jr.; beware: do not read this poem by Ishmael Reed 

Nutshell:

It takes a group to confirm  the fascinating variety of possibilities of meaning in a group of poems.  The grouping of poems had a subconscious theme of how to deal with the fact of death.  Starting with the glory of "a community" of sunflowers, the discussion branched out to deal with other collective nouns.  The Tagore poem and Moore poem "the need so great) triggered thoughts about the magic of dusk, Bernie's sharing of his poem about silent crows and a breathing invitation and Maura's invitation to come see spectacular sunsets from her place in Victor.  Please contact her if you want to experience the beauty!  

Community returns in the Martin Willitts poem, and subtly in the theme of interrelationship in the Tagore, and Emerson.  The final poem reminds us of the counterpart which destroys it.

Mark Doty:  This captivating poem about sunflowers with a title that suggests "we are all in this garden" subtly  examines the stages of life and the bigger question whether elegy is useful, and our role in lamenting the passing of nature's magnificence as we move from Spring to Winter.  Wonderful adjectives:  sunflower "architecture"... "muscular leaves"... personnification -- shiningly confident... or barely able to hold head up... to be in a rush//to be nothing but form.  Skyrocket passage through the world?  Do flowers desire?  want to live forever?  Projection:  How could they "stand apart from themselves and regret their passing when they are a field (hence the word community in the title) of lifting and bowing faces (like a singing church congregation?) faces ringed with flame.  Comments:  Bernie shared his breathing meditation: "flower fresh; mountain solid" and how he feels like an autumn flower.  Many felt a childlike quality, like children writing letters to God. 

Rabindranath Tagore: (1861-1941)for those not familiar with this poet, Wiki has a good introduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore  It will not replace the fine aperçu Judith shared who mentioned that most probably he wrote this poem in English (not a translation of Bengali).  We did discuss the old-fashioned use of "an" before a word starting with "h".  No one would pronounce "an hundred" today.  

The reader is immediately swept up in the aliveness of a living poet writing to him/her, no matter that we are reading this poem 100 years after it was written.  He is sending us not just one single flower, but a wealth of flowers on spring dawn, as well as reminding us of all memories that brings from 100 years prior.  

Jim Moore: 2 poems: Better yet: We enjoyed how we went from considerations of centuries, to imagining what happens before we are born.Neil brought up the question why "shame" in the list of "expected" responses to life (see my notes!)[1]

The Need Is So Great : The poem doesn't explain its title, but it certainly evoked many associations with the sense of "calm at dusk" observing the light at the end of day.  Everyone felt the predominance of liquids in late,last light...the repeated leave, with the double punch of meaning as noun and verb... the repeat of light and how it falls on last (of stricken) leaves with the double punch of meaning as noun and verb,  the choice of  stealing, slowly.  Many stories about Copper Beeches -- which indeed are magnificent trees and known for their grandeur, unusual branches running close to the ground, and Elmer told us more about the fungus that curtails their lifespan of a few hundred years.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_sylvatica

Emerson:  the introductory poem to the Poets Speak Anthology Water edited by John Roche. I would not have stumbled on the poet Martin Willitts without this anthology!  I was pleased to find a recent poem by him.  

Willitts:  This poem immediately elicited approval with a chorus of oooooooh!!!!  From the 13 syllable title, to the emotional reassurance most of us wanted to keep this poem in our pocket for a reminder of the importance of slowing down, mindful noticing of all the possibilities of vieewpoints.  Unusual vocabulary included "glassful of promises and memories", with the sound of that proverbial glass half full, half empty to explain attitudes towards life.  One trusts the italicized belonging to the now and how the imagination can connect us.  Indeed, if you are on the look-out for "startled energies", you will be amazed by the aliveness. Polly confirmed the ability of the heron to stay in the now.   We were intrigued by the shift on the 26th line, where the "I" becomes part of the whole of the world observed, and we imagine the slow signing adding to the "spell" (although he does not use this word.)  The "voice" referred to in the title now returns in the last five lines, but the reader is now offered a chance to hear it, "in a place sacred only to you".  Indeed, you nod affirmatively at the last line:  "There's room for many possible voices to hear."

Ishmael Reed:  This poem, on poet's walk is definitely political and the poem tile, "many mirrors" calls on  us to look deeply and reflect.   The hunger of the poem... reminded some of Shel Silverstein and story about being swallowed by a boa constrictor.   https://allpoetry.com/Boa-Constrictor  What is this poem with greedy mirrors-- and how are you part of it... Ishmael point out we are all part of it -- if we saw him performing it, perhaps he would point to different people -- his head... his arms... his fingers... his fingertips... and the reader.  He doesn't say "you".  We are statistics.  The final line delivers a multiple punch.  And how do we deal with the empty space left by missing friends?  Are we part of the poem, allowing them to go missing?  Have we experienced losing a friend?  Paid attention to the way people are invisibilized.  

---

[1] Better Yet:  

I am not Catholic, but perhaps the poet Jim Moore is and uses "shame"  in his poem "Better Yet" as the well-known feeling that leads humans from one sin to another.  I found this article enlightening -- and was delightfully reminded of C.S. Lewis and Screwtape's Letters!  https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/feeling-shame-is-not-repentance/. 

I also saw this explanation about pride:  in Roman Catholic theology, it one of the seven deadly sins, considered by some to be the gravest of all sins. In the theological sense, pride is defined as an excessive love of one’s own excellence. As a deadly sin, pride is believed to generate other sins and further immoral behaviour and is countered by the heavenly virtue of humility.

Let us hope our guardian angels help us with these matters. 

In terms of the poem's structure, there may be some help to identify what kind of tone is implied.

 It would seem Moore is coupling these paradoxical emotions:  

happiness/sadness

confusion/shame

grief/joy

The usual givens of  joy/sorrow are recognizable -- but perhaps he is implying something about "confusion" -- as the list starts with happiness,

and ends with joy -- having gone full circle.  

I like very much in the poem that he questions  if "wanting to go beyond where I've already been" is a "good thing".  He then couples that thought with "going back to the day before he was born".   Perhaps the poem's title, Better Yet is a loaded gun-- the colloquialism by itself smacks of judgement about the best option...   but perhaps he is making fun of the whole idea of options, desire, hanging on to life.

This explains my sense of a flippancy in his ending.  Aren't we all kicking away for all we're worth "in the dark" ??? 

 

---

[1] https://poets.org/poet/jim-moore

 

---

[1] https://mag.rochester.edu/walk/about  Poets Walk was the brainchild of Joe Flaherty, founder of Writers and Books who envisioned an interactive community  space for the Neighborhood of the Arts. https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/lifestyle/2015/06/16/iconic-founder-writers-books-retire/28809565/

Aug. 28

when it is August,/ you can have it August and abundantly so.  from YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL by Barbara Ras

 Welcome Morning by Anne Sexton;   What It’s Like to Wonder Whose Country It Was First -- by Abby Murray;  Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden; Blackberries by Seamus Heaney; The Rice Fields by Zilka Joseph; Wallpaper Poem  by Phillis Levin; stanza 1 + final lines of Mutability by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Nutshell: 

August 28: ironic that this day, 61 years ago, Martin Luther King delivered his iconic speech: "I have a dream". https://www.riverbender.com/articles/details/this-day-in-history-on-august-28-martin-luther-king-jr-delivers-i-have-a-dream-speech-75404.cfm

Welcome: Is the title a command?  A private conversation between the poet and the start of a new day?  We discussed how quickly we can shift our reading of tone of a poem by a current mood.  For some, the poem felt like the manic phase of Sexton's bipolarity, unlike her usual confessional style.  Judith offered the opinion that the poem seemed to be an unsuccessful attempt at sounding like Mary Oliver; others felt it expressed a sense of religious rite, supported by the "chapel of eggs", the "godhead of the table", the "holy birds".  Contrived or no, annoying or pleasurable, the mention on the first line of "joy" with a small "j", ending the final couplet with the mention of unshared "Joy" with a capital "J" that dies young, invites reflection on the possibilities of finding it in the everyday ordinary details.  The "practical" such as the "outcry from the kettle", the repeated "each morning" couples with a sense of offering grace, as prayer of rejoicing.  As Kathy put it, one feels glad that the poet is experiencing "laughter of the morning" akin to a sense of God, and able to share it.  The final couplet invites us to tell a story.

I added the anecdote of my poet friend David Delaney, who prefaced a reading of a poem about an IV drip of chemo, with these words: "an infant comes into this world like his daughter's 4 month old son.  They want food, love, safety.  And after that?  Solomon Rushdie says, You give them stories."  I didn't mention in the video recording, he is holding a painting he did of A.A. Milne and Winnie-the-Pooh:  behind him a WW1 gas mask, and behind that is the burnt and ruined landscape once known as "No Man's Land." Milne was a soldier (officer) in British army during the "War to End All Wars"; he saw heavy action in the terrible trenches of France. And from all that horror came the 100 Acre Woods and some of the most endearing characters  Winnie-the-Pooh.  

Yes, welcome morning.  The dark hours of 4 am and yesterday have moved on to the present, the possibility, to imagining, dreaming, creating —.  Now, how do you imagine "holy birds" -- and what will come of that "marriage of seeds" on which they feed?  If you feel Joy, indeed, share it!  

What it's like: The title intrigues:  What does definition of a country involve?  "Who was here first" ? Judith recommended this short video: Nina Tayley + This land is mine

 We pricked up our ears at the mention of  "non-man" and "we, the non-men" as bigger and beyond gender identity and also  picked up on the importance of naming, labeling, claiming which led to wondering what language Adam and Eve spoke... how they referred to themselves and each other.  The poem triggered a sharing of ideas of ownership bumping out the idea of common good... tribalism, Darwinism, anthropology... fear, survival... the stereotypical "male" response of controling "it".   .Many saw "our mother" as Earth... but some men objected that they were excluded from naming if mother was not Earth.  

I wrote Abby to ask her to explain more about the stream being so perfect it broke a man's heart... was he thinking to call it "his" to deal with his grief?  How to understand that?    As one person put it, if we lose something, we feel hollow, and desire it even more.  And yet, trying to have it can result in more destruction. Abby replied: the man in the poem breaks his heart on beauty and calls it his out of grief, which is, I think, giving him the benefit of the doubt. (Many might argue it was out of pure greed.) 

Frederick Douglass:  Robert Hayden provided an unrhymed sonnet next with a preponderance of somber long O's  (diastole, systole, more, world, none, lonely, Oh... alone, ) oh so much more than the gaudy "mumbo jumbo" of politicians.  A beautiful example of weaving repeats:  beautiful, first with terrible (as in great, as in fearsome) then with "needful" on the final line (needful repeated from the second line, "this beautiful/terrible thing, needful to man as air).

Whether Frederick Douglass speaking or Robert Hayden, or the countless poets, visionaries, ministers, in their rhetoric, the voice carries conviction.

Blackberries:  Like Abby's poem, sometimes you want something so much, truly it doesn't seem possible or fair that it rot-- and ironic that you could hope so hard but yet know cannot do otherwise.  Kathy pointed out the word choice on the final line where Heaney does not use "but"... I year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.  The dynamics of expectation are reinforced by the momentum of the 24 lines, and as Claudia pointed out, the description was filled with color like a painting -- but also sound... the occlusives of clot, inked up, cans, tinkling... pass on the the b's and p's of blogs,  pricks, palsm, Bluebeard himself and smell that you can taste in the ff's of fermented fruit, sweet flesh.

The Rice Fields:  Clever metaphor and funny story telling combine in this delightful poem.  What do we carry that no one can see?  What do we hope to hang on to, and preserve?

Wallpaper: forgive my typo on the poet's name!~!! Not Philip Levine! but Phillis Levin.  (In July issue of New Yorker).  We enjoyed the references, the implied transcience of dust, and time's timeless print/ Gone now Here tomorrow ending with the word "still".  

It seemed appropriate to end with the opening stanza of Shelley's Mutability whose fourth and final stanza ends on that word.  It reminded Richard of Keat's tomb:https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2018/04/16/the-gravestone-of-john-keats-romancing-the-stone/ (Here lies one whose name was writ in water.)

  

Thoughts before leaving on a 7 week trip

 I am cleaning out papers... seeing in December 2011 I quoted this:

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write. -- William Makepeace Thackeray

What a wonderful middle name!  I need to "make peace" with the fact that, true as this is... I am not making time for my own thoughts unless I am writing a poem.  I came across this note from 2007 in

The Seattle Japanese Garden -- no crutch of wiki or google, no doublecheck on etymology -- just a "crutchless moment" unconnected to anything-- and then I see the Striped Maple leaning on a crutch and write In the Japanese Garden, March 29, 2007.

**

Well, now for looking at notebooks.  No one needs to read them, but I like re-reading.  This one was given to me in May, 2018 by Jocelyn, the then mayor of Rennes on a visit to Rochester.  

Rivers... some braid their hair (Rita Dove, La Chapelle), some like yesterday, in Ellison Park, laze between muddy banks, licking all that springs up from the bottom -- and a series of l's appear... lapping, linking, and LOVE and doubLe -- no leaking away in worry.

Oct. 2020: water skaters rival solo drops released by leaves over Botheration Pond.  Eloquence of subtle echoes, as a raindrop pearls on a leaf... 

But there, in 2020, I have started a new journal, and remembering all that had happened since February and spelling out All That in seven letters.  (Joke my mother used to tell)...  and thoughts about our inner oysters negotiating thoughts and feelings.  

and today after a visit with my best belovèd daughter, and thinking of our best belovèd son, a conversation last night with one of my sisters who is writing her book of travel stories and her "charming Italian translations",  I receive a reply from a poet friend about my comments about John Ashbery's  poem "Myrtle" and how he leaps into naming a river after a long-lost girlfriend.  I coined a phrase:  "thinking management" evident in a poem.   

I love that someone came up with the germ Gregueria,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greguer%C3%ADaa one line poem which combines metaphor and humor.  Example:  Hummingbirds are quarter notes which have left the nest of the flute.   I was reminded of Francis Ponge and Parti Pris des Choses and the  French spelling of oyster.  huître where the I hides under the hat of a circonflexe. 

I suppose a Gregueria about the oyster might be this: Aside the impenetrable fortress in which it lives, the oyster's entire living world may offer more than a gastronomic delicacy in a pearl— the perfect metaphorical response to minor irritations. 

 He humorously portrays the disposition of "things"-- in small lyric paragraphs... In the case of an oyster, even the spelling confirms this small shellfish is nothing short of a miracle, for inside the impenetrable fortress (which, worse than stone, will cut your fingers and break your nails) is an entire world many enjoy eating and drinking... and unexpected dividend, the small halos it secretes around an irritating molecule of sand, turns into a pearl.   Were we humans even half as gifted.

Invisibles...in Portuguese Saudade and a nostalgia for something that does not exist. 

I return to this theme again and again.  The valiant effort of a spider to spin its silk; the way the sea cradles life, and wind cradles wheat, and the universe cradles limitless worlds-- this amazing embrace of something larger to keep us going.   Sun spotlights, bubbles rising to the surface of a brook,  a spill of light down angel stairs, 

Goodbye friendly reader.  Try not to use up your life in hating and being afraid. -- Stendhal