Margo by Fanny Howe; Irish Weather by Tess Gallagher; White Towels by Richard Jones; The Pear by Jane Kenyon; Hunger by Kelli Russell Agodon; Separation Wall by Naomi Shihab Nye; Ode to the Grimy Breeze of an Underground Subway Platform by Abby Murray; The Music before the Music by Jeanne Murray Walker;
In Memoriam: Fanny Howe 1940-2025
Writes [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, “The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.” Fanny Howe, the luminous and incontrovertible proof. Bio and more poems- tap the hyperlink!
NUTSHELL:
Poems about dichotomy, how the contradictions seems to kill us, keep us alive. To quote Khadijah Queen, poem -a-day Guest Editor for July "as a reader, I enjoy a poem that respects my capacity to receive and process contradiction and to deepen my empathy for the full range of human experience."
Margo: In this poem, one feels the pain of losing a friend. Each details shows it. Paul informed us that in Ireland, to be "planted" means to be buried. He also said there is more sunshine in Ireland than myth would have us know. There's a thrumming of "r" throughout the poem, whether as initial sound of rock, redden, rain or inside a word, like garden, heart, brief, Irish, perfume, tree, green, turf, burning. Image, scent, and whispers of alliterative "p", leading after 3 lines, to this musical rhythm: Diamonds on the stamens when the sun goes blind. As the poet says, "the poem touches on the pieces of the natural world, its colors, perfumes, sounds and finally its burning when all is said and done. It's a poem of hope for what is not seen."
Irish Weather: Paul approved of the "Irish" in the title, as accurate and that the poem seemed "meant to be spoken". Wonderful sounds of strong verbs like squalls, gust, plunder. And the response? short and compressed: it's raining; sun's out. Judith shared the saying, "when the sun is shining, the devil is beating his wife" as a way to describe a sunshower. One can imagine the speaker gesturing with arms the sideways rain, the spray of wheat grains. Axel commented on the elasticity of language and structure of two extremes, similar to the Frost poem about the "Freedom of the Moon".
White Towels: To start a poem out mentioning solitude and loneliness could elicit endless comments about how they are different, how they are felt and experienced. One might choose solitude, enjoy it; loneliness often is felt with loss. Judith shared the first lines of Elinor Wiley: Poor Loneliness and lovely solitude. https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/little-eclogue#google_vignette Neil offered the idea of looking at solitude and loneliness as a Venn diagram, two circles able to intersect/overlap. Another thought was of a sine curve, of highs and lows.
Other comments... the poem is all "mished up"; enjoyable personification of those towels which brought up very practical advice about the comfort of warmed towels for those who are ill. How the poem came from a collection called The Blessing, which in a way, resembles solitude which can work silently.
You can tell this is a poem that invites many doors to be opened, so many possible stories of this life a man is telling to those warm towels. So much to know about his children he carries in his arms as though asleep. Loneliness invites us to learn how to live with one another perhaps. How to understand each other humanely. This article about AI and Loneliness goes into it: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/21/ai-is-about-to-solve-loneliness-thats-a-problem
The Pear: The poem comes from her "Best Poems" and it may be an early poem, before her illness. Marge commented it feels like a "healing poem" for herself. It speaks to her way of being, a quiet thoughtfulness where each line break, careful use of sounds invites the reader in. Not too lyrical, nor too dramatic in the build up of the sun, burns hot and bright/making you more desolate. It feels paradoxical, and prepares for the shift to the pear. In her later work she will explore this sense of desolation in her poem, "Having it out with Melancholy". Eddy mentioned how, like Ada Limon, she skillfully uses nature like a mirror. 53 words. Two stanzas. A quatrain with diminishing lengths of line even as middle repeats with middling mind, only to land on one final word: afraid. In the next stanza, the first three lines swell to desolate. Like a turn in a sonnet, without a stanza break, the shift to the pear and the foreboding of the final two lines.
Hunger: The opening line is one of those universal truths about being human and our need for love, twisted as Bernie put it as a "sympathetic fallacy", inviting negativity but calling it good. To get into explanation of the irrational, as in Pathetic Fallacy: see https://www.victorianweb.org/technique/pathfall.html
I was glad as we read it, that there was some laughter. The contradictions, the non-sequiturs, the fact that the poem is titled "Hunger" brought up many responses. Physical eating of the coyote, but the poet's eating of hen and duck is side by side with what it is that we want to believe, want to be true, or want to have happen with mother goose and nonsense about three blind mice tossed in. Indeed "We are all trying to change/what we fear into something beautiful". As Major Jackson asks: "what blinds us to red flags, to what we hope our instincts should catch? We become wild in our desperation to present ourselves as worthy of love."
Separation Wall: A strong title, for what seems to be unpredictable, disjointed couplets. The opening couplet triggers introduces the idea of something becoming sour, (curdling, separate); the next couplet: the problem of silence, of giving up. Indeed, why were you born then? Reactionary treatment is no good, but not speaking, not trying to communicate, is to stop being human. Where do we stand with "willful ignorance"? It would be hard to read this poem and not to think about the conflict between Palestine and Israel since 1947 as well as the heartless war since Oct. 7, 2023 in Gaza.
In the 3rd couplet, Naomi brings in fear. How "they" as nuclear bomb (modern powers) are scared of a cucumber, (traditional food for the original inhabitants. The soothing tone of the mother, the grandmother, questions of how to slice cucumbers support the almost innocent depiction of the poet feeling "like a normal person with fantastic dilemmas". The confirmation of normal takes the space of almost three couplets, for the Grandmother, after a time, as long as "it takes a sun to set" to say "yes". "They" vs. me. In the discussion we did not address who is involved in the "we". Onlookers from the rest of the world? Israelis? Palestinians? Zionists? Hamas?
No one should want babies to find out about// : the line and stanza break allows us to pause, think about what we want and don't want the next generation to know. We would like the babies not to find out about // the failures waiting for them. She separates from "we" and counters. I would like/them to believe on the other side of the wall// line and stanza break. The hope represented by a circus, the artificial theatre that represents the world.
Our friends. Naomi gives us the hope of that 1st person plural -- hope in the learning of juggling, of using tall poles.
Ode to the Grimy Breeze: The poem speaks for itself. I love Abby's originality, starting with things you'd rather NOT be thankful for. How beautifully she places that almost perfect lotus, that Buddhist symbol in the grime, the heat, the smoke, the modern version of hell imposed by a dictator... how she transforms a cigarette of an armed guard into a source of choreography, how that means the dark cannot be stagnant, and light, the way light is, will explode, sparkle, disappear, in its cycles, now inviting amazement, then, goes offstage for a rest before returning.
The Music before the Music: a perfect sonnet... captures the synergy of orchestra ... not a celebration of chaos. Playful. How enjoyable to think of scales as horses on nickering runs, the plow and plant in one of Beethoven's "fields".
