Flay Chris Abani ; ICE by Sophie Cabot Black; The Game by Marie Howe; Telephone Repairman by Joseph Millar; Joy by Robinson Jeffers 1887 – 1962; The Clod and the Pebble by William Blake; Mindful by Mary Oliver
For O Pen
How we had talked about context last week and what it adds...Without the title of the June Jordan poem below... where do you go? The slow down commentary... "the power of poetry to comment, to respond, to shed light and offer us space to form our own impressions of what the facts may mean. To decide, then, with the knowledge provided by our very own bodies, what we mean to do about it." — Samiya from the SlowDown (I have no idea what that last sentence means.) Knowing that the title refers to The Sabra and Shatila massacre the 16–18 September 1982 killing of between 1,300 and 3,500 civilians—mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shias—in the city of Beirut is helpful
Nightline: September 20, 1982
by June Jordan
“I know it’s an unfortunate way to say it, but
do you think you can put this massacre
on the back burner now?”
from Directed by Desire: the collected poems of June Jordan
For Warmth by Thich Nhat Hanh
I hold my face between my hands.
No, I am not crying.
I hold my face between my hands
to keep my loneliness warm —
two hands protecting,
two hands nourishing,
two hands to prevent
my soul from leaving me
in anger.
Nutshell:
Flay: by Chris Albani, the curator of Poem-a-Day for February. If you click the hyperlink you will see a bit of his biography as survivor of the Biafran War and his impact in the world. He encourages us to use poetry as the lens through which we can observe “an explosion of humanness [and] an explosion of styles.” Certainly the title Flay explodes in subtle ways with subconscious references perhaps to Saints flayed by the devil, floggings, but also a word that can mean a criticism, a burning or striping away. The other verbs in the poem underline it: bores, slice, cut, punish, burns.
The first couplets' enjambments and layering of metaphor (point of a pen... hole /into a soul's dereliction) invite us to follow a long unfolding through four couplets of a search for a lost home. The play between inner and outer states, hints of the marks colonialism, the role of impositions of religion. The "point" of a pen, literal and figuratively, provides an opening and searches for right words, cites actions such as slicing tomatoes (red, as in blood), or an island. We noted migrant, as in "on the move" not an immigrant, the ambiguity of punished by spice, landing in another country with the "persistant aftertaste of a lost home". One person suggested that braised goat evokes perhaps sacrifice or violence. We are drawn in by many unusual juxtapositions, then, suddenly released in the final stanza, to where "the ocean begins". It is more a sense of a waiting for another chapter in a long voyage than a conclusion. We noted that the poem came from the collection Smoking the Bible which added the flavor of ancient Christianity and the idea of violence.
Back to the title, a one-word imperative. One can imagine the writer asking the pen to "flay" and expose the complexities and emotional impact of migration and the lasting scars it leaves.
ICE: Written in 2025, the capital letters echo current events with the acronym for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Indeed, there is the problem of melting ice in our polar regions and glaciers, so the physical moan, rumble, shifting in the poem could refer to that as well. The opening with the mention of disappearance, without knowing details, establishes an aura of uncertainty.
Like Flay, ICE plays with line breaks... line 1 : a small animal went out to the middle/
of what? No sign of anything/
Further. The enjambments are accentuated by the choice of capitalizing the first word on each line . They are both within each tercet as well as leaping over the cracks of stanzas accentuate the "breaking" without detailing the breaking up of families, the invisible breaking of hearts with erasures, losses.
The repetition of "this" at the end, the first time as end word on the stretching past the margin of the penultimate line, and the final crack of three words. Although it could imply a hopeless finality of This is it, the imperative to call something for what it is, stops the slippery nature of words that dismiss or justify the inadmissible. In January I had recommended One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad . The poem echoes the words of this intrepid journalist, "One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
The Game: One of Marie Howe's poems from her collection, "What the Living Do", this poignant memoir of how she and her siblings survived the dysfunction of her family is a marvelous example of effective story telling. The delicate pivot in the fourth stanza embraces a succinct ambiguity: is this a rare (and real) exception, or more pretend? The word Town Crier contains the same ambiguity, of one who cries (like the grown-up baby) and conveyor of news where "all's well" repeats like the refrain of a lullaby. It is a poem that both celebrates the power of the creative banding together of the children to survive as well as one that hints at the reasons for the necessity of "the game"
Telephone Repairman: One usually doesn't think of the importance of a lineman, until there is a break in communication. There is an implied selflessness of mending, so that messages can flow again. In two short stanzas, we have a portrait of one of the "invisible" workers, but also the universal nature of our human loneliness, not telling anyone; working by ourselves; shaking our heads in silence. The final image of syllables fluttering as if bringing a prayer to be loved, are like small butterflies juxtaposed with the curve of the earth. We noted the softness of the sound of these words this restorer of signals thinks. Some might call him a savior. I brought up the concept of Tikkun Olam, repair of the world.
Some were reminded of the song Wichita Lineman... and of course with the recent icestorms, we could imagine real linemen as described in this article, https://mainstreetmediatn.com/articles/life/the-wichita-lineman-explained/.
ADDED AFTER FACT: FROM JOE: I can tell you a little more about the poem. First, it was the oldest piece in the collection, and I wasn't sure it even belonged. One of my early advisors was the poet and former nun Madeline DeFrees who helped me with the ordering of the poems in Overtime. She thought I should use it as a kind of "Announcement Poem" (or some such), by isolating it at the beginning from the rest of the manuscript. Which I decided not to do, obviously.
And finally (hopefully not TMI), the last line comes from my teacher John-Roger, who once said in a seminar he was giving, that if there were one message that all human beings could share together, it might be: "Please love me".
Joy: Most everyone found this poem perplexing as it runs counter to associations with this powerful emotion. I highly recommend Christian Wiman's book Joy. In the introduction, (xx-xxi) he cites Nietzsche, and the idea that joy is inevitably tragic because death is absolute, and as the "very lifeblood of being, ought to be seized at every moment of existence."
For Jeffers, a mountain man, at odds with capitalism and clearly aware of the distinction between happiness and joy, "the whole notion of of joy is misguided and suggests some moral rot at the center of the species. Better to live like the stars and the mountain, the dark vulture hovering watchfully over the weaker meats." Wiman continues, "It's worth being reminded and made to feel besides its splendor, the brute, material necessity that is also at the heart of being, as well as the agency we retain when being crushed by it.
Joy is indeed brief, as is sorrow. Peace, strength can last for longer periods. Joy is not dependent on our human definitions. We were not sure who is speaking in the quotations -- perhaps "everyman" admitting his desire for joy to be permanent. Of course, how could we be feeling joy all the time, without diminishing it, becoming indifferent? The final line perhaps is a metaphorical reference to hooding a bird of pray so it does not see, or desire, the "meat".
AFTER THE FACT: FROM KATHY: Jeffers concept of "inhumanism" was his dominant life project. His poetry is the vehicle he uses to zealously and didactically put forth his philosophy of being, heavily steeped in existentialist thinkers like Heidegger and Nietzsche. Wiman gives only cursory (and appropriately so for an introduction to a book) connection to Nietzsche. I down-loaded a small book, THE DARK GLORY: Robinson Jeffers and His Philosophy of Earth Time & Things by TADEUSZ SŁAWEK, 1990. It is a very dense philosophical argument many levels above my understanding. In it, he quotes the lines you puzzled over:
“I am neither mountain nor bird
Nor star; and I seek joy.”
I too was puzzled by the ; and but the lines quoted are deeply embedded in Slawek's philosophical argument and I was lost and it didn't help my understanding of those lines in the poem.
It may be that the poem "Joy" could just use some poetic craft tweaking to give the confusing ; and some clarity. Indulge me; I found my edit of the poem added clarity for me. :-)
“I am neither mountain, nor bird, nor star;
and I seek joy.”: the weakness of your breed,
yet at length quietness will cover those wistful eyes.
The "I" and the "your" in these lines is confusing to me. Maybe the words in quotes are in the modern humanity's voice and the words starting with "the weakness of your breed" are the poets critical response. Or if Jeffers were more generous he might have used the word "our" rather that "your".
The Clod and the Pebble: Going back to Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827), he lays out arguments to define love. Clever use of heaven and hell, for the Clod, building heaven in hell's despair and for the pebble, content to let the brook wash over it, a hell in heaven's despite.
Mindful: The title sums up a reassuring attitude and practice of how to be fully human and alive. We admired the stanza break after the breathless,choppy first four lines, landing on "kills me/with delight.
Allows us space and time, so indeed, how can you help (last line before penultimate stanza) -- can invite you to think how you can help others, yourself... only to land on but grow wise...What refreshing reassurance, which prompts so many to write a daily gratitude journal. Some thought of the song Killing me softly.
