Poems:
Considerations: What have we borrowed from oriental poems?
Ezra Pound stole the following to come up with his definition of
poetry: the most concentrated form of verbal expression:
strong emphasis on internal alliteration and assonance
absence of rhyme
use of ellipsis
concrete imagery
Japanese language does not lend itself to expansive forms… small is better and more powerful.
communication: notes passed from sleeve to sleeve – or conundrums, furtive exchanges… and a high sense of decorum…
How does "organized vitality" work in the following?
Ted Kooser: This Paper Boat
(the delicacy of image; concept of "iki" or understated elegance. Contrast with the two page adjective-ladled, compounded love in Terri Ford (see Valentines - 2010)
Tao-Sheng (360-434): Married Love
the simplicity of cycles -- love as clay carried to fire, baked, broken, clay figurines remolded, sharing a quilt, a coffin.
John Ashbery: Breathlike
Does it matter how many "B" poems there are in Planisphere... where this one stands in the collection.. how Zone relates to the Zero or Zymurgy... how Ashbery takes cliches and turns them -- how to understand squirt conditions, the new interest in zoning... sexual interpretations of cup and ball game and throughout... or just how a RUT has anything to do with breathless if not... "The rut glimmered
through centuries of snow and after.
I suppose it was trying to make some point
but we never found out about that,"
Mark Doty : Crepe de Chine : an example of pushing concrete image to more image... Masterfully linked. Sensory associations and double entendres -- how do you understand "call me" in 4 different ways. Images, and a sense of "big" and the oversibilance cracked with "click of compact" and "clatter of a covenant of heels". Kim brought in an ad for perfume... how we buy into dreams... and tumblings of coiffeurs of heaven... what -- discarding halos, or trying to put them on... or simply clouds in the sky...
Pescadero: in recent New Yorker. By comparison, short poem, delightful goat, and the reassurance of being welcomed by animal... the "loves me, loves me not" game tellingly done... how often are we guilty of "good-natured indifference."
read outloud:
TO JOAN MITCHELL*
by Mark Doty
At twilight the locusts begin,
waves and waves,
nothing to do with lamentation.
No one’s told them the world is ending;
they proceed as always,
everything subsumed into—
you can’t call it a cry, exactly, no singularity in it,
but the thousands, the ten thousand
—voices?
Not singing.
Audible undulation, the waves
these bodies make. Seamless, encompassing,
filling Branard Street—
As it should be.
I want them not knowing,
in this way the sound becomes a kind of refuge,
filled with safety and splendor.
* Reprinted from Fire to Fire:
-- discussion of music... How Russian poet, Vera Pavlova talks of poems as a trinity of image, thought and music. How does Doty do this here?
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