August Clean-up --

Goatfoot, Milktongue and Twinbird
Who can resist reading this title outloud, and start hunting for the "dark mouth of the vowel by which the image tells its sensual rhyme" ! We applied Donald Hall's concepts to the August picks for "O Pen". I particularly love his definition of a poem as "one man's insides speaking to another man's insides".
August 2: poems that resonate:
Naomi Shihab Nye: Shoulders

Are we willing to do what this man is doing? Are we willing to see him in the way Naomi does?
Have you listened for the hum of dreams deep inside someone else?

Mary Oliver : When Death Comes

how the name of each flower is a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.

Have you felt married to amazement?
Can you imagine measuring amazement???????
"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."

Li-Young Lee : One Heart

"the work of wings/was always freedom, fastening one heart to every falling thing."

What will be the walker's lasting memory about the Art of the world?

**
Robert Hass: "Mexico" from Counting Thunder.
magical realism?
here and now in tongue-in-cheekish.
What do we know really of the speakers insides?
his posturing in a poem about Mexico, that really, he's being pursued by... hmmm. is it the lovely senorita in his dream, the posse, the wife...or the mirage... or that he is starving and running, and lives by his wits, gets side-tracked by mirages, white adobe with a red-tiled roof, where one will rest, drink some tequila,and dream of that lovely senorita.. but, enough of that.
Somehow, we're right on that faithful, unfaltering horse right with him, riding the poem.

**
See APR and all of Dorianne's poems. Timing is amazing!
cf. with Composed upon Westminster Bridge -- Wordsworth... poetry is not argument (as it was for Pope and George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet -- but mood, a way of feeling that distills experience.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: 1911...
Departure. and electronic poem from Linebreak 6/22/2010, "Naming Goodbye." by Stephanie Rogers.
form... craft. and fragments, negations. Trying to get the words to work. But do they?

Rae Armantrout: Scumble...
HAITE: Here's An Idea. The End.
vs. The Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab, Naomi Shihab Nye.

I go back to Kunitz, as if rolling on leaves.

"Live in the layers, not on the litter.
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

**
Keeping on, keeping on.