Feb. 21 : McGrath, Shakespeare 130, Neruda

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Companionate love... I do think. She doesn't want flattery.
Openers thought it twisty...


Capitalist Poem #5 --Campbell McGrath : it takes a while for me to get into something like this. Simple sentences that don't follow any form. Clear simple, "slurpified" lines which actually set up the end quite well!
"I was aware of social injustice
in only the vaguest possible way."

McGrath says never be afraid of appearing stupid, foolish, trivial, jejune. Whitman, Neruda might not have published anything if they believed that mattered.

compare:
"Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly)
different line breaks in another edition of Bly's translation, breaks which seemed to chop the poem up to the point of nonsense, into mere dull words disconnected from poetic meaning.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
by Wallace Stevens

Sheer ability to mix intellect and emotion in such a transcendent way.

Open 2/28: Gluck, Robinson, Technique of Empathy – Free Indirect Style

How we tell a story says a lot about the story teller -- and point of view is one of the first items that will determine how fast we turn the pages. Free Indirect Style allows a blending of voices, whether preverbal thoughts in character’s voice, a peek inside of his or her inner life
and compresses story and feeling to make the reader care.

In Gluck's poem, A Fantasy, in 4 stanzas (5, 6, 7, 6 lines)
the poem starts out with a strong speaker, "I'll tell you something:
with the observation of death as a beginning;
Indiscriminately generalized as "they" and someone, we witness a burial in the cemetary.
Stanza 3, a gathering at a specific widow's house ends with her thanking them for coming,
but told as if she is speaking.
Stanza 4, we see inside her heart, and there, the poem opens up -- the wishing that things would be otherwise -- no people sharing in the condolences, and turning back time, to cemetary, to sickroom, hospital -- this wish to move backward. Not so far as "the marriage, the first kiss"
and all that happens between.

We are allowed to feel a widow's grief, reflect on the larger theme of what it is to "live a life" -- scroll backwards in our minds our own story.

Robinson's poem, The Mill is a double suicide, or perhaps just one suicide, or perhaps just one crazy woman's world where tea is cold, and not just the fire is dead: lifework, spirit, zest,
and fear takes its place.

In the first stanza, "there might yet be nothing wrong" foreshadows and prepares the return of f the conditional in the 3rd stanza. Did she or didn't she drown herself? If she imagined dying without leaving a mark, good or bad, it is plausible. We are left curious, as our knowledge of other lives is guesswork. But perhaps as well, we imagine what it is to live a life so lonely, so isolated, that no one would know the difference.

The next, "Octopus in the Freezer" by Lee Ann Roripaugh is a playful poem using all the rich possibilities of the intelligence of an octopus -- layering 8 questions of a lone woman to an octopus, before we see her life. The rich life and memory of a child contrasts sharply with the snowstorm, the possible breakage of empty wine bottles described as bowling pins, and the last six lines which have such a desperate wish for feeling alive.

The McPoem by Ron Wallace is a fun way of looking at mass consumption of poetry available to all. We felt the last line was not needed with the clin d'oeil to Marianne Moore. Good use of enjambment WITH stanza break even, "free // of culinary pretension. after a 5 syllable, "economical." 4 syllable "American" which matches the 4 syllable culinary.

Wings and Earth -- bad title for a beautiful poem.

O Pen -- Valentine's Day

We've all seen valentines, sonnets, so I picked unusual poems:
O'Hara : Mayakovsky
David Baker : Snow Figure and Mongrel Heart
Kim Addonizio: First poem for you
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Modern Declaration

O'Hara and New York school: enthusiastic and bored at same time; Stein: Real thinking is conception aiming again and again and always getting fuller.
4 stanzas: Love : I : heart's a-flutter
II: I love you, I love you.
III. Blood.
IV: I am waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again.

Question of He. Mayakovsky; father; lover; Hysterical leaping; nature, relief, loss.


Baker: "No single position ever sufficient to articulate our lives; always in several places at once."

All senses used in Mongrel Heart:
tearing sounds -- could be tears streaming or ripping;
alliteration and sounds; sense of missing family;

Snow Figure : sensual meets professorial;
3 blocks of couplets. Hushed tones, tension of unlike impulses;
Hidden: ice/danger. The possible crack.
trust;

Here as pivot point.
metacognitive: I have put in a poem;
A figure of speech is where desire forces a crisis, a crossing -- -- telling but he uses

the "u" sounds of hush, humble, muffled, world, trust

First Poem for You : sonnet at burst of energy; duende, mystery and awareness of death.
vivid imagery: lighting, serpent, dragon. The ugh of nipple -- but those "p's" come back with persists, pain, permance...

trying has no period at the end.

Modern Declaration : strong character; whatever "it" is, it is steadfast. Not narcissistic.
A love of humanity...

Poetry and Spirituality -- the reverse side of Passion

How is “Passion” linked to the way we look at the world – at dandelions, or each other ?
What images are unearthed by poems?
What feelings?
What reality is unearthed -- or described and how do we relate to it.

Thank you for the input and looking at reminders of what passion is NOT, as well as how to hold opposites. These were not perhaps poems of intensity, music, leading TO inspiration, life-giving, (adjectives picked in our first meeting) but rather to help us think ABOUT this:
How does passion lead to a sense of a greater life?

I came up with these antonyms for Nemerov's "Dandelions"
mean (poor) : lustrous
stricken : starred
withered : polished
ruined (spinsters) : silvered beacons
ghostly (hair) seed-spun
Dry (sinners) fresh-stripped sentries


Antidote to Nemerov’s Dandelion, Jarrell’s use of products, and Brooks “beautiful half of a golden hurt” :

Perhaps in looking at “passion” we are also looking at how we approach living.
Today’s poems seemed to fall into “buddhist” and “non-buddhist” poems, in the larger context of embracing “now” without a judgmental mind. “Now” is not about wishing, anticipating, living for someone else.

I read this one:

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

For Nemerov's dandelions... a strange, misongynistic image of an unwanted flower, a misreading of aging -- we responded with seeing them as "fairy lights";

*
For "Next Day" -- a self-absorbed woman who has learned to overlook the wrong things, and not notice others, we wanted to show her a fuller life.

To be in love --
first three lines OK. And then she loses her eyes.
Fear of losing what you may have already lost.

Hirshfield poems: This was once a love poem... a tongue in cheek way of looking at letting go.
cat, sturdy African violets, prickly, but flowering cactus.

A Hand : how many associations...
Against Certainty: anticipating and breathlessness.
Late Self-Portrait by Rembrandt. -- and a leap to the dog. bucket. No mention of a painting.

Heather McHugh -- Upgraded to Serious

"Palliative and prophylactic... we are in a critical condition..." and if you have the power of a Heather McHugh, you will twist the twine until each word is wrung turning agape (as in tongue hanging out) with an underpining of Greek "agape" -- for the love of God, used, intermittently in different ways, as outcry whether in the Thou (so close to a sense of dime a dozen) by the thousand, or doubted as sceptic in skip to my lou, and No attached to a placebo.

She took on "sight" with Eyeshot... and I was pleased to find in the cover of that book, I had inscribed a poem which she read in Rochester in 2008 -- a poem not addressed to God or Man or Both.
If he's the rock, then I'm the water.
It he's the water, I'm the wind.
If he's the wind, I must be moonshine
driven in wavelengths to rock.

This was next to a black and white photograph in Palm Beach, which if I remember, had a slant of light coming into an empty lighthouse. There was also a photo with a marvellous shadow and a moon... and the words and image worked beautifully.
There was also this taken from "Spectacles" (Hinge and Sign, p. 93)
My wire-rimmed glasses
sprawl on the desk, either a bright
suggestion to the uncorrected
eye, or a small
wrecked bicycle.

I inscribed in my "Eye Shot" these poems from Upgraded to Serious.
p. 41. Missed Meaning -- which she also read at Palm Beach (Jan. 2011)(next to World in a Skirt) on p. 2
p. 50: From the Tower (next to Fido, Jolted by Jove, p. 5
p. 7 Fastener -- on p. 10, after Letters, Numbers, Signs, Words, referred to as words, and before Boy Thing.) (The poem is perfect: One as is as another as.
one with is with another with

p. 17 : Postcocious before Impolitic p 15
p. 29 Thous by the Thousands before p. 47 -- Through
p. 77 Who Needs It -- the last 2 stanzas but the whole poem is so good. on the back page.

Who Needs It

If language could be trusted to be true,
the hardest would be loudest,
softest, soft. But think again: the joke's
on you. Against a granite face the sea

has knocked for years without
much fuss or brouhaha--
just here and there a little
cracking sound, a suck
in a pocket of cranny.
But give it a load of beach-flesh -- and

you'll never hear the end of it: the pumps in full
palaver with the valvers, every grain
resounding, every pound. You'd think
slap-happy waves might hush, at such

soft-sanded touches. On the contrary there is
a cardiac clamor, a sumptuousness,
roaring into space. The ocean's noisiest

around the giving place.

**
O stranded earth, O beach of
fellow men, I see you selve and cleave in every
single way you can. And all the ways add up:
each needleworker's couch and bounded town,
each humming humanific lobe has thrown
its tune into the planetary wave. But what's

the message of our massing,
past these minuscules of parts? Is it a song of manyness,
or tininess. This suburb-reverb spilling out,
gregarious, egregious, from the globe --
does it go on for light-years, and convulve

the quietudes of heaven? Wake
some star-shells? Stir some dulse?
My guess is yes, since endlessness

needs us to take its pulse.
**

If you don't believe this is serious, if you don't believe that our language gets us into trouble, sometimes for fun, but sometimes our language is silent, as in her poem "Creature Crush" where the worse it is to see cruelty towards the monkey, the more money is given
(What's the worse / perverseness of this plan, / the helplessness or the complicity?)/
Apparently I neither can / release the monkey / nor assassinate the man.

This is followed by Nocebo :
where contraries should balance out (The mind's designed, declared De Vries, to keep the ears/ from grating on each other.) oh but you, you / screw the balance up, you human animal:
of hames the only caller and dropped, making
scapegoats out of badgers, snakes and grouse --
they're answering for YOU. And where's my fabled
freedom, if I cannot liberate

the creatures of my word, the eye
of my TV, the wiring of my house? What sense
might the excruciated make, whose ravenous receptors
(over veldts of happy elephants)

flock to the one shocked mouse?
(p. 55)
**
She speaks in polished pearls, like this.

“Any design that devises the greatest possible number of readings in the fewest possible words might find itself too easily at the service of a facile moral relativity. A plurality of priorities could be said to mark the death of priority itself. But the utility of poetry is of as little interest to me as is the biography of poets, and a temperament of my ilk takes onto-numerological solace from the great mystics: all and one are crucially hard to TELL apart. (Pragmatic America makes short work of the visiting mystic: the Dalai Lama at the hot dog stand: "Make me one with everything.") How pleasurable, then, to read the word "constitutive" two ways: its prefix at once a with and an against! And how swiftly etymological authority will denounce that delight, though its own art conspire in it!”

**
and some of her poems are more like an unravelling of complex thought than a poem, such as "And The Greatest of These"

Stupidity is no grounds for our despair
it drives or drowses everywhere—
waxen, bristling, pitted, slick –
as variously textured as
notoriously tough. It ought
arouse more wonder than aversion:
cases more complex are hexed, and know it,
while the simplest merely grin into the void.
…
I can’t lose hope over the way
we tort as we retort, reveal as we redress –
I can’t regret the spank of life, its sparkling
more-or-less. Where heartlands lie the lowest
(stream and meadow, desert, swamp)
I trample on. I keep up hope
at every everyloving turn.
Each turn, that is, except

the wickedest: when cruelty
comes cackling from its
crackhouses in nature – hell
must help me then because
I lose all heart at hurt intended. Not just

humans, after all who massacre
their cousins and their dogs....

**
“how the skipper is sick
of the terrible lit
graffiti in the head “

**

And the old Grammarian
knows that something understood
is missing. (The song of Skiptomai lou)
**

She's brilliant. Loveable because you can see her vulnerability when she reads,
how it hurts to see so clearly.

O Pen -- 2/7 : Jane Hirshfield and a Valentine from Ruth Stone

In Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes, at the end of a section about Jane Hirschfield, is a quote by Bill Stafford. "Talk with a little luck in it, that's what poetry is -- just let the words take you where they want to go. You'll be invited; things will happen; your life will have more in it than other people's lives have."

To understand this in context, kindly understand that the poems below work to deep levels. Hirshfield will convince you that a single haiku by Issa can have as great a compassion and enormous a grief as any English elegy. Poems work, b/c they are not explanation but promise connection, loosening and expand judgement’s heart.

She shared this piece, as one of her favorites, at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival,


Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight
also leaks between the roofplanks
of this ruined house.
-- Izumi Shikibu (from "The Ink Dark Moon, tr. by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani)

Our walls can protect us -- and keep us from good parts, such as Moonlight, which is often associated with love or Buddhist awakening.

Language – darkness seems larger, more open, because AFFIRMED.

We think more fully, act more fully IF we feel,like a string quartet,infinite as in this haiku by Basho.

Loneliness --
cicadas' crying
darkens the stone.

Jane explained the translation of "darkens" -- the idea is that the sound is
"dyeing" as if the stone were cloth, but the cleverness and deep understanding
is that of stone darkening wetness.
stone shown as altering – what in outer world would not change.
intimate experience – of loneliness – where one thing is connected to another.

Poems discuss in Open:
It was like this:
You were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not

The Envoy (it permits "going on" -- agreeing to be permeable to what comes to live willingly in the hard knowledge that we do not know what will come to us in our lives, or how it comes or goes.

Habit -- and A Cedary Fragrance: choosing... making the unwanted wanted.

For What Binds Us -- see below.

Green Apples -- Ruth Stone. Just like the wind to come to whisper, urgently, like love,
this is the moment, here, now. A poem to memorize.
**
Comments from Contemporary American Poetry:

For What Binds Us –
She often gives as public readings, as it steadies her and seats her as poet, person. themes of ranscience and loss, of interconnection and abidance; of how a person goes on, somehow, no matter what.
Images drawn from the earth, science, carpentry, horseflesh; bodies and psyches of lovers, a cup, these also seem abiding terrain. Not narrative, but writes of the inner life by describing the outer. Look, it requests of its reader, and makes a promise that if you do, you will see what it sees, feel what it feels. This is as good a description as any of the process by which certain kinds of lyric poems carry experience from one person into another. It was written in one breath; arrived at 4 am speaking itself.

"The practice of shapeliness and music and rhetoric enters the marrow. And then, when the time comes that a poem awakens a writer during a lightless hour, they are there, holding the psyche, permitting the transformation between raw and overwhelming grief and the grief that becomes a poem by being caught in craft-amber, in the lasting sap of the heart flood." p. 146

The order, "mend or tear" or "tear or mend" -- that untearability or unmendability which has the final say, makes an immense difference to the feeling one takes from the statement.

po+sp: Feb. 3

Poetry and Spirituality sounds like to long a title... Spirit-poality sounds like I'm lisping...
po+sp hopefully won't offend anyone... like poetry to be eaten with a spoon. with a big AND.
Poetry AND all that is involved with the spirit. This month's theme: passion.

What is passion? What words come to mind...
John : Spanish music;
Catherine: Life giving
Martin: intensity
Elaine : learning, opening,
Phyllis: music

And we started to nod our heads. A sense of surrender to greater life.

The poems distributed: 3 by editor of Poetry Magazine, Christian Wiman, who is battling cancer, and one by the Black poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar who addresses the problem of the American smile... thin paste of convention that cannot approximate inner fire -- or a man, woman, white or black, but hits at the feeling of receiving a smile that won't let you in.
**
From a Window – Christian Wiman

The idea of tree as Jungian symbol of life is definitely working. It is also the main symbol of the inner self. (universal Cosmic goddess. Ydrassil. the magical tree produced from a branch... Cinderella) I brought up the idea of "The Triumph of Time" where the tree is referred to half blossom, half withered; one city burning, another a symbolic Babylon.

the idea of seeing something "kaleidoscopically" -- broken down into pieces, and swirled into other forms has a sense of the fractal regenerating forms.
The last line is so unexpected, one re-reads the poem. How joy is not something that comes without some sort of "breaking".
We were reminded of Anne Frank's tree... of Etty Hilvesum

http://www.thefword.org.uk/reviews/2008/02/an_interrupted
**
Clearing – Christian Wiman

This poem's title already "clears" the way for multiple meaning of both noun and verb,
Literal and metaphorical clearing. The sounds are beautiful, meditative, the repetitions
wind beautifully through sentences looped through lines.
He does not use fancy speech, yet invents words such as " unsuffered seasons of wind", "wildflowered ground" and "word-riddled remnants"
where suffering, wildness, riddles have as much place as seasons, flowers, words; wind, ground, remnants.

The clearing and seeing through the harshness seems to allow a progression from a more Apollonian-intellectual realm to a more gut-heart instinctual Dionysian realm.
The mind-clearing cold shifts from depths of cold to mild… then the blaze

and again -- a breakthrough -- the burn and rust -- and
a man could suddenly want his life,
feel it blaze in him and mean,

how that word "mean" poised on the edge of a line-- held in place with a comma, and then
the closing lines:

as for a moment I believed,
before I walked on.

This is not a fixed place. Passion is not a fixed flame.
**

Reading Herodotus – Christian Wiman

Here, knowing that Herodotus wrote a history of the world, allows the reader an introduction to "world". Not an easy poem.
The word "tenderness" made me think of Galway Kinnell saying every poem should be called "Tenderness" -- I can't remember the context, but my mind gallops to the idea that such a soothing panacea is possible only by writing with great empathy. And that, like Naomi Shihab Nye explains in her poem "Kindness" cannot be understood until experience allows you many gates, lenses, trials.

The strange tree was understood to be the tree of generations
We discussed the woman "cursing her gods" -- understood this way: She gives up her religion and her discovered religion has the original language of praise. Another person put it this way:
Enormity of loss testifies to value of what had existed.
The ending strikes hard.

Each new child will learn these stories in some manner. Religion cannot mask and is a poor substitute for life. One person asked:
Are we doomed to squander our children, like cannon fodder?
Another criticized religion for pretending that life is a gift not a curse.
The Jungians softly held out both hands: one holds all perspectives to truly understand.

**
The Made to Order Smile – Paul Laurence Dunbar

What the speaker says, and what the poet says are not necessarily the same thing.
However, this speaker does not trust women, for whatever reason.

January 31 : Breughel w/ Nemerov, Wm Carlos Williams, Szymborska and Giovanni, Kavanagh

Ah, good taste, what a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness. -Pablo Picasso, painter and sculptor (1881-1973) Why do we say "I like it" or "I don't like it". The fact that poetry comes in many guises, allows us to look at poems to find out their emotional charge, how they are clear.

In The Spirit of Martin – Nikki Giovanni
The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm -- Wallace Stevens
The next two are inspired by Breughel paintings – links provided
THE DANCE -- William Carlos Williams
The Triumph of Time – Howard Nemerov
Landscape - Wislawa Szymborska
The Hospital - Patrick Kavanagh

This week's poems ranged from tones of conversational to academic, starting with Nikki Giovanni's inspirational "In the Spirit of Martin" -- and ending with Kavanagh's sonnet which demonstrates simply "what love does to things" --
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
For we must record love's mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

Giovanni:
A poem chock full of names -- for the younger readers, somewhat overwhelming, for others,a chance to google, for Joyce who heard Nikki speak, she showed Giovanni's book, Rosa, which tells the story of Rosa Parks.
Names of Civil Rights leaders, teachers, alongside 1950's TV shows, Titles of songs -- civil disobedience by the mention of Thoreau and Emerson, "but what... are you doing out" --

The predominance of the ellipses... in the poem... allows us both space to meditate on a rich history and to fill in more...

Ella Baker's name will hopefully take you to re-view anti-war quotes: http://antiwar.com/quotes.php
How violence takes us so far away from truth... how if lies are big enough, said frequently enough, they replace what should be "sense".

images: pressure Earth exerts on carbon to make a diamond; soil pushing against the flesh, molding the moan that becomes a cry that bursts forth crystalline, unbreakable, priceless, the incomparable Martin. How much pressure do the sins of the world press against the heart of a man who becomes the voice of his people.

The rest of the poem swirls like multi-media overlay, to set up this 4th stanza... and then the idea of what if he had been just a regular man... "He should have had a tattoo, you know... Freedom Now.... or something like that... and suddenly, we have a chance to join him in our humanity, laugh over a plate of skillet-fried chicken, etc.

Moving poem!

The Wallace Stevens by contrast is a calming poem, with repetition, an aura of peace... the platonic idea of perfect thought in a different ideal world of a book. And what if we wrote:

instead of book, "i pad" instead of "access to perfection to the page" i phone, google...
How the sweetness of calm and a book, might be in danger.

Nemerov's poem, chock full of allusions, constrasts sharply with Giovanni. Babylon, myth, Cronos munching a child, wagons crunching over palette, book, crowns -- are far removed from us -- and it takes many readings to see this ramshackle traveling show including Death on his donkey, the trumpeteer angel puffing the resurrection and end of days. The syntax is hard,
examples become "everything that is, and isn't", what the Triumph of Time exemplifies.

What relief then, to dance to WCW -- with internal rhyme, the round, around, impound, ground, sound repeating of the stomp of dancing, where the last line is the first line... the whining "ing" of the gerunds. To look up : Pictures from Breughel -- 10 poems on peasants...
and working with the inner eye, regardless of the demands of the age.

And another antidote to the Triumph of time -- Szymborska's Landscape -- perhaps the Old Masters
were never wrong about suffering (Auden) -- but Szymborska brings in detail where suddenly life and painting seem so real, and the poem itself is living mystery.

The Hospital -- I don't know the context, but love how in this stark scene (an art lover's woe -- imagine white, square, devoid of anything vivid.) "Nothing by love debarred" is a curious turn of phrase -- with the sense of prison bar, yet meaning, nothing is excluded by love. Nothing barred, shut out, forbidden, hindered. In the last 6 lines of the sonnet, he lists what love does to things... without saying what it does... just the naming of them is the love act.
Rialto -- just the name. the main gate, with a hint of a story of an accident; a shed,
where someone must have sat, enjoying the sun. The small, common, things. Love's mystery without claptrap. Our attention brings our passion... allows us a snatch of "the passionate transitory" -- as if it is always there for the taking.