Scarecrow on Fire – Dean Young (the other one on poetry foundation, not poets.org) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241444
Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer by Jane Kenyon
Love Song – a study in contradictions by Joseph Brodsky
Sonnet 29 – William Shakespeare
When you chose me by Pedro Salinas
translated from the Spanish by Willis Barnstone
**
Although I didn't lead this discussion, the poems gather around "love" and loss.
I would love to hear the original Spanish for Salinas' lines -- the importance of feeling CHOSEN by another, and how skilfully the poet uses the "duende" so gladness is not one-sided joy -- but comes from a deeper place that knows shadows and dark.
"And my gladness was
sad, as small watches are
without a wrist to fasten to,
without a winding crown, stopped.
But when you said: you,
to me, yes, to me singled out,
I was higher than stars,
deeper than coral.
And my joy
began to spin, caught
in your being, in your pulse."
(Kim's notes: Generation of 27: wide variety of genres and styles; cubism, futurism, surrealism. Included Federico Garcia Lorca)
**
Dean Young -- version of Scarecrow on Fire -- in reprint section of American Poetry Spring 2011 issue, p. 55
In this one-block poem, Young leaps from statement (assumptions of "we" -- "we all think about suddenly disappearing" -- do we? What does that mean...) to question. "What counts as a proper/ goodbye." followed immediately by a last winter in Iowa and ladybugs which are now also included in the "we".
"We all feel
suspended over a drop into nothingness.
Once you get close enough, you see what
one is stitching is a human heart. Another
is vomiting wings.
Humans, ladybugs... life. Another question. Where did we get/the idea to rub dirt into the wound (when we were kids, and was that just in PA?)
and a comment on poetry. Poems ARE made of breath, the way water,/cajoled to boil says, "This is my soul, freed."
I prefer the other poem of the same title which starts this way:
Everything is brushed away, off the sleeve, Off the overcoat huge ensembles of assertions
** in it, there are no assertions of "we" and the poem leaps with lively sounds and images.
"just jars of buttons spilled, recurring nightmare of straw on fire, you the scarecrow, the scare, the crow, totems gone, rubies flawed, flamingo in hyena’s jaws, noble and lascivious mouth of the gods hovering then gone, gone the glances, gone moths, cities of crystal become cities of mud, centurion and emperor dust, the flower girl, some of it rises, proof? some of it explodes, vein in the brain, seed pod poof, maybe something will grow, another predicament
of bittersweet, dreamfluff milkweed, declarations of aerosols, vows just sprays of spit fast evaporate, all of it pulverized as it hits the seawall, all of it falling snow on water, flash of flying fish, breach and blow and sinking, far below creatures of luminous jelly constellated and darting and baiting each other like last thoughts before sleep, last neural sparks coalescing as a face in the dark, who was she? never enough time to know."
A good poem should leave you with more questions than answers! (Art of Recklessness)
Kim's notes on Jane Kenyon:
Bill Moyer's film: "A Life Together" ends, hauntingly, but lovingly, with Kenyon’s poem, "It Might Have Been Otherwise" which includes the lines:
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
-1st published in Poetry journal, then published in The Boat of Quiet Hours 1986.
-Translated Anna Akhmatova poems; married to Donald Hall.
**Akhmatova connection with Brodsky:
Kim's notes: He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 for alleged "social parasitism" (living off unearned income) and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan.
Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity"
He was appointed American Poet Laureate in 1991
**
His "Love Song -- study of contradictions opposes two lines in each quatrain --
a rescue with arrest; a free bird with a drills; play with the complexity of mirrors and roles we play -- and the great surge of lava -- and the realization that we can love, but divorce, come together, separate...
If... is only followed by because at the last line.
**
Sonnet 29
to carry on "contradiction: Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at haven’s gate; I quote my MFA guru, Robert who says "Literally, it means something like, “When the lark wakes up at dawn it sings to heaven from the earth, and this is just like what happens when I am feeling very bad about myself and then I think of you.”
How, exactly, does the poet turn from the previous lines of crying, cursing, and discontent into a lark.
Apparently a prison program uses
beginning of this poem as a spring board for the inmates to write their own version of the poem, tell their own story through their own words. Very cool idea.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
Monday, June 27, 2011
June 27: Merwin, Wright, Herbert, Jonson, Stroud, cummings, Young
Identity – W.S. Merwin (from 6/20 line up)
Bedtime Story – Charles Wright
Love (III) -- George Herbert
Hymn to the Belly – Ben Jonson
Night in Day -- Joseph Stroud
may my heart always be open to little – ee cummings
Is This Why Love Almost Rhymes with Dumb? -- by Dean Young
What a cast of characters! What wonderful poems... Time's hunger in a scary story turned into a "sometime dance"; Hymns to the Belly, love turning up in Conversation with God, and contemplating the other...
The Merwin is left over from last week -- IDENTITY:
You are what you draw, what you study, what... surrounds you, enters you, what you imagine...
http://store.metmuseum.org/met-studio-prints/hans-hoffman-a-hedgehog/invt/99080830/
or is it that what you think you draw, is drawing you --
A hedgehog becomes a means for feeling the dark undersides of stones --
but whether one becomes a hedgehog, Hans, the attention spent observing, until one becomes so keenly aware, edges disappear.
**
In the next two poems:Beispiel compares Wright to Herbert: I love the way all those somethings in the middle of the poem act on and against the natural world: wringing, making, licking, stringing, inching and scratching. In the poem, the bedtime story of existence is simply time itself. Poets are concerned with the subject of time -- I guess the concern is mortality generally -- because not a minute goes by when time does not influence our daily, imaginative and spiritual lives. So, for Wright, time is what he calls the "Something Dance."
Beispiel speaks about Wright's switchback on George Herbert, "who in his masterpiece "Love (III)" lets God into his soul. It's a poem that begins, "Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back" and ends, "'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.' / So I did sit and eat." Here, Wright offers the "meat" to time. Then, like Herbert, letting time in, Wright allows the imagination to consider time more closely, well, another time." http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2011/06/bedtime_story_poem_on_time_can.html
How to take a scary story -- and then have it dance! Time is ravenous -- but Wright treats it a whole new way -- Marcie mentioned "atavistic" as flavor -- this is more than just spooky campfire story.
We questioned: The "generator" in the first line -- yet it has both the idea of "genesis" of something... as well as a machine. cicadas would be too confining.
Also, the "cleft feet" -- come far after the subject they are attached to. Imagine Time’s cloven feet and it seems the devil is walking.
A string of something -- imagining... followed by a string of questions of what we ought to do... How powerful to go from : "Something is inching its way into our hearts,
scratching its blue nails against the wall there." (the nails being fingernails, not spelled out as "evening's dusky blue nails" nor a handful of nails waiting to be hammered in...) should we clap our hands and dance
The Something Dance, the welcoming Something Dance?
I think we should, love, I think we should.
A great poem to memorize and tell again and again!
Along with the next ones!
The Joseph Stroud poem weaves a first line of "night not wanting to end" to leaps to different blacks, to all the glisten of light captured in obsidian, crow, watermelon seed... not scary, b/c of the guzzling sunflowers...
ee cummings beautiful love poem... and what "usefully" has to do with selves with perhaps an agenda not confined to TRULY loving...
We all chuckled and roared at both the Ben Jonson and the Dean Young.
Uplifting discussion!
Bedtime Story – Charles Wright
Love (III) -- George Herbert
Hymn to the Belly – Ben Jonson
Night in Day -- Joseph Stroud
may my heart always be open to little – ee cummings
Is This Why Love Almost Rhymes with Dumb? -- by Dean Young
What a cast of characters! What wonderful poems... Time's hunger in a scary story turned into a "sometime dance"; Hymns to the Belly, love turning up in Conversation with God, and contemplating the other...
The Merwin is left over from last week -- IDENTITY:
You are what you draw, what you study, what... surrounds you, enters you, what you imagine...
http://store.metmuseum.org/met-studio-prints/hans-hoffman-a-hedgehog/invt/99080830/
or is it that what you think you draw, is drawing you --
A hedgehog becomes a means for feeling the dark undersides of stones --
but whether one becomes a hedgehog, Hans, the attention spent observing, until one becomes so keenly aware, edges disappear.
**
In the next two poems:Beispiel compares Wright to Herbert: I love the way all those somethings in the middle of the poem act on and against the natural world: wringing, making, licking, stringing, inching and scratching. In the poem, the bedtime story of existence is simply time itself. Poets are concerned with the subject of time -- I guess the concern is mortality generally -- because not a minute goes by when time does not influence our daily, imaginative and spiritual lives. So, for Wright, time is what he calls the "Something Dance."
Beispiel speaks about Wright's switchback on George Herbert, "who in his masterpiece "Love (III)" lets God into his soul. It's a poem that begins, "Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back" and ends, "'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.' / So I did sit and eat." Here, Wright offers the "meat" to time. Then, like Herbert, letting time in, Wright allows the imagination to consider time more closely, well, another time." http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2011/06/bedtime_story_poem_on_time_can.html
How to take a scary story -- and then have it dance! Time is ravenous -- but Wright treats it a whole new way -- Marcie mentioned "atavistic" as flavor -- this is more than just spooky campfire story.
We questioned: The "generator" in the first line -- yet it has both the idea of "genesis" of something... as well as a machine. cicadas would be too confining.
Also, the "cleft feet" -- come far after the subject they are attached to. Imagine Time’s cloven feet and it seems the devil is walking.
A string of something -- imagining... followed by a string of questions of what we ought to do... How powerful to go from : "Something is inching its way into our hearts,
scratching its blue nails against the wall there." (the nails being fingernails, not spelled out as "evening's dusky blue nails" nor a handful of nails waiting to be hammered in...) should we clap our hands and dance
The Something Dance, the welcoming Something Dance?
I think we should, love, I think we should.
A great poem to memorize and tell again and again!
Along with the next ones!
The Joseph Stroud poem weaves a first line of "night not wanting to end" to leaps to different blacks, to all the glisten of light captured in obsidian, crow, watermelon seed... not scary, b/c of the guzzling sunflowers...
ee cummings beautiful love poem... and what "usefully" has to do with selves with perhaps an agenda not confined to TRULY loving...
We all chuckled and roared at both the Ben Jonson and the Dean Young.
Uplifting discussion!
Thursday, June 23, 2011
O Pen June 20 -- Black Guitar, Jack, Mall, Nancy Jane
Black Guitar by Michelle Bitting
Jack by Maxine Kumin
At the Galleria Shopping Mall -- Tony Hoagland
Nancy Jane by CHARLES SIMIC
Although I wasn't there to lead the discussion, two of the poems have names of people.
What happens with a title? If a poem is called "Jack" or "Nancy Jane" what sort of conjectures do we already make as readers?
Would you have guessed that Black Guitar would evoke an odalisque, replete with neck, hips, lungs, pores, or glint-edged glamour, to offset interior syrup running through the O of sound like a locomotive?
What setting and characters do you imagine in the Galleria Shopping Mall?
Much of craft in a poem hangs on the title. That the poem about a guitar is about BLACK guitar, literally colors our expectations. Having a poem with only a first name whets our appetite to want to find out more. It's only in the middle of the 5th stanza that we realize "Jack" is a horse. His name is not pronounced after the title until the penultimate stanza. It stabs us that the "wise old campaigner", the occupant of the "motel lobby", the "he" who prawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters, has been let out to the world at age 22-- and he has a name. It reminds me of Kipling's poem about his son -- "Has anyone seen my son, Jack?" -- how it rhymes with "he won't be coming back". Turning one's back on an old animal -- no jacking up, only the chewing J and the dry sack-sound which accentuate
grief and regret?
Likewise, with a double first name, Nancy Jane, which sounds more like a little girl, a Mary Jane, a commonplace of a name, Simic disguises a grandmother for only the brief jump from title to first word. But this Grandma is laughing -- on her deathbed, each stanza adding a new paradox or ironic twist to the scene. Ultimately, the loneliness of each one of us, at the end is not still -- but "like a wheel breaking off of a car" -- yet moving entirely on our own.
Jack by Maxine Kumin
At the Galleria Shopping Mall -- Tony Hoagland
Nancy Jane by CHARLES SIMIC
Although I wasn't there to lead the discussion, two of the poems have names of people.
What happens with a title? If a poem is called "Jack" or "Nancy Jane" what sort of conjectures do we already make as readers?
Would you have guessed that Black Guitar would evoke an odalisque, replete with neck, hips, lungs, pores, or glint-edged glamour, to offset interior syrup running through the O of sound like a locomotive?
What setting and characters do you imagine in the Galleria Shopping Mall?
Much of craft in a poem hangs on the title. That the poem about a guitar is about BLACK guitar, literally colors our expectations. Having a poem with only a first name whets our appetite to want to find out more. It's only in the middle of the 5th stanza that we realize "Jack" is a horse. His name is not pronounced after the title until the penultimate stanza. It stabs us that the "wise old campaigner", the occupant of the "motel lobby", the "he" who prawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters, has been let out to the world at age 22-- and he has a name. It reminds me of Kipling's poem about his son -- "Has anyone seen my son, Jack?" -- how it rhymes with "he won't be coming back". Turning one's back on an old animal -- no jacking up, only the chewing J and the dry sack-sound which accentuate
grief and regret?
Likewise, with a double first name, Nancy Jane, which sounds more like a little girl, a Mary Jane, a commonplace of a name, Simic disguises a grandmother for only the brief jump from title to first word. But this Grandma is laughing -- on her deathbed, each stanza adding a new paradox or ironic twist to the scene. Ultimately, the loneliness of each one of us, at the end is not still -- but "like a wheel breaking off of a car" -- yet moving entirely on our own.
Monday, June 6, 2011
O pen 6/6/2011 : more Poet Laureates, Szymborska, Dean Young
O pen discussion – 6/6/2011
Daystar – Rita Dove
Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri -- Mona Van Duyn
Vermeer – Wislawa Szymborska
Ash Ode -- by Dean Young For more Dean Young : see interview: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/dean-young Scarecrow on Fire – Dean Young From Dean Young’s new book: Fall Higher https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/util/email_poem_to_friend.asp?bid=1454&pid=1726
Patriotic Tour and Postulate of Joy –Robert Penn Warren
3 poems by women; 3 poems by men, but all with the human concern --
what is this all about? I quoted from the introduction of David Orr's book "Beautiful and Pointless" -- for what IS the point of so many words... whether poetry of witness, sharing a moment...or puzzling over the complexities of suffering and paradoxes of human motivation.
Rita Dove's title Daystar might leave you thinking about stardom, and the way we cannot see stars in the daytime, and "pure nothing" in the middle of the day -- in what seems to be a woman's effaced existence. The idea of starting a poem with "she wanted" immediately sets up a sense of lack, and the adjective police will attest to the power of verbed negatives: slumped, the pinched armor of a vanished cricket.
I love the power of "why" which makes a comment before jumping after a stanza break to answer a question.
And just what was mother doing out back with the field mice? Why,
building a palace.
Mona Van Duyn's poem allows a reading of "you" to be a lover, the earth,
and calls on all the senses with great intimacy. A great poem to read if you feel tempted to be a pebble hoping someone will mistake you for a planet!
Szymborska -- translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak p. 55 of American Poet Spring 2011 issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milkmaid_(Vermeer)
Vermeer:
The power of paint to capture an simple act that is never finished
And the power of this small, one sentence poem which references
Not a portrait of a milkmaid, but the way she is painted,
“in quiet and concentration” and the way art can allow us to survive,
believe, hope that the world too, will go on. The unstated questions,
what will determine the world’s end – and what was the original Polish for the verb “earned” and what is “end”.
Kathy brought up the article by Mark Doty : how poetry consoles us with the thought as we witness – As long as there is beautiful art – the world won’t end…
Dean Young : Reading his poems gives image to thoughts about what we DO, what happens to us, and the slippery nature of language.
Scarecrow on Fire – in his book Fall Higher and on p. 55 is different from “Scarecrow on Fire” which poets.org has in a “flow” version where words come into a box S L O W L Y
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22196
You might enjoy listening to this poem: (I put a few lines down)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/2444
Selected Recent and New Errors
My books are full of mistakes…
Conveyor belt caught the arm
New kid on the job
Worm/tequila
Do you think the dictionary says to itself…
I’ve got these words that means completely different things
And it’s tearing me apart.
Twisted silver wire of stealth and deception…
We have absolutely no proof God is not an insect rubbing our hind legs together to sing.
How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.
**
The Dean Young poems are chock full of images... first a sonnet, also an Ode...
Where the volta "flies off" (along with a woman...) to turn to the sieve of self and idea that one cannot catch another, fix another, keep another reinforced with the metaphor of the sea written in the desert.
The Scarecrow poem creates a collage of images which cinder down into further ashes.
Do we really ever KNOW anyone? What burns when we are cremated? What remains in the ashes?
Robert Penn Warren's poem with his clever repeating form provided a good example of irony.
Daystar – Rita Dove
Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri -- Mona Van Duyn
Vermeer – Wislawa Szymborska
Ash Ode -- by Dean Young For more Dean Young : see interview: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/dean-young Scarecrow on Fire – Dean Young From Dean Young’s new book: Fall Higher https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/util/email_poem_to_friend.asp?bid=1454&pid=1726
Patriotic Tour and Postulate of Joy –Robert Penn Warren
3 poems by women; 3 poems by men, but all with the human concern --
what is this all about? I quoted from the introduction of David Orr's book "Beautiful and Pointless" -- for what IS the point of so many words... whether poetry of witness, sharing a moment...or puzzling over the complexities of suffering and paradoxes of human motivation.
Rita Dove's title Daystar might leave you thinking about stardom, and the way we cannot see stars in the daytime, and "pure nothing" in the middle of the day -- in what seems to be a woman's effaced existence. The idea of starting a poem with "she wanted" immediately sets up a sense of lack, and the adjective police will attest to the power of verbed negatives: slumped, the pinched armor of a vanished cricket.
I love the power of "why" which makes a comment before jumping after a stanza break to answer a question.
And just what was mother doing out back with the field mice? Why,
building a palace.
Mona Van Duyn's poem allows a reading of "you" to be a lover, the earth,
and calls on all the senses with great intimacy. A great poem to read if you feel tempted to be a pebble hoping someone will mistake you for a planet!
Szymborska -- translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak p. 55 of American Poet Spring 2011 issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milkmaid_(Vermeer)
Vermeer:
The power of paint to capture an simple act that is never finished
And the power of this small, one sentence poem which references
Not a portrait of a milkmaid, but the way she is painted,
“in quiet and concentration” and the way art can allow us to survive,
believe, hope that the world too, will go on. The unstated questions,
what will determine the world’s end – and what was the original Polish for the verb “earned” and what is “end”.
Kathy brought up the article by Mark Doty : how poetry consoles us with the thought as we witness – As long as there is beautiful art – the world won’t end…
Dean Young : Reading his poems gives image to thoughts about what we DO, what happens to us, and the slippery nature of language.
Scarecrow on Fire – in his book Fall Higher and on p. 55 is different from “Scarecrow on Fire” which poets.org has in a “flow” version where words come into a box S L O W L Y
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22196
You might enjoy listening to this poem: (I put a few lines down)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/2444
Selected Recent and New Errors
My books are full of mistakes…
Conveyor belt caught the arm
New kid on the job
Worm/tequila
Do you think the dictionary says to itself…
I’ve got these words that means completely different things
And it’s tearing me apart.
Twisted silver wire of stealth and deception…
We have absolutely no proof God is not an insect rubbing our hind legs together to sing.
How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.
**
The Dean Young poems are chock full of images... first a sonnet, also an Ode...
Where the volta "flies off" (along with a woman...) to turn to the sieve of self and idea that one cannot catch another, fix another, keep another reinforced with the metaphor of the sea written in the desert.
The Scarecrow poem creates a collage of images which cinder down into further ashes.
Do we really ever KNOW anyone? What burns when we are cremated? What remains in the ashes?
Robert Penn Warren's poem with his clever repeating form provided a good example of irony.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)