O pen September 19 and 26 : images and sound

September 26: Ö – by Rita Dove
A few samples ofLorine Niedecker
Saving Just the Real – by Clarence Major
The Mind of Oatmeal – by Joanne Clarkson
Little Porch at Night – by Gibbons Ruark
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Ö – by Rita Dove (2nd poem on podcast – also she says it in German: : http://www.loc.gov/poetry/avfiles/poet-poem-dove-taylor.mp3.

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Rita Dove, first black woman, and youngest woman to be nominated as National Poet Laureate is known for her work with Black Identity. I love that she speaks fluent German and the Swedish umlauted "O" takes us to homonymic associations -- whether see/sea with the glass forehead; the rich overlay of present as time and gift;
Rather like a Chinese landscape with many foci, many centers, this first poem starts with human lips, forming sound -- the perimeter of an island -- and are we not islands? One word... changes the landscape, the neighborhood, the possibilities.

The clever line-endings, "we don't need much more to keep // things going.
you start out with one thing, end // up with another and nothing's / like it used to be, not even the future.

For Niedecker, both objectivist, but also soundscape artist, I am reminded of Milosz explaining "Epiphaneia" in his "Book of Luminous Things". It is that privileged moment when we intuitively grasp a deeper more esential reality.
The examples of economy, fragile formalities that do more with less, make reading her work an exercise in paying extreme attention. "Sound allows imagination to flower in ways logic would deny as irrational."
"I was the solitary plover
a pencil
for a wing-bone

addresses the process of writing -- but is so much more --
Friends of Niedecker created a website called "Solitary Plover".

Saving Just the Real perhaps reminds us of the 19th century, "Make it real" vs. the 20th century injunction, "make is new" -- although Major explores the new and liberty to explore the fragmenting of self... This short 14 line poem in two sentences mystified us. I offered that reading a poem one doesn't understand is an invitation to examine it more closely -- perhaps like St. Augustine -- "if no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to a person who asks, I do not know anymore..."

Everyone loved "The Mind of Oatmeal" -- one of the best demonstrations of alzheimers...

and the lovely villanelle by Gibbons Ruark ...
although he orders us around -- "summon the fireflies" -- but who cannot love the image "matches struck and gone" or "Morse code of the stars who've lost their places."

Apparently Sept. 19 everyone loved Stephen Dunn's Grudges and the two odes.
The group was puzzled about exactly what was going on in "Afterwords" for
example---two sisters, a couple with a sister having an affair with one
of them? etc. I find the beauty is the layering of nature -- the passing of summers from many viewpoints -- before the speaker was born, the various people who might have had a picnic in the spot... the play on afterwards and after word -- a sort of postscript for a story which is not told. Something is missing from the start, and the "you" which never bears a face, contradicts with a presence that must be released.

September 12 -- Levine, Taylor, + scattered notes. to be continued

Levine:
Salt and Oil: Kathy Commentary: vs. Salts and Oils;
The Valley

Salt and Oil as two characters... and as preservatives... how Levine draws us in --
"we", "you", "I"... repetition. How to use memory and writing to preserve... which is what the poem does.
vs. Pluralizing... a scandal of particularity that reveal a God in the shabbiest of places...
Louis MacNiece: Snow. vase of roses on one side... The world is suddener -- he sees reflection... the world is always more than one flat picture.
incorrigeably plural...

anomalous specificity

The words have come the whole way... time out of time... vs. 1948...
the real salty and oily food...


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Two Henry Taylor poems:
Elevator
Riding One-Eyed Horse

Perspective... like Odin...
undismissable dignity...


9/11... and lots of poetry ten years later.
Last night heard a poem about 9/11/11... and the day after 9/11/11...
Wage Peace -- attributed to Mary Oliver

It was refreshing to read a Richard Wilbur article from 1969, reprinted in the electronic Shenandoah... Richard Wilbur: from 1969:

http://shenandoahliterary.org/blog/2010/12/poetry-and-happiness/
There are two main ways of understanding the word “poetry.” We may think of poetry as a self-shaping activity of the whole society, a collective activity by means of which a society creates a vision of itself, arranges its values, or adopts or adapts a culture. It is this sense of “poetry” which we have in Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Men Made Out of Words,” where he says


The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

But “poetry” may also mean what we more usually mean by it; it may mean verses written by poets, imaginative compositions which employ a condensed, rhythmic, resonant, and persuasive language. This second kind of poetry is not unconnected with the first; a poem written by a poet is a specific, expert, and tributary form of the general imaginative activity.
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the desire to lay claim to as much of the world as possible through uttering the names of things.

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I am struck by the poetry of poets who have this sense of "a whole race" -- not just an original voice... or a voice that could just as well be droning on a phone as opposed to line-breaking and calling it a poem.

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Philip Levine is NOT a droner surfing through linebreaks. We enjoyed