UU Church:
Dec. 1
They Are Hostile Nations by Margaret Atwood (Poets Walk)
When the War is Over by W.S. Merwin
Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942 by Sharon Olds
Everything by Sharon Olds
12/8:
Tightening the Cinch -- Robert Bly
What the Living Do – Marie Howe
Elegy -- Ben Howard
2 poems from Ginosko
Supplement -- Almeta reading 3 poems from Poets Walk
Joy Harjo : Perhaps the World Ends here
Gwendolyn Brooks : A song in the front yard
Janine Pommy Vega: Which Side are you on?
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Nov. 16: Metaphor as a way of thinking... Boland, Hafiz, Nye
Metaphor... as a way of thinking.
Marriage is a bungee jump – by Walter MacDonald
This Moment – Eaven Boland
Two poems by Hafiz
Two poems by Naomi Shihab Nye: Burning the old year; Boy and Egg
What fun to see how MacDonald develops the idea of marriage as a bungee jump!
Just as bungee jumping and marriage are unpredictable, uneven, so is the use of rhyme and slant rhyme.
The final two stanzas: strain/pain; vows/now
echo the rhyme of the opening quatrain: canyon/minion; brushed/enough.
The leap to the next quatrain
... The ropes felt new enough
and he swore he measured them, the fall to the rocks
a lovers' leap eighty stories long.
The end, in a long leap -- prepared for in the penultimate stanza contains two breath-holding enjambements...
Hand in hand we stepped up
wavering to the ledge, hearing the rush
of a river we leaped to, a far-off
cawing crow, the primitive breeze of the fall,
and squeezed, clinging to each other's vows
that only death could separate us now.
**
The contrast of Boland's "This Moment",
breathless, fragmented, is a different sort of suspense.
Masterful. We reviewed her reading last Thursday...
Marriage is a bungee jump – by Walter MacDonald
This Moment – Eaven Boland
Two poems by Hafiz
Two poems by Naomi Shihab Nye: Burning the old year; Boy and Egg
What fun to see how MacDonald develops the idea of marriage as a bungee jump!
Just as bungee jumping and marriage are unpredictable, uneven, so is the use of rhyme and slant rhyme.
The final two stanzas: strain/pain; vows/now
echo the rhyme of the opening quatrain: canyon/minion; brushed/enough.
The leap to the next quatrain
... The ropes felt new enough
and he swore he measured them, the fall to the rocks
a lovers' leap eighty stories long.
The end, in a long leap -- prepared for in the penultimate stanza contains two breath-holding enjambements...
Hand in hand we stepped up
wavering to the ledge, hearing the rush
of a river we leaped to, a far-off
cawing crow, the primitive breeze of the fall,
and squeezed, clinging to each other's vows
that only death could separate us now.
**
The contrast of Boland's "This Moment",
breathless, fragmented, is a different sort of suspense.
Masterful. We reviewed her reading last Thursday...
UU Church, Nov. 16: picks from Poetry Nov. 2011
We might not remember all the details, but we do remember how something feels to us.
This week's discussion focussed on what touched us in the vignettes each poem provided.
Bryant Park at Dusk:
The rhyme, along with the wordiness of the poem, feels like a confession of rambling thoughts about loneliness in a convenient, sing-song ballad. However, looking at one man's observation at a woman, reading at dusk, gives the reader eyes to see
more than this simple scene. Instead, it is an invitation to think about dusk,
how it is a dividing line between familiar, unfamiliar, the end of a work or public day, and the beginning of a private day.
But she is on intimate terms, it seems, with the rhythms of Bryant Park,
"And what I loved was this:
when dusk had darkened her pages,
As if expecting a kiss,
She closed her eyes and threw her head back,"
Note how the poem allows space for the kiss to skip across a stanza break. The "kiss" rhymes with "this" -- what the observer loves. He continues...
"For that’s when the floodlights came on, slowly,
Somewhere far above my need,
And the grass grew green again, and the woman
Reopened her eyes to read."
Grendel's Mother is a masterful non-story that sets up the powerful tale of Beowulf.
The Danes are no saints, and like any culture, demonize the very things they are and fear. Two stanzas; three sentences. 8 lines. Note the CH sounds of scutcheon, touches, vetch, the T's and double O's, the way SC appears in scutcheon, scar,
the X of foxglove. The tenses start with the future; move to the past (he stood) and end with the present, simultaneous with the past and future -- as if fate has already been woven, as it weaves again and again. Here is the poem:
When the moon’s worn scutcheon
touches the flint-gray flood,
I will lave him in foxglove
and vetch until the blood
of his wretched heart heals.
Without a scar, he stood—
as the men make their way
into the quaking wood.
**
In King Tut's wife, we enter the grandeur of King Tut, the immortality of his tomb brought to size by his wife's feet -- and how the poet allows us to think why we would like her better. Certainly, the poet makes us feel something for her, which we don't for Tut.
**
The world is in pencil
is a small gem of 16 short lines, with the first a last lines as singletons,
followed by succeeding couplets. Who cannot love the way the Title links
to the first line : m-dash not pen. And the way the repeat m-dash and resonance of O's
I’ll bet it felt good
in the hand—-the o
of the ocean, and
the and and the and
of the land.
Delightful "happy-go-lucky" tone, yet behind the shiftings and recirclings as Ocean, land, mapping, tracing, retracing, permanence and impermanence have a deeper final say.
It reminded us of a creation story or sense of evolution.
**
Enoch's Blocks is a small "tour de force" of a small boy with his own version of the tower of Babel.
To understand these lines:
So CAB was a whirring warbler.
BACH was the Spanish Armada crashing
you would want to connect A + B + C from their first mention to CAB:
A is the color of fleet,
B is the color of war and demolition,
C is the color of echo and blur,
He is learning language as color... and the complexity of understanding
"And ENOCH he couldn’t describe.
And when it reached the height of Enoch,
standing, he tore whole tongues
down to their colors."
**
John says to review Ravel: L'Enfant et les Sortileges;
and Das Capital: Vol 3. The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof.
This week's discussion focussed on what touched us in the vignettes each poem provided.
Bryant Park at Dusk:
The rhyme, along with the wordiness of the poem, feels like a confession of rambling thoughts about loneliness in a convenient, sing-song ballad. However, looking at one man's observation at a woman, reading at dusk, gives the reader eyes to see
more than this simple scene. Instead, it is an invitation to think about dusk,
how it is a dividing line between familiar, unfamiliar, the end of a work or public day, and the beginning of a private day.
But she is on intimate terms, it seems, with the rhythms of Bryant Park,
"And what I loved was this:
when dusk had darkened her pages,
As if expecting a kiss,
She closed her eyes and threw her head back,"
Note how the poem allows space for the kiss to skip across a stanza break. The "kiss" rhymes with "this" -- what the observer loves. He continues...
"For that’s when the floodlights came on, slowly,
Somewhere far above my need,
And the grass grew green again, and the woman
Reopened her eyes to read."
Grendel's Mother is a masterful non-story that sets up the powerful tale of Beowulf.
The Danes are no saints, and like any culture, demonize the very things they are and fear. Two stanzas; three sentences. 8 lines. Note the CH sounds of scutcheon, touches, vetch, the T's and double O's, the way SC appears in scutcheon, scar,
the X of foxglove. The tenses start with the future; move to the past (he stood) and end with the present, simultaneous with the past and future -- as if fate has already been woven, as it weaves again and again. Here is the poem:
When the moon’s worn scutcheon
touches the flint-gray flood,
I will lave him in foxglove
and vetch until the blood
of his wretched heart heals.
Without a scar, he stood—
as the men make their way
into the quaking wood.
**
In King Tut's wife, we enter the grandeur of King Tut, the immortality of his tomb brought to size by his wife's feet -- and how the poet allows us to think why we would like her better. Certainly, the poet makes us feel something for her, which we don't for Tut.
**
The world is in pencil
is a small gem of 16 short lines, with the first a last lines as singletons,
followed by succeeding couplets. Who cannot love the way the Title links
to the first line : m-dash not pen. And the way the repeat m-dash and resonance of O's
I’ll bet it felt good
in the hand—-the o
of the ocean, and
the and and the and
of the land.
Delightful "happy-go-lucky" tone, yet behind the shiftings and recirclings as Ocean, land, mapping, tracing, retracing, permanence and impermanence have a deeper final say.
It reminded us of a creation story or sense of evolution.
**
Enoch's Blocks is a small "tour de force" of a small boy with his own version of the tower of Babel.
To understand these lines:
So CAB was a whirring warbler.
BACH was the Spanish Armada crashing
you would want to connect A + B + C from their first mention to CAB:
A is the color of fleet,
B is the color of war and demolition,
C is the color of echo and blur,
He is learning language as color... and the complexity of understanding
"And ENOCH he couldn’t describe.
And when it reached the height of Enoch,
standing, he tore whole tongues
down to their colors."
**
John says to review Ravel: L'Enfant et les Sortileges;
and Das Capital: Vol 3. The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
UU Church: theme of Story: Kunitz, Shihab-Nye, Service for Nov. 10+ metaphor
Stanley Kunitz: The Portrait
Naomi Shihab-Nye: My Father and the Fig Tree
Sifter
Remembered
Robert Service: The Quitter
How do we remember? What metaphors do we choose to live our lives?
If "I" is an Other, and people use metaphor every 10 to 25 words, as James Geary suggests reports, indeed, our idea that we see the world "directly" is indeed an illusion.
Is the "deepest cabinet" a metaphor in the Kunitz poem?
What happens when a photograph is ripped in silence?
What emotions make our "cheeks burn"?
How different from Shihab-Nye's memory of her father "weaving folktales like vivid little scarves."They always involved a figtree and if there weren't one, he'd add it in. What are the objects to which we attach such importance, because they help us personalize the world?
What kitchen implement would you choose to be?
What would you give to people to be remembered?
How different the "hell-for-breakfast" and sore-as-a-boil world the quitter can't take anymore -- how do you relate to the advice? it’s dead easy to die,
It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard. What metaphor would you use?
Naomi Shihab-Nye: My Father and the Fig Tree
Sifter
Remembered
Robert Service: The Quitter
How do we remember? What metaphors do we choose to live our lives?
If "I" is an Other, and people use metaphor every 10 to 25 words, as James Geary suggests reports, indeed, our idea that we see the world "directly" is indeed an illusion.
Is the "deepest cabinet" a metaphor in the Kunitz poem?
What happens when a photograph is ripped in silence?
What emotions make our "cheeks burn"?
How different from Shihab-Nye's memory of her father "weaving folktales like vivid little scarves."They always involved a figtree and if there weren't one, he'd add it in. What are the objects to which we attach such importance, because they help us personalize the world?
What kitchen implement would you choose to be?
What would you give to people to be remembered?
How different the "hell-for-breakfast" and sore-as-a-boil world the quitter can't take anymore -- how do you relate to the advice? it’s dead easy to die,
It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard. What metaphor would you use?
Thursday, November 3, 2011
UU - Nov 3 poems that didn't use story
What kind of stories do we look for in a poem? Ballads, legends, or snapshots that hint at more than what meets the eye?
The poems today:
David Ferry: "Seen Through a Window" and The Crippled Girl the Rose
were snapshots like a still life, captured from the perspective of the describer "I"
telling the reader that what he sees. Who ARE the people in the scene? Why as readers do we feel both observer and observed as distant, unknowable and only hints of more fully-lived lives? Our perceptions, whether of color, of how we perceive "hunched strength", or a blue bruise "flowering in plump, standing-milk flesh" by our very choice of description tells us more about the viewer than what is viewed.
After Ritsos, by Malene Morling is a 7 stanza poem divided into two long sentences and two short ones. At first, there is the address of the moment of dusk where light disappears, and a mystical experience so strong, that EVEN the man who mops the floor in the execution room of the prison stops to witness. The two short sentences confirm the importance of the moment. the sense that no matter the circumstance, "imprisonment" is not possible.
some Ritsos poems: http://yannisritsos.blogspot.com/
The Beggar's Cup perhaps summarizes us all -- the who we are and who we aren't,
holding out our cups to life to see what drops in.
The poems today:
David Ferry: "Seen Through a Window" and The Crippled Girl the Rose
were snapshots like a still life, captured from the perspective of the describer "I"
telling the reader that what he sees. Who ARE the people in the scene? Why as readers do we feel both observer and observed as distant, unknowable and only hints of more fully-lived lives? Our perceptions, whether of color, of how we perceive "hunched strength", or a blue bruise "flowering in plump, standing-milk flesh" by our very choice of description tells us more about the viewer than what is viewed.
After Ritsos, by Malene Morling is a 7 stanza poem divided into two long sentences and two short ones. At first, there is the address of the moment of dusk where light disappears, and a mystical experience so strong, that EVEN the man who mops the floor in the execution room of the prison stops to witness. The two short sentences confirm the importance of the moment. the sense that no matter the circumstance, "imprisonment" is not possible.
some Ritsos poems: http://yannisritsos.blogspot.com/
The Beggar's Cup perhaps summarizes us all -- the who we are and who we aren't,
holding out our cups to life to see what drops in.
Boland, Ryan, Szuber, Hirshfield -- + 3 Witches 10/31
Eaven Boland: The Pomegranate
Kay Ryan: Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard
Janusz Szuber: About a Boy Stirring Jam
Jane Hirshfield
From MacBeth: 3 witches and "boil caldron, boil and bubble"
Reading well-crafted poems allows the magic of language -- stirred i' the charmed pot!
The Pomegrante: a new spin on an old tale.
I moves through the poem as speaker, as mother, as invitation for the reader to become the other known as I, and Ceres, through past to present. The pomegranate is the SOUND in Frenc of apple -- which opens up the garden of Eden, as well as the gates of Hell. What do we know about a child's hunger? How can we protect the ones we love. A mother can only give her beloved daughter rifts in time...
"If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift."
This poem "In a Time of Violence", 1994 addresses
more than the teenage appetite that is hungry --
or a simple Adam and Eve reference, connection to Iraq through the Pomegranate... or application of the Greek myth to modern-day life.
If Yeats and Sylvia Plath had a love child, it would be Eaven Boland... she captures, mood, movement, time, speaking in fragments, short bursts of sentences which contrast with the lone nine-line sentence of the daughter plucking the pomegranate.
**
Kay Ryan's poems always bear up well under scrutiny, revealing that less is a well-condensed and pithy "more". She starts and ends with the same sentence -- but the title gives a different sense than the ending sentence. Coupled with her sense of humor is a broad depth, sprinkled into short lines. Why is running the same rut hard? or the wearing down of things? or ending in a small box? What is grand and damaging about walking in the public parade, as opposed to wondering at the marks on the every day, private things we touch.
**
Szuber's poem about a boy stirring jam from the blather is pulpy plum and snapshot of the details of making jam -- at first green and unappetizing, but then rich and dark purple, although the poem doesn't mention this. The language is alive, as if hand-crafted by someone who remembers a moment when they are young, and call it forth, alive -- like all unmentioned details, but fully knowing "each particle of time has an ultimate dimension."
Kay Ryan: Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard
Janusz Szuber: About a Boy Stirring Jam
Jane Hirshfield
From MacBeth: 3 witches and "boil caldron, boil and bubble"
Reading well-crafted poems allows the magic of language -- stirred i' the charmed pot!
The Pomegrante: a new spin on an old tale.
I moves through the poem as speaker, as mother, as invitation for the reader to become the other known as I, and Ceres, through past to present. The pomegranate is the SOUND in Frenc of apple -- which opens up the garden of Eden, as well as the gates of Hell. What do we know about a child's hunger? How can we protect the ones we love. A mother can only give her beloved daughter rifts in time...
"If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift."
This poem "In a Time of Violence", 1994 addresses
more than the teenage appetite that is hungry --
or a simple Adam and Eve reference, connection to Iraq through the Pomegranate... or application of the Greek myth to modern-day life.
If Yeats and Sylvia Plath had a love child, it would be Eaven Boland... she captures, mood, movement, time, speaking in fragments, short bursts of sentences which contrast with the lone nine-line sentence of the daughter plucking the pomegranate.
**
Kay Ryan's poems always bear up well under scrutiny, revealing that less is a well-condensed and pithy "more". She starts and ends with the same sentence -- but the title gives a different sense than the ending sentence. Coupled with her sense of humor is a broad depth, sprinkled into short lines. Why is running the same rut hard? or the wearing down of things? or ending in a small box? What is grand and damaging about walking in the public parade, as opposed to wondering at the marks on the every day, private things we touch.
**
Szuber's poem about a boy stirring jam from the blather is pulpy plum and snapshot of the details of making jam -- at first green and unappetizing, but then rich and dark purple, although the poem doesn't mention this. The language is alive, as if hand-crafted by someone who remembers a moment when they are young, and call it forth, alive -- like all unmentioned details, but fully knowing "each particle of time has an ultimate dimension."
UU - Poetry and Spirituality Oct. 27
Follow-up from Poetry and Spirituality
October 27, 2011
What a terrific group! Thank you Joyce, Phyllis, Rich, Mariano, Noel, Emily, Martin for your thoughtful participation.
For those who couldn’t make it, we discussed the church theme of “discipline” with four poems. For more reading, I highly recommend:
David Whyte, Poetry of Compassion
most any Mary Oliver or Ted Kooser
Stanley Kunitz, Passing Through
(you can also check out http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/stanley-kunitz )
Here is a quick sketch to summarize the main points ofdiscussion:
Adding to the mix of associations of discipline as commitment, a stick-to-itness of positive habits, a focus on priorities, as well as discipline as an area of study, a profession, or even a corrective measure, the poems brought out other aspects and benefits related to discipline. Perhaps surprisingly, openness, allows a receiving part of discipline, where in David Whyte’s poem, it “steels us” for revelation to allow a discovery of an unknown part of ourselves which like Lazarus is revived.
Mary Oliver’s confession of being deaf and blind to the metaphorical “honeycomb”
does not dwell in a “woe is me” chastisement, but rather, a desire that the “unknowable touch the buckle of her spine” – which brings to mind a posture of supplication and humility without stumbling on doubt. The last stanza, rather than certifying or confirming anything, leaves the reader to contemplate her attitude and confirms the importance of a discipline of faith.
Ted Kooser’s depiction of a dark, musty basement store, where an old man is trying out glasses, wearing another person’s rejected clothes, turns in the second stanza to a universal “you” where the reader also participates in “trying on new glasses” and looking into the mirror to check the fit. Plural mirrors reveal him, looking at us, and the opportunity to look beyond “the particular” and the past. Finally, Kunitz’ round mimics the repeating music, like Oliver’s repeating summer, of a glimpse of joy and his discipline to trudge to his semi-dark cell to try to capture it in words.
October 27, 2011
What a terrific group! Thank you Joyce, Phyllis, Rich, Mariano, Noel, Emily, Martin for your thoughtful participation.
For those who couldn’t make it, we discussed the church theme of “discipline” with four poems. For more reading, I highly recommend:
David Whyte, Poetry of Compassion
most any Mary Oliver or Ted Kooser
Stanley Kunitz, Passing Through
(you can also check out http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/stanley-kunitz )
Here is a quick sketch to summarize the main points ofdiscussion:
Adding to the mix of associations of discipline as commitment, a stick-to-itness of positive habits, a focus on priorities, as well as discipline as an area of study, a profession, or even a corrective measure, the poems brought out other aspects and benefits related to discipline. Perhaps surprisingly, openness, allows a receiving part of discipline, where in David Whyte’s poem, it “steels us” for revelation to allow a discovery of an unknown part of ourselves which like Lazarus is revived.
Mary Oliver’s confession of being deaf and blind to the metaphorical “honeycomb”
does not dwell in a “woe is me” chastisement, but rather, a desire that the “unknowable touch the buckle of her spine” – which brings to mind a posture of supplication and humility without stumbling on doubt. The last stanza, rather than certifying or confirming anything, leaves the reader to contemplate her attitude and confirms the importance of a discipline of faith.
Ted Kooser’s depiction of a dark, musty basement store, where an old man is trying out glasses, wearing another person’s rejected clothes, turns in the second stanza to a universal “you” where the reader also participates in “trying on new glasses” and looking into the mirror to check the fit. Plural mirrors reveal him, looking at us, and the opportunity to look beyond “the particular” and the past. Finally, Kunitz’ round mimics the repeating music, like Oliver’s repeating summer, of a glimpse of joy and his discipline to trudge to his semi-dark cell to try to capture it in words.
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