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.
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