Friday, March 30, 2012
poems for April 4
Passionate political activist, feminist who appeared in the 50’s, Adrienne Rich says that “Art means nothing if it simply decorates the table of the power which holds it hostage.”
You can hear her read her poems on the right hand column at this site.
http://article.wn.com/view/2012/03/30/Feminist_poet_and_essayist_Adrienne_Rich_dies_at_82/
3 poems by Adrienne Rich:
What Kind of Times Are These
Delta
The Burning of Paper Instead of Children
I chose the final poem in Ellen Bryant Voigt's book "Kyrie" (published 1995) which tells of the 1918 influenza epidemic through a sequence of linked blank verse sonnets which addresses some of its repercussions.
There are sonnets of reflections; sonnets about different people, like Mattie, the Doctor; sonnets that are strictly metaphor.
The epilogue, written in six tercets draws the curtain with a snow storm
Epilogue: by Ellen Bryant Voigt
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) and political poetry:
How strange, just 3 weeks ago, I was finishing 695 page "Outlaw Bible of American Poetry,(OBOAP)(published in 1999) preparing a 2.5 hr lecture on "political poetry"and now, today, am re-reading Adrienne Rich's poem, "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children" which has an epigraph from Berrigan, who figures in the OBAP.
What is political poetry? Should not all poetry be in some way, of, for, about the people? Which audience does it reach? The OBoAP gives examples of experiments beyond slammers, renegades, unbearables...some is outrageous. Some political poems are lyrical rage shaped for consumption and what Kenneth Patchen calls poems written in the evening of the two-fisted prayer. Some are merely personal diaries of frustration.
In the OBoAP there are poems which address the difficulty of being identified as American where you don’t feel like the American who is providing a reputation for you. There is George Tsongas imagining a summary of America this way: “The States” – It’s an/ amazing /place, where/ no one enjoys// life// but they/all want/to live/forever. There are snapshots of McDonalds, poems which look at abstract art, fortune cookies and Woody Woodpecker and Barbie. Poems which explain living on the edge, and embrace NOW is THEN’S only tomorrow. There is Father Daniel Berrigan next to mention of drunkard Jack Kerouac and Burroughs who shot his wife. A short poem about relationship by Ken Kesey (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) next to French rebel Rimbaud ressurected to see the dentist.
Adrienne Rich started her political activism in the mid 50's -- and has lived an authentic life, with hope that her words serve truth. Not only did she believe art and politics could co-exist, but must co-exist. She considered herself a socialist because "socialism represents moral value - the dignity and human rights of all citizens," she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. "That is, the resources of a society should be shared and the wealth redistributed as widely as possible."
**In 2006, Adrienne Rich published an essay “Legislators of the World” in The Guardian saying, “In our dark times we need poetry more than ever." I enclose the entire text below.
In “The Defence of Poetry” 1821, Shelley claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. This has been taken to suggest that simply by virtue of composing verse, poets exert some exemplary moral power – in a vague unthreatening way. In fact, in his earlier political essay, “A Philosophic View of Reform,” Shelley had written that “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged” etc. The philosophers he was talking about were revolutionary-minded: Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft.
And Shelley was, no mistake, out to change the legislation of his time. For him there was no contradiction between poetry, political philosophy, and active confrontation with illegitimate authority. For him, art bore an integral relationship to the “struggle between Revolution and Oppression”. His “West Wind” was the “trumpet of a prophecy”, driving “dead thoughts … like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth”.
I’m both a poet and one of the “everybodies” of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire. I hope never to idealise poetry – it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Poems for March 28
Spring has come with a frightful fever this year...but perhaps we can take a second look at how words have penned spring, using "pantoum technique", just slightly shifting the rules. Bears, Belgian Mares, moths and questions about good/s.
The Pantoum Says Everything Twice -- Jaime Warburton
TO BORROW RADIANCE by Dianna Henning
March by James Wright
Spring -- by Mary Oliver
Goods -- Wendell Berry
Ode to the Hebrew Letter “Chet” by Maya Pindyck
The Pantoum Says Everything Twice -- Jaime Warburton
TO BORROW RADIANCE by Dianna Henning
March by James Wright
Spring -- by Mary Oliver
Goods -- Wendell Berry
Ode to the Hebrew Letter “Chet” by Maya Pindyck
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
First day of Spring... Confederate, Union, Endangered species, a little rap in your shakespeare and yes, no, maybe...
Today, we started off, re-reading the Tate — and I made a few comments about the ode, as a way of looking at something from different angles,
and Tate's curious way of using words in unexpected combinations which stripped them of their implications. In my scribbles to myself I had jotted down something about the afterlife of poems -- what it is that
1) after reading the poem, re-reading it, you still like it?
2) you feel you have gone nowhere, and feel embarrassed (for the poem, or yourself)
3) you come to a sense of impasse
For the poems today, luckily, it felt like #1 .
How much one might need or want to know about the author, the time, is sometimes not as interesting as the "frames" that other people bring -- so it was special that today, the group presented me with a special thank you bookmark, treats, and Maura brought in seeds of Blackberry Lily for everyone. We all are thankful for the "seeds" planted in our discussions.
Back to Tate and the Confederate Dead:
His eye roves over place and time. It is autumn,and the leaves return 4 times. It took 15 of us to read it, one stanza at a time, including the 4 couplets. The slight changes in the refrain increase in intensity, the leaves, first "flying, plunge";there does not seem to be a relationship between what happens before or after the refrain. The second refrain, "flying, they plunge and expire"; (following a stanza that repeats "you know" three times, there is an idea that "you" is engaged, and the poem tells you "turn your eyes to the immoderate past". The third refrain follows the result -- "you will curse the setting sun." The refrain now has "you" cursing, and the "leaves are crying". Following by an aural engagement -- a contrast of a mute "you", (a mummy, in time), with the moribund female hound. The final refrain uses the first person plural and predicts how we will explain what the leaves do.
What shall we say? What shall we do with the act? And the poem ends with an indented line, starting with "Leave now", followed by four lines -- and this marvellous image of a snake, who "riots with his tongue through the hush" (although we cannot hear the words of a snake), this snake, the sentinel who will count us too, when we join the dead.
The more I read this poem, the more I admire its tension of unusual juxtapositions -- for instance the "brute curiosity" of an angel's stare, which (like Medusa) turns you to stone... the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze /of the sky... A perfect place to introduce Zeno and Parmenides-- for how are we to understand man?
In the Lowell, it is not so much the diction as his way of combining a checkerboard of impressions, starting with the demolition of the Boston Aquarium, and sight of the St. Gaudens Civil war relief, combining child/man, history/modern times… leaving us to question war, and what it is to "serve the republic".
The 17 quatrains gallop along; a predominant sibilance, repetition of fish, loss.
The almost comic mention of yellow dinosaurs who will deal the work of the modern,
grunting and gouging to make a garage followed by the comparison of parking spaces luxiating like civic/ sandpiles" and Puritan-pumpkin girders. Finally in the 7th stanza, we see the connection with the Union Dead. Snapshots of history and this idea of the final burial ditch, and the lingering image of giant finned cars --
the fish are "free" or disappeared; our society slides by on grease... are we part of a savage servility? What is it we have done, think we have done, what is it we will do? Will it be more of the same, repeating over and over?
For fun, we just listened to the Jayne Cortez and rapping sonnet — the fun of interpretation as an oral art…
Ending with the Stafford. The more personal we can make our examples, the more chance is that we strike a universal…
and Tate's curious way of using words in unexpected combinations which stripped them of their implications. In my scribbles to myself I had jotted down something about the afterlife of poems -- what it is that
1) after reading the poem, re-reading it, you still like it?
2) you feel you have gone nowhere, and feel embarrassed (for the poem, or yourself)
3) you come to a sense of impasse
For the poems today, luckily, it felt like #1 .
How much one might need or want to know about the author, the time, is sometimes not as interesting as the "frames" that other people bring -- so it was special that today, the group presented me with a special thank you bookmark, treats, and Maura brought in seeds of Blackberry Lily for everyone. We all are thankful for the "seeds" planted in our discussions.
Back to Tate and the Confederate Dead:
His eye roves over place and time. It is autumn,and the leaves return 4 times. It took 15 of us to read it, one stanza at a time, including the 4 couplets. The slight changes in the refrain increase in intensity, the leaves, first "flying, plunge";there does not seem to be a relationship between what happens before or after the refrain. The second refrain, "flying, they plunge and expire"; (following a stanza that repeats "you know" three times, there is an idea that "you" is engaged, and the poem tells you "turn your eyes to the immoderate past". The third refrain follows the result -- "you will curse the setting sun." The refrain now has "you" cursing, and the "leaves are crying". Following by an aural engagement -- a contrast of a mute "you", (a mummy, in time), with the moribund female hound. The final refrain uses the first person plural and predicts how we will explain what the leaves do.
What shall we say? What shall we do with the act? And the poem ends with an indented line, starting with "Leave now", followed by four lines -- and this marvellous image of a snake, who "riots with his tongue through the hush" (although we cannot hear the words of a snake), this snake, the sentinel who will count us too, when we join the dead.
The more I read this poem, the more I admire its tension of unusual juxtapositions -- for instance the "brute curiosity" of an angel's stare, which (like Medusa) turns you to stone... the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze /of the sky... A perfect place to introduce Zeno and Parmenides-- for how are we to understand man?
In the Lowell, it is not so much the diction as his way of combining a checkerboard of impressions, starting with the demolition of the Boston Aquarium, and sight of the St. Gaudens Civil war relief, combining child/man, history/modern times… leaving us to question war, and what it is to "serve the republic".
The 17 quatrains gallop along; a predominant sibilance, repetition of fish, loss.
The almost comic mention of yellow dinosaurs who will deal the work of the modern,
grunting and gouging to make a garage followed by the comparison of parking spaces luxiating like civic/ sandpiles" and Puritan-pumpkin girders. Finally in the 7th stanza, we see the connection with the Union Dead. Snapshots of history and this idea of the final burial ditch, and the lingering image of giant finned cars --
the fish are "free" or disappeared; our society slides by on grease... are we part of a savage servility? What is it we have done, think we have done, what is it we will do? Will it be more of the same, repeating over and over?
For fun, we just listened to the Jayne Cortez and rapping sonnet — the fun of interpretation as an oral art…
Ending with the Stafford. The more personal we can make our examples, the more chance is that we strike a universal…
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
NeMLA Conference, 15-18 March, 2012Rochester, NY
Almost 200 pages of offerings... different languages, special readings, etc.
Hosted by St. John Fisher College.
A Sampling...Will I remember much about :
”Dissecting the Lower Sensorium: smell, taste and touch in the Renaissance” (p. 38 of the 191 page catalogue)... well... I can look up my notes on smell, taste and how to tongue kisses, but I rather think it isn’t a priority...
Object Lessons: The Thingly Realm in Modern Literature (and fetishism)
the Ambiguous Prose poem... and how the prose poem's muscles work without line breaks with edginess... and humor, words as moments in air... “Verse, Prose and Vertigo: Crossing Common –Rooted Parallel Roads in the Slot of Meanwhile”. (Bergson’s idea. Time is rolling. not chopped into instants.)
A delightful dialogue between the personnifications of Prose and Poetry by Joseph Scapellato, Jaime Walburton's pantoum, where things are repeated, but not quite in the same way.
The highlight for me was "Art and American Literature: informing perceptions".
The yellow Wallpaper as modern art; Futurism and E.E. Cummings; White Noise and the Supermarket Aesthetic. Another entry on all this another time.
A little French rejuvenation with L'encre et l'ecran a l'oeuvre: learning the vocabulary of all the "diegetique" or voices used for narration -- perhaps a speaker overlaid on the character, an echo, a thought, etc. role of Bande Dessinee and sound, film as rolling novel... the visual and aural interplay in Marcel Pagnol
and how film adaptation pushes theatre and words to new dimensions by visual support that goes beyond the stage... but that meant missing p 117 21st century identities, experiences, landscapes, landscrapes, apostrophes, odes, ekphrasis...
Novel as Threat, Therapy : 3 articulate presentations on the novel, accused of harboring imagination, Gide's "anti-roman" and the problem of truth-bending...
Wonderful poems read by M.J. Iuppa, Sarah Freleigh; B.K. Fisher with art by Alice Neel. Steven Huff's prose poems.
Then there are all the sessions I didn’t attend:
Language contact; something imagined, not recalled; Aphorism in the moment and across time; Burrough’s “Poetics of Sampling”; “My ‘pen’ is my “tongue”: the voice of Jane Grey Swisshelm in the Pittsburg Saturday Visitor”; comparitive praxis in the humanities;
making sense(s) of William Blake; “Are the Tulips Angry: modernism’s nature;
Image and language: Godard and the problem of expression.
Oh. how to feel quite small. It would be nice to read Calasso "La Litteratura e gli Dei" - about the vedic sense of the syllable, ces molécules sonores dont est dit que "ce qui est un nombre pour les hommes, pour les dieux est une syllable". "La syllable (aksara) est une vibration irréductible ,qui précede la signification, mais ne se laise pas absorbée en elle". Elle seule peut établir la continuité du temps, sans laquelle on "se retrouve dans un état de dispersion irréductible dont la peur est plus radicale que la peur de la mort".
Play Brahms Piano Quintet the way we heard it last night ... early music applications of attack, metrical license… subtle and exquisite
so much more.
Hosted by St. John Fisher College.
A Sampling...Will I remember much about :
”Dissecting the Lower Sensorium: smell, taste and touch in the Renaissance” (p. 38 of the 191 page catalogue)... well... I can look up my notes on smell, taste and how to tongue kisses, but I rather think it isn’t a priority...
Object Lessons: The Thingly Realm in Modern Literature (and fetishism)
the Ambiguous Prose poem... and how the prose poem's muscles work without line breaks with edginess... and humor, words as moments in air... “Verse, Prose and Vertigo: Crossing Common –Rooted Parallel Roads in the Slot of Meanwhile”. (Bergson’s idea. Time is rolling. not chopped into instants.)
A delightful dialogue between the personnifications of Prose and Poetry by Joseph Scapellato, Jaime Walburton's pantoum, where things are repeated, but not quite in the same way.
The highlight for me was "Art and American Literature: informing perceptions".
The yellow Wallpaper as modern art; Futurism and E.E. Cummings; White Noise and the Supermarket Aesthetic. Another entry on all this another time.
A little French rejuvenation with L'encre et l'ecran a l'oeuvre: learning the vocabulary of all the "diegetique" or voices used for narration -- perhaps a speaker overlaid on the character, an echo, a thought, etc. role of Bande Dessinee and sound, film as rolling novel... the visual and aural interplay in Marcel Pagnol
and how film adaptation pushes theatre and words to new dimensions by visual support that goes beyond the stage... but that meant missing p 117 21st century identities, experiences, landscapes, landscrapes, apostrophes, odes, ekphrasis...
Novel as Threat, Therapy : 3 articulate presentations on the novel, accused of harboring imagination, Gide's "anti-roman" and the problem of truth-bending...
Wonderful poems read by M.J. Iuppa, Sarah Freleigh; B.K. Fisher with art by Alice Neel. Steven Huff's prose poems.
Then there are all the sessions I didn’t attend:
Language contact; something imagined, not recalled; Aphorism in the moment and across time; Burrough’s “Poetics of Sampling”; “My ‘pen’ is my “tongue”: the voice of Jane Grey Swisshelm in the Pittsburg Saturday Visitor”; comparitive praxis in the humanities;
making sense(s) of William Blake; “Are the Tulips Angry: modernism’s nature;
Image and language: Godard and the problem of expression.
Oh. how to feel quite small. It would be nice to read Calasso "La Litteratura e gli Dei" - about the vedic sense of the syllable, ces molécules sonores dont est dit que "ce qui est un nombre pour les hommes, pour les dieux est une syllable". "La syllable (aksara) est une vibration irréductible ,qui précede la signification, mais ne se laise pas absorbée en elle". Elle seule peut établir la continuité du temps, sans laquelle on "se retrouve dans un état de dispersion irréductible dont la peur est plus radicale que la peur de la mort".
Play Brahms Piano Quintet the way we heard it last night ... early music applications of attack, metrical license… subtle and exquisite
so much more.
Giovanni, Clifton, and Allen Tate (March 14 tbc 3/21)
Our session today allowed a glimpse of context and associations each of us bring to a poem from our background and experience. Just as reading a poem line by line gives a different feel from reading a poem sentence by sentence, stanza by stanza, so does knowing the time period, information about the author, information about references within the poem. This adds different lenses to our understanding. (This. This. This.)
Today, it came up that Lucille Clifton had an extra finger on each hand, which for some gives authority to this “Larger self” in It was a dream. Jim brought up the story of the black and white girl called Jackie and Esther, as the poem “Survival is it’s own Revenge”is dedicated to Jackie and Esther, although we can’t be certain they are the same. Martin made a connection between the possibility of the author coming from Africa and keeping the original voice alive.
No one made a connection with possum for the lowest animal on the totem pole, often ridiculed in Negro spirituals and stories, (not to mention the final P, the 53rd Governor of Mississippi, White surpremicist Paul B.Johnston, jr. used to explain the initials of N.A.A.C.P. (Niggers, alligators, apes, coons, and possums.) However, no matter what connection, I loved how Giovvani used her edge of ironic humor, and how the last word “and live” could be referring to her, as well as that wet leaf. Humor is an effective tool here, for hinting at something more serious than roadkill.
Jumping to Allen Tate’s poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead brought up discussion of slavery and the civil war and a host of reactions.
Tate, was considered the firebrand of the Fugitives (group started in 1922 in the South) and considered that a good poem relied on craftsmanship. A fine satirist and critic, he prided himself in an almost baroque metaphysical poetry, using words in unexpected combinations, stripped of their usual shades of meaning, implications...
Does knowing this help you read his Ode to the Confederate Dead differently?
Does it help to know what an Ode is?
I paraphrase it this way: it is a lyric poem which holds up a person, place, thing, or idea
like a prism to catch as many angles as possible to bring to light.
Next week, we will briefly resume our discussion of Tate.
Perhaps it might help you to appreciate his crafting of irregular stanzaic patterns, the repetitions. Do you see any set up (by the words or their position )of sacrifice?
How do the 4 couplets, work? What recurrence beside “stone/s, slab, vocabulary of the dead and graveyard, strike you? What other unusual rhyming of words such as : riven troughs (pronounced trawffs – (the open o a bit shorter than aw: http://visual.merriam-webster.com/pronunciation.php?id=earth/geology/00127&title=trough
and sough: usually pronounced (suffs): http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=sough
What ironic transformation does the last word, first line, impunity adopt in the second line? Is erasure of name, for fallen soldiers, often cut down in their prime, weathering of tombstone really to “be exempt from punishment”?
What effect does the implied paradox seasonal eternity have?
Usually it is the wind that soughs but here it is the stone.
2nd stanza, line 6: humors of the year may well refer as subtext to the 4 humors, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Temperaments
immitigable pines: rare adj. which does not define a living tree.
( unable to be mitigated; relentless; unappeasable)
A few more combinations which strike me.
inscrutable infantry? (What is impenetrable, impossible to understand about soldiers trained to fight on foot?)
saltier oblivion (sea) juxtaposed with salt of their blood sealing...
ribboned coats of grim felicity...
verduous anonymity (young, blooming green) – see 3 lines from end the gentle green serpent
Today, it came up that Lucille Clifton had an extra finger on each hand, which for some gives authority to this “Larger self” in It was a dream. Jim brought up the story of the black and white girl called Jackie and Esther, as the poem “Survival is it’s own Revenge”is dedicated to Jackie and Esther, although we can’t be certain they are the same. Martin made a connection between the possibility of the author coming from Africa and keeping the original voice alive.
No one made a connection with possum for the lowest animal on the totem pole, often ridiculed in Negro spirituals and stories, (not to mention the final P, the 53rd Governor of Mississippi, White surpremicist Paul B.Johnston, jr. used to explain the initials of N.A.A.C.P. (Niggers, alligators, apes, coons, and possums.) However, no matter what connection, I loved how Giovvani used her edge of ironic humor, and how the last word “and live” could be referring to her, as well as that wet leaf. Humor is an effective tool here, for hinting at something more serious than roadkill.
Jumping to Allen Tate’s poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead brought up discussion of slavery and the civil war and a host of reactions.
Tate, was considered the firebrand of the Fugitives (group started in 1922 in the South) and considered that a good poem relied on craftsmanship. A fine satirist and critic, he prided himself in an almost baroque metaphysical poetry, using words in unexpected combinations, stripped of their usual shades of meaning, implications...
Does knowing this help you read his Ode to the Confederate Dead differently?
Does it help to know what an Ode is?
I paraphrase it this way: it is a lyric poem which holds up a person, place, thing, or idea
like a prism to catch as many angles as possible to bring to light.
Next week, we will briefly resume our discussion of Tate.
Perhaps it might help you to appreciate his crafting of irregular stanzaic patterns, the repetitions. Do you see any set up (by the words or their position )of sacrifice?
How do the 4 couplets, work? What recurrence beside “stone/s, slab, vocabulary of the dead and graveyard, strike you? What other unusual rhyming of words such as : riven troughs (pronounced trawffs – (the open o a bit shorter than aw: http://visual.merriam-webster.com/pronunciation.php?id=earth/geology/00127&title=trough
and sough: usually pronounced (suffs): http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=sough
What ironic transformation does the last word, first line, impunity adopt in the second line? Is erasure of name, for fallen soldiers, often cut down in their prime, weathering of tombstone really to “be exempt from punishment”?
What effect does the implied paradox seasonal eternity have?
Usually it is the wind that soughs but here it is the stone.
2nd stanza, line 6: humors of the year may well refer as subtext to the 4 humors, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Temperaments
immitigable pines: rare adj. which does not define a living tree.
( unable to be mitigated; relentless; unappeasable)
A few more combinations which strike me.
inscrutable infantry? (What is impenetrable, impossible to understand about soldiers trained to fight on foot?)
saltier oblivion (sea) juxtaposed with salt of their blood sealing...
ribboned coats of grim felicity...
verduous anonymity (young, blooming green) – see 3 lines from end the gentle green serpent
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
poems for March 21: poetry read vs. read outloud -- shakespeare and rap!
Poems for March 21:
Two poems with a link to hear them outloud; one poem to remind us why we read to/with each other; two links for context to Tate and Lowell for those who want them. Note: I do not expect this to be an academic class, but rather a gathering to share observations of, and provoked by the poems.
a) Endangered Species List: by Jayne Cortez
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kes2zG6ZzUw
b) Sonnet 147 (Shakespeare) in free-style rap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n1zhbEwK4I
c) Ritual to Read to Each other: William Stafford
Two links to context for Tate and Lowell.Tate Ode to the Confederate Dead; and Lowell: For the Union Dead.
We as readers are in search of our stories. Context allows us to see our lives in the situations painted. Dobyns in Next Word, Better Word in his chapter about context and causality sums up the written text as a series of effect on the page, and a series of causes
off the page. Below two links to commentaries:
a) Commentary by Edward Hirsch on Ode to the Confederate Dead:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/tate/ode.html
b) For the Union Dead -- by Robert Lowell
“I'm after invention rather than memory” – Lowell
For those who want context for Lowell’s poem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Union_Dead
**
Two poems with a link to hear them outloud; one poem to remind us why we read to/with each other; two links for context to Tate and Lowell for those who want them. Note: I do not expect this to be an academic class, but rather a gathering to share observations of, and provoked by the poems.
a) Endangered Species List: by Jayne Cortez
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kes2zG6ZzUw
b) Sonnet 147 (Shakespeare) in free-style rap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n1zhbEwK4I
c) Ritual to Read to Each other: William Stafford
Two links to context for Tate and Lowell.Tate Ode to the Confederate Dead; and Lowell: For the Union Dead.
We as readers are in search of our stories. Context allows us to see our lives in the situations painted. Dobyns in Next Word, Better Word in his chapter about context and causality sums up the written text as a series of effect on the page, and a series of causes
off the page. Below two links to commentaries:
a) Commentary by Edward Hirsch on Ode to the Confederate Dead:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/tate/ode.html
b) For the Union Dead -- by Robert Lowell
“I'm after invention rather than memory” – Lowell
For those who want context for Lowell’s poem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Union_Dead
**
Thursday, March 8, 2012
poems for March 14
Beware the Ides of March --
Possum Crossing by Nikki Giovanni(6/7/1943
It was a dream by Lucille Clifton (6/27/1936 Depew, New York – 2/13/2010 )
Survival is Its Own Revenge by Akua Lezli Hope (https://www.rochestervi.com/content/rocoetry™-presents-local-poet-akua-lezli-hope
Ode to the Confederate Dead – Allen Tate (1899-1979)
For the Union Dead -- Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Three black women, two DWM (Dead White Men), one a Fugitive poet, who believes that
craftsmanship has to reveal itself as craftsmanship, not art that conceals art, the other a confessional poet. Are these poems timeless? What lines jump out with energy to grab you now in 2012?
Discussion:
Dear O-pen-ers from today!!
I will send out an email to all participants and next week's poem, but have bcc'd all those present today. I was pleased to see so much discussion carrying on after our very short hour and in the spirit of discussion share more below. Feel free to comment to me.
Our session today allowed a glimpse of context and associations each of us bring to a poem from our background and experience. Just as reading a poem line by line gives a different feel from reading a poem sentence by sentence, stanza by stanza, so does knowing the time period, information about the author, information about references within the poem. This adds different lenses to our understanding. (This. This. This.)
Today, it came up that Lucille Clifton had an extra finger on each hand, which for some gives authority to this “Larger self” in It was a dream. Jim brought up the story of the black and white girl called Jackie and Esther, as the poem “Survival is it’s own Revenge”is dedicated to Jackie and Esther, although we can’t be certain they are the same. Martin made a connection between the possibility of the author coming from Africa and keeping the original voice alive.
No one made a connection with possum for the lowest animal on the totem pole, often ridiculed in Negro spirituals and stories, (not to mention the final P, the 53rd Governor of Mississippi, White surpremicist Paul B.Johnston, jr. used to explain the initials of N.A.A.C.P. (Niggers, alligators, apes, coons, and possums.) However, no matter what connection, I loved how Giovvani used her edge of ironic humor, and how the last word “and live” could be referring to her, as well as that wet leaf. Humor is an effective tool here, for hinting at something more serious than roadkill.
Jumping to Allen Tate’s poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead brought up discussion of slavery and the civil war and a host of reactions.
Tate, was considered the firebrand of the Fugitives (group started in 1922 in the South) and considered that a good poem relied on craftsmanship. A fine satirist and critic, he prided himself in an almost baroque metaphysical poetry, using words in unexpected combinations, stripped of their usual shades of meaning, implications...
Does knowing this help you read his Ode to the Confederate Dead differently?
Does it help to know what an Ode is?
I paraphrase it this way: it is a lyric poem which holds up a person, place, thing, or idea
like a prism to catch as many angles as possible to bring to light.
Next week, we will briefly resume our discussion of Tate.
Perhaps it might help you to appreciate his crafting of irregular stanzaic patterns, the repetitions. Do you see any set up (by the words or their position )of sacrifice?
How do the 4 couplets, work? What recurrence beside “stone/s, slab, vocabulary of the dead and graveyard, strike you? What other unusual rhyming of words such as : riven troughs (pronounced trawffs – (the open o a bit shorter than aw: http://visual.merriam-webster.com/pronunciation.php?id=earth/geology/00127&title=trough
and sough: usually pronounced (suffs): http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=sough
What ironic transformation does the last word, first line, impunity adopt in the second line? Is erasure of name, for fallen soldiers, often cut down in their prime, weathering of tombstone really to “be exempt from punishment”?
What effect does the implied paradox seasonal eternity have?
Usually it is the wind that soughs but here it is the stone.
2nd stanza, line 6: humors of the year may well refer as subtext to the 4 humors, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Temperaments
immitigable pines: rare adj. which does not define a living tree.
( unable to be mitigated; relentless; unappeasable)
A few more combinations which strike me.
inscrutable infantry? (What is impenetrable, impossible to understand about soldiers trained to fight on foot?)
saltier oblivion (sea) juxtaposed with salt of their blood sealing...
ribboned coats of grim felicity...
verduous anonymity (young, blooming green) – see 3 lines from end the gentle green serpent
Thank you all for your insights!
Possum Crossing by Nikki Giovanni(6/7/1943
It was a dream by Lucille Clifton (6/27/1936 Depew, New York – 2/13/2010 )
Survival is Its Own Revenge by Akua Lezli Hope (https://www.rochestervi.com/content/rocoetry™-presents-local-poet-akua-lezli-hope
Ode to the Confederate Dead – Allen Tate (1899-1979)
For the Union Dead -- Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Three black women, two DWM (Dead White Men), one a Fugitive poet, who believes that
craftsmanship has to reveal itself as craftsmanship, not art that conceals art, the other a confessional poet. Are these poems timeless? What lines jump out with energy to grab you now in 2012?
Discussion:
Dear O-pen-ers from today!!
I will send out an email to all participants and next week's poem, but have bcc'd all those present today. I was pleased to see so much discussion carrying on after our very short hour and in the spirit of discussion share more below. Feel free to comment to me.
Our session today allowed a glimpse of context and associations each of us bring to a poem from our background and experience. Just as reading a poem line by line gives a different feel from reading a poem sentence by sentence, stanza by stanza, so does knowing the time period, information about the author, information about references within the poem. This adds different lenses to our understanding. (This. This. This.)
Today, it came up that Lucille Clifton had an extra finger on each hand, which for some gives authority to this “Larger self” in It was a dream. Jim brought up the story of the black and white girl called Jackie and Esther, as the poem “Survival is it’s own Revenge”is dedicated to Jackie and Esther, although we can’t be certain they are the same. Martin made a connection between the possibility of the author coming from Africa and keeping the original voice alive.
No one made a connection with possum for the lowest animal on the totem pole, often ridiculed in Negro spirituals and stories, (not to mention the final P, the 53rd Governor of Mississippi, White surpremicist Paul B.Johnston, jr. used to explain the initials of N.A.A.C.P. (Niggers, alligators, apes, coons, and possums.) However, no matter what connection, I loved how Giovvani used her edge of ironic humor, and how the last word “and live” could be referring to her, as well as that wet leaf. Humor is an effective tool here, for hinting at something more serious than roadkill.
Jumping to Allen Tate’s poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead brought up discussion of slavery and the civil war and a host of reactions.
Tate, was considered the firebrand of the Fugitives (group started in 1922 in the South) and considered that a good poem relied on craftsmanship. A fine satirist and critic, he prided himself in an almost baroque metaphysical poetry, using words in unexpected combinations, stripped of their usual shades of meaning, implications...
Does knowing this help you read his Ode to the Confederate Dead differently?
Does it help to know what an Ode is?
I paraphrase it this way: it is a lyric poem which holds up a person, place, thing, or idea
like a prism to catch as many angles as possible to bring to light.
Next week, we will briefly resume our discussion of Tate.
Perhaps it might help you to appreciate his crafting of irregular stanzaic patterns, the repetitions. Do you see any set up (by the words or their position )of sacrifice?
How do the 4 couplets, work? What recurrence beside “stone/s, slab, vocabulary of the dead and graveyard, strike you? What other unusual rhyming of words such as : riven troughs (pronounced trawffs – (the open o a bit shorter than aw: http://visual.merriam-webster.com/pronunciation.php?id=earth/geology/00127&title=trough
and sough: usually pronounced (suffs): http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=sough
What ironic transformation does the last word, first line, impunity adopt in the second line? Is erasure of name, for fallen soldiers, often cut down in their prime, weathering of tombstone really to “be exempt from punishment”?
What effect does the implied paradox seasonal eternity have?
Usually it is the wind that soughs but here it is the stone.
2nd stanza, line 6: humors of the year may well refer as subtext to the 4 humors, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Temperaments
immitigable pines: rare adj. which does not define a living tree.
( unable to be mitigated; relentless; unappeasable)
A few more combinations which strike me.
inscrutable infantry? (What is impenetrable, impossible to understand about soldiers trained to fight on foot?)
saltier oblivion (sea) juxtaposed with salt of their blood sealing...
ribboned coats of grim felicity...
verduous anonymity (young, blooming green) – see 3 lines from end the gentle green serpent
Thank you all for your insights!
Thursday, March 1, 2012
March 7
Poems for March 7, 2012
The Frog – Hillaire Belloc
Rose Colored Glasses – by Kenneth Rexroth
Dedication: Poems by Ben Lerner
Three Dog Night" by Faith Shearin
**
March may well come in like a lion, but April Fool’s is as much at work this month as the next. Here’s a bit of humor, some rose-colored glasses for Springtime in Paris, and some contemporary angles which could be Rochester.
The Frog – Hillaire Belloc
Rose Colored Glasses – by Kenneth Rexroth
Dedication: Poems by Ben Lerner
Three Dog Night" by Faith Shearin
**
March may well come in like a lion, but April Fool’s is as much at work this month as the next. Here’s a bit of humor, some rose-colored glasses for Springtime in Paris, and some contemporary angles which could be Rochester.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)