Excerpts fom the Pope in St. Lucia by Laurence Lieberman (p. 38-40 APR)
Writers Writing Dying by C.K. Williams (p. 46, APR)
Full Moon and Little Frieda by Ted Hughes
American Wedding by Joseph Millar
Facts about the Moon -- Dorianne Laux
Don't miss Dorianne's reading at the MAG (part of BOA's wine and dine) 3 pm,
Sunday September 23.
Although we only had excerpts of a very long poem, Lieberman gives us a snapshot of Dunstan St. Omer and refers to the cathedral he prepared for the pope’s visit to St. Lucia,
some refer to as an undertaking as daunting as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. I had little knowledge of Carribean culture, aside Derek Walcott’s “Omeros”, nor much knowledge of Lieberman, who says that His goal as poet and traveller is to 'take in my hands, all, all! that I touch! and leave/ no fingerprints. No signature.'
In the small example provided, certainly this is true. We have a snapshot about a situation, and learn something about the man whose hands will restore the peeling murals. Lieberman paints a scene where the artist’s soul wrestles with God – but it is only reading more about St. Omer, that I found out he was the first to paint Christ as a black man, to make him accessible to the West Indian people living Castries.
For more about St. Omer: http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-13/hail-mary-art-dunstan-st-omer.
Lieberman uses a rolling line, which surges like the sea in the “three unveilings”, as it tells the story of the painter, the painting, and what it is to paint the house of God.
The next selection, of CK Williams’ prose poem, Writers Writing Dying engages us with a vernacular wit that makes a serious subject (how we spend our lives before we die) an accessibly interesting subject. The title alone gives pause for thought: Is is writers writing the word “dying”;
writers engaged in producing writing, with an obviated “about” before dying... or perhaps a triumvirate of writers, writing and dying, or any combination thereof? In the opening paragraph, composed of two sentences, Williams employs a dash – followed by a humorous and long commentary on the reaction of a person who died while sleeping which of course, is an exercise in imagination— a projection on the part of the writer, of the position of the now dead person’s voice. I am reminded of the Oliver Herford poem, “The Elf and the Dormouse” where an elf gaily absconds with a mushroom as umbrella, under which a dormouse was protectedly sleeping. “"Where is my toadstool?" loud he lamented.” arrives in the penultimate couplet. see: http://www.bartleby.com/104/28.html (1)
Of course, Williams carries the lament further, with a delightful image of rubber gloves, and human nature idealizing the “way we want to go”.
“and never forgiven the death they’d construed for themselves
being stolen from them so rudely, so crudely, without feeling themselves like rubber gloves
stickily stripped from the innermostness they’d contrived to hoard for themselves.”
The poem sallies forth, ending on a note like Li Po’s poem about Chuang-zu and the butterfly and the fun of wondering whether one is the man dreaming he becomes a butterfly, or butterfly becoming Chuang-zu at waking.
See poem here: http://www.the-professor-mon.com/general-taoism/PoetryLiPo.html (2)
The ending words, “what for” has the same feel as the “so what” – and Williams ends on a note of celebration for the fun of writing – which is the way we defy dying, which we are doing of course, while living.
Since Williams had referred to writers, coupling Sylvia Plath/Hart Crane, whose suicides deprive us of more stanzas they might have written, the next poem provides a snapshot of Plath’s daughter and husband. We questioned the lines in the second stanza that bridge the cows going home and the exclamation of “moon” by little Frieda: “A dark river of blood, many boulders, /Balancing unspilled milk.” which act rather like a separation between visible (daylight) of familiar (cows) and the not yet that we cannot foresee and the mysterious (moon, which has the sound of a cow, closed by an “n” ).
Joe Millar’s poem is packed with nouns that paint a dancing portrait of a family at a wedding that has nothing static or posed. One adjective that stood out, plangent, has a double edge to its meaning: both loud and reverberating, and expressive, plaintive. It’s dropped in the opening part of the poem like the Yiddish words in the opening line, and the Ketubah that follows. The image “unschooled like a map of the world” works for both the father-observer, and the new couple who have yet to discover what the promise means to them.
Eating, listening, observing, and two stanzas of what their future might entail, (with humorous details that the father knows from experience... ) lead to the final stanza where everything is swallowed whole. The moon isn’t just any moon, but speckled, torn, hinting at the emotion of the father giving away his daughter in marriage. The moonlight, the perfume of the rose on his “worsted” lapel where “worst” and “stead” combine sounds with material all twist like the worsted: yarn or thread spun from combed, stapled wool fibers of the same length. And yes, as reader, one swallows the nuptial wine with confidence, ready to cheer the father about to “dance all night” on this occasion of two families woven together by a wedding.
To repeat the “blurbs”: "If you want the real news of how America lives, of what it's like to be here with us...Millar will tell you with exactitude and delicacy in poems like none you've read before. He knows a country, an America, that's been here all along waiting for its voice. It's time we listened." -Philip Levine
"Millar can ride a poem into some wildly imaginative territory, and he knows how to sound the blue note at just the right moment. His impulse is to tell a story, but he never forgets, as a poet, to tell it one line at a time." -Billy Collins
In honor of her upcoming reading on Sunday, we closed with “Facts about the Moon” by Dorianne Laux.
The title announces facts, and indeed, it starts with one which points to the impermanence of the moon’s position, and our own. The rhetorical vernacular, “What’s a person supposed to do” in response, allows
the reader to join in the vulnerability of being human, where life is rarely governed by fact.
The collective responsibility of “we” stands out by rejecting the attitude of “don’t worry about that”, and the petulant truth of the speaker’s opinion.
“And please don't tell me
what I already know, that it won't happen
for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we've done.”
The “secret pity for the moon” bridges into the empathy we owe anyone in trouble, and the moon turns into troubled mother. This allows the facts about the moon’s role as gravity regulator for oceans and poles, to take on new gravitas, where moon and mother have no choice but to accept the inevitable pull no matter if harboring the undeserving.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Friday, August 17, 2012
Poems for September 10
Pebble by Zbigniew Herbert
I’ll Explain Some Things by Pablo Neruda
Consolation and the Order of the World by Wright
two poems by Wislawa Szymborska: Everything;
A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth
Somethings, Say the Wise Ones by Mary Oliver
Thursday, August 16, 2012
poems for Aug. 27
Bruegel – by Paul Carroll
War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy
Two poems by Sherman Alexie
Dear Emily Dickinson; Curse #7 (p. 20, APR)
Studying Poetry 3,000 years from Now by Dara Wier (p. 31 APR)
Late Night TV by Dorianne Laux
Maura brought in Billy Collins' poem "Moon" -- reminding me of the power we have to "people our imagination" and not feel so lonely. Hello Moon -- let me introduce to you to a part of me, and put things into perspective. Delightful.
So was the first poem, "Bruegel" filled with vivid imagery (children cough and drop away like loose buttons), cold (magpies/thicken their feathers for the night) and hunger of winter under the endless green sky hanging like "a block of ice above/endless plots of snow, the sense of the precariousness of life, swinging like the sign by the inn, by one hinge. Without going into the suffering of the narrator, the painting of the Hunters by Brueghel reminds us that life was not easy then, much as we might idealize peasants dancing... Brueghel,
as title, is tribute to this genius who could paint "people caught in a breath, the death to come, hidden." Brilliant poem, where, to reference Mark Twain, the "lightening" is at work, not a mere description of lightening bug.
We remembered the uncertainty of Breughel's time... the massacre of the Innocents, the protestant revolt -- and this morning, hearing the massacre of more innocents in Syria... Interesting that Paul Carroll is dancer and lawyer, defending environmental rights... which perhaps are responsible for the hint of stilled movement and justice. into the nested layers. Carroll does not say "who is near the end" -- or who "we" represents linked to the Breughel painting -- but binds us all together with it.
**
Carol Duffy, British poet laureate captures the difficulty of being a war photographer -- how, to witness suffering, and in order to "do the job" be impassive. The etymology is interesting, coming from 1660s, "not feeling pain," the meaning "void of emotions" is from 1690s. Photographic vocabulary is a perfect metaphor -- for instance, the pain arriving in the "development", which Duffy captures: "Solutions slop in trays/beneath his hands which did not tremble then/
though seem to now." The poem goes on switching from war zone to two words: "Rural England. Home again/to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel" -- ordinary pain? The poem veers back to the emerging photo ("Something is happening") recalling the stranger caught in the photograph, the cries of his wife, the blood in the dust.
To juxtapose the "job" with human concerns hits with full force here: A hundred agonies in black-and-white/from which his editor will pick out five or six/
for Sunday's supplement.
The use of rhyme, (must/dust; tears/pre-lunch beers... where/care) reinforces job/feeling disparity.
Rich remembers Brahms Requiem and the lyrics "all grass disappears", and talk came up of the civil war...
Sherman Alexie is a refreshing poet -- able with a sense of humor which yet works like acid to carve out a point. We enjoyed imagining the world of Emily Dickinson, and the civil war, how "God-hungry" is also "God-defying"-- what did she know of what happened in the "greasy grass" oiled by guns, carts, men?
Curse #7, makes you wonder what the other curses are... did he write Curse #1-6?
What a brilliant move to make someone feel both sides where two wrongs have a chance to re-assess what needs to be right...
Dara Wier takes us through odd syntax to read through her lines a few times,
as if in a double-take. We started the discussion speaking of uncertainty, of negative capability... echoes of Auden's "Of suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters" -- but who are the "old Masters" we will remember next century, let alone next in the next millenium...
Dorianne Laux' poem has amazing turns, creating all the spooky "unrest" of late night, insinuating some TV but what is striking is the role of the "I" -- who has the power to make a creepy character disappear -- and then the choice:
" though if I do the darkness / will swallow me, drown me."
It is good to ponder "By what untraceable set of circumstances" the late night character on TV... simultaneously with the idea that
"Somewhere in the universe is a palace/ where each of us is imprinted with a map."
War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy
Two poems by Sherman Alexie
Dear Emily Dickinson; Curse #7 (p. 20, APR)
Studying Poetry 3,000 years from Now by Dara Wier (p. 31 APR)
Late Night TV by Dorianne Laux
Maura brought in Billy Collins' poem "Moon" -- reminding me of the power we have to "people our imagination" and not feel so lonely. Hello Moon -- let me introduce to you to a part of me, and put things into perspective. Delightful.
So was the first poem, "Bruegel" filled with vivid imagery (children cough and drop away like loose buttons), cold (magpies/thicken their feathers for the night) and hunger of winter under the endless green sky hanging like "a block of ice above/endless plots of snow, the sense of the precariousness of life, swinging like the sign by the inn, by one hinge. Without going into the suffering of the narrator, the painting of the Hunters by Brueghel reminds us that life was not easy then, much as we might idealize peasants dancing... Brueghel,
as title, is tribute to this genius who could paint "people caught in a breath, the death to come, hidden." Brilliant poem, where, to reference Mark Twain, the "lightening" is at work, not a mere description of lightening bug.
We remembered the uncertainty of Breughel's time... the massacre of the Innocents, the protestant revolt -- and this morning, hearing the massacre of more innocents in Syria... Interesting that Paul Carroll is dancer and lawyer, defending environmental rights... which perhaps are responsible for the hint of stilled movement and justice. into the nested layers. Carroll does not say "who is near the end" -- or who "we" represents linked to the Breughel painting -- but binds us all together with it.
**
Carol Duffy, British poet laureate captures the difficulty of being a war photographer -- how, to witness suffering, and in order to "do the job" be impassive. The etymology is interesting, coming from 1660s, "not feeling pain," the meaning "void of emotions" is from 1690s. Photographic vocabulary is a perfect metaphor -- for instance, the pain arriving in the "development", which Duffy captures: "Solutions slop in trays/beneath his hands which did not tremble then/
though seem to now." The poem goes on switching from war zone to two words: "Rural England. Home again/to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel" -- ordinary pain? The poem veers back to the emerging photo ("Something is happening") recalling the stranger caught in the photograph, the cries of his wife, the blood in the dust.
To juxtapose the "job" with human concerns hits with full force here: A hundred agonies in black-and-white/from which his editor will pick out five or six/
for Sunday's supplement.
The use of rhyme, (must/dust; tears/pre-lunch beers... where/care) reinforces job/feeling disparity.
Rich remembers Brahms Requiem and the lyrics "all grass disappears", and talk came up of the civil war...
Sherman Alexie is a refreshing poet -- able with a sense of humor which yet works like acid to carve out a point. We enjoyed imagining the world of Emily Dickinson, and the civil war, how "God-hungry" is also "God-defying"-- what did she know of what happened in the "greasy grass" oiled by guns, carts, men?
Curse #7, makes you wonder what the other curses are... did he write Curse #1-6?
What a brilliant move to make someone feel both sides where two wrongs have a chance to re-assess what needs to be right...
Dara Wier takes us through odd syntax to read through her lines a few times,
as if in a double-take. We started the discussion speaking of uncertainty, of negative capability... echoes of Auden's "Of suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters" -- but who are the "old Masters" we will remember next century, let alone next in the next millenium...
Dorianne Laux' poem has amazing turns, creating all the spooky "unrest" of late night, insinuating some TV but what is striking is the role of the "I" -- who has the power to make a creepy character disappear -- and then the choice:
" though if I do the darkness / will swallow me, drown me."
It is good to ponder "By what untraceable set of circumstances" the late night character on TV... simultaneously with the idea that
"Somewhere in the universe is a palace/ where each of us is imprinted with a map."
poems for Aug. 20
Wondrous by Sarah Freligh
Alphabets by Seamus Heaney
Alphabet Poem Skipping Rope by y.t.
two poems for the Olympic games
The Wrestler by Kazim Ali
Lifting by Ouyang Yu
Show and tell: July/Aug. 2012 APR p. 24-28
Four Hundred Men on the Cross
**
The poems today gave a chance to appreciate the weave of life over time through books, past history, the nature of knowledge, memory and the magic of imagination. After the Heaney poem Kathy had mentioned reading Tranströmer’s memoirs. I was reminded me of “Preludes” where Tranströmer says, “Two truths approach each other – one from inside the other from outside and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.”
Today’s discussion was like that. Sarah’s poem with the layering of story, the mother, the author of the story, a sort of elegiac math with the image of loss as multiplication, “ every subtraction is exponential”, “how each grief” (followed by line/stanza break...) multiplies the one preceding it. Wondrous as a fitting title for what makes us wonder, as well as the sense of awe of that which cannot be pinned down by fact and number.
I brought up the term, Sprezzatura, translated in various ways as rehearsed spontaneity, studied carelessness, well-practiced naturalness that lies at the center of persuasive discourse of any sort. It suits this poem.
Seamus Heaney’s poem with its range of tones, and times, does feel like a memoir, not of learning letters, or history, or a parading through latinate and anglo-saxon flavors of language, but a tribute to the power of imagination as a coping skill. As Martin said, “we are not genetically built for schools”.
Maura encouraged us to go to the Eastman house to see the alphabet in pictures (Neil Winokur’s “A to Z” portfolio) part of the exhibit “Untold Stories” which is showing until Sept. 16.
The two Olympic games poems brought forth ideas about sports, Olympics, games and much more. The beauty of “wordlifting” as a concept, of being "between the thing and gravity..." as David put it, or perhaps between idea and word... which calls to mind the bicycle series where the actual bicycle has been erased digitally, leaving only a suspended rider and the shadow of the bicycle. http://www.ignant.de/2012/07/17/floating/
Wrestling, from the sheer physicality of it, could also be metaphoric wrestling,
or relating, one person to another, one person to an idea. We ended with Longenbach's Mist Valley, two angles of August – which for a teacher means the last days before resuming school -- but for all of us perhaps, that time when the alphabet is ripe and waiting for harvest before we taste the soup of sounds, sense it makes.
What a wonderful group. So grateful for all the sharing of insights.
Alphabets by Seamus Heaney
Alphabet Poem Skipping Rope by y.t.
two poems for the Olympic games
The Wrestler by Kazim Ali
Lifting by Ouyang Yu
Show and tell: July/Aug. 2012 APR p. 24-28
Four Hundred Men on the Cross
**
The poems today gave a chance to appreciate the weave of life over time through books, past history, the nature of knowledge, memory and the magic of imagination. After the Heaney poem Kathy had mentioned reading Tranströmer’s memoirs. I was reminded me of “Preludes” where Tranströmer says, “Two truths approach each other – one from inside the other from outside and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.”
Today’s discussion was like that. Sarah’s poem with the layering of story, the mother, the author of the story, a sort of elegiac math with the image of loss as multiplication, “ every subtraction is exponential”, “how each grief” (followed by line/stanza break...) multiplies the one preceding it. Wondrous as a fitting title for what makes us wonder, as well as the sense of awe of that which cannot be pinned down by fact and number.
I brought up the term, Sprezzatura, translated in various ways as rehearsed spontaneity, studied carelessness, well-practiced naturalness that lies at the center of persuasive discourse of any sort. It suits this poem.
Seamus Heaney’s poem with its range of tones, and times, does feel like a memoir, not of learning letters, or history, or a parading through latinate and anglo-saxon flavors of language, but a tribute to the power of imagination as a coping skill. As Martin said, “we are not genetically built for schools”.
Maura encouraged us to go to the Eastman house to see the alphabet in pictures (Neil Winokur’s “A to Z” portfolio) part of the exhibit “Untold Stories” which is showing until Sept. 16.
The two Olympic games poems brought forth ideas about sports, Olympics, games and much more. The beauty of “wordlifting” as a concept, of being "between the thing and gravity..." as David put it, or perhaps between idea and word... which calls to mind the bicycle series where the actual bicycle has been erased digitally, leaving only a suspended rider and the shadow of the bicycle. http://www.ignant.de/2012/07/17/floating/
Wrestling, from the sheer physicality of it, could also be metaphoric wrestling,
or relating, one person to another, one person to an idea. We ended with Longenbach's Mist Valley, two angles of August – which for a teacher means the last days before resuming school -- but for all of us perhaps, that time when the alphabet is ripe and waiting for harvest before we taste the soup of sounds, sense it makes.
What a wonderful group. So grateful for all the sharing of insights.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Poems for August 13
Poems for August 13
Crossing Over By William Meredith
Only in Things -- W.S. di Piero
A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima) – by Jeanine Gailey
I could take -- by Hayden Carruth
After Television – by Hayden Carruth
A Mown Lawn by Lydia Davis
he first “sunbeam” quote in The Sun, August 2012 issue:
“Life is bitter and fatal, yet men cherish it and beget children to suffer the same fate.”
The poems discussed today embraced the difficulty of living with uncertainty, whether as slave crossing the Ohio river on ice floes, navigating through a relationship, or witness to “centuries of egomania”. Meredith takes the ice floe image, separating, enjambing subject/verb as lines leap from couplet to couplet: the “whole river/ “is milling”,
we/ to are going to find new ways of understanding the opening line: “That’s what love is like.” How wonderful to have a line like like, “I contemplate this unfavorable aspect of things” taken straight from the passage cited from Uncle Tom, just as is “undulated raft”. As Kathy remarked, the cultural background of the epigram is taken to the personal. The ending couplet starts with an enjambed “anyhow.” What we do in spite of anything? We discussed the role of the fool – the one who is wise enough to be outside of society and point a finger at it. How to learn to deal with our weight (carbon footprint perhaps?) and walk light. Rich cited the new report by Jorgen Randers, Club of Rome, see http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=703
and his forthcoming book, 2052.
Love as an important thread – I can’t remember how Martin arrived at citing the 60 minutes program interviewing Louis Zanparini – how if we do not forgive, we will remain poisoned by what has harmed us.
The 14 line poem Only in Things by di Piero uses nouns with full weight. Swaths of sky; leafage; tailpipes, smokestacks orating sepia exhaust;
nature (pistil) and man-made (mailbox key) rendered as smaller enthusiasms, the whale-gray taken up again by unchanged half-tones yet changing (expressed by wheel, wind-trash, revolving doors). The question: Who can stare at .... and not weep... Our choices: wakefulness or distraction. be woven or dumped into? and into what?
The volta (turn) lands on the 9th line, a fragment. “This constant stream of qualia we feel in our stomachs. Emily wished there were more of the “sun arriving” – Rich remarking that sun is treated as rare, a stranger... and that draws to mind the sacred worship of the sun, sense of holy...
the “rain rushes us” is stopped by a line break, and the enigmatic “love to love”
and further enigmatic stop to stop with a comma before listing what perhaps is in pursuit of us
and what we are becoming. Unsettling.
Back to Meredith, how do we walk light through it?
A poem like Carruth’s “I could take” brings hope. The poem eases into the complexity of an act of sharing (shearing) a leaf, a word, piecing together the two torn edges, unique, raggedy, “imperfections that match”.
Some thought Meredith’s poem would be appropriate for a wedding ceremony. Carruth’s poem, for a celebration of such union on anniversaries!
Just what are we doing with our environment, and how do we love, seem to be parallel threads to living. Jeanine Gailey’s poem, A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima) promoted a lively discussion of what we think will help the environment, with some finding it optimistic to use lanterns, seeds, -- build, plant, set things alight in all the senses of the word.
Discussion ranged from wondering at the negligence of government not taking into account what scientists warn...how even science cannot control... and how a poem can transform something so scary it terrifies us, into a thing of beauty and give us hope to keep trying.
“After Television” by Hayden Carruth is fun to analyze by looking at how he handles linebreaks and enjambments – and where not. Discussion revolved around how easily we toss out animals, family, the effect of television can be numbing, but also make us think we can turn on and off any aspect of life. Watching a nature program, we can feel marvel, distress, but that changes nothing in how we relate to nature... The topic of safari clubs providing animals for a fee came up. How, not only are we cut off from animals, our animal nature, but also our literature. TV= pragmatism – but are we willing to accept that as our definition?
We ended by my reading “Mown Lawn” – witty and fun, but driving home an unease.
Ah... poems. Thank you. Poets would be dead without readers
Crossing Over By William Meredith
Only in Things -- W.S. di Piero
A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima) – by Jeanine Gailey
I could take -- by Hayden Carruth
After Television – by Hayden Carruth
A Mown Lawn by Lydia Davis
he first “sunbeam” quote in The Sun, August 2012 issue:
“Life is bitter and fatal, yet men cherish it and beget children to suffer the same fate.”
The poems discussed today embraced the difficulty of living with uncertainty, whether as slave crossing the Ohio river on ice floes, navigating through a relationship, or witness to “centuries of egomania”. Meredith takes the ice floe image, separating, enjambing subject/verb as lines leap from couplet to couplet: the “whole river/ “is milling”,
we/ to are going to find new ways of understanding the opening line: “That’s what love is like.” How wonderful to have a line like like, “I contemplate this unfavorable aspect of things” taken straight from the passage cited from Uncle Tom, just as is “undulated raft”. As Kathy remarked, the cultural background of the epigram is taken to the personal. The ending couplet starts with an enjambed “anyhow.” What we do in spite of anything? We discussed the role of the fool – the one who is wise enough to be outside of society and point a finger at it. How to learn to deal with our weight (carbon footprint perhaps?) and walk light. Rich cited the new report by Jorgen Randers, Club of Rome, see http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=703
and his forthcoming book, 2052.
Love as an important thread – I can’t remember how Martin arrived at citing the 60 minutes program interviewing Louis Zanparini – how if we do not forgive, we will remain poisoned by what has harmed us.
The 14 line poem Only in Things by di Piero uses nouns with full weight. Swaths of sky; leafage; tailpipes, smokestacks orating sepia exhaust;
nature (pistil) and man-made (mailbox key) rendered as smaller enthusiasms, the whale-gray taken up again by unchanged half-tones yet changing (expressed by wheel, wind-trash, revolving doors). The question: Who can stare at .... and not weep... Our choices: wakefulness or distraction. be woven or dumped into? and into what?
The volta (turn) lands on the 9th line, a fragment. “This constant stream of qualia we feel in our stomachs. Emily wished there were more of the “sun arriving” – Rich remarking that sun is treated as rare, a stranger... and that draws to mind the sacred worship of the sun, sense of holy...
the “rain rushes us” is stopped by a line break, and the enigmatic “love to love”
and further enigmatic stop to stop with a comma before listing what perhaps is in pursuit of us
and what we are becoming. Unsettling.
Back to Meredith, how do we walk light through it?
A poem like Carruth’s “I could take” brings hope. The poem eases into the complexity of an act of sharing (shearing) a leaf, a word, piecing together the two torn edges, unique, raggedy, “imperfections that match”.
Some thought Meredith’s poem would be appropriate for a wedding ceremony. Carruth’s poem, for a celebration of such union on anniversaries!
Just what are we doing with our environment, and how do we love, seem to be parallel threads to living. Jeanine Gailey’s poem, A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima) promoted a lively discussion of what we think will help the environment, with some finding it optimistic to use lanterns, seeds, -- build, plant, set things alight in all the senses of the word.
Discussion ranged from wondering at the negligence of government not taking into account what scientists warn...how even science cannot control... and how a poem can transform something so scary it terrifies us, into a thing of beauty and give us hope to keep trying.
“After Television” by Hayden Carruth is fun to analyze by looking at how he handles linebreaks and enjambments – and where not. Discussion revolved around how easily we toss out animals, family, the effect of television can be numbing, but also make us think we can turn on and off any aspect of life. Watching a nature program, we can feel marvel, distress, but that changes nothing in how we relate to nature... The topic of safari clubs providing animals for a fee came up. How, not only are we cut off from animals, our animal nature, but also our literature. TV= pragmatism – but are we willing to accept that as our definition?
We ended by my reading “Mown Lawn” – witty and fun, but driving home an unease.
Ah... poems. Thank you. Poets would be dead without readers
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