poems for October 1

Celebration by Denise Levertov- (October 24, 1923 – December 20, 1997)
Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain by Louis Simpson (1923-2012)
The President Flies Over by Patricia Smith (b. 1955- )
Enuresis by Cid Corman (June 29, 1924 – March 12, 2004)
Fado by Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953 --) (Fado: A type of popular Portuguese song, usually with a melancholy theme and accompanied by mandolins or guitars.)
Big Game -- by Brenda Shaughnessy (b. 1970- )

A sampler of poems that echo Dickinson's formal "ecstasy" and Whitman's exhuberance from last week; a glance at modernist technique...


I couldn’t help smiling at Levertov’s brilliance – the musical images – the “exceptional”expressed as youthful (green, young virtuoso, prodigy), how the wind provides an oceanic chant,
and all is light, song and sacred, with a touch of Wales providing a backdrop contrast of “reasonable gloom”... It tickles the heart with a gladness of being! Enviable writing! We’re just entering the energetic days of Fall – where the “sh” of shadows contrasts the sound of the other “sh”words (sharpest/oceanic/shine/impatient) which are far from any hush – rather, part of the bright, brassy song such brilliance plays. A great poem to read to snap one’s thoughts to gratitude for living! David pointed out the form as an inverted sonnet -- the volta arriving in the split line after the sestet, where on the 8th line one arrives at "blessing" and the festive rite. A poem evoking "how Green was my Valley" -- the excitement of a Welsh "Breakout" when everything stops, to celebrate the sudden arrival of sun.

Simpson's poem seems a reverse celebration, contrasting Whitman's statue, and memory of Walt's exuberance with the parts of America we might prefer to ignore -- "used car lots", and fatigue of "light sick to death"and our fate, just like Greece and Rome,
is the future in ruins. The two exclamation points, after "cancelled" and ruins,
scissor in an extra shadow of irony, and turn to the final stanza where we can imagine red. We discussed these lines at length as well as "the housewife who knows she's dumb". Dumb, as mute? as the "advertisement" of the myth of the ideal blond,
just as Walt did not "prophesise" but "advertise" ? Note how Simpson speaks for all poets, through Walt, happy at being found out, -- comfortable with the image of
"a crocodile in wrinkled metal" -- loafing -- as if to equate the role of the poet
to be the sly and dangerous animal lying in wait for the red of revolution --
is Italy, the country in the shape of the boot, dancing on Greece? the angel at the gate, perhaps ready to cast out Adam and Eve, imagines red, as Nancy pointed out, a stronger red than that actually painted, a red that has not happened yet -- leaving the reader to imagine what that might be.
David Michael offered a reference to Robinson Jeffers: we’re really ruining things – it will be OK if we get rid of people. Martin offered the optimism of seeing nature blossoming again in Chernobyl...

The Patricia Smith poem is one of a collection about hurricane Katrina, in her book, "Blood Dazzler" but the beauty of her poem is that it could be any President "flying over" -- passing by, one of
"My flyboys memorize flip and soar.
They’ll never swoop real enough
to resurrect that other country,

won’t ever get close enough to give name
to tonight’s dreams darkening the water.

**
It isn't only the president.. but all of us are at risk for memorizing "flip and soar"... how to turn away from the "other" and soar towards what looks to be "heaven". The discussion revolved around the 1% who are gaining by an astronomical
600%, leaving others behind... the hurricane is like a huge water balloon/elephant,
the last line in the poem " I understand that somewhere it has rained."
equivalent to reporting on a second hand report of the elephant, without ever naming it from trunk to tail. How do we respond to catastrophe? Do we reduce it to a report of rain? a rhetorical turn?


Cid Corman's Enuresis captures a different response to this being human
that of a child fearing punishment, and witnessing the "I am" in the terrible "slam" of the parents fighting. It made us grateful that we didn't have such catastrophe.


Jane Hirschfield's Fado, takes an approach, that embraces the magic of possibility with the hardship of reality. The prestidigitator (quick fingered magician) produces a dove from the quarter behind the girl's ear, and such amazement (comparing the two) then moves to another "half-stopped moment" to a woman in Portugal singing a Fado that balances, like copper bowls, the living with the song. Seamless mastery!

We read the Shaughnessy, but will discuss it next week!

Carmin sent me this afterwards: it reflected our discussion!

"There were a few references in today's poems of finding beauty where you are - a coal-dusty village, singing woman in wheelchair in Portugal, Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain angel in the gate, flowering plum, dances etc.

Though Luis Albert Urrea's books often are in a setting of poverty, displaced people, discrimination, with sometimes vulgar and ugly settings, he seems to find beauty in the people and places. One of my bookclub friends didn't like INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH - "too many smells, too many fluids", she said. While this is true, lots of smells and fluids, how can it be otherwise with the people and locations he writes about?"


The following is from DOMPE DAYS, a short story in the book, BY THE LAKE OF SLEEPING CHILDREN.

Imagine this: a muscular storm came in during the last days, and as we drove into the Tijuana dump, we were greeted by an apocalyptic scene. Let me try to describe it. The dump, as you know, is cheek by jowl with the rangy home-built cemetery. In fact, many of the graves are partially covered by trash. The garbage used to be in the canyon about 150 feet deep; it is now a hill about 40 feet high. Above this hill is a seething crown of 10,000 gulls, crows, pigeons. But mostly gulls. Imagine, further, mud. Running yellow mud; brown, reddish, black wastewater mixed with dust, ashes and clay. The few graves with cement slabs over them glisten with the rain. The mud is a gray so dark it verges on black. The sky is raging. Knots of clouds speed east, far above the gulls, and the gulls rise so high that they seem an optical illusion; from the huge birds to nearly invisible specks in the sky, they seem to hang on wires, a mad museum display, held in place by the violent wind.

Now we drive in, and the muddy graves are pale blue and pale green and pale brown as their wooden crosses fade; the cement headstones are all white or streaked rainy gray. And from the hill of trash, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of plastic bags -- tan bags, blue bags, white supermarket bags, black trash bags, yellow bread wrappers and video store bags -- book paper, newspapers open like wings, ribbons of toilet paper, tissues like dancing moths, even half-dead balloons, are caught in the backdraft and are rising and falling in vast slow waves behind the hill, slow motion, a ballet in the air of the parti-colored landscape, looking like special effects, like some art department's million-dollar creation, Lucifer's lava lamp, silent ghostly, stately, for half a mile, turning in the air, rolling, looping.

And up top, exposed to the elements, the garbage is flying like a snowstorm.

........about 40 pages later he writes: There was nothing left here. Not a voice. I felt watched by shadows as I climbed out, hurried away from the traces of sorrow downwind of the city.


She concluded, "The phrases "optical illusion", "mad museum display", "some art department's million-dollar creation", "Lucifer's lava lamp" fit so well with the scene. I guess this is a pretty eerie beauty but maybe better than seeing only the dump."

I agree.

poems for Sept. 24

A Supermarket in California – Allen Ginsberg
Whitman at Armory Square -- by M.C. Allan (published by Linebreak, Sept. 17)
a few lines from Whitman, Song of Myself
I taste a liquor never brewed -- Emily Dickinson
Spring and Fall – Gerard Manley Hopkins
Cello - by Dorianne Laux
Porch Swing in September by Ted Kooser


Inspired by the Filreis Modern Contemporary Poetry, a quick look at our American modernist stage-setters: how are they still alive? Does rhyme stop us from singing "all truths (that) wait in things" -- what makes a poem "successful" for you? Do you have expectations or come with an empty mind? When you make associations, are there judgements involved? Just as representational painting shows us something we might see and recognize, words paint both physical (sensory) and emotional experience.
How do such diverse poets do this-- and what contexts and philosophy do they reveal in so doing?

**

The first two poems reflect the ever-reaching influences of Whitman. As I shared with those present on 9/24, I am enjoying thoroughly the free on-line course offered by Al Filreis, U Penn, and faculty advisor of the Kelly center, called “Mod-Po” or Modern Contemporary American Poetry. (To see the endless FREE courses on-line: Re: https://www.coursera.org/courses
To see the Mod-Poetry course: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry

Whitman’s exhuberance can feel arrogant, until you consider his “democratic” understanding that we all have access to “truth” which waits in things. “In all people I see myself – none more and not one barleycorn and the fool less, and the good or bad, I say of myself, I say of them.” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass). He identifies with a collective self, becomes the voice-piece of America in this role,
singing the vitality of a new nation. His enumerations, capturing the “blab of the pave”, his almost overwhelming celebration of the sensory and sensual self, opened a door for poetry, loosened from strict meter and rhyme, and nourished by experience, not thoughts.

Ginsberg captures the spirit – starting with the nourishment of supermarket, which spills into his own “blab of the pave” including Lorca by the watermelons. Almost a century later, Whitman is called “a lonely old grubber” which is a sharp contrast from what one called Whitman’s “playful lechery”. “Which way does your beard point tonight” in the penultimate stanza has a “we” which could be Ginsberg and Walt, or a larger we. The role of pronouns in Ginsberg’s poem allow an open-ness, characteristic of modern poetry to be more than one thing: “we” as reference to gay men/ gay people or a larger collective, including the reader...
The final image gives due homage to Whitman as “courage-teacher”, and leaves us with the finality of death... our own, and that of our country Whitman had once sung with such celebration. Which bank is smoking? The one of the living or the dead? And we are reminded of the river of forgetfulness, the final word, “Lethe”.
Certainly questions remain: what meanings does Ginsberg ascribe to the lost America of love? And you, the reader?

The next poem by M.C. Allen we read with Elaine reading the regular type, and the rest of us reading the italics as a chorus. The form of the poem could be a collage of two poems, the regular type as one, the italics as another, drawing on Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser”, although not quite. Chilling reminder of the Civil war, but also of the need for healing. Because the poem is a collage, open-ness of interpretation is not limited to a sexualizing of Whitman, but a more general call on his long-lined, confident poetry which can uplift the spirit, and a celebration of writing. Perhaps the threading of what was this way, is a reminder of what continues in the voice of the wounded.

The Dickinson poem uses an economy of meter, rhyme, a breathlessness of dashes which hint at what is not spoken, shifting metaphor, to fully embrace an earthly experience which transports the spirit. We discussed the capitalization of certain nouns, as one does in German, and the hymn-like rhyhms, where the beats alternate from 8 syllables to 6, except for the “tippled” penultimate line. Informed by Emerson, Emily’s introspection brings her to imagine a world of possibilities which leaves the reader to discover. Marcie summed it up as the “Omigod – sex with the air” on one of those days one feel exhilarated by the energy of a beautiful day. Emily spoke of a program in which experts have determined that Emily was quite the lush and “hit the bars of Amherst” at night.
There’s so much more to know about a person – such as the “meaning” of dashes rising up, or slanting down – all we can trust is the poem itself and the clues it provides.
On a personal note, I thoroughly enjoyed writing an essay on this charming poem, and reading other students’ essays as part of the Filreis course.

The Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring and Fall” was missing the final line:
“It is Margaret you mourn for” and some of the accent marks.
We agreed that wanwood would be “pale” wood and thought of the physical fall,
(Goldengrove, leafmeal, colder) juxtaposed with the fresh innocence of Margaret—
can one grieve loss in such a state? Perhaps the greatest loss, David suggested implied in the word “blight” is Man’s fall from grace, symbolized by being cast out of the Garden of Eden. We do not grieve that as much as watching a Margaret change from child to suffering adult.

Dorianne’s poem, Cello is a true chef-d’oeuvre. Three sentences, 2 ½ lines , 5 ½ lines, 7 ½ lines long. The lengthening of the lines of the repeated adjectives in “ish”, the accumulative sounds of the “dead music” juxtaposed with the “rosined bow sound of the living”. Like Hopkins’ “heart heard... ghost guessed”, it is up to us to shoulder our losses and departed loved ones.

Kooser’s sonnet, “Porch Swing in September” allows us to admire the detail of a spider’s work in the fulcrum of man-made swing and seasons, wind. The intricacy of each “world” is caught with sounds of wood, “soft vibrations of moths/the wasp tapping....”
I can’t think of a spider at work in morning on her dew-jeweled web without imagining
“time for the cool dewdrops to brush from her work” – each one reflecting both itself, the worlds we don’t usually see, and the web. Perfect imagery without any artifice that captures the sense of the ephemeral without hounding the reader about change.