Poems for February 4
Somewhere to Paris – by Richard Blanco
Dark Charms by Dorianne Laux
Live Light by James Grinwis
from Timbered Choir -- Wendell Berry
Letter to a Lost Friend by Barbara Hamby
quotes of poetry by an art exhibit, Williams Gallery, UU Church, S. Winton Rd.
The first three poems used a single block approach, the Berry gathered into five lines stanzas, and the Hamby had a long line, followed by an indented, shorter line.
How do we respond to form? to title? to "made-up" words as we respond to surface meaning?
I called attention to the multiple layers in the etymology of "Charms" , the ambiguous announcement of "Live Light" -- is it adjective, or verb? descriptor or command? As we read the poems, the repetitions, the play of dream to reality, use of common detail to something we can only hint out as we ponder how important anything is, what the "truth" of anything is.
We admired Richard Blanco's skill, both as inaugural poet, but also the way he "train stitched" the space between "there" and "here", the dreamed and dreaming, until the reader too is swept up in the scrolling wave, heartbeat, breath, and through enjambement, "nothing" defies touch, and can be read two ways
as "keeping nothing with nothing" /to deny the dark. How to you understand this accumulation? The epigram from Pascal -- where there is no misery if you keep in the quiet of your room... not defined by anything outside. The sole cause of a man's unhappiness
is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
--Pascal, Pensées
A beautiful meditation. What makes it convincing is the final sentence and, like the moon video Maura suggested we spend 4 minutes watching,we allow ourselves to BE the solitude
... never more beautiful, the arc of space
I travel through for a few hours, touching
nothing and keeping nothing, with nothing
to deny the night, the dark pines pointing
to the stars, this life, always moving and still.
Somewhere to... could be Paris, or dreamland, or wherever you have been, but are no longer. Which threaded nicely to Dorianne Laux's poem, embracing the "dark", like an incantation, a magic spell. I would say by consensus the favorite line was "bag like a lung filled with shadow and song." which describes "it" -- what is dragged in the past, something in us that longs to be named, something and the final line: "dreams of running, the keys to lost names." Again, the line breaks are such that "explaining this" cannot be done -- as the words don't spell anything out explicitly and the opening line "Eventually the future shows up everywhere" bears re-reading. What is true? What is important?
I loved the language play of the Grinwis, "a big question pops out of the frost cabbages" and his questioning starts to revolve (unlike the stonewheel, unable to rotate any direction) "Everyone is waiting/
for something. Why won’t it come?
Indeed "time strikes out at night like a loose bandoleer" --
Wendell Berry's soothing words take us to trees, tasks laid aside, to what is afraid of us, what we fear... finally the chance to listen to our own song.
The Hamby addresses aging, but also that yearning for a word that would help us pin down what can't be said... John brought up the story of Gertrude Stein chiding Picasso for his portrait of her: Stein – but I don’t look like this. Picasso: You will. Marcie brought in the quote:
People die. Life goes on. We are all people just walking each other home.
title – what it isn’t said. What friend? how lost? what is the relationship of the us. But poems aren't about facts pinned down -- but a a place we enter a deeper consciousness, recognize a feeling we might have been too busy to notice.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
Poems for January 14
New Year Resolve by May Sarton,
Flowers by Linda Pastan,
Above the Lake -- Stephen O’Connor (Verse Daily 1/7/13)
How it is -- Maxine Kumin
Bagel Shop Jazz – Bob Kaufmann
New Year Resolve:
We spent quite a bit of time on the May Sarton poem, admiring how the rhyme did not make a clunky appearance, but rather the sounds and repetitions created a pleasing effect. Unfortunately, I had the poems open with my comments, and didn't save them,
and in an unexpected shutdown of the computer, they were not saved, so I can only go by memory.
This is the perfect situation to allow her message of allowing silence, like a cat, to enter. Clutter enters twice in the first stanza, with an overtone of the “Walrus and the Carpenter’s “the time has come, to speak of many things”. Clutter clutters as noun and verb whereas, by the last stanza, “clutter” is shoved aside. Thus, the “firming of resolve” comes after the speaker considers the inner peace found in silence that allows clarity. Inner and outer world combine ending with a slant reference to the 23rd psalm.
We discussed at length the line, “all I have ever been/false or true/ will live again in my head” – with multiple takes on how “being” could be as an inside interpretation, as opposed to being run by “monkeymind” and outside clutter we have allowed without mindful attention.
Flowers is a sensuous run of couplets filled with colors and luscious sounds, names of flowers like “clivia” and a perfect touch of unusual adjectives – the “odd magenta”, “secular lilies” (without any mention of sacred), "notched" tulips. "The odd strangeness of flowers" in the chill of winter does indeed make one ask, “Is it real” -- and think about how juxtaposition changes our view of everything.
Above the Lake is a fine puzzle poem, filled with imbedded meanings, to the point that Sandra had the idea of substituting all the "this means that" to reduce the poem to this idea:
In this season, the snow, (woods, sky, mute roar)
is composed of abstraction (brook as diagonal gash, trees as lines, )
which is meaning (longing, loneliness accreting as quiet on quiet, white on bluish white)
Even if you don't read the poem this way, the way it is constructed, allows snow, abstraction and meaning to "accrete" and end on "white" (which is the color of blank).
We had a romp with that one -- and only just enough time to read the Maxine Kumin whose elegy for Anne Sexton is one of the most brilliant poems I know.
t
Flowers by Linda Pastan,
Above the Lake -- Stephen O’Connor (Verse Daily 1/7/13)
How it is -- Maxine Kumin
Bagel Shop Jazz – Bob Kaufmann
New Year Resolve:
We spent quite a bit of time on the May Sarton poem, admiring how the rhyme did not make a clunky appearance, but rather the sounds and repetitions created a pleasing effect. Unfortunately, I had the poems open with my comments, and didn't save them,
and in an unexpected shutdown of the computer, they were not saved, so I can only go by memory.
This is the perfect situation to allow her message of allowing silence, like a cat, to enter. Clutter enters twice in the first stanza, with an overtone of the “Walrus and the Carpenter’s “the time has come, to speak of many things”. Clutter clutters as noun and verb whereas, by the last stanza, “clutter” is shoved aside. Thus, the “firming of resolve” comes after the speaker considers the inner peace found in silence that allows clarity. Inner and outer world combine ending with a slant reference to the 23rd psalm.
We discussed at length the line, “all I have ever been/false or true/ will live again in my head” – with multiple takes on how “being” could be as an inside interpretation, as opposed to being run by “monkeymind” and outside clutter we have allowed without mindful attention.
Flowers is a sensuous run of couplets filled with colors and luscious sounds, names of flowers like “clivia” and a perfect touch of unusual adjectives – the “odd magenta”, “secular lilies” (without any mention of sacred), "notched" tulips. "The odd strangeness of flowers" in the chill of winter does indeed make one ask, “Is it real” -- and think about how juxtaposition changes our view of everything.
Above the Lake is a fine puzzle poem, filled with imbedded meanings, to the point that Sandra had the idea of substituting all the "this means that" to reduce the poem to this idea:
In this season, the snow, (woods, sky, mute roar)
is composed of abstraction (brook as diagonal gash, trees as lines, )
which is meaning (longing, loneliness accreting as quiet on quiet, white on bluish white)
Even if you don't read the poem this way, the way it is constructed, allows snow, abstraction and meaning to "accrete" and end on "white" (which is the color of blank).
We had a romp with that one -- and only just enough time to read the Maxine Kumin whose elegy for Anne Sexton is one of the most brilliant poems I know.
t
Thursday, January 3, 2013
2013! Poems for Jan. 7
Ode to Repetition by Ellen Bass
The Conductor by Jacqueline Berger
Frankly by Naomi Shihab Nye
Happiness by Jane Kenyon
Push Back the Catastrophes – by Jayne Cortez
How to start the new year... examine what "new" and "same" mean, and read a bit of Ellen Bass. What an audacious title -- an ODE to repetition -- so the same walk,
looking at the sea which not only cycles through tides but reflects the weather; wash the same dishes, and in the same breath think of the rhodendron making not just blossoms but "pink ceremony". Water then, will be a gift, lampposts will wear halos in the fog, and the moon will rinse parked cars as we age, and we can find reassurance in stars, call them faultless as they disappear into day. Well, of course, you can't paraphrase a poem, but you will want to enjoy the colloquial tone that Ellen Bass sprinkles with such unusual images. Have you ever thought of waves as "surf's drunk crashing into the cliffs like a car wreck."
We discussed at length the nature of repetition -- how especially in music, even though the notes might be the same, they aren't played the same way when repeated. The variation hanging on the repeated hanging on we do to the familiar. How Bass challenges the metaphor of the "fixed town of your life" with line breaks that suspend the possibilities only to surprise you. I'm grateful, is followed by an observation
that the toilet is in it's usual place; back in bed she finds that the same woman in bed is not the same; The opening of curtains repeated the second time has no closing. A wonderful poem to read to be reminded not so much of what happens (repeats over and over) to each of us, but the possibility of how we face that fact.
We could despair, be afraid, or watch how same wears a different face, as we do.
The next poem allows us to think of who we are -- from the front, or the back, old, young, healthy or stricken with a disease like parkinsons; the role of music; the role of "composing" or "constructing" a face. The two "I" sentences could be the conductor speaking, but just as easily the speaker of the poem, who seems to be able to "wear his skin". Twice the use of innocence, but the repetition expands into trying to pinpoint the meaning of "the face/unconstructed". The ending question, stretched over seven lines implies for how close he is to not being
able to be a conductor, or alive, twice, repeating the word "edge".
the description of Parkinsons' effect, "fingers tap their useless code" and what else can he do, but show us who he is/ a man standing too close to the edge,/ edge no one can call him back from.
Martin called on the fact that the poem comes from a book entitled, "The Gift that Arrives Broken"-- all of us are born with something slightly "broken" -- sometimes not apparent, sometimes declaring itself much later in life. Perhaps there is a play on the word "construct" and "conduct", which would accentuate the unconstructed smile, is attached to the person whose gift broken, will prevent him from conducting both music and his life.
We did not discuss "Frankly" by Naomi Shihab Nye very long, but admired the wry tone, and how indeed we do not know how to be with the dying, let alone make time for them.
What is labor? What do we bare, bear, as in carry, and what bores us in all the senses of the word, what penetrates through us, or cannot engage us.
Kenyon's poem, Happiness develops a fine context to show happiness as something
that appears as unpredictably as a prodigal son, an uncle you never knew about.
And so you feast, "and weep... to know that you were not abandoned" in those "unmerciful hours of despair". Three times she repeats in the final stanza,
"it comes" with the fourth time repeating, it even comes... followed by a list of inanimate objects: boulder, pine barrens, rain and wineglass. Why is it weary of
holding wine -- the waiting for celebration and feast -- as if to underline that
unpredictability of happiness.
The final poem, I wonder, if it were performed like Jayne Cortez' "endangered species" which is spoken with music, might come across better. But the message is clear. Whether it is Gaia, mother earth, or an endangered animal or human,
catastrophe is pushed back to the root cause: the catastrophers.
The Conductor by Jacqueline Berger
Frankly by Naomi Shihab Nye
Happiness by Jane Kenyon
Push Back the Catastrophes – by Jayne Cortez
How to start the new year... examine what "new" and "same" mean, and read a bit of Ellen Bass. What an audacious title -- an ODE to repetition -- so the same walk,
looking at the sea which not only cycles through tides but reflects the weather; wash the same dishes, and in the same breath think of the rhodendron making not just blossoms but "pink ceremony". Water then, will be a gift, lampposts will wear halos in the fog, and the moon will rinse parked cars as we age, and we can find reassurance in stars, call them faultless as they disappear into day. Well, of course, you can't paraphrase a poem, but you will want to enjoy the colloquial tone that Ellen Bass sprinkles with such unusual images. Have you ever thought of waves as "surf's drunk crashing into the cliffs like a car wreck."
We discussed at length the nature of repetition -- how especially in music, even though the notes might be the same, they aren't played the same way when repeated. The variation hanging on the repeated hanging on we do to the familiar. How Bass challenges the metaphor of the "fixed town of your life" with line breaks that suspend the possibilities only to surprise you. I'm grateful, is followed by an observation
that the toilet is in it's usual place; back in bed she finds that the same woman in bed is not the same; The opening of curtains repeated the second time has no closing. A wonderful poem to read to be reminded not so much of what happens (repeats over and over) to each of us, but the possibility of how we face that fact.
We could despair, be afraid, or watch how same wears a different face, as we do.
The next poem allows us to think of who we are -- from the front, or the back, old, young, healthy or stricken with a disease like parkinsons; the role of music; the role of "composing" or "constructing" a face. The two "I" sentences could be the conductor speaking, but just as easily the speaker of the poem, who seems to be able to "wear his skin". Twice the use of innocence, but the repetition expands into trying to pinpoint the meaning of "the face/unconstructed". The ending question, stretched over seven lines implies for how close he is to not being
able to be a conductor, or alive, twice, repeating the word "edge".
the description of Parkinsons' effect, "fingers tap their useless code" and what else can he do, but show us who he is/ a man standing too close to the edge,/ edge no one can call him back from.
Martin called on the fact that the poem comes from a book entitled, "The Gift that Arrives Broken"-- all of us are born with something slightly "broken" -- sometimes not apparent, sometimes declaring itself much later in life. Perhaps there is a play on the word "construct" and "conduct", which would accentuate the unconstructed smile, is attached to the person whose gift broken, will prevent him from conducting both music and his life.
We did not discuss "Frankly" by Naomi Shihab Nye very long, but admired the wry tone, and how indeed we do not know how to be with the dying, let alone make time for them.
What is labor? What do we bare, bear, as in carry, and what bores us in all the senses of the word, what penetrates through us, or cannot engage us.
Kenyon's poem, Happiness develops a fine context to show happiness as something
that appears as unpredictably as a prodigal son, an uncle you never knew about.
And so you feast, "and weep... to know that you were not abandoned" in those "unmerciful hours of despair". Three times she repeats in the final stanza,
"it comes" with the fourth time repeating, it even comes... followed by a list of inanimate objects: boulder, pine barrens, rain and wineglass. Why is it weary of
holding wine -- the waiting for celebration and feast -- as if to underline that
unpredictability of happiness.
The final poem, I wonder, if it were performed like Jayne Cortez' "endangered species" which is spoken with music, might come across better. But the message is clear. Whether it is Gaia, mother earth, or an endangered animal or human,
catastrophe is pushed back to the root cause: the catastrophers.
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