Poems for February 25th: starting w/ Wakefield

Poems for February 25

The Meadow by Marie Howe
Miss Consolation for Emotional Damages – by Laura Kasischke (Lilies Without)
While They Speak – Titos Patrikios
The Flying Cat by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Promise by Jane Hirshfield


Marie Howe uses an epigraph from Friedrich Hölderlin for her book, Come, Thief (from which "The Meadow" is taken.) I'm not sure of the original German, which has been translated as variously as this:
“But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” or “where danger is, also lies deliverance”
or “what rescues us”.

In the poem, The Meadow, she starts with a search for words and the meadow, muddy with dreams, which allows a weaving between certain, uncertain, a telephone and a woodpecker; there is no question that a dozen wasps become puttering prop planes, or that the grass be bewildered, that the two older, self-important horses be unable to "design"how the small white pony will escape the fence. Forgiveness hinges on "this small time when you can forget what you are". Perhaps a metaphor for a poem as a walk into words, as mysterious as the meadow remembering how to make wildflowers... The point is not to "figure out" and have answer on how to speak for sound alone, listen for and to the cry, identify, understand. The journey is search, choice, and faith:
Bedeviled,/
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words//

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

**
In contrast, The Kasischke poem is a rollercoaster for sound and rhythm -- no regular couplets or line length here. What is "the" embarrassment? As fundamental as Adam and Eve becoming aware of their nakedness? Kasischke repeats "it" over and over, providing more and more possibilities -- meanwhile the title echoes in question -- why "Miss Consolation" like a pageant queen -- and what emotional damages? Perhaps, with the Einstein reference, it is about identifying brilliance beyond race, religion. The bluntly stated inability to deal with a "curvature of a 3rd dimension" holds up a mirror of the danger of falling into a sameness out of shame for coming from a place that seems to be different from the one in which you find yourself.

David was reminded of Marge Piercy's "Barbie Doll" -- the cutting off of the nose -- the final ending in the casket where all you can say is "isn't she pretty" and pay lip service to what is sold as a dream life.

The Patrikios sparked great discussion -- and the question of what it is that we bring to poems from our own experience and beliefs. Is the poem just a snapshot in a cafe -- about a writer, writing about freedom and love? Kathy reminded us of Adrienne Rich saying "as long as we can't agree, at least we will have something to talk about." This is such a poem. How can we truly talk about freedom and love without knowing its opposite? The "how could you say" can be interpreted in different tones -- perhaps accusatory, perhaps
responding to something we have not heard, as if to ask the person who said it, to explain further, with the conviction that the fact that these things have been spoken of, means there is possibility for freedom and love... Patrikios believes that poetry should do this: bring people together, help readers discover something new about themselves and to address and provide answers to problems that have gone unnoticed.

Perhaps the third item is not so much "provide answers" -- but to reflect about aspects of problems that have gone unnoticed. The fact that there was so much discussion about these nine lines indeed brought us together, helped us discover something new as we listened to each other.

The Flying Cat came to the rescue at this point and reminded us about our versions of our careers of worrying... What is our private language of pain? And what do we transpose onto our animals who cannot tell us in words how they respond to life? Regardless, we are the ones who must look at our own "black holes in space or the weightless rise of fear".

Binding the poems together, was Jane Hirshfield.
I quoted from Philip Levine who seems to echo some of the thoughts in the interview link.

“Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.”

What is it that we mean when we say "Stay"?
The pause of stillness allows us to recognize our relationship to everything around us.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

How does "always" work as the final word? So, we go back to the title, "The Promise" read again,
and note how each thing has such trouble being still. How constant our shifting, our love.

Poems for February 18

The Fist by Derek Walcott
Soldierization -- by Jane Satterfield (Verse Daily 1/13/13)
The Argument -- Robert Peake
The Cricket and the Grasshopper by Dan Beachy-Quick
Valentine for Ernst Mann


You might receive a chuckle about "The Passionate Freudian" to His Love – by Dorothy Parker
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21356
and
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love -- by Christopher Marlowe
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16408

but what is each trying to say, establish and how? Is it any different from Richard Wakefield's brilliant
"Writing about Love" where "love" holds the spine, with the writing shifting from one side to another?

Wit and message work hand in hand. I look forward to our discussion!

**
Poems for February 18: Discussion

Love? I love poems which challenge Hallmark! Love has as many guises as circumstances. I find great comfort from reminders that we are all on this journey together. “There are more like us. All over the world/ There are confused people, who can’t remember / The name of their dog when they wake up, and people /Who love God but can’t remember where // He was when they went to sleep. It’s/ All right. The world cleanses itself this way.

“Writing about Love” is one of those poems worth memorizing. It has that sort of cleansing power. What is “love” in quotation marks, love without quotation marks, and what is love if one is not writing about it? This playful yet deep poem arranges words around the “spine” of love. The lines demonstrate the paradoxical difficulty of writing about love as an experience, which shifts into love as a general subject. Removed from us into memory, we wonder just what love it was we were experiencing, and what it means now.
Both the image of the cave echo where the word “delayed” is delayed to the next line and the image that stays, enjambed to “a moment” further enjambed by “love has gone” to fall onto the next line, “into another room” reminds me of Tosca and Recondita armonia — hidden harmony. Why not write love /on a stick ... and toss it in the river, watch where the word and “real love” join.
Writing about Love – by Richard Wakefield
Love is hard to write about because
love moves. We’re always looking where it was,
saying “love” and pointing to a spot
now void of love, now empty or, if not
empty, then echoing “love” as a cave will say
a name delayed. Or love is an image that will stay
a moment in the eye after our love has gone
into another room. Write “love” upon
a stick and throw it into a river, and “love”
moves no less fluidly than real love.

Perhaps like Derek Walcott’s “Love after Love”, this poem without any stanza pattern
allows us to peel away all the words on either side of love, the way Walcott asks us to ‘Peel your image from the mirror.’ Then we can “give back the heart/to itself...” Walcott also writes in his poem “Oddjob, a Bull Terrier” about our “unreadiness” for sorrow, and what lies deeper than silence, at “love-deep” level “must be said/in a whimper,/in tears,/in the drizzle that comes to our eyes/ not uttering the loved thing’s name,/ the silence of the dead,/ the silence of the deepest buried love is/ the one silence.”
We know we cannot truly live without feeling – and it is only by our emotions as we live, love, lose,
fail, forget, that the “one love” includes ourselves, as we “unpeel” an understanding of ourselves.

Walcott ends by repeating “and it is blest/deepest by loss/it is blest, it is blest.” In French, “blesser”, means to wound. This calls to mind the poem, also by Walcott, “The Fist” where he asks in the first stanza, “When have I ever not loved/ the pain of love? But this has moved // past love to mania.” It feels paradoxical to love “gripping the ledge of unreason, before/plunging into the abyss.” The last line contains two unbroken sentences. “Hold hard then, heart. This is the way at least you live.”

The poems for Feb. 18 were anything but popular Valentines.
“Soldierization”, brings a neologism in the title of the toughness of the process of being a soldier, following orders, keeping cool. It is a dramatic script in two voices that mirror and repeat a woman’s experience with tanks, guns, “chronicle and elegy”. “There’s duty in memory’s mirror, brains and brawn start here.” Satterfield announced, second sentence she would bring her brains to “this”. The repetitions, the choral response are like a prayer. Words may not suffice, but they are the only way thing left. “Poor words, quiet grave.”

“The Argument” seems to call on the old French etymology of the word, "reasoning, opinion; accusation, charge" with the mention of it in the third sentence: “The argument to remain placid is as soft/as the fur-covered thoraxes, as clear/and as light as the transparent wings.” The mention of bees whirring on a face “as close to kissing as they will come,/bound together but without intimacy,/” pulls me as reader to thinking about the arrival of metaphorical bees, some “terror unable to win its case” while the tiny legs “tap their reasons across his pores”. Perhaps we all are in position of beekeeper, able to withstand terror by doing nothing (not reacting to it.) The tone of the poem is concise, scientific yet the description of bees on a beekeeper’s face is poetic, the movement of the bees “rippling like sauce” and the tapping becomes the “music of stillness”.

The next 14 line poem by Dan Beachy-Quick has an appealing flow, enticing diction, and initially I thought some fable might be in store such as the ant and the cricket. Repetition of the word “green” like “grow” moves from first word to last word, “ceases” to “ceasing”, last word to first. “Tangle”, tangles and twins.
repeated three times before ending as owner of “green” as the final word. Poetry of the earth never ceases, the song of the cricket, hidden, yet heard in this chaotic lushness.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “Valentine for Ernest Mann” remains one of my all-time favorite valentines
opening with a personable observation about poems and a generous sharing of the secret of how to find not just poems, but love in our lives.

**
The discussion of poems for Feb. 25 seemed to reflect the magic of poetry to “reinvent whatever our lives gives us”—how we curve “poetry as memorable speech” (to quote W.H. Auden) and reach out for what is absent as does Richard Blanco in “Love Poem According to Quantum Theory”. “According to theory”.... repeated in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 6th stanza. “There’s another” changes like Wakefield’s words on either side of love. Enjoy it below. From Looking for the Gulf Motel.

Love Poem According to Quantum Theory

According to theory, there’s another
in an equal and opposite world who
dreams into words all I’ve never

captured in a handful of rain, a feather,
or palms swaying under a tarnished moon.
According to theory, there’s another

who’s growing younger as I grow older,
who’ll remember what I’ll forget soon:
every word, every poem, every letter

I’ve written—memories will wither
and disappear into that dark vacuum
where according to theory another

keeps embracing, kissing all the lovers
I’ve unembraced, unkissed, except you
with me in this world of words I’ll never

find for us, yet always reaching further
than Orion to where the stars all bloom,
and according to theory there’s nother
for you whose words are far more clever.

February 11

Martin Espada : Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass
http://martinespada.net/Litany_at_the_Tomb_of_FD.html
Mary Oliver: The Poet with his Face in His Hands (The New Yorker, 4/4/2005)
: Spring Azures
We Wear the Mask -- Paul Laurence Dunbar 1872–1906
There Is No Word by Tony Hoagland
Where by Taha Muhamad Ali

Imagination threads all the poems discussed today. To see, envision, understand with insight...
paradox, the obscure, becomes possible.

I didn't plan the Espada poem, written on the occasion of visiting Rochester, Frederick Douglass' tomb, interview with Bill Moyers on Obama's 2nd inauguration, to prepare us for Obama's State of the Union speech Tuesday 2/12, Lincoln's Birthday.
The world is as we see it, and always will be. (from interview w/ Martin Espada w/ Bill Moyers on Obama’s 2nd inauguration. http://billmoyers.com/wp-content/themes/billmoyers/transcript-print.php?post=22548

But there is something about the foresight of strong leaders, courageous men that allow us to enter the language of "the impossible".
In our discussion, Martin reminded us to pay attention to the difference between "illusion" and "hope".
Hope is OK. Susan B. Anthony saying, "Failure is impossible" had the grit of hard work in it.

That Espada used the "omphalos" or epicenter, the O in Douglass' name, the shape of a button, in a litany -- not an elegy, gives a sacred feel to a prayer, filled with hope.
This is... repeated 8 times; semi-colons and colons marking relationships, clear images of past to present tense cuts out the social importance.



The two Oliver poems struck me as containing a new tone. More realistic. Worthy of the "stone-hard beauty" as well as the playful. By using the second person, she could be talking to herself, to the reader, or universal "us". Does she say to go it alone with complaint, or rather -- take some time with it until you do what you have to do to transform it?

The same with Spring Azures -- whatever the circumstance of Blake, butterfly, or reader, what turns the poem from tra-la-la lyric is the story of Blake, how his imagination freed him, just like the butterfly wings,
the spring return of azures, sharing that hope with us, the reader.

The Dunbar poem gives a clear portrait of the black man. David pointed out the break in the regular rhyme,
Rich pointed out specifically the hemiola (O Great Christ) in between the two iambs of the final stanza.
Subtle ties indeed.

Hoagland's layered sensibility from white milk in wrapped plastic to the stretching of language, relationship is a tour de force which resonates beyond the "how witty, I'm so glad I read that".

Taha Muhamad Ali brings our imagination home, to the reminder of looking for the pencil.