Please find poems for the first of December! I have finished galloping behind in the November issue of "Poetry" and in the email provided links to translators notes in this special issue on translation. To keep up the Irish spirit, you will find a translation of Seán Ó Ríordáin, but also Yiddish and French.
I was delighted to see a Chinese and Anglo name for Liu Xia's ekphrastic poem, UR's Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer* for Jerzy Ficowski's poem and further to find out more about the poets themselves. Grotz alludes to George Steiner’s “total reading” where meaning and interpretation lie beyond the text and a quick look at Bonnefoy will yield this thought: poetry is less about saying something about reality than coupling with it, less an accidental formulation than a quest for a light that is beyond words.
Although Larry Levis writes in English, I like how he adopts 15th century French poet François Villon.
Empty Chairs (p. 110) by Liu Xia
August 5, 1942, (p. 112) by Jerzy Ficowski
The Museum (p. 123) by Yves Bonnefoy
Switch, (p. 136)by Seán Ó Ríordáin
What Will Stay Behind (p. 147) Abraham Sutkzever
Also considered, but not used:
François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time (p. 116) by Larry Levis
The first poem implies connection, and a state of becoming in spite of repeating three times, "empty"
and "leave", where empty chairs seem to wait, trapped in their "frozen state". It's the sort of poem I like, because I read it several times, and start to see new relationships... ideas -- one doesn't question that the speaker of the poem is sitting in a Van Gogh painting, nor that he doesn't see her.
The Ficowski poem is memorable, with the repeated "I don't know", the doctor in the holocaust... the comparison with Charon, the "I know" at the end...
After it, it feels trivial to comment on the sounds of Bonnefoy's poem, or the changing registers of the Riordain.
In a way, all of the poems addressed the "mirror man" of our selves. Certainly the Sutzkever, one of the “Diary Poems” were, like his earliest work, a navigation through the landscape of the self. We closed with the In Memoriam by Alastair Reid 3/221926- 9/21/2014 printed on the inside cover of the November issue of Poetry.
Could it have been mine,
that face—cold, alien—
that an unexpected mirror,
crossed by a quick look,
flashed me back?
It was a moment’s chance,
since, at second glance,
the face has turned familiar—
my mouth again, my eyes
wide in surprise.
Now, though I verify
oddness of bone and eye,
we are no longer one,
myself and mirror-man.
Trust has gone.
I had thought them sure,
the face and self I wore.
Yet, with no glass about,
what selves, whose unsuspected
faces stare out?
-- from Poetry, February 1959
reprinted in the inside cover of the November 2014 issue
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Friday, November 28, 2014
Poems for Lunch November 20
To Spareness -- Jane Hirshberg
The Sentence -- Ana Akhmatova***
Moon by Frederick Smock;
Theory of Memory by Louise Glück;
Dreamwood by Adrienne Rich
Song in Winter by Marianne Boruch
Song Again, in Spring
**
see discussion on November 17 (summarized by Kimberley) of the Hirschberg and Akhmatova.
Hirsjhfield's definition of spareness by defining the opposite, in a full round of views
honors Spareness as if to praise it.
I brought up the French épargner: to spare also means to save. Hirshfield's words invite opposite meanings like that, for spareness.
For the Ahkmatova, the discussion revolved around how to understand a fragment of a translation.
What survival skills-- how to live, if you kill memory, imagine brilliant day/deserted house?
The Smock seemed childlike -- first stanza engaging, but the next two arrive like adult sledgehammers.
So, in case you didn't get it: We're the illusion the moon is looking at. There's no magic, no discovery.
The Glück comes from her new book, "Faithful and Virtuous Night" which just received an award.
Prose like this is not as compelling to me as poems. If the future will erase the present... or vice-verse, what is the difference of understanding dream/hypothesis vs. what we think is?
I picked Dreamwood because one of my friends used the opening lines as epigraph for his chapbook and I find them intriguing. We noted "late report" was not "last report" -- late as in tardy, as in dead. -- material and dream.
Compared to the short prose passage, there was substance in images: typing, map, wooden stand...
The Boruch poems also border dream/reality. Doom is or it isn't.
Shape seeking..
this "we", this "our " and "us" thing...
a play on part -- as a share of something -- part coward...
something divided...
strange meditations.
The Sentence -- Ana Akhmatova***
Moon by Frederick Smock;
Theory of Memory by Louise Glück;
Dreamwood by Adrienne Rich
Song in Winter by Marianne Boruch
Song Again, in Spring
**
see discussion on November 17 (summarized by Kimberley) of the Hirschberg and Akhmatova.
Hirsjhfield's definition of spareness by defining the opposite, in a full round of views
honors Spareness as if to praise it.
I brought up the French épargner: to spare also means to save. Hirshfield's words invite opposite meanings like that, for spareness.
For the Ahkmatova, the discussion revolved around how to understand a fragment of a translation.
What survival skills-- how to live, if you kill memory, imagine brilliant day/deserted house?
The Smock seemed childlike -- first stanza engaging, but the next two arrive like adult sledgehammers.
So, in case you didn't get it: We're the illusion the moon is looking at. There's no magic, no discovery.
The Glück comes from her new book, "Faithful and Virtuous Night" which just received an award.
Prose like this is not as compelling to me as poems. If the future will erase the present... or vice-verse, what is the difference of understanding dream/hypothesis vs. what we think is?
I picked Dreamwood because one of my friends used the opening lines as epigraph for his chapbook and I find them intriguing. We noted "late report" was not "last report" -- late as in tardy, as in dead. -- material and dream.
Compared to the short prose passage, there was substance in images: typing, map, wooden stand...
The Boruch poems also border dream/reality. Doom is or it isn't.
Shape seeking..
this "we", this "our " and "us" thing...
a play on part -- as a share of something -- part coward...
something divided...
strange meditations.
Poems for November 17 (report from Kimberley Ferrance) _ Nov. 24
Preliminaries:
1. Judith: Although she could not be here for our Nov. 3 discussion including Grass Fingers by Angelina Weld Grimke, she will share an 1868 letter from Angelina to her newly discovered nephews...
2. Although we discussed somewhat that beauty of this poem, read aloud, here is the audio version: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/first-song followed by the written version
Poems: (see discussion November 5 at Rundel)
First Song by Galway Kinnell
The Cellist by Galway Kinnell
Saint Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell
**
To Spareness by Jane Hirshfield
The Sentence by Anna Ahkmatova
Each one of these poems demand a quiet space to allow the words to resonate beyond the sounds they make.
Kimberley reports: Our minds ran away with us a little with the sexual inuendos in the Cello poem. The First Song evoked appreciation for simple things and how sometimes you may find the beauty in something that others wouldn't have thought to. The Sow went as expected, Emily expressed her love of all animals and cherished the sow. Everyone was wondering if there was a story behind the Saint Francis and sow connection outside of him being patron saint of animals. Jane Hirshfield wowed many people, especially all the detail and examples of spareness she includes. As a group we recalled that we all always love her work and never came across a poem of hers we didn't like. The Sentence was looked at after a handful of people had gone since it was 1:15ish. Also, it felt like a fragment and that it needed some context. We compared two translations of the second stanza and marveled at what a difference the translator can make. I had recalled that this was part of a longer piece but never can pull things out of my brain when I need to. So I refreshed my memory at home and shared.
*** from Kimberley:
For explanation purposes, I think it best to start from the micro-perspective and put the piece in context with the macro, therefore anyone can explore as far as they wish. My main source for this information is The Complete Poems of ANNA AKHMATOVA: Updated & Expanded Edition; 1994; Translations by Judith Hemschemeyer and Editing by Roberta Reeder. (forgive me, I forget my APA citing format)
The Sentence is seven (VII) of a fifteen part poetry & prose cycle entitled REQUIEM. This part is dated June 22, 1939, which is the actual day Anna’s son, Lev Gumilyov, was sentenced to a labor camp in Leningrad. Therefore, the title is literal. Of course we can all then explicate that the “stone word” is a metaphor for the verdict passed down. (or not, who am I to interpret for you)
Lev Gumilyov came from the union of Anna and Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna’s first husband. They met in 1903 when she was only 14, then married in 1910. By the time of The Sentence, Nikolay had already been imprisoned for taking part in a counter-revolutionary plot and executed in 1921.
REQUIEM is described as “a tribute to the ordeal of the victims of the Terror and women who waited in the prison lines hoping to get word of them,” and is “based on her (Anna’s) own experience in Leningrad.”
This is all in the time of Stalin and his “purge” that took place in Russia. There was a ban on publication of Anna’s work from 1925-1940. She began writing REQUIEM in 1935, but was afraid to actually write it down. She recited the verses to trustworthy friends so that they could be passed along, memorized and later reassembled.
REQUIEM wasn’t published in the Soviet Union until 1989.
ref. AKHMATOVA as a “pen name”: carries more weight than that. Her father insisted she change her name when she was just a teenager and had begun writing poetry. He did not want his name to be associated with the trade of a poet. The name comes from a maternal ancestor.
**
Poems for November 24
Eaven Boland
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet by Eavan Boland
The Lost Art of Handwriting by Eavan Boland
The Lost Land by Eavan Boland
The Journey by Eavan Boland
In “The Journey,” you write that “somewhere a poet is wasting / his sweet uncluttered metres on the obvious // emblem instead of the real thing.” What is that “real thing” poets should write about, but don’t?
Well, in that case, an antibiotic. Literally. The poems begins with a riff about that: that there’s never “been a poem to an antibiotic.” It’s at the heart of this fairly long dream-poem. “The Journey” is essentially a poem about child mortality; our own infant daughter had recovered from a dangerous meningitis around that time. But it’s also about the fact that such subjects are extraordinarily absent from poetry. So the poem begins and continues with an argument about the way ornamental language can protect a poet from reality. It’s something I think crops up from time to time, the old debate about what agency language has in a poem: whether it merely decorates the subject or reveals it. And that’s the larger theme of “The Journey.” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/180235
Loss:the common denominator:
We discussed at length this line: "An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak,"
signs for sounds... her words there to imagine the voice...
Thank you all who were present for the thoughtful discussion of the poems yesterday. How great to have a group share so many layers: "How does poetry arise from a life experience…” a summary of Irish history, knowledge such as the translation of Dublin as “Black Pool”; info on the importance of the Boland name; and how to understand the loss, role of language if mute before sorrow and what that means. As promised in my note, I read the poem below.
As we approach Thanksgiving, indeed, one of the wonderful gifts for which I give thanks is this group of remarkable people who gather to discuss poems each week.
I am grateful to each of you for what you bring. Thank you!
With heartfuls of good wishes,
Kitty
AN ELEGY FOR MY MOTHER IN WHICH SHE SCARCELY APPEARS
by Eavan Boland
1. Judith: Although she could not be here for our Nov. 3 discussion including Grass Fingers by Angelina Weld Grimke, she will share an 1868 letter from Angelina to her newly discovered nephews...
2. Although we discussed somewhat that beauty of this poem, read aloud, here is the audio version: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/first-song followed by the written version
Poems: (see discussion November 5 at Rundel)
First Song by Galway Kinnell
The Cellist by Galway Kinnell
Saint Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell
**
To Spareness by Jane Hirshfield
The Sentence by Anna Ahkmatova
Each one of these poems demand a quiet space to allow the words to resonate beyond the sounds they make.
Kimberley reports: Our minds ran away with us a little with the sexual inuendos in the Cello poem. The First Song evoked appreciation for simple things and how sometimes you may find the beauty in something that others wouldn't have thought to. The Sow went as expected, Emily expressed her love of all animals and cherished the sow. Everyone was wondering if there was a story behind the Saint Francis and sow connection outside of him being patron saint of animals. Jane Hirshfield wowed many people, especially all the detail and examples of spareness she includes. As a group we recalled that we all always love her work and never came across a poem of hers we didn't like. The Sentence was looked at after a handful of people had gone since it was 1:15ish. Also, it felt like a fragment and that it needed some context. We compared two translations of the second stanza and marveled at what a difference the translator can make. I had recalled that this was part of a longer piece but never can pull things out of my brain when I need to. So I refreshed my memory at home and shared.
*** from Kimberley:
For explanation purposes, I think it best to start from the micro-perspective and put the piece in context with the macro, therefore anyone can explore as far as they wish. My main source for this information is The Complete Poems of ANNA AKHMATOVA: Updated & Expanded Edition; 1994; Translations by Judith Hemschemeyer and Editing by Roberta Reeder. (forgive me, I forget my APA citing format)
The Sentence is seven (VII) of a fifteen part poetry & prose cycle entitled REQUIEM. This part is dated June 22, 1939, which is the actual day Anna’s son, Lev Gumilyov, was sentenced to a labor camp in Leningrad. Therefore, the title is literal. Of course we can all then explicate that the “stone word” is a metaphor for the verdict passed down. (or not, who am I to interpret for you)
Lev Gumilyov came from the union of Anna and Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna’s first husband. They met in 1903 when she was only 14, then married in 1910. By the time of The Sentence, Nikolay had already been imprisoned for taking part in a counter-revolutionary plot and executed in 1921.
REQUIEM is described as “a tribute to the ordeal of the victims of the Terror and women who waited in the prison lines hoping to get word of them,” and is “based on her (Anna’s) own experience in Leningrad.”
This is all in the time of Stalin and his “purge” that took place in Russia. There was a ban on publication of Anna’s work from 1925-1940. She began writing REQUIEM in 1935, but was afraid to actually write it down. She recited the verses to trustworthy friends so that they could be passed along, memorized and later reassembled.
REQUIEM wasn’t published in the Soviet Union until 1989.
ref. AKHMATOVA as a “pen name”: carries more weight than that. Her father insisted she change her name when she was just a teenager and had begun writing poetry. He did not want his name to be associated with the trade of a poet. The name comes from a maternal ancestor.
**
Poems for November 24
Eaven Boland
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet by Eavan Boland
The Lost Art of Handwriting by Eavan Boland
The Lost Land by Eavan Boland
The Journey by Eavan Boland
In “The Journey,” you write that “somewhere a poet is wasting / his sweet uncluttered metres on the obvious // emblem instead of the real thing.” What is that “real thing” poets should write about, but don’t?
Well, in that case, an antibiotic. Literally. The poems begins with a riff about that: that there’s never “been a poem to an antibiotic.” It’s at the heart of this fairly long dream-poem. “The Journey” is essentially a poem about child mortality; our own infant daughter had recovered from a dangerous meningitis around that time. But it’s also about the fact that such subjects are extraordinarily absent from poetry. So the poem begins and continues with an argument about the way ornamental language can protect a poet from reality. It’s something I think crops up from time to time, the old debate about what agency language has in a poem: whether it merely decorates the subject or reveals it. And that’s the larger theme of “The Journey.” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/180235
Loss:the common denominator:
We discussed at length this line: "An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak,"
signs for sounds... her words there to imagine the voice...
Thank you all who were present for the thoughtful discussion of the poems yesterday. How great to have a group share so many layers: "How does poetry arise from a life experience…” a summary of Irish history, knowledge such as the translation of Dublin as “Black Pool”; info on the importance of the Boland name; and how to understand the loss, role of language if mute before sorrow and what that means. As promised in my note, I read the poem below.
As we approach Thanksgiving, indeed, one of the wonderful gifts for which I give thanks is this group of remarkable people who gather to discuss poems each week.
I am grateful to each of you for what you bring. Thank you!
With heartfuls of good wishes,
Kitty
AN ELEGY FOR MY MOTHER IN WHICH SHE SCARCELY APPEARS
by Eavan Boland
Poems for November 10
See below for a tribute to Galway Kinnell.
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/collection/galway-kinnell-tribute?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Academy+of+American+Poets+Newsletter+November+4&utm_content=Academy+of+American+Poets+Newsletter+November+4+CID_d3daefe0d54ca9d59f237863263f1800&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=special%20tribute%20collection
Wait – by Galway Kinnell
Suitcase by James Longenbach
On Beauty by James Longenbach
Exquisite Candidate by Denise Duhamel
Neverland - by Galway Kinnell
**
The first poem
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/collection/galway-kinnell-tribute?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Academy+of+American+Poets+Newsletter+November+4&utm_content=Academy+of+American+Poets+Newsletter+November+4+CID_d3daefe0d54ca9d59f237863263f1800&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=special%20tribute%20collection
Wait – by Galway Kinnell
Suitcase by James Longenbach
On Beauty by James Longenbach
Exquisite Candidate by Denise Duhamel
Neverland - by Galway Kinnell
**
The first poem
Poems for lunch November 13
“ What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come. - Galway Kinnell
“To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment”— Galway Kinnell
Poems:
Wait – by Galway Kinnell
Suitcase by James Longenbach
On Beauty by James Longenbach
Exquisite Candidate by Denise Duhamel
Little Champion by Tony Hoagland
My question for Wait: what lines work for you? How?
Does the poem work without a story?
Wait, as noun, as verb, and even if pinned down in syntax, quivers according to tones -- commands,
desperate plea, gentle suggestion. If you pin a poem down to an aphorism such as "time heals all wounds" it loses in power, but here, there's a tinge of sadness, navigating past and future, repetitions -- "no one is tired enough" leads to another wait -- hair has become music of hair, pain, music of pain, and instead of seasons and gloves becoming lovely again, a music of looms weaving all our loves again...
a unique and singular time worth waiting for, only heard when exhausted. Death? or the idea that we cannot change until we are pushed to the limit? However one understands it, there is need, enormous emptiness carved out of our tiny beings, asking to be filled...
The Longenbach poem felt Kafka-esque by contrast -- mysterious or perhaps sinister as the suitcase allows us to imagine the excitement of leaving-- and then that curious contrast of packing a suitcase, like organizing choices,unlike building a fire, with necessary space for air. Why would the former be one of life's greatest pleasures? Perhaps the suitcase is a metaphor for a poem -- the packing, the writing.
On Beauty is almost surreal-- capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful-- telling a story of survival in gruesome war time.
The Duhamel a romp through satire.
People didn't warm up to the Hoagland. Not even a chuckle at "heteronormativity".
I asked what lends itself to a satisfaction level... The opening Kinnell poem allowed more universals, includes us as opposed to the thought of the butterfly, who gives solace to the speaker of the poem, who we regard as an outsider.
“To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment”— Galway Kinnell
Poems:
Wait – by Galway Kinnell
Suitcase by James Longenbach
On Beauty by James Longenbach
Exquisite Candidate by Denise Duhamel
Little Champion by Tony Hoagland
My question for Wait: what lines work for you? How?
Does the poem work without a story?
Wait, as noun, as verb, and even if pinned down in syntax, quivers according to tones -- commands,
desperate plea, gentle suggestion. If you pin a poem down to an aphorism such as "time heals all wounds" it loses in power, but here, there's a tinge of sadness, navigating past and future, repetitions -- "no one is tired enough" leads to another wait -- hair has become music of hair, pain, music of pain, and instead of seasons and gloves becoming lovely again, a music of looms weaving all our loves again...
a unique and singular time worth waiting for, only heard when exhausted. Death? or the idea that we cannot change until we are pushed to the limit? However one understands it, there is need, enormous emptiness carved out of our tiny beings, asking to be filled...
The Longenbach poem felt Kafka-esque by contrast -- mysterious or perhaps sinister as the suitcase allows us to imagine the excitement of leaving-- and then that curious contrast of packing a suitcase, like organizing choices,unlike building a fire, with necessary space for air. Why would the former be one of life's greatest pleasures? Perhaps the suitcase is a metaphor for a poem -- the packing, the writing.
On Beauty is almost surreal-- capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful-- telling a story of survival in gruesome war time.
The Duhamel a romp through satire.
People didn't warm up to the Hoagland. Not even a chuckle at "heteronormativity".
I asked what lends itself to a satisfaction level... The opening Kinnell poem allowed more universals, includes us as opposed to the thought of the butterfly, who gives solace to the speaker of the poem, who we regard as an outsider.
Friday, November 7, 2014
poems for November 5 Tribute to Galway Kinnell
First Song
The Cellist
Gravity
Another Night in Ruins
In choosing some Kinnell poems, to honor this beloved poet who just passed away, I stumbled on a site about his 70th birthday, with poets choosing poems to honor.
Another Night in Ruins -- Galway Kinnell
chosen by Anne Marie Macari for Kinnell’s 70th birthday party.
(a poem, in part, about poetry as life’s work.)
"Galway, you are amazing," said Yusef Komunyakaa before reading "Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond" in a deep, sonorous voice. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171396
"You make me feel less embarrassed to be human," explained Marie Howe, who chose to read "Freedom, New Hampshire." http://www.the-reaction.blogspot.com/2007/02/friday-afternoon-poem_16.html
Robert Bly prefaced "The Bear" by calling Kinnell "a wonderful bear of a man."
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/bear
Doty explained that Kinnell's work showed him where the imagination could go, then read "It All Comes Back." http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2005-05-02#folio=070
Williams was blunt: "When I first heard Galway read, something in me said, 'Holy shit.'" He concluded with "The Porcupine," his southern accent gliding across the stanzas.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/kinnell/bear.htm
Sharon Olds launched straight into "Oatmeal," http://www.elovepoems.com/poem/oatmeal
which, like so many Kinnell poems, uses an experience rooted in physicality (eating) to discuss a mental experience (writing poetry). In this case, the lonely speaker decides to invite an imaginary companion to share his unappealing bowl of gloppy oatmeal—he chooses John Keats so that they might enliven the meal by discussing literature.
interview: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_kinnell.php
**
I choose these quotations at random, to give a flavor of his thinking:
“ What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come. - Galway Kinnell
“To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment”
― Galway Kinnell
And what a rich experience it is to be a Galway Kinnell recounting this.
poems for October 30
With Halloween ghosting the week, herewith faintly related seasonal poems.
For Open, suggestions included When the Night Winds Howl” from Ruddigore and we did
a group reading of MacBeth’s witchew chimint in on —
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
I also highly recommend this “dance with death” — if you don’t know The Green Table— an amazing ballet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaZQsZUsytc
Poems for Lunch: October 30-- see also Oct. 27
“Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names.” — John Milton in 1634 from Comus, a mask
Early October Snow by Robert Haight
The Haunted Oak – Paul Lawrence Dunbar
All Souls' Day by Frances Bellerby (1909-1975) (discussed O Pen 10/27)
Theories of Time and Space Natasha Trethewey (discussed O Pen 10/27)
Haight: The writer's imagination unfolds, a sense of ghost... looking outside window and in mirror.
Dunbar: wonderful rhythm and drum beat which increases sense of inevitable.
For Open, suggestions included When the Night Winds Howl” from Ruddigore and we did
a group reading of MacBeth’s witchew chimint in on —
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
I also highly recommend this “dance with death” — if you don’t know The Green Table— an amazing ballet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaZQsZUsytc
Poems for Lunch: October 30-- see also Oct. 27
“Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names.” — John Milton in 1634 from Comus, a mask
Early October Snow by Robert Haight
The Haunted Oak – Paul Lawrence Dunbar
All Souls' Day by Frances Bellerby (1909-1975) (discussed O Pen 10/27)
Theories of Time and Space Natasha Trethewey (discussed O Pen 10/27)
Haight: The writer's imagination unfolds, a sense of ghost... looking outside window and in mirror.
Dunbar: wonderful rhythm and drum beat which increases sense of inevitable.
poems for lunch Oct 27
The Vampire Conrad Aiken, 1899 – 1973
The Haunted Oak by Paul Lawrence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906)
All Souls' Day by Frances Bellerby (1909-1975)
Theories of Time and Space by Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966)
“Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names.”
— John Milton in 1634 from Comus, a mask
How is it that only part of a poem will start people? In this Halloween selection, these comments just about the Aiken:
Langston Hughes: Harlem Renaissance
what was before my eyes, but made me see it.
5 ladies to dance. Geoffrey Holder
http://www.express.co.uk/news/obituaries/521511/Obituary-Geoffrey-Holder-Actor-August-1-1930-October-5-2014-Aged-84
Carmin de Lavalade
The creation...
negative anima... la belle dame sans merci..
war goddess: Gamoragon...
war as ultimate temptress...
conjure up an enemy...
“All the Light we Cannot See”... WW2... We lost 2 million in the first war; they lost a million and a half there will not be another war.
What is war to you... what kind of job do you do in war... embrace war or not.
result the same: people still dead...
finding meaning in agression.
Green Table: Ballet.. Kurt Joose
0:59 / 1:56
The Green Table (Kurt Jooss)(Joffrey Ballet Chicago) DVD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaZQsZUsytc
Vampire – what sucks and takes...
succubus
Aiken discovered his father who shot his mother and himself. age 11.
Short story: Secret Snow, Silent Snow
from Kathy: this 14 stanza poem gets more frightful as it goes on! http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/vampire
The Vampire Conrad Aiken,
**
The Bellerby is subtle, extremely sad... How is the craft disguised? Is there a hint of sentimentality, or intimacy?
The Trethewey start with a provocative title. Does it work?
I think it does, especially with the opening line, like a student responding to an academic lecture.
There is journey, what we might/might not remember and undertones of tomb as tome..
comments from group:
Embarkation of Cythera (Watteau – thin silks)Aphrodite
time waits for no photographer
random blank pages – what we might not remember... but also... that black prisoners not noted although white were...before Katrina -- 60 miles away from New Orleans
Ship Island split and washed out to sea.
Consider me a colored boy – Langston Hughes
Once nobody, now me.
Here is a case of knowing the context of the poem, which enhances it.
poems for lunch October 23
As 10/20:
Merwin : Still Life
Kooser: Two
Strand: The Hill
Stone: American Gothic
+ two UK poets represented in the October issue of Poetry:
Caleb Klaces : Moths
Amy Key: How Rare a Really Beautiful Hand Is Now, Since the Harp Has Gone Out of Fashion!
Poems for October 20
Still Life -- by W.S. Merwin
Two – by Ted Kooser
Testimony -- by Joseph Fasano
Curio a prose poem by Meghan Privitello
The Hill by Mark Strand
Very Far After e e cummings
American Gothic by John Stone
This morning, seeing the announcement of yet another writer passing, and then looking at my selection of poems, thinking of older poets Merwin and Strand, I’m reminded by the celebration of Cummings’ birthday on Writer’s Almanac 10/14, there is no better place than poetry to embrace the living/dying cycle. I’m hoping the Jon Stone response to American Gothic (same poet who wrote “3 for the Mona Lisa”*** we discussed last week) will help us at the end… With great affection to you all for all the wonderful sharing!
Still Life:
How do you read the title? As words imitating a painting... or Still (as in ongoing) Life, which the present participles seem to elaborate upon. Or the sense of "It's life, even with this going on".
Merlin's lines allow for simultaneously different meanings to work all at once.
Comments from the group: How little we know of nature, color spectrum of sun, accessible, but not always visible.
last line: unexpected... powerful... everything goes on... memory
old person/child..
present participles..
present tense claim of person...
we live in the now we cannot grasp gone before it (arrives)
fleetingness
said/silent...
nature...
continuum of time.
child... no demarcation
Two: beautifully crafted to demonstrate the value of "a bonded two-ness"-- how two men separate, then come back, but we learn they are a father/son only in the middle of the poem. The only 4-syllable word: interwoven. The only metaphor: their hands making a gate and yet the poem breathes, each sentence a frame.
Testimony:
images: moon /lantern...
enjambments (and separated piece...)
being along w/ oneself... seems to echo Merwin's poem.
Knowledge not given easily...after all is said and done, you have yourself...
pain of change...
The poet says he was thinking of Galway Kinnell’s reunion with the ‘wild darkness,’ and of Mark Strand’s wish to ‘lie down under the small fire / of winter stars.’ So I did. And the stillness that I heard there became this poem. Of course we’ve all tried to return somewhere and found it impossible, but sometimes that very impossibility can become its own song.”
Curio:
She’s having fun...but are we? is it cute... or annoying? Is there a worthwhile sentiment?
The Hill: Strand creates mystery...what do we, have we missed... yet reassures... "echoes this is the way I do it" as if to accept life as it is... (and sure, and if life isn't a terrible place, God Bless it...)
hill: aloneness of effort... life difficult... (he's missed lots of different transpiration -- but hasn't "missed the boat" one person joked). We loved the "So what" about the leaves rattling.
poetic feet...match how he steps along.
Judith snuck in the next one -- in the style of Cummings, but it is hers!
And since we enjoyed John Stone's "3 for the Mona Lisa" I had picked "American Gothic".
We could feel the personality of the couple... If you know where the poem will end up, it is a trick poem, but this isn't. Who would have thought she wondered about turning off the stove while posing -- and what a wonderful element to add to the tone... It took us back to Frost and the process of discovery--
one finds the image... like an ice cube on the stove riding on itself.
Auden: how can I know what I think until I see what I say...
Two – by Ted Kooser
Testimony -- by Joseph Fasano
Curio a prose poem by Meghan Privitello
The Hill by Mark Strand
Very Far After e e cummings
American Gothic by John Stone
This morning, seeing the announcement of yet another writer passing, and then looking at my selection of poems, thinking of older poets Merwin and Strand, I’m reminded by the celebration of Cummings’ birthday on Writer’s Almanac 10/14, there is no better place than poetry to embrace the living/dying cycle. I’m hoping the Jon Stone response to American Gothic (same poet who wrote “3 for the Mona Lisa”*** we discussed last week) will help us at the end… With great affection to you all for all the wonderful sharing!
Still Life:
How do you read the title? As words imitating a painting... or Still (as in ongoing) Life, which the present participles seem to elaborate upon. Or the sense of "It's life, even with this going on".
Merlin's lines allow for simultaneously different meanings to work all at once.
Comments from the group: How little we know of nature, color spectrum of sun, accessible, but not always visible.
last line: unexpected... powerful... everything goes on... memory
old person/child..
present participles..
present tense claim of person...
we live in the now we cannot grasp gone before it (arrives)
fleetingness
said/silent...
nature...
continuum of time.
child... no demarcation
Two: beautifully crafted to demonstrate the value of "a bonded two-ness"-- how two men separate, then come back, but we learn they are a father/son only in the middle of the poem. The only 4-syllable word: interwoven. The only metaphor: their hands making a gate and yet the poem breathes, each sentence a frame.
Testimony:
images: moon /lantern...
enjambments (and separated piece...)
being along w/ oneself... seems to echo Merwin's poem.
Knowledge not given easily...after all is said and done, you have yourself...
pain of change...
The poet says he was thinking of Galway Kinnell’s reunion with the ‘wild darkness,’ and of Mark Strand’s wish to ‘lie down under the small fire / of winter stars.’ So I did. And the stillness that I heard there became this poem. Of course we’ve all tried to return somewhere and found it impossible, but sometimes that very impossibility can become its own song.”
Curio:
She’s having fun...but are we? is it cute... or annoying? Is there a worthwhile sentiment?
The Hill: Strand creates mystery...what do we, have we missed... yet reassures... "echoes this is the way I do it" as if to accept life as it is... (and sure, and if life isn't a terrible place, God Bless it...)
hill: aloneness of effort... life difficult... (he's missed lots of different transpiration -- but hasn't "missed the boat" one person joked). We loved the "So what" about the leaves rattling.
poetic feet...match how he steps along.
Judith snuck in the next one -- in the style of Cummings, but it is hers!
And since we enjoyed John Stone's "3 for the Mona Lisa" I had picked "American Gothic".
We could feel the personality of the couple... If you know where the poem will end up, it is a trick poem, but this isn't. Who would have thought she wondered about turning off the stove while posing -- and what a wonderful element to add to the tone... It took us back to Frost and the process of discovery--
one finds the image... like an ice cube on the stove riding on itself.
Auden: how can I know what I think until I see what I say...
Poems for October 16
a few poems that appeared this week... some old, some new.
To the Happy Few by W.S. Merwin
Composition by John Ashbery
Preludes by T. S. Eliot (chosen by Poem a day, 9/26/2014)
The Emperor of Ice Cream – Wallace Stevens
two versions of Poems by Zen Master Dōgen (Stephen Berg)
Postcard to Herself -- Peter Sears
If Poetry is supreme fiction... what world does the poem create?
In the first poem, Merwin addresses a fictitious "happy few" who escape identification by some larger corporate or national body... in order to address the question of identity... who are you "without a word /of explanation/
and only yourself/as evidence--
as if the division is about the self (you without a word... only yourself) and others (explaining you as evidence).
In Ashbery's poem, the reader has a view of a day, as if portioned into tv, news, perhaps a memory or two...
I find the ending delightful. What is home? The fact that we can't define it, and the speaker of the poem tells us it is a nutty concept, (although not "rented depression"in the pure and troubled time of next month...)
and the play of intermittent "now and then" is broken into "now" / "then" -- and imagining them as lovers,
then as your lovers...
And speaking of nutty concepts, surely "home"
is way up there on the list. I feel more certain about "now"
and "then," because they are close to me,
like lovers, though apparently not in love with me,
as I am with them. I like to call to them,
and sometimes they reply, out of the deep business of some dream.
How different the TS Eliot...fragmented, depressingly so, free verse and yet a hint of form:
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
The Stevens strange juxtaposition of living and dead, another modernist poem tomes have been written about.
with little time left to discuss the "Versions of Poems by Zen Master Dōgen" or the fine Peter Sears poem,
which goes beyond modernism to look at self as a young American in Europe,
"So, ruffled, she went sluffing by the sea,
sealed in the pink envelope of herself."
and ending with a cryptic irony,
Soon she would be home,
she thought, with only herself to tell about.
To the Happy Few by W.S. Merwin
Composition by John Ashbery
Preludes by T. S. Eliot (chosen by Poem a day, 9/26/2014)
The Emperor of Ice Cream – Wallace Stevens
two versions of Poems by Zen Master Dōgen (Stephen Berg)
Postcard to Herself -- Peter Sears
If Poetry is supreme fiction... what world does the poem create?
In the first poem, Merwin addresses a fictitious "happy few" who escape identification by some larger corporate or national body... in order to address the question of identity... who are you "without a word /of explanation/
and only yourself/as evidence--
as if the division is about the self (you without a word... only yourself) and others (explaining you as evidence).
In Ashbery's poem, the reader has a view of a day, as if portioned into tv, news, perhaps a memory or two...
I find the ending delightful. What is home? The fact that we can't define it, and the speaker of the poem tells us it is a nutty concept, (although not "rented depression"in the pure and troubled time of next month...)
and the play of intermittent "now and then" is broken into "now" / "then" -- and imagining them as lovers,
then as your lovers...
And speaking of nutty concepts, surely "home"
is way up there on the list. I feel more certain about "now"
and "then," because they are close to me,
like lovers, though apparently not in love with me,
as I am with them. I like to call to them,
and sometimes they reply, out of the deep business of some dream.
How different the TS Eliot...fragmented, depressingly so, free verse and yet a hint of form:
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
The Stevens strange juxtaposition of living and dead, another modernist poem tomes have been written about.
with little time left to discuss the "Versions of Poems by Zen Master Dōgen" or the fine Peter Sears poem,
which goes beyond modernism to look at self as a young American in Europe,
"So, ruffled, she went sluffing by the sea,
sealed in the pink envelope of herself."
and ending with a cryptic irony,
Soon she would be home,
she thought, with only herself to tell about.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
O pen : October 13 -- more ekphrasis... with a bit of soap...
Next Day - by Randall Jarrell
Angel Surrounded by Paysans – by Wallace Stevens
Villanelle - Two de Chiricos - Mark Strand
Vermeer - Howard Nemerov
Breughel: Triumph of Time by Howard Nemerov
too long for discussion, but interesting to read: “The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House” and “Drawing Lessons” by Nemerov
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237252 and http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2008/07/701-drawing-lessons-howard-nemerov.html
Three for the Mona Lisa by John Stone
**
Continuing with Ekphrastics... except for Next Day...
How does the title prepare us -- and how do you read it? The first two poems of the bunch present two very different problems. "Next Day", a persona poem of a woman fearing the aging process, can lend itself to both a scene in a grocery store, admiring all the optimistic names of laundry detergents, which happens after the lady attends her friend's funeral, or after her reflection about her friend's in the poem, or as an invitation to a general sense of "next" to load onto "day". Perhaps more. The diction in the poem, the skillful line breaks, the flow of the stanzas is rather like skating up the aisles of a grocery store, getting to the parking lot,
and thinking about "next" and ending by the grave. The "box" in line two, refers to "Cheer", "Joy" and "All"
but as scrub-away coffins perhaps. And yet, the soap bubbles and illusions subside, leaving these last and wonderfully honest lines:
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I’m anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.
How different the Modernist poems... and abstract art. In Longenbach's elegant and articulate volume, "The Resistance to Poetry" I found this reflection helpful: "We read poetry not to understand... but "to experience the sensation, the sound, of words leaping just beyond our capacity to know them certainly." Discovering in a poem something strange in what we thought familiar, we draw fresh wonder at the alien beauty of our own becoming in the world."
Let's start with the title of the Stevens' poem:
Angel Surrounded by Paysans --
English (singular) surrounded by French (plural) -- lofty by lower class... or maybe the Angel needs the French peasants to overturn the hierarchy of things and bring some francophone culture? Or...
We'll get back to the title, after we see where the lines go, what they net, or refuse..
At first, it looks like it will be a dialogue -- "One of the peasant "There is
A welcome at the door to which no one comes?"
as if we have dropped in media res on some conversation. We know from notes that this painting, Still Life by Pierre Tal-Coat (Courtesy Peter Hanchak). http://www.wallacestevensbiography.com/pics/Still-Life-by-Pierre-Tal-Coat.jpg) inspired the poem “Angel Surrounded by Paysans" . On October 5, 1949, Stevens wrote to Paule Vidal, who had purchased the painting for him:
I have even given it a title of my own: Angel Surrounded By Peasants. The angel is the Venetian glass bowl on the left with the little spray of leaves in it. The peasants are the terrines, bottles and the glasses that surround it. This title alone tames it as a lump of sugar might tame a lion.
That explains nothing to me, the reader, who cannot see the dark Venetian glass bowl as an Angel of Reality --
give me the creased white tablecloth, which looks as if the wings are clipped...
Stevens gives us beautifully seductive language, such as "liquid lingerings" which seem (to quote Longenbach's phrase) to privilege sound over sense. And the questions marks which end both the Angel's 10 couplets, as well as the broken line of the peasant, complicate matters. Is the Peasant inside, wondering who is outside the door or vice-versa?
If we believe the Angel, " I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
how do we know about being? He seems to intimate that the Angel, half-figure pointing to meanings, is poetry-- both not of this earth, yet what allows us to connect to what is "real".
Strand's responses to the bleak De Chirico paintings, give a similar unease of not understanding.
The Villanelle keeps turning the gaze.... but does it develop the thought?
Both paintings are disquieting... like the poem... Some of the responses:
A sense of sterility with none of us in it and no signs of life in poem... a sense of no entry as opposed to a sense of being crushed out of reality in the painting...
The first villanelle plays on the word "content" as noun or adjective -- is it stated that the Philosopher's content? or it announcing the content a Philosopher addresses? The second villanelle, The Disquieting Muses
embraces disquiet, which contrary to what one might hope a muse would inspire, reinforces boredom and despair.
To offset such depressing and glum thoughts, Vermeer and Nemerov cheer us on.
The assurance of the first stanza, at first glance is a comfort! That "is" is stated, first, as a complete and contained standpoint, and then repeated with a looser brushstroke -- gives an optimism of "reality" -- and does it matter how to read the last sentence? Is it beautiful that modesty is seductive or that the care for daily things is -- or it is both, and why the strange adverb "extremely"?
Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.
The seduction of the next stanza again reassures, with the marvelous "holy mathematic/
Plays out the cat's cradle of relation/Endlessly;even the inexorable/
Domesticates itself and becomes charm.
What is wrong with us -- or what is wrong with our words and understanding as Nemerov presents the next supposition: if you could feel what I feel, I think we could be happy...
If Vermeer could paint what he did...
"In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
...
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky."
Perhaps it suffices to know art exists, captured in little rooms of stanzas, paintings... allows us to deal with what we know will be coming
Nemerov and Breughel, leave us with quite a different feel. The difficult language agglutinates, two stanzas, both one sentence long ending with the Triumph of Time,
"which everything that is, with everything that isn't,
as Brueghel patiently puts it down, exemplifies."
It was a relief to end the session with the John Stone -- "3 for the Mona Lisa" --
We enjoyed discussing this famous painting... and overhearing people talking about it,
not knowing quite how to respond to her delightful concentration. How does one capture emotion, feelings?
capturing the difficult reaction to the painting...
The discussion ended with a mention of the novel "Headlong" by Michael Frayn --
The plot centres on the discovery of a long-lost painting from Pieter Bruegel's series The Months. The story is essentially a farce, but contains a large amount of scholarship about the painter. Frayn distinguishes between the iconology and iconography of the paintings and suggests that rather than simply being a series of pastoral images they symbolise a Dutch populace undergoing great suffering as a result of Spanish rule.
Angel Surrounded by Paysans – by Wallace Stevens
Villanelle - Two de Chiricos - Mark Strand
Vermeer - Howard Nemerov
Breughel: Triumph of Time by Howard Nemerov
too long for discussion, but interesting to read: “The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House” and “Drawing Lessons” by Nemerov
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237252 and http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2008/07/701-drawing-lessons-howard-nemerov.html
Three for the Mona Lisa by John Stone
**
Continuing with Ekphrastics... except for Next Day...
How does the title prepare us -- and how do you read it? The first two poems of the bunch present two very different problems. "Next Day", a persona poem of a woman fearing the aging process, can lend itself to both a scene in a grocery store, admiring all the optimistic names of laundry detergents, which happens after the lady attends her friend's funeral, or after her reflection about her friend's in the poem, or as an invitation to a general sense of "next" to load onto "day". Perhaps more. The diction in the poem, the skillful line breaks, the flow of the stanzas is rather like skating up the aisles of a grocery store, getting to the parking lot,
and thinking about "next" and ending by the grave. The "box" in line two, refers to "Cheer", "Joy" and "All"
but as scrub-away coffins perhaps. And yet, the soap bubbles and illusions subside, leaving these last and wonderfully honest lines:
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I’m anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.
How different the Modernist poems... and abstract art. In Longenbach's elegant and articulate volume, "The Resistance to Poetry" I found this reflection helpful: "We read poetry not to understand... but "to experience the sensation, the sound, of words leaping just beyond our capacity to know them certainly." Discovering in a poem something strange in what we thought familiar, we draw fresh wonder at the alien beauty of our own becoming in the world."
Let's start with the title of the Stevens' poem:
Angel Surrounded by Paysans --
English (singular) surrounded by French (plural) -- lofty by lower class... or maybe the Angel needs the French peasants to overturn the hierarchy of things and bring some francophone culture? Or...
We'll get back to the title, after we see where the lines go, what they net, or refuse..
At first, it looks like it will be a dialogue -- "One of the peasant "There is
A welcome at the door to which no one comes?"
as if we have dropped in media res on some conversation. We know from notes that this painting, Still Life by Pierre Tal-Coat (Courtesy Peter Hanchak). http://www.wallacestevensbiography.com/pics/Still-Life-by-Pierre-Tal-Coat.jpg) inspired the poem “Angel Surrounded by Paysans" . On October 5, 1949, Stevens wrote to Paule Vidal, who had purchased the painting for him:
I have even given it a title of my own: Angel Surrounded By Peasants. The angel is the Venetian glass bowl on the left with the little spray of leaves in it. The peasants are the terrines, bottles and the glasses that surround it. This title alone tames it as a lump of sugar might tame a lion.
That explains nothing to me, the reader, who cannot see the dark Venetian glass bowl as an Angel of Reality --
give me the creased white tablecloth, which looks as if the wings are clipped...
Stevens gives us beautifully seductive language, such as "liquid lingerings" which seem (to quote Longenbach's phrase) to privilege sound over sense. And the questions marks which end both the Angel's 10 couplets, as well as the broken line of the peasant, complicate matters. Is the Peasant inside, wondering who is outside the door or vice-versa?
If we believe the Angel, " I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
how do we know about being? He seems to intimate that the Angel, half-figure pointing to meanings, is poetry-- both not of this earth, yet what allows us to connect to what is "real".
Strand's responses to the bleak De Chirico paintings, give a similar unease of not understanding.
The Villanelle keeps turning the gaze.... but does it develop the thought?
Both paintings are disquieting... like the poem... Some of the responses:
A sense of sterility with none of us in it and no signs of life in poem... a sense of no entry as opposed to a sense of being crushed out of reality in the painting...
The first villanelle plays on the word "content" as noun or adjective -- is it stated that the Philosopher's content? or it announcing the content a Philosopher addresses? The second villanelle, The Disquieting Muses
embraces disquiet, which contrary to what one might hope a muse would inspire, reinforces boredom and despair.
To offset such depressing and glum thoughts, Vermeer and Nemerov cheer us on.
The assurance of the first stanza, at first glance is a comfort! That "is" is stated, first, as a complete and contained standpoint, and then repeated with a looser brushstroke -- gives an optimism of "reality" -- and does it matter how to read the last sentence? Is it beautiful that modesty is seductive or that the care for daily things is -- or it is both, and why the strange adverb "extremely"?
Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.
The seduction of the next stanza again reassures, with the marvelous "holy mathematic/
Plays out the cat's cradle of relation/Endlessly;even the inexorable/
Domesticates itself and becomes charm.
What is wrong with us -- or what is wrong with our words and understanding as Nemerov presents the next supposition: if you could feel what I feel, I think we could be happy...
If Vermeer could paint what he did...
"In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
...
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky."
Perhaps it suffices to know art exists, captured in little rooms of stanzas, paintings... allows us to deal with what we know will be coming
Nemerov and Breughel, leave us with quite a different feel. The difficult language agglutinates, two stanzas, both one sentence long ending with the Triumph of Time,
"which everything that is, with everything that isn't,
as Brueghel patiently puts it down, exemplifies."
It was a relief to end the session with the John Stone -- "3 for the Mona Lisa" --
We enjoyed discussing this famous painting... and overhearing people talking about it,
not knowing quite how to respond to her delightful concentration. How does one capture emotion, feelings?
capturing the difficult reaction to the painting...
The discussion ended with a mention of the novel "Headlong" by Michael Frayn --
The plot centres on the discovery of a long-lost painting from Pieter Bruegel's series The Months. The story is essentially a farce, but contains a large amount of scholarship about the painter. Frayn distinguishes between the iconology and iconography of the paintings and suggests that rather than simply being a series of pastoral images they symbolise a Dutch populace undergoing great suffering as a result of Spanish rule.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Poems for Lunch -- October 9
At the Coast by Peter Sears
My Dance Card Is Full by Vicki Snitzler
No Problem by Peter Sears
Night Fishing by Peter Sears
At the Old Cemetary Outside of Fossil by Peter Sears
The poems by Peter Sears are part of his "new and selected" entitled, "Small Talk". It's super special for me, as he was one of my advisors at Pacific U. I'm glad he was elected as Oregon's Poet Laureate and that this new book came out. My selections... somewhat haphazard, to give a "sense" of humble self-confidence that combines a certain lightheartedness with depth… Sears knows how to string us along, for instance, nodding with approval at the audacity of the speaker of the poem who is involved with being himself, as if not even aware he is SOP only to realize maybe he's more weird than we might like. I respect Sears because of his unique and inventive way of thinking.
Discussion:
“At the Coast” was also the last poem in his book, “Tour” — so even though he makes a comment that he's not sure it "coheres", he’s hanging on to it as. His comment, recently re-reading this poem written in 1970, in Lincoln City, OR where he first penned it: "Looking back now at the poem, I think it sounds better than it is. In the last stanza it opens into a love poem and then, in the last sentence, reverts to the "I". The question of the last sentence is asked of the "you."
Reading aloud, it comes alive… reminded Jim of “Suzanne takes you down” and Leonard Cohen… For me, it made me think of “aporia” — where Socrates gets you at a loss to say something to respond( especially to that last sentence…) I noticed you used “glaze” for a different poem — was curious if there were a connection with pottery. We tried different sorts of possible understandings of the “you" — all of them OK.)
The Snitzler gave us different impressions from the poem title — is it a sense of elation — MY dance card is FULL! Yippee—
Or sorry— no room for anything else… just going to join the square dance and keep dancing home…
Flavors of dance, and a sense of the different partners — how we change flavors because of the music, the partner…
“No Problem” came from Green Diver, last poem in the first section…
(we LOVED the surprise at the end — the inventiveness which corrects assumptions!)
At the Old Cemetery Outside of Fossil. : (so good, we just oohed and continued reading more.7 sentences. 3 lines, 3 lines, 2 lines, 2 lines -- (which imitate the feel "a little snaky/as if I'm trespassing) ... the double mention of whirl,(about "my size" and leaning to left/right... and the surprise ending of the wind wanting to dance with the SOP, alone there in the cemetery ). Brilliant.
The Old Woods: (The setting balances dream, childhood,the memory of the kid; the halloweenish spookishness twitching without saying the word “witch” or spell, or magic; the aliveness of the interplay w/ present.)
Night Fishing: from his book, "The Brink" in the section called "Night Fishing"... Love the teddy-bearish feel of loneliness. How great to know it breathes easily… love the mystery of rain blurring… )
Long After I’m Gone: made us all choke up, the metaphor, the feel of time from long ago with a kerplunk like Sal's blueberries... Jim decided this poem should be posted in Laundromats...
Father/daughter... how a memory will rise up like toast... ornery blue jeans spinning until "dry as crackers"...
The daughter's comment, "this is taking// a lot longer, dad, than you said it would"... how that helps
against "each day falling faster and faster away".
7. Dear Giant Squid #2. I had to read the other one in his chapbook, "Luge" too we loved it so much.
This first letter starts out, "This is a fan letter. I don't care what the Japanese scientists say, I saw them on TV getting all excited about how they have photos of you....etc.
Part of the fun was reading the poems in different ways: one person/one stanza; one person/one line — then repeat — one person one sentence — so a short sentence really stands out. Like “The Old Woods” - 4th line: “I’m small.”
I love doing this — so people really notice the pull of syntax against line break, pay attention to the choices.
**
We left feeling we had spent a valuable hour with a man who produces good work, revitalized, appreciative of the power of imagination,
Feeling Just a little more connected to our human realities.
My Dance Card Is Full by Vicki Snitzler
No Problem by Peter Sears
Night Fishing by Peter Sears
At the Old Cemetary Outside of Fossil by Peter Sears
The poems by Peter Sears are part of his "new and selected" entitled, "Small Talk". It's super special for me, as he was one of my advisors at Pacific U. I'm glad he was elected as Oregon's Poet Laureate and that this new book came out. My selections... somewhat haphazard, to give a "sense" of humble self-confidence that combines a certain lightheartedness with depth… Sears knows how to string us along, for instance, nodding with approval at the audacity of the speaker of the poem who is involved with being himself, as if not even aware he is SOP only to realize maybe he's more weird than we might like. I respect Sears because of his unique and inventive way of thinking.
Discussion:
“At the Coast” was also the last poem in his book, “Tour” — so even though he makes a comment that he's not sure it "coheres", he’s hanging on to it as. His comment, recently re-reading this poem written in 1970, in Lincoln City, OR where he first penned it: "Looking back now at the poem, I think it sounds better than it is. In the last stanza it opens into a love poem and then, in the last sentence, reverts to the "I". The question of the last sentence is asked of the "you."
Reading aloud, it comes alive… reminded Jim of “Suzanne takes you down” and Leonard Cohen… For me, it made me think of “aporia” — where Socrates gets you at a loss to say something to respond( especially to that last sentence…) I noticed you used “glaze” for a different poem — was curious if there were a connection with pottery. We tried different sorts of possible understandings of the “you" — all of them OK.)
The Snitzler gave us different impressions from the poem title — is it a sense of elation — MY dance card is FULL! Yippee—
Or sorry— no room for anything else… just going to join the square dance and keep dancing home…
Flavors of dance, and a sense of the different partners — how we change flavors because of the music, the partner…
“No Problem” came from Green Diver, last poem in the first section…
(we LOVED the surprise at the end — the inventiveness which corrects assumptions!)
At the Old Cemetery Outside of Fossil. : (so good, we just oohed and continued reading more.7 sentences. 3 lines, 3 lines, 2 lines, 2 lines -- (which imitate the feel "a little snaky/as if I'm trespassing) ... the double mention of whirl,(about "my size" and leaning to left/right... and the surprise ending of the wind wanting to dance with the SOP, alone there in the cemetery ). Brilliant.
The Old Woods: (The setting balances dream, childhood,the memory of the kid; the halloweenish spookishness twitching without saying the word “witch” or spell, or magic; the aliveness of the interplay w/ present.)
Night Fishing: from his book, "The Brink" in the section called "Night Fishing"... Love the teddy-bearish feel of loneliness. How great to know it breathes easily… love the mystery of rain blurring… )
Long After I’m Gone: made us all choke up, the metaphor, the feel of time from long ago with a kerplunk like Sal's blueberries... Jim decided this poem should be posted in Laundromats...
Father/daughter... how a memory will rise up like toast... ornery blue jeans spinning until "dry as crackers"...
The daughter's comment, "this is taking// a lot longer, dad, than you said it would"... how that helps
against "each day falling faster and faster away".
7. Dear Giant Squid #2. I had to read the other one in his chapbook, "Luge" too we loved it so much.
This first letter starts out, "This is a fan letter. I don't care what the Japanese scientists say, I saw them on TV getting all excited about how they have photos of you....etc.
Part of the fun was reading the poems in different ways: one person/one stanza; one person/one line — then repeat — one person one sentence — so a short sentence really stands out. Like “The Old Woods” - 4th line: “I’m small.”
I love doing this — so people really notice the pull of syntax against line break, pay attention to the choices.
**
We left feeling we had spent a valuable hour with a man who produces good work, revitalized, appreciative of the power of imagination,
Feeling Just a little more connected to our human realities.
Monday, October 6, 2014
Ekphrastic poems for October 6
The Starry Night by Anne Sexton
Rembrandt's Late Self-Portraits, Elizabeth Jennings (1975)
The Self-Portrait of Ivan Generalic by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
The Village of the Mermaids by Lisel Mueller
On Seeing Larry Rivers' "Washington Crossing the Delaware" at the Museum of Modern Art by Frank O'Hara
Washington Crossing the Delaware by David Shulman
Monet Refuses the Operation- Lisel Mueller
Ekphrastic responses:
For the Anne Sexton: ( how different from Hopkins’ “Terrible Sonnets” filled with elves and dazzle ).
Note how she repeats” “This is how/I want to die. “ But the second time she continues with a colon— in the final stanza — the pull of the “into that rushing beast of the night” — the vital energy to which to abandon oneself. I found it interesting that her 8th collection of poetry, “The Awful Rowing Towards God” derived the title from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter.”
I feel in Sexton’s ekphrastic response, she captures Van Gogh’s energy — understands his manic affliction there in St. Rémy, which is shared with the reader by the epigram. She has put herself into the painting, feeling the aliveness, where her identity can only interfere.
The next poem is a marvelous contemporary response by a woman to an old master from 400 years ago! In today’s discussion, it came up that Rembrandt did the most self-portraits of any artist — over 40! Perhaps he loved painting so much, he used the subject best at hand (himself)… Jennings captures both a poem addressed to any “you” who reads the poem, as well as the “you” of Rembrandt who captured life in paint, in an excitement of portraying a breath of truth! She addresses Rembrandt, the self, and also the bonus old age adds to a self-portrait.
Sadness, joy, what to reckon with… Would this message have worked as well with a different painting? Can we look at this painting in quite the same way having read her words?
The self-portrait of Ivan Generalić is a hard poem. The portrait from 1975 was the one in the powerpoint which showed the bald man against a turquoise background. No villages, hills, animals. The complex rhyme scheme seems to clatter as religious references in the tercets build, build, to the final squares of black.
The Larry Rivers’ painting with O’Hara’s response. Note how O’Hara includes the title, the artist and where the painting is… the tongue-in-cheek tone of a poem written in the McCarthy era, challenging some of the clichés (don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes… and the whole idea of truth — George Washington and the Cherry Tree) in a sort of irresponsible use of language with a ? and ! interrupting the flow of a sentence as if telling you how to read it… General Fear as persona… or the General who fears… or just fear, general…
Both painting and poem unnerve, create a different feel to the “myth” .
By contrast, the Shulman poem to the realistic almost iconic view of George Washington crossing the Delaware, gives an energy to the crazy idea of his campaign. Each line is an anagram of the title! And it’s a rhymed sonnet… so perhaps the unimaginable form belies the unimaginable feat which set in motion our country. In my book, a lot of fun!
The Monet Refuses the Operation is a wonderful dramatic monologue where a woman takes up Monet’s voice… and sums up impressionism, and takes the physicality of painting and his serial paintings to metaphysical realms.
Rembrandt's Late Self-Portraits, Elizabeth Jennings (1975)
The Self-Portrait of Ivan Generalic by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
The Village of the Mermaids by Lisel Mueller
On Seeing Larry Rivers' "Washington Crossing the Delaware" at the Museum of Modern Art by Frank O'Hara
Washington Crossing the Delaware by David Shulman
Monet Refuses the Operation- Lisel Mueller
Ekphrastic responses:
For the Anne Sexton: ( how different from Hopkins’ “Terrible Sonnets” filled with elves and dazzle ).
Note how she repeats” “This is how/I want to die. “ But the second time she continues with a colon— in the final stanza — the pull of the “into that rushing beast of the night” — the vital energy to which to abandon oneself. I found it interesting that her 8th collection of poetry, “The Awful Rowing Towards God” derived the title from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter.”
I feel in Sexton’s ekphrastic response, she captures Van Gogh’s energy — understands his manic affliction there in St. Rémy, which is shared with the reader by the epigram. She has put herself into the painting, feeling the aliveness, where her identity can only interfere.
The next poem is a marvelous contemporary response by a woman to an old master from 400 years ago! In today’s discussion, it came up that Rembrandt did the most self-portraits of any artist — over 40! Perhaps he loved painting so much, he used the subject best at hand (himself)… Jennings captures both a poem addressed to any “you” who reads the poem, as well as the “you” of Rembrandt who captured life in paint, in an excitement of portraying a breath of truth! She addresses Rembrandt, the self, and also the bonus old age adds to a self-portrait.
Sadness, joy, what to reckon with… Would this message have worked as well with a different painting? Can we look at this painting in quite the same way having read her words?
The self-portrait of Ivan Generalić is a hard poem. The portrait from 1975 was the one in the powerpoint which showed the bald man against a turquoise background. No villages, hills, animals. The complex rhyme scheme seems to clatter as religious references in the tercets build, build, to the final squares of black.
The Larry Rivers’ painting with O’Hara’s response. Note how O’Hara includes the title, the artist and where the painting is… the tongue-in-cheek tone of a poem written in the McCarthy era, challenging some of the clichés (don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes… and the whole idea of truth — George Washington and the Cherry Tree) in a sort of irresponsible use of language with a ? and ! interrupting the flow of a sentence as if telling you how to read it… General Fear as persona… or the General who fears… or just fear, general…
Both painting and poem unnerve, create a different feel to the “myth” .
By contrast, the Shulman poem to the realistic almost iconic view of George Washington crossing the Delaware, gives an energy to the crazy idea of his campaign. Each line is an anagram of the title! And it’s a rhymed sonnet… so perhaps the unimaginable form belies the unimaginable feat which set in motion our country. In my book, a lot of fun!
The Monet Refuses the Operation is a wonderful dramatic monologue where a woman takes up Monet’s voice… and sums up impressionism, and takes the physicality of painting and his serial paintings to metaphysical realms.
Friday, October 3, 2014
Poems for Oct. 2
Late September by Charles Simic
The Something by Charles Simic
A Sense of Place by Billy Collins
In the Room of a Thousand Miles By Billy Collins
Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne by Billy Collins
The Sun Rising by John Donne (1572–1631)
Poems for Lunch – follow-up to our discussion 10/3 – contrasts –
between two poet laureates, work of a contemporary poet with one 4 centuries ago... style and content...
As ever, I am grateful for the contributions and comments in our discussions~
As if on cue, this morning, poets.org sent this poem by Michael Broder:
Last night,
I dreamt of making sense,
parts of speech caught up in sheets
and blankets, long strips of fabric
wrapped loosely around shoulders,
goblets, urns, cups with unmatched saucers.
You were there, and the past seemed important,
what was said, what was done,
feelings felt but maybe not expressed,
signs randomly connected
yet vital to what comes next,
to a coming season,
next year’s trip to Nauset Beach.
I woke up wanting to read a poem by that name,
and I found one with a lifeguard’s chair,
a broken shell, gulls watching egrets,
home an ocean away.
*
Poem-a-day follows with a statement from the poet:
“I wanted the poem to enact the dream it purports to recount. If dreams are wish fulfillment, then this dreamer yearns for some kind of cognitive coherence. The sense the dreamer seeks turns out to be nonsense, and yet poetry finds a way of making it sensible after all.”
—Michael Broder
I had noted in the flyleaf of my copy of “The Voice at 3 am”(published 2006) from an article about his appointment as National Poet Laureate in August 2007,
“what you encounter in dreams that does not correspond to reality we perceive with eyes and ears ... faith in the miracle of imagination” and “you won’t like most of what you read, but whatever you like, read that.”
Late September, the final poem in “The Voice” creates a dreamworld which starts by stating “The mail truck goes down the coast/Carrying a single letter.” and then continues by personnifying a seagull as bored, forgetful juxtaposed with the foreboding of tragedies in the making. The next stanza leaps into the past and what you thought you heard... Who is “you”? And how does he know what this “you” is thinking? Is it himself? And why is the sea weary?
He taps into a universal fear: pretending to be rushing off somewhere/and never getting anywhere loosely connected with the sea’s “many lifetimes”. Finally he ends up with
the feeling of Sunday, which for him involves heavens “casting no shadow...” and tombstones which huddle “as if they, too, had the shivers”.
As opposed to whacking the reader over the head with “Last night I dreamt”, he seems to start in the middle of a dream... wakes up to a memory and ends with setting his feet in dawn. Which poem works for you, and why?
a few thoughts on Simic and Collins:
Both poets take a stance, creating their own “film”, sharing their imagination—inviting us to consider our own landscapes, and what we think we see, have seen.
The Collins “A sense of Place” has a passing bird, which makes us think of Simic’s mail truck,
accidents of weather, and surprising adjectives such as “snarling” for the drawing of the fish; shrouded for the cove on the coastline... alarming for the green (approaching tornado?) The “if”, repetition of “might have” sets up a beautiful contrast with the actual landscape...
To contrast the staccato feel of Simic with the flow of Collins blending an easy-going vernacular with erudite overtones:
“There is a menace in the air/of the tragedies in the making.”
“But as it is, the only thing that gives me/a sense of place is this upholstered chair/with its dark brown covers,/ angled into a room near a corner window.”
The contrast between “Memorizing ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne with the original is also fun as a deft commentary for what is involved with spending time with something to value it... lines such as the metaphor or “walk three times around this hidden lake”, the plank of every line, the personification of the poem as walking by his side, the pun on the word stanza, which is Italian for room.
The Something by Charles Simic
A Sense of Place by Billy Collins
In the Room of a Thousand Miles By Billy Collins
Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne by Billy Collins
The Sun Rising by John Donne (1572–1631)
Poems for Lunch – follow-up to our discussion 10/3 – contrasts –
between two poet laureates, work of a contemporary poet with one 4 centuries ago... style and content...
As ever, I am grateful for the contributions and comments in our discussions~
As if on cue, this morning, poets.org sent this poem by Michael Broder:
Last night,
I dreamt of making sense,
parts of speech caught up in sheets
and blankets, long strips of fabric
wrapped loosely around shoulders,
goblets, urns, cups with unmatched saucers.
You were there, and the past seemed important,
what was said, what was done,
feelings felt but maybe not expressed,
signs randomly connected
yet vital to what comes next,
to a coming season,
next year’s trip to Nauset Beach.
I woke up wanting to read a poem by that name,
and I found one with a lifeguard’s chair,
a broken shell, gulls watching egrets,
home an ocean away.
*
Poem-a-day follows with a statement from the poet:
“I wanted the poem to enact the dream it purports to recount. If dreams are wish fulfillment, then this dreamer yearns for some kind of cognitive coherence. The sense the dreamer seeks turns out to be nonsense, and yet poetry finds a way of making it sensible after all.”
—Michael Broder
I had noted in the flyleaf of my copy of “The Voice at 3 am”(published 2006) from an article about his appointment as National Poet Laureate in August 2007,
“what you encounter in dreams that does not correspond to reality we perceive with eyes and ears ... faith in the miracle of imagination” and “you won’t like most of what you read, but whatever you like, read that.”
Late September, the final poem in “The Voice” creates a dreamworld which starts by stating “The mail truck goes down the coast/Carrying a single letter.” and then continues by personnifying a seagull as bored, forgetful juxtaposed with the foreboding of tragedies in the making. The next stanza leaps into the past and what you thought you heard... Who is “you”? And how does he know what this “you” is thinking? Is it himself? And why is the sea weary?
He taps into a universal fear: pretending to be rushing off somewhere/and never getting anywhere loosely connected with the sea’s “many lifetimes”. Finally he ends up with
the feeling of Sunday, which for him involves heavens “casting no shadow...” and tombstones which huddle “as if they, too, had the shivers”.
As opposed to whacking the reader over the head with “Last night I dreamt”, he seems to start in the middle of a dream... wakes up to a memory and ends with setting his feet in dawn. Which poem works for you, and why?
a few thoughts on Simic and Collins:
Both poets take a stance, creating their own “film”, sharing their imagination—inviting us to consider our own landscapes, and what we think we see, have seen.
The Collins “A sense of Place” has a passing bird, which makes us think of Simic’s mail truck,
accidents of weather, and surprising adjectives such as “snarling” for the drawing of the fish; shrouded for the cove on the coastline... alarming for the green (approaching tornado?) The “if”, repetition of “might have” sets up a beautiful contrast with the actual landscape...
To contrast the staccato feel of Simic with the flow of Collins blending an easy-going vernacular with erudite overtones:
“There is a menace in the air/of the tragedies in the making.”
“But as it is, the only thing that gives me/a sense of place is this upholstered chair/with its dark brown covers,/ angled into a room near a corner window.”
The contrast between “Memorizing ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne with the original is also fun as a deft commentary for what is involved with spending time with something to value it... lines such as the metaphor or “walk three times around this hidden lake”, the plank of every line, the personification of the poem as walking by his side, the pun on the word stanza, which is Italian for room.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
poems for September 29
Speaking Is – by Cara Benson
To an Old Square Piano by Robinson Jeffers
A Gift by Amy Lowell
An Ending—Howard Nemerov
Solitudes by Margaret Gibson
Theme for English B by Langston Hughes
They Sit Together on the Porch by Wendell Berry
A Rune, Interminable by Marie Ponsot
A full slate of poems which started with "speaking" -- and how we speak up, or voice, and ending with listening to Eileen Aroon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoWpQWanUAI as "A Rune" reminded paul of "Aroon" which means "a loved one".
Ending of a season, a time, and what is lost along the way, what remains true within us.
The first poem felt delightfully cubist -- geometry (including the comment speaking is a "trap -- e void") and odd assortments of objects, where a chamber pot and helmet fit side by side; the conundrum of the witty reversal of "not customs— accounting" in what is declared or not.
What is our custom, what do we account for general customs we don't speak out about,etc.
Associations included Frost's "Out- Out..." the fatigue at the end of the day and survival vs. "those that lifted eyes could see";
lay-out... If you take the title and last word: Speaking is... accounting...
Judith was reminded of the Cocteau film, Orphée – l’oiseau chante avec ses doigts deux fois...what comes out of radio...
I can't remember who said “I hope whatever team you’re playing on, wins...” or why...
but however it is -- most of us agreed, Benson's poem was worth reading again.
Jeffers poem felt more dated (remember he was born in 1887!) old-fashioned but not treacly...
a sense of wearing down... the piano respected for its own history...with lovely deep O
sounds and end-rhyme ABC ACB.
Lowell's "gift" felt like anything but if the expectation was something not sludgy. Self-centered creepiness? a bad joke? Amy-gist as imagist, an epithet Judith said people applied to her.
Nemerov provided relief...
subtle use of rhythm...the pleasure of the sound texture, diction...
language is tough... intensely thoughtful, external/internal.
We discussed weather/mood... exhausting to be always sunny...
The next poem, posted on Writer's Almanac Sept. 11, has a few "cutesy" line breaks which detracted from a sense of waiting-- perhaps Gibson's idea of reinforcing separation, and Solitude.
How satisfying then, to read the terrific Langston Hughes -- although the poem was published in the 1959, probably written earlier. The separation between white and black, a lot more powerful than the waiting loneliness in the Gibson. Hughes poem walks you into a deeper daring to say I, just like you...have my truth to say. We discussed the idea of writing as being "black ink on white paper" black on white... and the "somewhat more" that comes before "free" -- both about race, but also implying censorship of what is written.
We thorough enjoyed the Wendell Berry -- the conversation an old couple can't bear to voice... We talked about different ways of avoiding saying “die”: – he steps out of the picture...
goes first... gone to your reward... laid down w/ Jesus...
kicks the bucket... bites th dust... called home...
you have two days to go...
A satisfying session -- because of the discussion, bringing to life through words, a liveliness about closure.
Poems for lunch -- September 25
The Persona Poem... what lies between the lines...
Sampling from Mo ’ Joe Anthology, compiled by John Roche, RIT
“There are many Joes throughout the galaxies of Poetry”
Cup a Joe – John Roche
Joeness is -- Carol Moscrip
Joe Wrote a Poem -- Dane R. Gordon
Joe becoming – Paulette Swartzfager
Joe the Photographer – Kitty Jospé
Joe’s “March of Time” -- Larry Belle
Post-Gas Wells, Post-Nuclear Missile Silos -- Karla Linn Merrifield
**
Siren Song -- Margaret Atwood
Strugnell's Haiku by Wendy Cope
+ links to two others.
A Rune Interminable -- Marie Ponsot
I explained how John Roche's anthology "Mo' Joe" came about -- the fun of the reading at BYQE bookshop..
Mike shared a "joe story" about superstar Joe Montana from work where there are a lot of Buffalo Bill Fans...
in his words:
" when a game is coming up there is usually a flurry of e-mails discussing the game, mostly good-natured kidding like “our team is going to demolish your team;” “Oh yeah?! Your team is so bad that [fill in the blanks]” and the like. Once, Buffalo was hosting a team led by an acclaimed superstar named Joe Montana. He was so well-known that people didn’t need to say the full name, they would just say things like “Joe is going to storm into town and take apart your team.” It was all Joe this, Joe that.
One of my friends responded with a short poem that he made up on the spot as he was responding to an e-mail:
Joe
Here comes Joe
The Bills welcome Joe
Joe now sad
Joe
The response was overwhelming. All these guys who never gave a thought to poetry were suddenly analyzing and deconstructing this poem:
“The symmetry!”
“It starts small, builds up, then fades into an anticlimax.”
“The first line says it all: ‘Joe.’ That’s what the buzz is, the popular sentiment: Joe can do it all, ‘Joe’ is all you need to say. Then, Joe is coming to your town! Watch out! Everybody go hide!! Then the Bills’ response to the hype: Yeah, so he’s coming to our town; big deal. We welcome him. We’re up to the challenge. Bring it on. We’ll give him our brand of ‘welcoming.’ Then: Joe now sad. Three little words that sum up the outcome of the game: Joe’s team lost. He’s sad. His team and their fans are in mourning. Finally: ‘Joe’ again. A single word summing up the disposition of all the sound and fury. Look at Joe now; see what became of the mighty Ozymandias Joe.”
It was just a funny, interesting little interlude that we still remember and kid each other about."
Indeed -- we enjoyed hearing the story!
We discussed what made Joe special.. the humor of Joe who misspells, his journey, the nature of "joeness"how maybe "Joan" the poet would pick up on the O of hope and pOet.
I appreciated that people like Joe the Photographer... his unflinching desire to capture and convey what he sees in spite of the danger.
In contrast, Atwood's siren song, which repeats the word "song" as it wraps around the secret of the ego... and co-dependence, draws us in with the first line:
"This is the song everyone would like to learn..." the voice is universal, seductive... only you-- only you can help-- coupled with "you are unique" -- aren't those two things we'd love to believe? Boring song... and darn it, it does work every time (to our unspoken down fall).
We had fun imagining Strugnell... we read it line by line and played around with reading only the first lines together, the second and the third to see if that might help out his Haiku... a fun teaching non-haiku poem,
rather Falstaffian.
The Rune, Interminable -- people picked up the key of "unhurrying", the timing of time, both as first forms of life, in seed, the winter/spring of wintergreen as the poem's rich rhyme, the O's of first word "low" and last word "lost" against the tick of the I.
Sampling from Mo ’ Joe Anthology, compiled by John Roche, RIT
“There are many Joes throughout the galaxies of Poetry”
Cup a Joe – John Roche
Joeness is -- Carol Moscrip
Joe Wrote a Poem -- Dane R. Gordon
Joe becoming – Paulette Swartzfager
Joe the Photographer – Kitty Jospé
Joe’s “March of Time” -- Larry Belle
Post-Gas Wells, Post-Nuclear Missile Silos -- Karla Linn Merrifield
**
Siren Song -- Margaret Atwood
Strugnell's Haiku by Wendy Cope
+ links to two others.
A Rune Interminable -- Marie Ponsot
I explained how John Roche's anthology "Mo' Joe" came about -- the fun of the reading at BYQE bookshop..
Mike shared a "joe story" about superstar Joe Montana from work where there are a lot of Buffalo Bill Fans...
in his words:
" when a game is coming up there is usually a flurry of e-mails discussing the game, mostly good-natured kidding like “our team is going to demolish your team;” “Oh yeah?! Your team is so bad that [fill in the blanks]” and the like. Once, Buffalo was hosting a team led by an acclaimed superstar named Joe Montana. He was so well-known that people didn’t need to say the full name, they would just say things like “Joe is going to storm into town and take apart your team.” It was all Joe this, Joe that.
One of my friends responded with a short poem that he made up on the spot as he was responding to an e-mail:
Joe
Here comes Joe
The Bills welcome Joe
Joe now sad
Joe
The response was overwhelming. All these guys who never gave a thought to poetry were suddenly analyzing and deconstructing this poem:
“The symmetry!”
“It starts small, builds up, then fades into an anticlimax.”
“The first line says it all: ‘Joe.’ That’s what the buzz is, the popular sentiment: Joe can do it all, ‘Joe’ is all you need to say. Then, Joe is coming to your town! Watch out! Everybody go hide!! Then the Bills’ response to the hype: Yeah, so he’s coming to our town; big deal. We welcome him. We’re up to the challenge. Bring it on. We’ll give him our brand of ‘welcoming.’ Then: Joe now sad. Three little words that sum up the outcome of the game: Joe’s team lost. He’s sad. His team and their fans are in mourning. Finally: ‘Joe’ again. A single word summing up the disposition of all the sound and fury. Look at Joe now; see what became of the mighty Ozymandias Joe.”
It was just a funny, interesting little interlude that we still remember and kid each other about."
Indeed -- we enjoyed hearing the story!
We discussed what made Joe special.. the humor of Joe who misspells, his journey, the nature of "joeness"how maybe "Joan" the poet would pick up on the O of hope and pOet.
I appreciated that people like Joe the Photographer... his unflinching desire to capture and convey what he sees in spite of the danger.
In contrast, Atwood's siren song, which repeats the word "song" as it wraps around the secret of the ego... and co-dependence, draws us in with the first line:
"This is the song everyone would like to learn..." the voice is universal, seductive... only you-- only you can help-- coupled with "you are unique" -- aren't those two things we'd love to believe? Boring song... and darn it, it does work every time (to our unspoken down fall).
We had fun imagining Strugnell... we read it line by line and played around with reading only the first lines together, the second and the third to see if that might help out his Haiku... a fun teaching non-haiku poem,
rather Falstaffian.
The Rune, Interminable -- people picked up the key of "unhurrying", the timing of time, both as first forms of life, in seed, the winter/spring of wintergreen as the poem's rich rhyme, the O's of first word "low" and last word "lost" against the tick of the I.
Reading at Brockport -- " A Different Path Gallery" September 27, 2014 : post-reading ruminations
I love readings... it's more than a birthing process, bringing a poem to its audible life to sit in the light of an audience...after the gestation period in which each poem grows...
there is also the "nursing period" where often another layer of revision takes place...
Dream Lens: one of the Borderliner poems shared-- I'm not sure "madeleines and mad lenses" worked... but realize how much importance I attach to "The Joy of Cooking" -- as poems such as "Butter Butter" (to be published) and "In Mother's Kitchen" (Gathering Lines) also come from there. Dream Lens, unlike the other two, one recounting a slant memory of my mother's madness, the other the processed foods which had nothing to do with the recipes from scratch, deals with the mystery of a dream -- combined with Proust's memory triggered by a Madeleine dipped in Tilleul. Does the poem do justice to the conceit of "attending to what is before us?" with its feet in the hopes and dreams of a 14 year old girl? The point isn't "what to make of the mystery of hidden messages" in a dream 50 years later. The Poem isn't ready yet... goes into the "to work on" pile.
On Spells : interesting concept of "wordless charcoal" that's in my poem "Golden Smoke", and section of a new book I put together in June of that title. R: came up as a letter when I first started writing poetry -- the tool for Regret. This time, it is for "Rise" -- the lower case r speaking: "hold up your corps" -- the verbal match for "are" connected to "we, you, they" -- the little i rolling a head of wonder... s snaking into a mobius strip emphasized by e for ease of silence... OK for sound and spell in a reading, but not publishable.
The ekphrastic poems worked: the Lewis Hine photo -- already per for
I love cleave poems. I had read "On silk road" at Litsplosion, but here read "An Old Japanese Mask" -- that will be a good one for Valley Manor 10/15...
I also read Madonna and Child -- in the section of Golden Smoke I call "color for burnt land" -- it was OK, but revised it, and realized "In Cappadocia" is stronger.. both have the spirit of "there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground"
I thoroughly revised "Stealing a Line" -- going back to think about what "wailing under aboutness" meant in an interview with Lucia Perillo. It's now called "wailing" -- my friend Linda says my first ending in response
to my mother's "All I want is a little white pill to end this all" of "I told her, go ahead" might be alienating to the reader. She's right -- much better to include the reader and ask "what would you have said" -- and allow such a thought to be one of the many one shuffles in one's head witnessing someone else's despair.
The "Evening Thief in the Storefront Window" I revised to be a "Joe the Evening Thief" -- in the spirit of
Joe the photographer... which I read. I am so grateful to John for having put together this anthology.
Grateful to the 2013 Fringe poetry chain which provided "Next" which turned into Golden Smoke, title poem for the ms I put together in June which needs re-submitting after revising.
I did read the Cummings' inspired "Sea of faces" -- little face dots like iiiiii's which I had read better at Litsplosion -- and in the second half of the reading, following a Q&A, explained the process of composing like Cummings, but combining musical settings which use his poetry as with the background of his paintings as lyric.
The fun of reading the Lord's Prayer backwards in a new, "selected" Backwards activity. Good for certain readings.
Not sure this would work in a book -- inspired by Robert Marx -- and I wouldn't have known about him without photographer friends...
the story of my roommate (also a poem workshopped by JP in August) in "No Orioles Sing in the Willows" seemed to work, as did "Real, tailing" -- a kind of prosy way of visiting the rice terraces near Guilin, prompted by the sign "do not climb the tailings" -- what is real following, or what tails "real"... not a bad question...
Walk-Stitch seems to work -- inspired by the plants in Centennial Sculpture Park at the MAG -- another one that will work at Valley Manor...
Van Gogh's boots from Cadences... a good one for readings and one of my favorites...
Word of the Day -- fun poem for readings, also done at Litsplosion...
I am so grateful for all who came... so grateful for such an opportunity...
there is also the "nursing period" where often another layer of revision takes place...
Dream Lens: one of the Borderliner poems shared-- I'm not sure "madeleines and mad lenses" worked... but realize how much importance I attach to "The Joy of Cooking" -- as poems such as "Butter Butter" (to be published) and "In Mother's Kitchen" (Gathering Lines) also come from there. Dream Lens, unlike the other two, one recounting a slant memory of my mother's madness, the other the processed foods which had nothing to do with the recipes from scratch, deals with the mystery of a dream -- combined with Proust's memory triggered by a Madeleine dipped in Tilleul. Does the poem do justice to the conceit of "attending to what is before us?" with its feet in the hopes and dreams of a 14 year old girl? The point isn't "what to make of the mystery of hidden messages" in a dream 50 years later. The Poem isn't ready yet... goes into the "to work on" pile.
On Spells : interesting concept of "wordless charcoal" that's in my poem "Golden Smoke", and section of a new book I put together in June of that title. R: came up as a letter when I first started writing poetry -- the tool for Regret. This time, it is for "Rise" -- the lower case r speaking: "hold up your corps" -- the verbal match for "are" connected to "we, you, they" -- the little i rolling a head of wonder... s snaking into a mobius strip emphasized by e for ease of silence... OK for sound and spell in a reading, but not publishable.
The ekphrastic poems worked: the Lewis Hine photo -- already per for
I love cleave poems. I had read "On silk road" at Litsplosion, but here read "An Old Japanese Mask" -- that will be a good one for Valley Manor 10/15...
I also read Madonna and Child -- in the section of Golden Smoke I call "color for burnt land" -- it was OK, but revised it, and realized "In Cappadocia" is stronger.. both have the spirit of "there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground"
I thoroughly revised "Stealing a Line" -- going back to think about what "wailing under aboutness" meant in an interview with Lucia Perillo. It's now called "wailing" -- my friend Linda says my first ending in response
to my mother's "All I want is a little white pill to end this all" of "I told her, go ahead" might be alienating to the reader. She's right -- much better to include the reader and ask "what would you have said" -- and allow such a thought to be one of the many one shuffles in one's head witnessing someone else's despair.
The "Evening Thief in the Storefront Window" I revised to be a "Joe the Evening Thief" -- in the spirit of
Joe the photographer... which I read. I am so grateful to John for having put together this anthology.
Grateful to the 2013 Fringe poetry chain which provided "Next" which turned into Golden Smoke, title poem for the ms I put together in June which needs re-submitting after revising.
I did read the Cummings' inspired "Sea of faces" -- little face dots like iiiiii's which I had read better at Litsplosion -- and in the second half of the reading, following a Q&A, explained the process of composing like Cummings, but combining musical settings which use his poetry as with the background of his paintings as lyric.
The fun of reading the Lord's Prayer backwards in a new, "selected" Backwards activity. Good for certain readings.
Not sure this would work in a book -- inspired by Robert Marx -- and I wouldn't have known about him without photographer friends...
the story of my roommate (also a poem workshopped by JP in August) in "No Orioles Sing in the Willows" seemed to work, as did "Real, tailing" -- a kind of prosy way of visiting the rice terraces near Guilin, prompted by the sign "do not climb the tailings" -- what is real following, or what tails "real"... not a bad question...
Walk-Stitch seems to work -- inspired by the plants in Centennial Sculpture Park at the MAG -- another one that will work at Valley Manor...
Van Gogh's boots from Cadences... a good one for readings and one of my favorites...
Word of the Day -- fun poem for readings, also done at Litsplosion...
I am so grateful for all who came... so grateful for such an opportunity...
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Rundel Poems for Lunch -- September 18
Seen from Above by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Music at My Mother's Funeral by Faith Shearin
You're the Top by Tony Hoagland
They Sit Together on the Porch by Wendell Berry
No by Mark Doty
potpourri of poems
Seen from above, blends a repetition of “steady” applied to trains, “missives” from other-where, dislocation ... and you think you might be entering an idea about winter’s reach as “steady” connects to icicles, leaves, people with their clocksongs and deaths.
At this point the tone changes; maybe the poem could end there—“keep the fire lit/
things are not as they seem.” But the poem insists on an enigmatic instruction about bell-ringing, with both feet off the ground. What has this to do with the title?
What do we look for in poems? Intrigue, mystery but yet, which invites in spite of not being able to put our finger on it, that leaves us feeling satisfied.
The tercets allow the eye to tumble from “other-where—
from “clocksongs” through white space, “and filled-up lives” .
The next poem, Music at My Mother’s Funeral, in one unbroken stanza, starts in media res, where the mother is part of planning the music, but leads to “the soundtrack of her life”. The humorous details, including the music of the seat belt reminder she ignored
paints a delightful picture of a woman who knew her own mind.
How different from the memory of a Grandmother in Hoagland’s poem, also written in triplets, but with the unwarranted enjambement of un-/ politically correct. Diction, word choice is pleasing and captures the age of Cole Porter – whose lyric is bright, beautiful and useless – the ending words of the poem, which at first comes as a shock, as if it is the grandmother’s life, caught in her ignorance about the world, or her red high-heel kicked into the chandelier. It led us into a discussion of how we remember grandparents, as opposed to our own parents. Jim went on a tangent about what’s broken in society
the juxtaposition of Ghandi and Napoleon brandy, the suspension of “just” and prohibition (shelter of a dry martini). The speaker of the poem establishes an adolescent view of the flavors of this woman compared to trivial rhymes, that transitions to how she saw herself – which surprisingly seems no different, and sad.
The Wendell Berry portrait could be played in d minor, a sad end of life snapshot,
with the word “dark” used in 3 different ways: night, without light; and death as the dark doorway.
Doty’s “No”
With all the hard “c” and “cl” sounds, the vivid adjectives (alien lacquer, ruined wall paper, smell unopened) the turtle, like God, is the one in charge, at the center of everything. A delightful poem in both conceit and manner. As I mentioned in the August discussion of this poem, Doty captures the world of the child, and layers in this line, "I think the children smell unopened," both their own "unsmelled" lives, as well as understanding the unopened secret of the turtle they hold to each adult face. The verb “heft”, the slant rhyme of “unlit”, with “single” reinforce the sense of possible which they love, that “he might poke out his old, old face”.
Because we had some time left over, we also read Lisel Mueller’s poem “Things and Naomi Shihab Nye’s, “The Art of Disappearing” and Mike noted how we could end many of the poems sooner –
Seen from above: “things are not as they seem”
Music: but it did not seem to matter.
You’re the top: suspended in a lyric by Cole Porter
No –the single word of the shell
Wendell Berry was the only one where such a cut would not be good.
Jess had the idea of saying just the last line. Applied to Seen from Above
Seen from above
from other-where
bandwidth
last leave winnowing
with their clocksongs
like chaff from a scythe
keep the fire lit.
(end there.)
Applied to the Doty:
Because they want us to feel
in their own hands, want us to feel
he’s the color of ruined wallpaper
nothing but the plummy leather.
They know he makes night
as they do. His age
from which they are excluded,
building anywhere. They love
unopened
the single word of the shell.
Music at My Mother's Funeral by Faith Shearin
You're the Top by Tony Hoagland
They Sit Together on the Porch by Wendell Berry
No by Mark Doty
potpourri of poems
Seen from above, blends a repetition of “steady” applied to trains, “missives” from other-where, dislocation ... and you think you might be entering an idea about winter’s reach as “steady” connects to icicles, leaves, people with their clocksongs and deaths.
At this point the tone changes; maybe the poem could end there—“keep the fire lit/
things are not as they seem.” But the poem insists on an enigmatic instruction about bell-ringing, with both feet off the ground. What has this to do with the title?
What do we look for in poems? Intrigue, mystery but yet, which invites in spite of not being able to put our finger on it, that leaves us feeling satisfied.
The tercets allow the eye to tumble from “other-where—
from “clocksongs” through white space, “and filled-up lives” .
The next poem, Music at My Mother’s Funeral, in one unbroken stanza, starts in media res, where the mother is part of planning the music, but leads to “the soundtrack of her life”. The humorous details, including the music of the seat belt reminder she ignored
paints a delightful picture of a woman who knew her own mind.
How different from the memory of a Grandmother in Hoagland’s poem, also written in triplets, but with the unwarranted enjambement of un-/ politically correct. Diction, word choice is pleasing and captures the age of Cole Porter – whose lyric is bright, beautiful and useless – the ending words of the poem, which at first comes as a shock, as if it is the grandmother’s life, caught in her ignorance about the world, or her red high-heel kicked into the chandelier. It led us into a discussion of how we remember grandparents, as opposed to our own parents. Jim went on a tangent about what’s broken in society
the juxtaposition of Ghandi and Napoleon brandy, the suspension of “just” and prohibition (shelter of a dry martini). The speaker of the poem establishes an adolescent view of the flavors of this woman compared to trivial rhymes, that transitions to how she saw herself – which surprisingly seems no different, and sad.
The Wendell Berry portrait could be played in d minor, a sad end of life snapshot,
with the word “dark” used in 3 different ways: night, without light; and death as the dark doorway.
Doty’s “No”
With all the hard “c” and “cl” sounds, the vivid adjectives (alien lacquer, ruined wall paper, smell unopened) the turtle, like God, is the one in charge, at the center of everything. A delightful poem in both conceit and manner. As I mentioned in the August discussion of this poem, Doty captures the world of the child, and layers in this line, "I think the children smell unopened," both their own "unsmelled" lives, as well as understanding the unopened secret of the turtle they hold to each adult face. The verb “heft”, the slant rhyme of “unlit”, with “single” reinforce the sense of possible which they love, that “he might poke out his old, old face”.
Because we had some time left over, we also read Lisel Mueller’s poem “Things and Naomi Shihab Nye’s, “The Art of Disappearing” and Mike noted how we could end many of the poems sooner –
Seen from above: “things are not as they seem”
Music: but it did not seem to matter.
You’re the top: suspended in a lyric by Cole Porter
No –the single word of the shell
Wendell Berry was the only one where such a cut would not be good.
Jess had the idea of saying just the last line. Applied to Seen from Above
Seen from above
from other-where
bandwidth
last leave winnowing
with their clocksongs
like chaff from a scythe
keep the fire lit.
(end there.)
Applied to the Doty:
Because they want us to feel
in their own hands, want us to feel
he’s the color of ruined wallpaper
nothing but the plummy leather.
They know he makes night
as they do. His age
from which they are excluded,
building anywhere. They love
unopened
the single word of the shell.
Social Media... and poetry: fear of obliteration and alienation
How does social media and internet enter the picture? Robert Pinsky believes poetry destabilizes mass culture (source of tremendous collective anxiety), but the poet also is afraid of obliteration and alienation...becoming like everyone else /and losing connection if we are fluently different.
Wendy Willis,in her article, “A Million People on One String: Big Data and the Poetic Imagination” published in Poetry Northwest helped me to think again about the meaning of "art" in the context of poets and writers as citizens of “modernity” as producers of content. She compares Internet to a chocolate factory, churning out specially designed confections to satisfy our deepest and most compulsive cravings, play to our weaknesses.
For poets these are existential... clattering craving for recognition... desire to be seen... Facebook, twitter for all (or none) to admire...
I wonder what Cummings might have thought about this? A nuisance? something that could perk his imagination?
Willis reminds us of Wallace Stevens, "Man with the Blue Guitar". Even though the artist may not play things as the reader sees them, the job is to see how the artist is playing..
"The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
We will start the discussion with a look at the Stevens' poem and a short look at Cummings' spirit... the relevance and acceptability of the lyric was certainly called into question in their times.
In 1969, John Ashbury's "Soonest Mended" where long sentences are broken into lines to look like a poem, seems to make the poem a vehicle for ruminations and musings.
45 years later, we read efforts such as Mathias Svalina: Dream Delivery Service: “I will write the dreams without consultation with the dreamer,& deliver them daily.”
Champions of social mediated poetics sometimes sound gleefully dystopian: “We’ve all been flattened to virtual handles and data” they say, “so literature should be similarly flattened...
Flatness of unqualified exuberance; rote positivity; flatness of pious conceptualism; wry deflection; language authentic when simplistic, but wallowing in inability for nuanced response...
But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting
Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years,
Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,
But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression
Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day
When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering
Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning
Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that
Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,
That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint
None of us ever graduates from college,
For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up
Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.
And you see, both of us were right, though nothing
Has somehow come to nothing: the avatars
Of our conforming to the rules and living
Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,
Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept
The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,
For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.
The Paris Review, 1969
Wendy Willis,in her article, “A Million People on One String: Big Data and the Poetic Imagination” published in Poetry Northwest helped me to think again about the meaning of "art" in the context of poets and writers as citizens of “modernity” as producers of content. She compares Internet to a chocolate factory, churning out specially designed confections to satisfy our deepest and most compulsive cravings, play to our weaknesses.
For poets these are existential... clattering craving for recognition... desire to be seen... Facebook, twitter for all (or none) to admire...
I wonder what Cummings might have thought about this? A nuisance? something that could perk his imagination?
Willis reminds us of Wallace Stevens, "Man with the Blue Guitar". Even though the artist may not play things as the reader sees them, the job is to see how the artist is playing..
"The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
We will start the discussion with a look at the Stevens' poem and a short look at Cummings' spirit... the relevance and acceptability of the lyric was certainly called into question in their times.
In 1969, John Ashbury's "Soonest Mended" where long sentences are broken into lines to look like a poem, seems to make the poem a vehicle for ruminations and musings.
45 years later, we read efforts such as Mathias Svalina: Dream Delivery Service: “I will write the dreams without consultation with the dreamer,& deliver them daily.”
Champions of social mediated poetics sometimes sound gleefully dystopian: “We’ve all been flattened to virtual handles and data” they say, “so literature should be similarly flattened...
Flatness of unqualified exuberance; rote positivity; flatness of pious conceptualism; wry deflection; language authentic when simplistic, but wallowing in inability for nuanced response...
But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting
Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years,
Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,
But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression
Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day
When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering
Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning
Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that
Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,
That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint
None of us ever graduates from college,
For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up
Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.
And you see, both of us were right, though nothing
Has somehow come to nothing: the avatars
Of our conforming to the rules and living
Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,
Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept
The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,
For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.
The Paris Review, 1969
Poems for Sept. 21
Love poem with ecological concerns -- Bob Hicok
Briefly Accept Events as They Occur by Sharon Dolin
-- Epictetus
Pay No Attention to Things That Don’t Concern You by Sharon Dolin
-- Epictetus
Times the Whole World By Zero by Ben Purkert
sweeping psalm by Christopher Janke
Blink by Sid Miller
The poems this week take a peek at some of the contemporary poetry selected from Summer/Fall 2014 Poetry Northwest and one poem from the Boston Review.
In 1969, John Ashbury's "Soonest Mended" starts this way:
“Barely tolerated, living on the margin
In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued
On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso
Before it was time to start all over again.”
45 years later, we read efforts such as Mathias Svalina: Dream Delivery Service: “I will write the dreams without consultation with the dreamer,& deliver them daily.”
What has changed in our poetry regarding our attitudes towards technology?
What makes us glad to read a poem as vehicle for ruminations and musings on the nature of being human?
Comments from Summer/Fall 2014 Poetry Northwest articles by Zach Savich and Wendy Willis:
“In social media, a work often seems inseparable from how we talk about it... Champions of social mediated poetics say, “we’ve all been flattened to virtual handles and data... so literature should be similarly flattened.”
“the poem as selfie is the aesthetic criterion of contemporary verse”. Geoffrey Hill
Does anyone have a memorized copy of Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended”?
The internet is the island of the lotus eaters, it is the house of mirrors, it is brothel and donut shop wrapped into one.
Poet as disruptor, world-creator and conjurer, guardian and spokesperson for the unconcious. As Wallace Stevens spells out in the Man with the Blue Guitar:
“The Man with the Blue Guitar” (excerpts.) by Wallace Stevens:
I
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
**
commentary:
The Man with the Blue guitar...
and suddenly, we think Green Eggs and Ham... and Sam I am, and Picasso and the sounds – two syllables for the instrument, one for the plural 2nd person of the verb to be,
searching for the key “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves”.
Carmin shared a quote from Miles Davis: Sometimes it takes a long time for you to sound like yourself. David brought up the theatrical set up that asks “who is talking” – on the stage of a world where each player is filled with his/her inevitable subjectivity.
We noted the complaint of color, the insistence that the player get out of the way—and the insistence that there is one way the is real, and Martin offered the idea that reality really only exists in relationship. Perception, measurement, scientists imply are a probability...
Bob Hicok; I also read from the Summer issue of Poetry Northwest his other two poems:
Amen; Oops which capture life in a digital world. What intrigued me about the poem
Love poem with ecological concerns was what kind of expectations we have of a love poem – and how ecological concerns enter in. We read it twice, first sentence by sentence, then line by line, which allowed for a rich layering. ex.
along the course of time to an end
that is really an entering
of forgetting? While those
are three thousand pound questions
I can’t answer, I can change
my ring tone to the dying words ...
so, intimation of death, preceded by a sense of kinship...
And how do I take my skin off
to show the river I know we are family
and in this struggle to have form
together, have duration and wear a name
Emily felt he captured an E.E. Cummings spirit, exploring evanescence and miracle of being alive...even though of limited duration... the “you” at the end of the poem is mysterious – this “you” who would call... hear the ring tone of the dying river... reminded by it that this “you” whose inner water, like the speaker’s inner water, is not here to stay.
The next two poems reflected stoic philosophy – the second one in particular, don’t
pay attention to things that don’t concern you” left a disjointed feel –which Paul compared to reading the dictionary – rarely end up with the word you were looking for.
We also discussed the word “slurring” – whether slurring only to drop to the next line to land on pain, or to take a Stoic view of pain... dismissing it without acknowledging its qualities... which led into a discussion about pain.
The next two poems left us hanging – and we tried to piece together some sense, but abandoned them in hopes maybe someone next week might have an idea.
The final poem “blink” opened up many directions of perception—remembering the “staring game” where the one who blinks first loses; the psychology of blinking to throw someone off; the idiomatic use of things happening “in a blink”. Paul suggested that the speaker of the poem is using the metaphor for whatever small gesture (encompassed by a blink) on which love hinges. Whether we blink because we can’t take in anymore; or in order to take in more... everything has the ability to speed by in blinks whether you count them or not.
Briefly Accept Events as They Occur by Sharon Dolin
-- Epictetus
Pay No Attention to Things That Don’t Concern You by Sharon Dolin
-- Epictetus
Times the Whole World By Zero by Ben Purkert
sweeping psalm by Christopher Janke
Blink by Sid Miller
The poems this week take a peek at some of the contemporary poetry selected from Summer/Fall 2014 Poetry Northwest and one poem from the Boston Review.
In 1969, John Ashbury's "Soonest Mended" starts this way:
“Barely tolerated, living on the margin
In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued
On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso
Before it was time to start all over again.”
45 years later, we read efforts such as Mathias Svalina: Dream Delivery Service: “I will write the dreams without consultation with the dreamer,& deliver them daily.”
What has changed in our poetry regarding our attitudes towards technology?
What makes us glad to read a poem as vehicle for ruminations and musings on the nature of being human?
Comments from Summer/Fall 2014 Poetry Northwest articles by Zach Savich and Wendy Willis:
“In social media, a work often seems inseparable from how we talk about it... Champions of social mediated poetics say, “we’ve all been flattened to virtual handles and data... so literature should be similarly flattened.”
“the poem as selfie is the aesthetic criterion of contemporary verse”. Geoffrey Hill
Does anyone have a memorized copy of Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended”?
The internet is the island of the lotus eaters, it is the house of mirrors, it is brothel and donut shop wrapped into one.
Poet as disruptor, world-creator and conjurer, guardian and spokesperson for the unconcious. As Wallace Stevens spells out in the Man with the Blue Guitar:
“The Man with the Blue Guitar” (excerpts.) by Wallace Stevens:
I
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
**
commentary:
The Man with the Blue guitar...
and suddenly, we think Green Eggs and Ham... and Sam I am, and Picasso and the sounds – two syllables for the instrument, one for the plural 2nd person of the verb to be,
searching for the key “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves”.
Carmin shared a quote from Miles Davis: Sometimes it takes a long time for you to sound like yourself. David brought up the theatrical set up that asks “who is talking” – on the stage of a world where each player is filled with his/her inevitable subjectivity.
We noted the complaint of color, the insistence that the player get out of the way—and the insistence that there is one way the is real, and Martin offered the idea that reality really only exists in relationship. Perception, measurement, scientists imply are a probability...
Bob Hicok; I also read from the Summer issue of Poetry Northwest his other two poems:
Amen; Oops which capture life in a digital world. What intrigued me about the poem
Love poem with ecological concerns was what kind of expectations we have of a love poem – and how ecological concerns enter in. We read it twice, first sentence by sentence, then line by line, which allowed for a rich layering. ex.
along the course of time to an end
that is really an entering
of forgetting? While those
are three thousand pound questions
I can’t answer, I can change
my ring tone to the dying words ...
so, intimation of death, preceded by a sense of kinship...
And how do I take my skin off
to show the river I know we are family
and in this struggle to have form
together, have duration and wear a name
Emily felt he captured an E.E. Cummings spirit, exploring evanescence and miracle of being alive...even though of limited duration... the “you” at the end of the poem is mysterious – this “you” who would call... hear the ring tone of the dying river... reminded by it that this “you” whose inner water, like the speaker’s inner water, is not here to stay.
The next two poems reflected stoic philosophy – the second one in particular, don’t
pay attention to things that don’t concern you” left a disjointed feel –which Paul compared to reading the dictionary – rarely end up with the word you were looking for.
We also discussed the word “slurring” – whether slurring only to drop to the next line to land on pain, or to take a Stoic view of pain... dismissing it without acknowledging its qualities... which led into a discussion about pain.
The next two poems left us hanging – and we tried to piece together some sense, but abandoned them in hopes maybe someone next week might have an idea.
The final poem “blink” opened up many directions of perception—remembering the “staring game” where the one who blinks first loses; the psychology of blinking to throw someone off; the idiomatic use of things happening “in a blink”. Paul suggested that the speaker of the poem is using the metaphor for whatever small gesture (encompassed by a blink) on which love hinges. Whether we blink because we can’t take in anymore; or in order to take in more... everything has the ability to speed by in blinks whether you count them or not.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Poems for September 15
With the Fringe coming up, this week, we discussed a few Cummings poems, which you will be able hear set to to contemporary music -- a different way of "making things new".
There are many different types of poems that Cummings writes... which is a reminder that it is not fair to judge a poet by just a handful of poems. The larger question,
is how others can approach a poem, enjoy it, feel they have seen a piece of the poet, a piece of themselves in a larger part of art.
Flaubert: “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”
Poetry isn’t about “getting it” for art is not something to “achieve” succeed in
or fail at, but rather invites us to have a conversation and relationship with it.
I look forward to our conversations!
Poems by Cummings
1. who are you,little i
2. may my heart always be open to little (New Poems, #19; 1938
3. supposing i dreamed this (is 5: 1926; IX from FOUR)
4. Song (but we've the may)
5. your little voice (Tulips, 1925, Amores, I)
6. imagine i'm/ from XAIPE (Greek word for “rejoice”)
(dedicated to Hildegarde Lasell Watson), 1950
7. in the rain- (Tulips, 1925, Amores II)
I find it interesting to compare the comments of the Thursday group with the Monday on the first poem -- "little" seems to be one of those key words for Cummings -- and in addition to looking at the parentheses, the peering of a smaller i, Martin noted that "five or six years old" could also refer to the passage of time--- not necessarily confined to a child, but a feeling which may have happened five or six years ago... Elaine noted the colon after "feeling:" which accentuates the importance of it. Marcie was reminded of the style of A.A. Milne who captured the magical tone of childhood... and Jan shared an anecdote of her 5 year old grandson, who didn't want his mother to grow old. Judith reminded us that English is the only language that capitalizes "I" in the nominative case.
We tried reading the poem aloud in different ways, as we did on Thursday -- a male voice, a female voice, a voice for what is inside and outside the parentheses... each voice finding a unique cadence as the poem unfolded in multiple understandings.
**
May my heart always be open to little / is a perfect poem to read line by line, pausing to allow each line to carry its own meaning, before attaching it to the next line. The slant rhymes are rich -- fail/smile; eye-rhymes of wrong/young; the juxtapositions of old/stroll; separating of hungry and thirsty with fearless and supple (echoes of "pull" in usefully, truly). Cummings weaves a rich texture with simultaneous sounds and possibilities. We discussed as well the missing "much", which would have ruined the rhythm and not allowed "love yourself so" to stand on its own next to "more than truly". I asked if people felt "pulling the sky over w/ a smile" was a little too sentimental, still thinking about the critique of Cummings as a minor poet, stuck in adolescence. What word other than smile would foil the "fail"?
Supposing i dream this... we noted how the wind does wrap -- words are pulled closer together separated by commas without spaces, and no one swells to noone'echoing the double "o" of fool...and latter "poor".
The 'f" wonderful/flower/laughing juxtaposes with dark jealousy -- and one senses a
complex view of a couple... We commented also on how Cummings, even when embracing a serious theme, still seems to have fun-- not to say that there is a playful tone here, but(one senses even with the darkness, the roaming, unhinged wind)he is enjoying the way he is crafting the feeling. 2nd Stanza, "since the best he can do/ is to peer through windows,unobserved -- the "he" seems to be self-observing...
Just as Thursday's group noted, everyone concurs how a Cummings' poem keeps growing in breadth and scope the more you decipher in it.
"But we’ve the may" as a first line, introduces syntax as an entity unto itself... what does "may" mean as subjunctive (will, possibility, uncertainty, desire, doubt) or as month, when one dances around the may pole? Must, when, now, until follow suit --
saying, doing, growing -- "without until". Marcie pinpointed how we use "until" --
da-da-da-da-da of life goes on until... and something ruins it, or changes it...
There was a typo -- 4th stanza -- it is "dim" not drim -- although we enjoyed the neologism.
Your little voice: Elaine noted the sense of witnessing whirling dervishes with the dizzy spacing and how the tone rises to an ecstatic otherness... We all enjoyed the sense of random capitalizations (and how they are NOT random! ex. up/Up which connects the alliterative "delicious dancing"(up) "Up" to the contradictory "pale important" //
how Humorous makes you think of medicinal humors and humerus bones
This is such a contrast from the first poem, where "little" is important to his emotional interior. Martin wondered about his poems as dreams where reality is a dreamscape where disparate things merge...)
imagine i'm ... we discussed at length the shape -- a breast with a nipple, pregnant lady, half a spinning top, a French soldier's helmet, a diamond cut in half… crosses of Calvary… drawn back bow or arrowhead. We tried reading it in different ways to capture the sense of interruptions...
i’m asking you dear to…
what else could a…
no but it doesn’t…
of course but you don’t seem to realize /i can’t make
it OR..
i can't make it clearer…
war just isn’t what we imagine …
but please for god’s…
O what the hell/ yes it’s true…
(it's true that was me)
That was me but that me isn’t me…
can’t you see now…
no not any — christ (swearing) but you
(but you) must understand
why
because
i am
dead
Yes, I made a typo with yell... which works pretty well, but it is what the hell.
What is the O... god's O... omega, fullness, and the only capitalized letter in the poem? Kathy summarized it as "inner thoughts about war" -- the turmoil of it...
We ended on in the rain --
and spent some time on "rarely-beloved" rare as unusual… what is coined in sunset...
Back to little i... and the wonder of day linked by sunset to night... and the morning starts again, thinking of one's lover... how rare and precious...
So much more to say. I have tried to point out possibilities that lie in our very rich, very marvellous discussion.
There are many different types of poems that Cummings writes... which is a reminder that it is not fair to judge a poet by just a handful of poems. The larger question,
is how others can approach a poem, enjoy it, feel they have seen a piece of the poet, a piece of themselves in a larger part of art.
Flaubert: “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”
Poetry isn’t about “getting it” for art is not something to “achieve” succeed in
or fail at, but rather invites us to have a conversation and relationship with it.
I look forward to our conversations!
Poems by Cummings
1. who are you,little i
2. may my heart always be open to little (New Poems, #19; 1938
3. supposing i dreamed this (is 5: 1926; IX from FOUR)
4. Song (but we've the may)
5. your little voice (Tulips, 1925, Amores, I)
6. imagine i'm/ from XAIPE (Greek word for “rejoice”)
(dedicated to Hildegarde Lasell Watson), 1950
7. in the rain- (Tulips, 1925, Amores II)
I find it interesting to compare the comments of the Thursday group with the Monday on the first poem -- "little" seems to be one of those key words for Cummings -- and in addition to looking at the parentheses, the peering of a smaller i, Martin noted that "five or six years old" could also refer to the passage of time--- not necessarily confined to a child, but a feeling which may have happened five or six years ago... Elaine noted the colon after "feeling:" which accentuates the importance of it. Marcie was reminded of the style of A.A. Milne who captured the magical tone of childhood... and Jan shared an anecdote of her 5 year old grandson, who didn't want his mother to grow old. Judith reminded us that English is the only language that capitalizes "I" in the nominative case.
We tried reading the poem aloud in different ways, as we did on Thursday -- a male voice, a female voice, a voice for what is inside and outside the parentheses... each voice finding a unique cadence as the poem unfolded in multiple understandings.
**
May my heart always be open to little / is a perfect poem to read line by line, pausing to allow each line to carry its own meaning, before attaching it to the next line. The slant rhymes are rich -- fail/smile; eye-rhymes of wrong/young; the juxtapositions of old/stroll; separating of hungry and thirsty with fearless and supple (echoes of "pull" in usefully, truly). Cummings weaves a rich texture with simultaneous sounds and possibilities. We discussed as well the missing "much", which would have ruined the rhythm and not allowed "love yourself so" to stand on its own next to "more than truly". I asked if people felt "pulling the sky over w/ a smile" was a little too sentimental, still thinking about the critique of Cummings as a minor poet, stuck in adolescence. What word other than smile would foil the "fail"?
Supposing i dream this... we noted how the wind does wrap -- words are pulled closer together separated by commas without spaces, and no one swells to noone'echoing the double "o" of fool...and latter "poor".
The 'f" wonderful/flower/laughing juxtaposes with dark jealousy -- and one senses a
complex view of a couple... We commented also on how Cummings, even when embracing a serious theme, still seems to have fun-- not to say that there is a playful tone here, but(one senses even with the darkness, the roaming, unhinged wind)he is enjoying the way he is crafting the feeling. 2nd Stanza, "since the best he can do/ is to peer through windows,unobserved -- the "he" seems to be self-observing...
Just as Thursday's group noted, everyone concurs how a Cummings' poem keeps growing in breadth and scope the more you decipher in it.
"But we’ve the may" as a first line, introduces syntax as an entity unto itself... what does "may" mean as subjunctive (will, possibility, uncertainty, desire, doubt) or as month, when one dances around the may pole? Must, when, now, until follow suit --
saying, doing, growing -- "without until". Marcie pinpointed how we use "until" --
da-da-da-da-da of life goes on until... and something ruins it, or changes it...
There was a typo -- 4th stanza -- it is "dim" not drim -- although we enjoyed the neologism.
Your little voice: Elaine noted the sense of witnessing whirling dervishes with the dizzy spacing and how the tone rises to an ecstatic otherness... We all enjoyed the sense of random capitalizations (and how they are NOT random! ex. up/Up which connects the alliterative "delicious dancing"(up) "Up" to the contradictory "pale important" //
how Humorous makes you think of medicinal humors and humerus bones
This is such a contrast from the first poem, where "little" is important to his emotional interior. Martin wondered about his poems as dreams where reality is a dreamscape where disparate things merge...)
imagine i'm ... we discussed at length the shape -- a breast with a nipple, pregnant lady, half a spinning top, a French soldier's helmet, a diamond cut in half… crosses of Calvary… drawn back bow or arrowhead. We tried reading it in different ways to capture the sense of interruptions...
i’m asking you dear to…
what else could a…
no but it doesn’t…
of course but you don’t seem to realize /i can’t make
it OR..
i can't make it clearer…
war just isn’t what we imagine …
but please for god’s…
O what the hell/ yes it’s true…
(it's true that was me)
That was me but that me isn’t me…
can’t you see now…
no not any — christ (swearing) but you
(but you) must understand
why
because
i am
dead
Yes, I made a typo with yell... which works pretty well, but it is what the hell.
What is the O... god's O... omega, fullness, and the only capitalized letter in the poem? Kathy summarized it as "inner thoughts about war" -- the turmoil of it...
We ended on in the rain --
and spent some time on "rarely-beloved" rare as unusual… what is coined in sunset...
Back to little i... and the wonder of day linked by sunset to night... and the morning starts again, thinking of one's lover... how rare and precious...
So much more to say. I have tried to point out possibilities that lie in our very rich, very marvellous discussion.
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Poems for September 11 -- CUMMINGS
E.E. Cummings ! and one poem by Pablo Neruda
by Cummings (first lines)
Unto Thee I
who are you,little i
may my heart always be open to little
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
one//t //his
(a// le
If you forget me — by Pablo Neruda
To prepare for the upcoming Fringe and special performance of Cummings in musical settings, I showed the loop that will be given before the performance. The first four Cummings poems are part of the CD. It is interesting to me to hear two different composers write different versions: for instance, both Joyce Hagen and Regina Baiocchi have written versions of "i carry your heart" and "i like my body". Baiocchi likes to give her own title, as Cummings usually doesn't have one. In the case of "i like my body" Hagan also gave her title, "so quite new" , whereas Baiocchi chose "love crumbs". Knowing that composers are interpreting the poems with their personal idea of lyrics is yet another step beyond discussing the poems in our group.
Both Christine Donkin and Hilary Tann wrote versions of "who are you little i"
which are quite different. I do hope you will come hear the music at the Fringe in the Sproull Atrium, Sat. Sept. 20 at 6 pm.
unto thee i : from Tulips published in 1922 in the section called Orientales
we noted the formal “Thee” and “thou” – sacred implications; the I and Thee could be inseparable. The poems feels bathed in softness with heavy alliteration of /f/s/l –
like a prayer rising as the poem trickles down the page. We noted line breaks
such as 3rd stanza, “...inhale the”
and the eye must travel before arriving on the word
“slow”
Ending on the foreign word, as if landing in a mysterious land.
who are you little i – published 1963, in 73 poems, year after his death
Juxtapose the sound of long and short I:
I: i / night / high
i: six / window/ if
Elaine noted the cleverness of five (long I) or six (short I) – where the important first person as a child has nothing to do with the adult world. Mike noted how “i” is a pair of eyes peering .– Inside (in parentheses) the child knows a wonderful way of feeling not just what a sunset is, but an acceptance of day/having to become night – with so many more implications.
The bigness of little is held in a parenthesis!
may my heart always be open to little - published in 1938
Each line can be read alone by itself and then read again with the next line – so two simultaneous thoughts.
then slow down further.
May my heart always be open
to little
birds
and suddenly the heart is addressing (the birds who are) the secrets of living.
Note how hungry and thirsty are separated by the positive, “fearless” and “supple”.
2nd line of last stanza: note how “much” is implied after so – if you have a break as you read the line it changes the meaning.
and love yourself so more than truly.
I don’t know if the 3rd stanza is zen – having the courage to let go to do nothing –
what is do nothing usefully?
i carry your heart with me - published in 1958
We read both stanza by stanza and with 2 voices – one within and one outside the parentheses. The doubling gives a strong feeling tone – almost possessive –
and the marvelous capacity of love that lies inside, and yet allows the stars the freedom to follow their own path in this interconnectedness.
The two vertical poems.
one//t is from Xaipe (which means rejoice in Greek) published in 1950.
The first and last word: one
the light in alighting, is lightened by floating, so both not heavy, but also a source of light. One this / is not a usual combination. One. This snowflake is upon a gravestone.
Where are the other snowflakes. Addresses the unicity of one. Preserves the unicity of the one under the grave. The gravest one. The more you decipher, the deeper it becomes.
l(a : published in 1958 – I apologize – the “l” was missing in the handout.
l (a leaf fall s) one l ness.
The two l’s, like I’s or ones, are separated by what’s in parentheses. one is followed by l,
which is not the same (1 is numeric, one is spelled). The loneliness heightened.
if you forget me:
I don’t know who the translator is, but it would be important, as Jim pointed out, to know.
We spoke of the psychological steeling one can do, so that if you are not longer with your loved one, (your beloved country, your beloved profession), it will be easier to accept the loss. Neruda cautions himself, anticipates, yet warns, giving a sense of both imminent separation, and hope.
by Cummings (first lines)
Unto Thee I
who are you,little i
may my heart always be open to little
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
one//t //his
(a// le
If you forget me — by Pablo Neruda
To prepare for the upcoming Fringe and special performance of Cummings in musical settings, I showed the loop that will be given before the performance. The first four Cummings poems are part of the CD. It is interesting to me to hear two different composers write different versions: for instance, both Joyce Hagen and Regina Baiocchi have written versions of "i carry your heart" and "i like my body". Baiocchi likes to give her own title, as Cummings usually doesn't have one. In the case of "i like my body" Hagan also gave her title, "so quite new" , whereas Baiocchi chose "love crumbs". Knowing that composers are interpreting the poems with their personal idea of lyrics is yet another step beyond discussing the poems in our group.
Both Christine Donkin and Hilary Tann wrote versions of "who are you little i"
which are quite different. I do hope you will come hear the music at the Fringe in the Sproull Atrium, Sat. Sept. 20 at 6 pm.
unto thee i : from Tulips published in 1922 in the section called Orientales
we noted the formal “Thee” and “thou” – sacred implications; the I and Thee could be inseparable. The poems feels bathed in softness with heavy alliteration of /f/s/l –
like a prayer rising as the poem trickles down the page. We noted line breaks
such as 3rd stanza, “...inhale the”
and the eye must travel before arriving on the word
“slow”
Ending on the foreign word, as if landing in a mysterious land.
who are you little i – published 1963, in 73 poems, year after his death
Juxtapose the sound of long and short I:
I: i / night / high
i: six / window/ if
Elaine noted the cleverness of five (long I) or six (short I) – where the important first person as a child has nothing to do with the adult world. Mike noted how “i” is a pair of eyes peering .– Inside (in parentheses) the child knows a wonderful way of feeling not just what a sunset is, but an acceptance of day/having to become night – with so many more implications.
The bigness of little is held in a parenthesis!
may my heart always be open to little - published in 1938
Each line can be read alone by itself and then read again with the next line – so two simultaneous thoughts.
then slow down further.
May my heart always be open
to little
birds
and suddenly the heart is addressing (the birds who are) the secrets of living.
Note how hungry and thirsty are separated by the positive, “fearless” and “supple”.
2nd line of last stanza: note how “much” is implied after so – if you have a break as you read the line it changes the meaning.
and love yourself so more than truly.
I don’t know if the 3rd stanza is zen – having the courage to let go to do nothing –
what is do nothing usefully?
i carry your heart with me - published in 1958
We read both stanza by stanza and with 2 voices – one within and one outside the parentheses. The doubling gives a strong feeling tone – almost possessive –
and the marvelous capacity of love that lies inside, and yet allows the stars the freedom to follow their own path in this interconnectedness.
The two vertical poems.
one//t is from Xaipe (which means rejoice in Greek) published in 1950.
The first and last word: one
the light in alighting, is lightened by floating, so both not heavy, but also a source of light. One this / is not a usual combination. One. This snowflake is upon a gravestone.
Where are the other snowflakes. Addresses the unicity of one. Preserves the unicity of the one under the grave. The gravest one. The more you decipher, the deeper it becomes.
l(a : published in 1958 – I apologize – the “l” was missing in the handout.
l (a leaf fall s) one l ness.
The two l’s, like I’s or ones, are separated by what’s in parentheses. one is followed by l,
which is not the same (1 is numeric, one is spelled). The loneliness heightened.
if you forget me:
I don’t know who the translator is, but it would be important, as Jim pointed out, to know.
We spoke of the psychological steeling one can do, so that if you are not longer with your loved one, (your beloved country, your beloved profession), it will be easier to accept the loss. Neruda cautions himself, anticipates, yet warns, giving a sense of both imminent separation, and hope.
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
poems for September 8
How do poems reflect time periods political and social slants? If someone wrote a baseball poem in 2014 would it have anything in common with Thayer's late 19th century favorite, or Williams' approach?
In contrast, what are the satisfying characteristics of Kenyon's "songs", Ryan's pithy wit and Siken's self-absorbed man?
Casey at the Bat by Ernest Lawrence Thayer (published in the Examiner, 6-3-1888 – for fun see http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/po_case.shtml)
The crowd at the ball game by William Carlos Williams (1938)
Three Songs at the End of Summer by Jane Kenyon (in Otherwise, published by Graywolf Press in 1996)
In Case of Complete Reversal -- Kay Ryan (in Poetry, September 2014)
Landscape With a Blur of Conquerors by Richard Siken (2014)
I wonder, like Auden about influences -- who has read whom, and can we tell?
“When reading a poet who found his own voice after 1922, I often come across a cadence or a trick of diction which makes me say “Oh, he’s read Hardy, or Yeats, or Rilke” but seldom, if ever can I detect an immediate, direct influence from Eliot. His indirect influence has, of course, been immense, but I should be hard put to it to say exactly what it is.” – W.H. Auden
This heads an article about Eliot and oral performance of poetry.
Would we change our opinion of The Waste Land if reading "He Do the Police in Different Voices"? How differently will we read Casey, the crowd, the sounds of summer and the sobs, Ryan's clipped almost cryptic short lines... the meditative verse of the poet talking to himself -- or maybe to nobody...
*
Monday's discussion started and ended with poems that hook the audience -- diction, sounds, images wrap us into a baseball came, and a painter's world of choices, making us feel part of the process -- and arriving at more universal considerations.
Whether written in 1988 or 2014, written as a joke or as a serious writer, the point remains, that we poems that touch us, give us a piece of ourselves to think about in the larger context of humanity.
Casey at the Bat, written in 1888 is "The Night Before Christmas" has lively sounds that bring alive a gripping baseball game, the hopes pinned on a hero, his arrogance and his downfall. The anti-climatic stroke is the failure of the bat to meet the ball,but more than "air" is shattered by the blow -- we as readers are, and know the spectators in Mudville. The poem doesn't tell us this, or try to hammer us with a lesson, and we in our discussion, we enjoyed bringing in examples of politicians and iconic figures who are built up as answers, but whose arrogance interferes.
Williams delivers a more cerebral poem about crowd mentality, where the baseball game is quite incidental. Written in 1923, a quick review of history will reveal changes in Europe, the return of the last US troops from Germany, the rising price of bread, fall of the German mark, rise of power of Hitler. Also, some KKK action, and in Italy, all non-fascist parties are dissolved. George Bernard Shaw's "St. Joan" is performed. All of these events have an impact on crowds...
Williams captures in clattering couplets what is.... parallel to what the crowd is...
Kenyon's "Three Songs at the End of Summer" started a discussion about depression, happiness, the difficulty of being so when someone is screaming at you, "Relax, relax", and how she blends different aspects of time. The crescendo of feeling from crows and midwives, to the "right now" of the sounds of the camp, breaks into the 6 lines of wrenching sobbing that wracks her entire body, before entering a
childhood memory... as if the tears were her entry way to the deep interior part of her, knowing, she is about to die...
The Kay Ryan poem, elicited a discussion about accessibility, and what makes a poem, feel like a poem: how do we sense that each word is carefully chosen... how does the non-linear arrangement of two sentences reveal a depth of thought over time?
Martin reminded us that built into an event is the opposite. Hearing “your son fell off the horse...” might sound bad, without knowing this is the thing that will save him from going to war.
How strange to talk about a thing that isn’t, a direction that could be!
mutation...
how to understand this... the age of miracles...
how we find ways to cope.
vs. Kenyon's “this is the only life I have...”
Many felt Ryan reinforced the resilience of life to adapt...
Is a stack of minuses thus, not negative, but rather a storehouse that will provide an out?
Judith reminded us that the way to paint bamboo is to paint bamboo until you don’t know you’re painting it.
John brought us the point that as a species, we are programmed to multiply... but have ability to commit suicide... abort...
The final poem, Landscape With a Blur of Conquerors by Richard Siken feels as if it is on the way to being abstract... but is recognizable... How do we create, and what how do we wield power? We go with Siken to explore what this means in the poem.
One of his comments about the poem was this: "I’m uncomfortable with the way I contaminate the world with myself, with my greed and hungers and multiplicities. What’s the answer? That’s a good question.”
He allows us as readers to look at our greed, hungers and multiplicities.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Rundel September 4
Among the Elements in a Time of War by Eamon Grennan
First Song by Joseph Stroud
The Juggler by Richard Wilbur
Realism by Czeslaw Milosz (written in his 80’s)
Of The Work of Love and Why She Has This Book Made by Doreen Gildroy
In Dead Poets Society, Williams plays unorthodox professor John Keating, who rejects the conservative culture of the elite Welton Academy and implores his students to strive for meaning in their lives. In the film’s pivotal scene, Williams tells his students, “we don't read and write poetry because it’s cute, we read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for...”
He goes on to quote Walt Whitman’s “O Me! O Life!,” a poem that ends by speaking directly to its readers: “You are you, and life goes on... the powerful play goes on and you will contribute a verse. What will your verse be?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_zsMwCOoEs&feature=youtu.be
The poems last week reflected elements, such as fire, air, sky, water, earth, but juxtaposed with war; the transformation of blossom to hummingbird wing; a poem which juggled form and rhyme as it described a juggler and how it is that we defy gravity, turn the table on ordinary things; a meditation on Dutch painting and life; a description of what can happen by taking five minutes to oneself.
**
For the first poem, directions were to read, until you wanted to stop!
For some, that meant pausing at the end of a line; for others, at the end of a phrase, others to read a long line followed by an indented line...
So how does line inform an innate feeling tone? We noted the anthropomorphic fog, face of earth, the sounds that enveloped each element. Such great brokenness in one uninterrupted (aside from the lines) stanza with indents... silence of the present moment. This poem develops a sense of waiting, the way it is in war, someone pointed out, where 99% of the time one waits, and then the 1% of unimaginable destruction comes. Here the last line is the earth itself-- its indifference for a moment broken
could not stop sobbing... Powerful.
Joseph Stroud, born in 1943 in California, has an odd use of punctuation.We read up to each period to feel how the sentence (or lack of one) pulls against the line. It starts with a fragment, 3rd line ending with a period followed by "I thought" which does thread a sentence on the next two lines. Wonderful use of enjambement with 7th line,
heads/disappeared; and 5th line up from the bottom, "bloodstone/turned".
The poem ends with two mysterious fragments, allowing us to ponder "all these gone years". The group had varying ideas of the horses at the end, as well as the moon-crossing blackness, some feeling a sense of dread, others a sense of reassurance.
Wilbur has done it again -- wit, masterful form, still providing poems in his 90's!
The Juggler appeared in the May/June 2014 issue of American Poetry Review.
We read this one also up to a period, to see how the chaotic first stanza smooths into a more regular 6 line stanza with both rhyme and slant end rhyme. The explosion of exuberance, the crash in the penultimate stanza is following by three "if's"
in a quiet afterthought which made some feel "zen at work, clearing out the cobwebs, breathing in and out our energies." The props lie still, but we would clap for someone who can defy the ordinary, the weight of the world -- for once.
Milosz takes a different perspective of the ordinary. We again read up to a period to draw attention to the variety of line length and sentence. Yet more fragments.
Recognizable still lives. A spot of light in the stark and cloudy landscapes leads to the thought that all this was painted, here eternally, because once, it was. The next word is "Splendor (certainly incomprehensible)/touches... and then we have a series of paradoxical surprises -- cracked wall, refuse heap, jerkins of rustics, a broom and two fish bleeding.
But the surprise is not finished! A sudden duo of imperatives appear -- Rejoice! Give Thanks. At the end it is OUR song -- rising like smoke from a censer -- as if purified...
The final poem was an arrangement of one sentence in a couplet, two singletons; a couplet, one singleton; two couplets, one singleton a couplet.
Having a line stand by itself with white space of a stanza still hangs on to what precedes it, yet allow both to be independent. I love this kind of collage, and Gildroy does it well.
and made myself : could mean, compose oneself
think about : could be a command, as if another person is there under the tree.
and made myself think about, is a whole different story.
The creation of a voice grabbing her heart from this 5 minute pause feels as savage as an excavation in a mine. Great contrasts of tone...
First Song by Joseph Stroud
The Juggler by Richard Wilbur
Realism by Czeslaw Milosz (written in his 80’s)
Of The Work of Love and Why She Has This Book Made by Doreen Gildroy
In Dead Poets Society, Williams plays unorthodox professor John Keating, who rejects the conservative culture of the elite Welton Academy and implores his students to strive for meaning in their lives. In the film’s pivotal scene, Williams tells his students, “we don't read and write poetry because it’s cute, we read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for...”
He goes on to quote Walt Whitman’s “O Me! O Life!,” a poem that ends by speaking directly to its readers: “You are you, and life goes on... the powerful play goes on and you will contribute a verse. What will your verse be?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_zsMwCOoEs&feature=youtu.be
The poems last week reflected elements, such as fire, air, sky, water, earth, but juxtaposed with war; the transformation of blossom to hummingbird wing; a poem which juggled form and rhyme as it described a juggler and how it is that we defy gravity, turn the table on ordinary things; a meditation on Dutch painting and life; a description of what can happen by taking five minutes to oneself.
**
For the first poem, directions were to read, until you wanted to stop!
For some, that meant pausing at the end of a line; for others, at the end of a phrase, others to read a long line followed by an indented line...
So how does line inform an innate feeling tone? We noted the anthropomorphic fog, face of earth, the sounds that enveloped each element. Such great brokenness in one uninterrupted (aside from the lines) stanza with indents... silence of the present moment. This poem develops a sense of waiting, the way it is in war, someone pointed out, where 99% of the time one waits, and then the 1% of unimaginable destruction comes. Here the last line is the earth itself-- its indifference for a moment broken
could not stop sobbing... Powerful.
Joseph Stroud, born in 1943 in California, has an odd use of punctuation.We read up to each period to feel how the sentence (or lack of one) pulls against the line. It starts with a fragment, 3rd line ending with a period followed by "I thought" which does thread a sentence on the next two lines. Wonderful use of enjambement with 7th line,
heads/disappeared; and 5th line up from the bottom, "bloodstone/turned".
The poem ends with two mysterious fragments, allowing us to ponder "all these gone years". The group had varying ideas of the horses at the end, as well as the moon-crossing blackness, some feeling a sense of dread, others a sense of reassurance.
Wilbur has done it again -- wit, masterful form, still providing poems in his 90's!
The Juggler appeared in the May/June 2014 issue of American Poetry Review.
We read this one also up to a period, to see how the chaotic first stanza smooths into a more regular 6 line stanza with both rhyme and slant end rhyme. The explosion of exuberance, the crash in the penultimate stanza is following by three "if's"
in a quiet afterthought which made some feel "zen at work, clearing out the cobwebs, breathing in and out our energies." The props lie still, but we would clap for someone who can defy the ordinary, the weight of the world -- for once.
Milosz takes a different perspective of the ordinary. We again read up to a period to draw attention to the variety of line length and sentence. Yet more fragments.
Recognizable still lives. A spot of light in the stark and cloudy landscapes leads to the thought that all this was painted, here eternally, because once, it was. The next word is "Splendor (certainly incomprehensible)/touches... and then we have a series of paradoxical surprises -- cracked wall, refuse heap, jerkins of rustics, a broom and two fish bleeding.
But the surprise is not finished! A sudden duo of imperatives appear -- Rejoice! Give Thanks. At the end it is OUR song -- rising like smoke from a censer -- as if purified...
The final poem was an arrangement of one sentence in a couplet, two singletons; a couplet, one singleton; two couplets, one singleton a couplet.
Having a line stand by itself with white space of a stanza still hangs on to what precedes it, yet allow both to be independent. I love this kind of collage, and Gildroy does it well.
and made myself : could mean, compose oneself
think about : could be a command, as if another person is there under the tree.
and made myself think about, is a whole different story.
The creation of a voice grabbing her heart from this 5 minute pause feels as savage as an excavation in a mine. Great contrasts of tone...
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
August 18
Planting Peas by Linda M. Hasselstrom
No by Mark Doty
The Want of Peace by Wendell Berry
Telephone by Devin Johnston
Finding the Lego by Maryann Corbett
Could Have Danced All Night by Dean Young
What are the sounds, smells, of dark, the sounds of "closed" ? What pushes us to want silence in a rooted underworld? What echoes from a man-made contraption carried to the natural world by a mocking bird, and a piece of lego? How do we sense the wolf tearing our world apart...
In the July/Aug. 2014 issue of American Life in Poetry, there are some fine poems by Lucia Perillo and an interview. She says of MS, whose rules her life, "The trick is to make despair sound interesting... don’t battle MS, relent to its humiliations, which are the same humiliations of most lives, only on an accelerated timetable." Two poems by Dean Young who states, "I believe reality is approximately 65% if."
We examined darkness, roots, the quiet silent work passed on from generation to generation -- the sybil who introduces Eliot's poem "The Wasteland" asking for one thing -- to finally die... the long O sounds of Hasselstrom's poem prompted a discussion of how to pronounce Shakespeare... "ore", hoe', snow, old, furrow -- and one by one would be oown by oown... The great mother, the push and push back of life whether of peas or turtles...
Doty captures the world of the child, and layers in this line, "I think the children smell unopened," both their own "unsmelled" lives, as well as understanding the unopened secret of the turtle.
For Berry's "The Want of Peace", a discussion of the role of empires who must insist on obedience.
"The Telephone" ended up delighting us, the more we uncovered the details, the way, in the game of "telephone" one whispered sentence is carried from person to person, in this case, bird, to bird, from present to past of Indian, French explorer, naming of land, to wind, as the essence of spirit.
Likewise Corbett's poem took us both to the world of the child, remembering the harsh slap of a mother, and the world of the mother, remembering her harsh slap delivered, with a final choice of such memory.
We ended up singing "I Could have danced all night" remembering Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady... Corbett's opening idea, "You find it when you’re tearing up your life,
trying to make some sense of the old messes,"
or Dean Young's,
"The wolf appointed to tear me apart
is sure making slow work of it."
If we narrow the windows to limit dark messiness, the light appears stronger...
Our discussion was enriched by the Spartan story of the boy and the fox: perhaps like the reference in Wendell Berry's poem (We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness)
Once, a 13 year old Spartan boy stole a fox from a village near his camp. Alas, a trainer found him and asked him what he was doing off campus. The boy had seen the trainer and had hidden the fox beneath his cloth. As the boy said nothing, the trainer insisted. The fox, still alive, beneath the boy's cloth, started scratching him, in order to escape. While doing that, the boy continued to deny the stealing until the wounds suffered by the fox killed him.
The apogee of one’s training was to comprehend the laws and to be a vital member of the Apella, the Spartans citizens body.
Young's poem has the very Buddhist idea of embracing suffering -- here, poor feeble wolf, unable to use your fangs, bite...
And on it goes... we hang on to life, for we are not the sybil and when our hearts skip a beat... we are both closer to death, but feel so alive.
I Could have danced all night
And still have begged for more
I could have spread my wings
And done a thousand things
I've never done before
I'll never know what made it so exciting
Why all at once my heart took flight
I only know when (he) began to dance with me
I could have danced all night
/what keeps our little engines going? desire, desire, desire, says Kunitz.
No by Mark Doty
The Want of Peace by Wendell Berry
Telephone by Devin Johnston
Finding the Lego by Maryann Corbett
Could Have Danced All Night by Dean Young
What are the sounds, smells, of dark, the sounds of "closed" ? What pushes us to want silence in a rooted underworld? What echoes from a man-made contraption carried to the natural world by a mocking bird, and a piece of lego? How do we sense the wolf tearing our world apart...
In the July/Aug. 2014 issue of American Life in Poetry, there are some fine poems by Lucia Perillo and an interview. She says of MS, whose rules her life, "The trick is to make despair sound interesting... don’t battle MS, relent to its humiliations, which are the same humiliations of most lives, only on an accelerated timetable." Two poems by Dean Young who states, "I believe reality is approximately 65% if."
We examined darkness, roots, the quiet silent work passed on from generation to generation -- the sybil who introduces Eliot's poem "The Wasteland" asking for one thing -- to finally die... the long O sounds of Hasselstrom's poem prompted a discussion of how to pronounce Shakespeare... "ore", hoe', snow, old, furrow -- and one by one would be oown by oown... The great mother, the push and push back of life whether of peas or turtles...
Doty captures the world of the child, and layers in this line, "I think the children smell unopened," both their own "unsmelled" lives, as well as understanding the unopened secret of the turtle.
For Berry's "The Want of Peace", a discussion of the role of empires who must insist on obedience.
"The Telephone" ended up delighting us, the more we uncovered the details, the way, in the game of "telephone" one whispered sentence is carried from person to person, in this case, bird, to bird, from present to past of Indian, French explorer, naming of land, to wind, as the essence of spirit.
Likewise Corbett's poem took us both to the world of the child, remembering the harsh slap of a mother, and the world of the mother, remembering her harsh slap delivered, with a final choice of such memory.
We ended up singing "I Could have danced all night" remembering Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady... Corbett's opening idea, "You find it when you’re tearing up your life,
trying to make some sense of the old messes,"
or Dean Young's,
"The wolf appointed to tear me apart
is sure making slow work of it."
If we narrow the windows to limit dark messiness, the light appears stronger...
Our discussion was enriched by the Spartan story of the boy and the fox: perhaps like the reference in Wendell Berry's poem (We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness)
Once, a 13 year old Spartan boy stole a fox from a village near his camp. Alas, a trainer found him and asked him what he was doing off campus. The boy had seen the trainer and had hidden the fox beneath his cloth. As the boy said nothing, the trainer insisted. The fox, still alive, beneath the boy's cloth, started scratching him, in order to escape. While doing that, the boy continued to deny the stealing until the wounds suffered by the fox killed him.
The apogee of one’s training was to comprehend the laws and to be a vital member of the Apella, the Spartans citizens body.
Young's poem has the very Buddhist idea of embracing suffering -- here, poor feeble wolf, unable to use your fangs, bite...
And on it goes... we hang on to life, for we are not the sybil and when our hearts skip a beat... we are both closer to death, but feel so alive.
I Could have danced all night
And still have begged for more
I could have spread my wings
And done a thousand things
I've never done before
I'll never know what made it so exciting
Why all at once my heart took flight
I only know when (he) began to dance with me
I could have danced all night
/what keeps our little engines going? desire, desire, desire, says Kunitz.
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