Verses for Everyday Use (5 excerpts from Fadhil al-Azzawi. There are 4 pages of them in "Al-Mutannabi Street Starts Here".
Silence, by Billy Collins
Snow by Philip Levine
Snow Day by Billy Collins
What’s Written on the Body by Peter Perreira
Sire by W.S. Merwin
Although my initial idea was to read again, this week, "Silence", but out of the context of "Al-Mutannabi Street starts here", and leading into the context of two poems about snow that follow, we started with personal associations with titles. Would this be different hard on the heals of reading "Market run-on"?
Silence is usually associated with peace, stillness. It could possibly be censorship, or refraining from speaking. However understood, the title, "Silence" is a paradox as it contradicts silence by the very presence of the word, which will break the very thing it is when spoken. Collins captures the silence of what could happen, what happens without our noticing, or what we notice only when it stops. The fourth tercet repeats "silence" on each line: intimate silence of holding; silence of a window; silence when the beloved departs. Silence is again repeated three times, in the last line of the fifth tercet, the pile-up of silence breaking into a metaphor, continued in the sixth.
...
a silence that had piled up all night
like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.
This is a poem that gently prods us to read it again, each time, finding poignant revelations.
From a one-word title, and 6 tercet poem that ends on snow as simile, now let's look at a one-word title, Snow, to hold two stanzas, the second of which also uses a simile of snow as tears of lost souls choosing to return to earth. Levine uses the word "filthy" both 4th line for water and 15th line for a window, as he describes the Detroit river, traffic.
The 3rd sentence makes the reader stop, as if we were the ones who hit a parked car. "The bright squads of children/on their way to school howl/ at the foolishness of the world/they will try not to inherit.
The repeat of spring/grass, as spring grass as the earth's song in answer to the new sun, change of season, dark rain of Spring nights prepares us for the final stanza in which snow's response to the Earth, is to comfort. All by itself, the last stanza probably could not stand alone. Against the squalor of the city, the memory of a time before steel and fire, snow, "which has no melody of form", rings with redemptive, unconditional love.
Billy Collins, Snow Day, starts with the metaphor of "revolution", snow waving a white flag, as if announcing "surrender"! Second stanza, the verbs continue the battle: smother, bury, block, the world "fallen under this falling." Snow and anarchy give way to the announcement of nursery school closings,
the names reminiscent of some children's tale, song or rhyme. Ding Dong the witch is dead!
Hi-ho evoking Snow White's dwarves, Tom Thumb, Peanuts -- but even better, an epiphany that these schools are the nests for our innocents/innocence. The narrator of the poem becomes a spy, trying to find out what the girls by the fence are plotting. Although we see the scene, the underpinnings to support "riot" and "queen" as fairy tale figure work our consciousness.
Comparing this poem to Levine's snow, we go back to "the bright squads of children"... who suddenly seem more active as future revolutionaries.
The next poem, written by Doctor and poet, Peter Perreira shares its the title with the collection of poems in which it's found. We "read" people through body language, "read faces", feel deep emotions
without words. We also know of the numbering on the skin of slaves, prisoners. This small vignette
includes a man from Cambodia, his interpreter and the doctor-narrator/speaker of the poem.
We as readers also try to "gather/the tatters of his speech", understand not just the complaint (hit by the wind), the physical "violaceous streaks", but how the interpreter explains the icons and script
tattooed across his back.
I am not sure in what year Merwin wrote "Sire". Another Poet Laureate, like Collins and Levine,
he is known for his suspended lines which do not have periods. This poem is liberal with punctuation.
Starting with the anaphor, "Here comes..." repeated three times in the first stanza, soon pattern disappears, although "Here comes" arrives again in the middle of the second stanza.
Who are the players? shadow, little wind dragged by the hour, the speaker's ignorance, and finally,
a thistle seed the speaker believes to be the lost wisdom of his grandfather.
Indirections, incomprehensions, indecision... wearing shoes, then boots, on crutches, barefoot..
in what shoes does one find oneself?
Threads of biography, including the "good woman" providing children like cakes... "flinging after you/Little endearments, like rocks, or her silence like a whole Sunday of bells."
This poem too requires several readings, each one increasingly rewarding.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Poems for January 27
study 39 -- William Kistler
13 Ways of looking at a Blackbird -- Wallace Stevens
The Introduction – Billy Collins
Fictional Characters by Danusha Laméris
Truth, fact, fiction and how we perceive ourselves and others... sounds like a grandiose aim, and yet, these four poems guide us to think about the "how" we proceed to shoot arrows in this direction.
Paradox is useful, as in Kistler's study, filled with "thinking about people and things" about it,
which echoes in his mind as he contemplates each week's "mudslide of facts".
The opening line, "beginning where we had never fully been", gives as little clue to the "we" as to what sort of beginning is addressed. By the end of the poem, one could think it is about America, built on
the Declaration of Independence, penned by a man who sired children to his indentured slave, who would not benefit from such ideas. And is this not true of "actuality" where, with those led by noses into cellphones, are at risk to know what reality is.
I found this "study" which Kistler explains as "language in the service of insight" more intriguing both linguistically and intellectually than his catalogue of loss last week, in which the reader and study ended by "craters of sadness,/rubble covered by what the wind brings, / wounded eyes lost in the mind of loss. What bothers me though, is a sense of reading someone shut up in his "study", ruminating alone,
with no emotional lifeline for the reader to pull.
Stevens celebrated poem gave rise to a discussion of the many ways we understand even such a thing as a blackbird -- mythological connections; a sense of the sinister; a sense of the shadow following or completing us; How do we understand something? Observe? Looking is perception with the mind involved,
with both spiritual and physical eye. There is also whimsy of having "thin men of Haddam" (and imagining business men in suits in Connecticut" and the paradoxical bawds of euphony, which combines plebeian with elevated register. I see a wink in non-sequitur of assumption: "The river is moving./ The blackbird must be flying. Above all, what I love in this poem are the parts I've always cherished that stand out as if printing on yet another new fabric with each new reading.
Part VI: The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
and again this shadow in Part VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
and my all-time favorite which addresses time and nuances of beauty sounded/implied:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
One thing is sure, there cannot be just ONE way of looking at a blackbird.
Carmin shared the Billy Collins poem with this comment:
"occasionally I come across a poem that requires me to look up many references and after the time spent I am left unsatisfied. For this type poem I delight in the following Billy Collins poem."
With his delightful drip of irony, Collins juxtaposes "let the poem speak for itself" with a conversational, "surely you know, but of course" and a plethora of obscure details, including highly diverse possibilities for "monad".
We ended the hour with a good discussion of how we as readers attribute consciousness to one another by taking what Dennett calls “the intentional stance”: I imagine that you are (as I am) able to decide and intend some meaning. I imagine that, in that way, you are like me. You, dear fictional character, like me, real life person inventing my life as I go along, sometimes want to exit the path someone is mysteriously creating for you.
We brought up examples of people who have multiple lives... or thoroughly double lives... how to allow yourself to live more fully than your parameters...on or off the page.
13 Ways of looking at a Blackbird -- Wallace Stevens
The Introduction – Billy Collins
Fictional Characters by Danusha Laméris
Truth, fact, fiction and how we perceive ourselves and others... sounds like a grandiose aim, and yet, these four poems guide us to think about the "how" we proceed to shoot arrows in this direction.
Paradox is useful, as in Kistler's study, filled with "thinking about people and things" about it,
which echoes in his mind as he contemplates each week's "mudslide of facts".
The opening line, "beginning where we had never fully been", gives as little clue to the "we" as to what sort of beginning is addressed. By the end of the poem, one could think it is about America, built on
the Declaration of Independence, penned by a man who sired children to his indentured slave, who would not benefit from such ideas. And is this not true of "actuality" where, with those led by noses into cellphones, are at risk to know what reality is.
I found this "study" which Kistler explains as "language in the service of insight" more intriguing both linguistically and intellectually than his catalogue of loss last week, in which the reader and study ended by "craters of sadness,/rubble covered by what the wind brings, / wounded eyes lost in the mind of loss. What bothers me though, is a sense of reading someone shut up in his "study", ruminating alone,
with no emotional lifeline for the reader to pull.
Stevens celebrated poem gave rise to a discussion of the many ways we understand even such a thing as a blackbird -- mythological connections; a sense of the sinister; a sense of the shadow following or completing us; How do we understand something? Observe? Looking is perception with the mind involved,
with both spiritual and physical eye. There is also whimsy of having "thin men of Haddam" (and imagining business men in suits in Connecticut" and the paradoxical bawds of euphony, which combines plebeian with elevated register. I see a wink in non-sequitur of assumption: "The river is moving./ The blackbird must be flying. Above all, what I love in this poem are the parts I've always cherished that stand out as if printing on yet another new fabric with each new reading.
Part VI: The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
and again this shadow in Part VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
and my all-time favorite which addresses time and nuances of beauty sounded/implied:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
One thing is sure, there cannot be just ONE way of looking at a blackbird.
Carmin shared the Billy Collins poem with this comment:
"occasionally I come across a poem that requires me to look up many references and after the time spent I am left unsatisfied. For this type poem I delight in the following Billy Collins poem."
With his delightful drip of irony, Collins juxtaposes "let the poem speak for itself" with a conversational, "surely you know, but of course" and a plethora of obscure details, including highly diverse possibilities for "monad".
We ended the hour with a good discussion of how we as readers attribute consciousness to one another by taking what Dennett calls “the intentional stance”: I imagine that you are (as I am) able to decide and intend some meaning. I imagine that, in that way, you are like me. You, dear fictional character, like me, real life person inventing my life as I go along, sometimes want to exit the path someone is mysteriously creating for you.
We brought up examples of people who have multiple lives... or thoroughly double lives... how to allow yourself to live more fully than your parameters...on or off the page.
poems for January 23
Poems for January 23
p. 42 The al-Mutanabbi Street Bombing by Brian Turner
p. 137 Untitled –Ibn al-Utri
Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes
Market Forces Runon by Tony Kranz
p. 248 Verses for Everyday Use -- Fadhil al-Azzawi
Page numbers refer to Al-Mutanabbi St. Starts Here, edited by Beau Beausoleil.
Last week, we left off with “After Rumi” by by Janet Sternburg (p. 67, Al-Mutanabbi St. Starts Here). Now, 4 more poems from this anthology including an elegy for someone who perished in the bombing, and a 9th century lament. It seemed fitting for Martin Luther King day, to include Langston Hughes' 1935 poem. What makes poetry timeless? Satisfying? What poems draw us in, demanding something in us change?
In the Turner poem, we picked up on the "poetic devises" which unfold the story line. Perhaps the most striking was the repetition of the word "broken" first for sounds, then for the neck of the water pipe, bouncing like a goose with a wrung neck-- as a man runs past "broken sounds of the wounded". Broken also is the tradition of sitting at a cafe in discussion, smoking. In the stanza that brings us to couples in California, the"k" of "wake at the break of dawn" echoes along with the light dusting of ash of the poems
booth old and contemporary, as time goes on. In spite of the destruction, most felt a sense of hope, as though the wisdom of the words, the act of the lovers can transmute acts of violence.
In the 9th century Ibn al-Utri poem, the subtle reference to internal division and strife is layered in the Mongol invasion. Victims of those who want power comes in different forms.
We read the Langston Hughes stanza by stanza, with everyone joining the chorus "America never was America to me", and individuals reading each phrase starting with "I". Hughes hooks all the individual I's, in,
after the italicized "who are you" - draws us in to think about what we veil and mumble as the poem rumbles to declare "O let America be America again" -- where each "ME" becomes part of the "We" that will make "America again"!
Such an orderly syntax is in direct contrast with the run-on phrase that elaborates what falls from the sky, and what triggered the explosion that has blown books and bones to bits (all those B's collect into the rubble). The poem demonstrates its meaning by the form where what falls in fragments...results from Market Forces.. while in our name, America's flag waves.
We will start next week with the Verses for Everyday Use. I pointed out how, out of 4 pages of verses, I have only chosen a scattering, and reiterated how we don't know contexts, nor the accuracy of translation. Words can be translated one by one, the the worlds in which they live cannot.
p. 42 The al-Mutanabbi Street Bombing by Brian Turner
p. 137 Untitled –Ibn al-Utri
Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes
Market Forces Runon by Tony Kranz
p. 248 Verses for Everyday Use -- Fadhil al-Azzawi
Page numbers refer to Al-Mutanabbi St. Starts Here, edited by Beau Beausoleil.
Last week, we left off with “After Rumi” by by Janet Sternburg (p. 67, Al-Mutanabbi St. Starts Here). Now, 4 more poems from this anthology including an elegy for someone who perished in the bombing, and a 9th century lament. It seemed fitting for Martin Luther King day, to include Langston Hughes' 1935 poem. What makes poetry timeless? Satisfying? What poems draw us in, demanding something in us change?
In the Turner poem, we picked up on the "poetic devises" which unfold the story line. Perhaps the most striking was the repetition of the word "broken" first for sounds, then for the neck of the water pipe, bouncing like a goose with a wrung neck-- as a man runs past "broken sounds of the wounded". Broken also is the tradition of sitting at a cafe in discussion, smoking. In the stanza that brings us to couples in California, the"k" of "wake at the break of dawn" echoes along with the light dusting of ash of the poems
booth old and contemporary, as time goes on. In spite of the destruction, most felt a sense of hope, as though the wisdom of the words, the act of the lovers can transmute acts of violence.
In the 9th century Ibn al-Utri poem, the subtle reference to internal division and strife is layered in the Mongol invasion. Victims of those who want power comes in different forms.
We read the Langston Hughes stanza by stanza, with everyone joining the chorus "America never was America to me", and individuals reading each phrase starting with "I". Hughes hooks all the individual I's, in,
after the italicized "who are you" - draws us in to think about what we veil and mumble as the poem rumbles to declare "O let America be America again" -- where each "ME" becomes part of the "We" that will make "America again"!
Such an orderly syntax is in direct contrast with the run-on phrase that elaborates what falls from the sky, and what triggered the explosion that has blown books and bones to bits (all those B's collect into the rubble). The poem demonstrates its meaning by the form where what falls in fragments...results from Market Forces.. while in our name, America's flag waves.
We will start next week with the Verses for Everyday Use. I pointed out how, out of 4 pages of verses, I have only chosen a scattering, and reiterated how we don't know contexts, nor the accuracy of translation. Words can be translated one by one, the the worlds in which they live cannot.
Poems for January 20
Oasis in a Moment by Sohrab Sepehri
excerpt from "The Oasis of Now"
Bird at the Window by Sophie Cabot Black
Grand Central by Billy Collins
Hello Central by Ron Padgett
study eighteen – William Kistler
study thirty-nine –by William Kistler
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
We did not have time to discuss 13 ways of looking at a Blackbird, but our discussion last week reminded me of the importance of choosing different lenses, and going beyond a singular monocle. Martin's comment about so many people reading poetry, then writing more poems, allowing a bubbling up --of... and here I need to lamely fill in my words: different ways to think about life and our place in it.
Where do you go with the word "Oasis" and then again, what can we know of poems in translation where rhythms and sounds are traded for one translator's lens... And what does it mean to call something "central" or "Grand Central"? And what does "study" mean? Part of a series to represent many multiple moments? I respect poets who use language in the service of insight!
The marvelous discussion about translation, prose vs. poetry on Monday could very well continue ad infinitum. For those who were not present, we never did arrive at the last two poems.
You might like to read the “blog" in the New York Review of Books by Charles Simic, which feels like a “poem in snatches of prose”.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jan/21/short-days-and-long-nights/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=January+21+2014&utm_content=January+21+2014+CID_04a70caa88c1d3090300c6f5f3c01d81&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=Short%20Days%20and%20Long%20Nights
(see attachment: Short Days and Long Nights)
What rhythms, metaphors, poetic devices make it seem “poem-like”? Is this any different from a passage from a Novel?
John kindly provided two excerpts from Dickens which I also attach. (see attachment: two prose passages)
I propose that for those interested, enjoy further explorations — but we’ll return to our usual group discussion of specific poems.
**
The Bird at the Window was perhaps the most enigmatic of the poems discussed. The ingredients: couplets, with formal caps at the beginning of each line, but no period, words which stretched both towards those preceding them and those following, as if to borrow context for both. I picked the poem (Source: Poetry-- June 2008); from an article by Billy Collins in which he refers to
her volume The Exchange. “Her poems are difficult without being too difficult. They make you do some work, and of course the work of poetry is not work if it is good. It’s pleasure. You do have to pay attention, and if you do, you get rewarded. There’s a lot of different poetry out there that doesn’t reward attention because it is impenetrable.
The juxtaposition of bird and woman, what lies inside and outside, what each could do, and how others would perceive it, has a bit of Steven's "13 ways of looking at a blackbird" but this is not a poem about perception as much as balancing desire and craving of the inside self with the outside self. There is no conclusion, but rather a brush of "almost" understanding which could prompt the reader to meditate on possible worlds of meanings.
What a relief then to read Collins' poem, which travels along the billboards of the NY subway system. As David put it, he "skewers our self-absorption in 8 orderly lines." And in 8 lines, enthusiastic contributions about time as measured by clocks, space traveled in trains, and astral possibilities in which we seek order in the chaos of the stars. The slant references to the Bible, Lucretius increase the pleasure.
The Padgett story of Central provided chuckles of recognition and an urge to share similar stories of lopsided layouts of towns, and how not only a building, but meaning is endangered as time goes on.
Although we discussed what makes a prose poem, a poem, the role of sound, metaphor, rhythm, in the end,
does it matter? Padgett ends with a line which combines emotion with architecture, involving everyone who reads it to feel the universal desire to be the narrator, also saying:
"... I answer "Here" in a voice
that makes me feel useful, like a brick."
In Study 18, this novel form of "poem" which is more meditation falling neither as potential poem nor prose uses rich diction, an ambiguous "look" which stands out to observe what the speaker presents as a heavy rubble punctuated by the funeral knelling of the word "gone".
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
poems for lunch: January 16
Burning the Old Year by Naomi Shihab Nye
Removing the Dross by Thomas R. Moore
Time Problem by Brenda Hillman
After Rumi by Janet Sternburg (p. 67, Al-Mutanabbi St. Starts Here)
January is a fine time to review priorities, sift through “old” to make way for “new”, and to take words out of context from Greek Poet, Yannis Ritsos in his diaries, “struggle to bind our attention”… to details we often miss in routines.
To a color to a stone
To the way an ant walks. A bumblebee
Creeping along a dry leaf as noisy
As a passing tram. That’s how we realize
What silence has settled within us.
Well, not much chance of bumblebees in Rochester in January, and we have no physical reminder of war, but many chances to share words
And see how we too can fit into the voice of the poem, “at the edge of our handkerchief/tied tight as a knot” which binds us to the world.
For the first poem, we spoke of ceremony -- the ritual of burning, sacrifices. What is interesting in the poem however, are the things we don't notice, which 'COULD BE" flammable -- or put on an altar for a venerable burning: notes, lists, juxtaposed with the absences that shout and leave a space.
In four stanzas, 5 lines, to 4, 3, 3, we follow a meditation of fire : sizzle, swirling flame, and the crackle after the blazing dies. Only the 3rd stanza is devoid of fire. I like to ask if there is any place of "puzzlement" -- and indeed, the last line of the 2nd stanza, "so little is stone" was such.
What does that mean? weight? solid as in rock, or something that lasts.
In a way, you could read the last line of each stanza and thread a poem-- which also works with the first line of each stanza -- which gives a sense of "frame". Perhaps that is what our minds do, piecing together fragments, like a prism.
Letters swallow themselves in seconds (letters in envelopes, but maybe also a child's alphabet letters)
So much of any year is flammable
Where there was something and suddenly isn't
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves
**
Marry the air
so little is a stone
I begin again with the smallest numbers
crackle after the blazing dies.
**
A poem like this one is satisfying for the invitation to read again and again, and still feel on the brink of discovery.
Removing the Dross has a strong rhythmic feel, in six squared blocks (tercets) linked by enjambments
across/ ... before/... rubbed... / He marked... /
Perhaps a Bruce Springsteen reference (and his E Street Band, Nicknamed "The Boss"), a Vulcan reference
which might have to do with the part of Hephaestus' story when he was given the Goddess Venus to marry. It was said that whenever Venus is unfaithful, Vulcan grows angry and beats the red-hot metal with such a force that sparks and smoke rise up from the top of the mountain, to create a volcanic eruption.
When did snow-shoveling become a biography or memory of a father? In this poem selected by Ted Kooser.
Brenda Hillman's poem gave rise to discussion, but also frustration. Why the extra spaces, the references to Hawkings, the sense of academic writing for people who like this kind of heady stuff which sounds like a tape-recorder left on in a therapy session. Was she too busy to edit? To what point can connect. We gave it a shot, putting on our best time-space-push-the boundary hats, but had many questions, without an urge to spend yet another bit of time on it.
The last poem presented an intriguing title. What does "After" mean? In the style of, in pursuit of, or speaking chronologically, 800 years later.. Rumi
This short poem with parentheses (each of us)
(most of us)
(some of us)
dwindling an "all" to a "part" comes alive at the repetition of "Rumi tells us, in/translation, always/
translation. He tells us in /juxtaposed with how translation continues to translate. What does the heart do, each morning, empty and scared? First praise the book. But even getting to that "sense" might not be what the poet wants. Given that her poem appears in "Al-Mutanabbi St. Starts Here" it would well be a poem embracing all the possible "Afters" of Rumi. Without him, (through books, translated) would we know there are a thousand ways to kiss the ground in Praise? Without him, can we bear how pages of books, ripped from bindings on Al Mutannabbi Street share their leaves. Multiple meanings here are again satisfying.
Removing the Dross by Thomas R. Moore
Time Problem by Brenda Hillman
After Rumi by Janet Sternburg (p. 67, Al-Mutanabbi St. Starts Here)
January is a fine time to review priorities, sift through “old” to make way for “new”, and to take words out of context from Greek Poet, Yannis Ritsos in his diaries, “struggle to bind our attention”… to details we often miss in routines.
To a color to a stone
To the way an ant walks. A bumblebee
Creeping along a dry leaf as noisy
As a passing tram. That’s how we realize
What silence has settled within us.
Well, not much chance of bumblebees in Rochester in January, and we have no physical reminder of war, but many chances to share words
And see how we too can fit into the voice of the poem, “at the edge of our handkerchief/tied tight as a knot” which binds us to the world.
For the first poem, we spoke of ceremony -- the ritual of burning, sacrifices. What is interesting in the poem however, are the things we don't notice, which 'COULD BE" flammable -- or put on an altar for a venerable burning: notes, lists, juxtaposed with the absences that shout and leave a space.
In four stanzas, 5 lines, to 4, 3, 3, we follow a meditation of fire : sizzle, swirling flame, and the crackle after the blazing dies. Only the 3rd stanza is devoid of fire. I like to ask if there is any place of "puzzlement" -- and indeed, the last line of the 2nd stanza, "so little is stone" was such.
What does that mean? weight? solid as in rock, or something that lasts.
In a way, you could read the last line of each stanza and thread a poem-- which also works with the first line of each stanza -- which gives a sense of "frame". Perhaps that is what our minds do, piecing together fragments, like a prism.
Letters swallow themselves in seconds (letters in envelopes, but maybe also a child's alphabet letters)
So much of any year is flammable
Where there was something and suddenly isn't
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves
**
Marry the air
so little is a stone
I begin again with the smallest numbers
crackle after the blazing dies.
**
A poem like this one is satisfying for the invitation to read again and again, and still feel on the brink of discovery.
Removing the Dross has a strong rhythmic feel, in six squared blocks (tercets) linked by enjambments
across/ ... before/... rubbed... / He marked... /
Perhaps a Bruce Springsteen reference (and his E Street Band, Nicknamed "The Boss"), a Vulcan reference
which might have to do with the part of Hephaestus' story when he was given the Goddess Venus to marry. It was said that whenever Venus is unfaithful, Vulcan grows angry and beats the red-hot metal with such a force that sparks and smoke rise up from the top of the mountain, to create a volcanic eruption.
When did snow-shoveling become a biography or memory of a father? In this poem selected by Ted Kooser.
Brenda Hillman's poem gave rise to discussion, but also frustration. Why the extra spaces, the references to Hawkings, the sense of academic writing for people who like this kind of heady stuff which sounds like a tape-recorder left on in a therapy session. Was she too busy to edit? To what point can connect. We gave it a shot, putting on our best time-space-push-the boundary hats, but had many questions, without an urge to spend yet another bit of time on it.
The last poem presented an intriguing title. What does "After" mean? In the style of, in pursuit of, or speaking chronologically, 800 years later.. Rumi
This short poem with parentheses (each of us)
(most of us)
(some of us)
dwindling an "all" to a "part" comes alive at the repetition of "Rumi tells us, in/translation, always/
translation. He tells us in /juxtaposed with how translation continues to translate. What does the heart do, each morning, empty and scared? First praise the book. But even getting to that "sense" might not be what the poet wants. Given that her poem appears in "Al-Mutanabbi St. Starts Here" it would well be a poem embracing all the possible "Afters" of Rumi. Without him, (through books, translated) would we know there are a thousand ways to kiss the ground in Praise? Without him, can we bear how pages of books, ripped from bindings on Al Mutannabbi Street share their leaves. Multiple meanings here are again satisfying.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Poems for Jan. 13
To the New Year by W. S. Merwin
From the First Book of Far Away by Eileen G'Sell
Ilona's Eyelids -- Eileen G'Sell
In the Lap of a Stranger by Karen Whalley
As If by Karen Whalley
Mindful by Mary Oliver
I wrote this when sending out the poems for this week:
My mind is reeling with reading so many poems -- collections of "best of 2013" and a new issue of APR and Poetry, and so many I want to read, mull over, and write of my own... Merwin's poem appeared twice this Christmas, now post-Christmas/new year's season, and 4 of Mary Oliver's gathered together last week as one of my writing groups exchanged emails... they make wonderful, grounded book-ends for poems which
paint glimpses that catch at feelings, signs of life, at once recognizable, yet not familiar, to me, as if calling out both far away, yet echoing inside.
I write this now, after our meeting, which, even with 20 people present, allowed not only a variety of insights and opinions, but brought us to a discussion of what "sentimentality" means, and why some people have an adverse reaction to it; At the end, Jim kindly brought in a comment on his recent readings about the brain, which makes convenient frameworks, so that as time goes on, the mind uses them to sort out information flying in. The problem is of course, no previous framework exactly fits the new experience, so we deal with approximate frames, which in turn slant our understanding, further jeopardizing the hope of "truth".
Judith sums it up with some Kipling:
There are 9 and 60 ways
to recite tribal ways
and every single one of them is right.
The challenge is balance. Regarding sentimentality, one thought is that we sense some disproportion, or some grating by a preconception which excludes our sense of what we consider "worthy". Poems are mirrors,
and remind us that we are constantly changes, and our responses shift in turn.
20 minutes on Merwin, which left me a sense of people really enjoying the poem. I found it easy to find questions -- whether about a favorite line, or considering the "you" as someone other than the New Year.
Responses: the poem is like a grace at the beginning of a meal (year); the sounds and stillness the poem conveys allows possibilities which will come out by themselves...
our age sounds like "hour rage"-- is it modern times out of hand, our inner psyche...
in our "new age” how little we know:
"our knowledge such as it is"
-- is not so much a cliche as hinting that knowledge could be something other than it is-- perhaps unbidden
and "our hopes such as they are"
hints beyond the ordinary.
The final lines combine a great sense of the untapped, and unforeseeable, but with a sense of optimism.
invisible before us
untouched and still possible
**
After reading the pithy "inner poems" and ending on Mary Oliver's "Mindfulness, her poem to some seemed facile, not one like Merwin's which keeps growing and multiplying in layers. But this brought the group to a discussion about our subjectivity -- today, or this moment, this "now", like a new year, is only one instance in our perception of things.
In the New Yorker issue of this week (Jan. 13) Jennifer Grotz has a poem called "Apricots".
You might want to substitute the word "Apricot" with "Poems" -- we judge them carefully, as though we "have been given the charge to determine/which are good or bad" -- and finding goodness in all the variations... in and out of the tree... "each one tastes different, like a mind having/erratic thoughts." The ending trance..
"halfway between eating and thinking
the thought of an apricot, the apricot of a thought,
whose goodness occurs over time, so that
some had been better earlier, others soon
would become correct, I mean ripe."
There is no "correct"... and can we all agree about "ripe"?
From the First Book of Far Away by Eileen G'Sell: (coming to grips w/ separation)
The discussion included noting the details of "broken", the one long latinate word, "fastidious"
and the idea of sound sweeping us, with a vague idea of sense, but certainly not "pegged" or, as in the poem, Apricots "correct". It is as if we need to be constantly adjusting our understanding.
The poem elicited these comments:
David: Wilde's "Do you understand everything you just said?"
Judith: Auden: "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?"
Ilona's Eyelids -- also by Eileen G'Sell stirred up a lot of discussion -- again the music of the sounds,
and how the poem traced a story of innocence to loss of faith. It is an exquisitely layered poem starting with the name, Ilona, the idea of eyelids, (not eyes) and proceeding from dolls to "mean martinis" ending with a stygian slant:
"A fake boat, bereft of sound.
The soft, cold lips of belief."
Karen Whalley's "In the Lap of a Stranger" gives us a mirror of the "there but for the grace of God, go I" and a chance to reflect on how we relate to each other and what this means about us as humans.
Her other poem, "As If" also painted a heart-wrenching story --where "death circled without landing."
Perhaps Joyce's idea of wanting just one more line was to have a sense of closure or clearer context.
All in all, it was one of the more animated discussions we have had at open, and certainly not finished!
From the First Book of Far Away by Eileen G'Sell
Ilona's Eyelids -- Eileen G'Sell
In the Lap of a Stranger by Karen Whalley
As If by Karen Whalley
Mindful by Mary Oliver
I wrote this when sending out the poems for this week:
My mind is reeling with reading so many poems -- collections of "best of 2013" and a new issue of APR and Poetry, and so many I want to read, mull over, and write of my own... Merwin's poem appeared twice this Christmas, now post-Christmas/new year's season, and 4 of Mary Oliver's gathered together last week as one of my writing groups exchanged emails... they make wonderful, grounded book-ends for poems which
paint glimpses that catch at feelings, signs of life, at once recognizable, yet not familiar, to me, as if calling out both far away, yet echoing inside.
I write this now, after our meeting, which, even with 20 people present, allowed not only a variety of insights and opinions, but brought us to a discussion of what "sentimentality" means, and why some people have an adverse reaction to it; At the end, Jim kindly brought in a comment on his recent readings about the brain, which makes convenient frameworks, so that as time goes on, the mind uses them to sort out information flying in. The problem is of course, no previous framework exactly fits the new experience, so we deal with approximate frames, which in turn slant our understanding, further jeopardizing the hope of "truth".
Judith sums it up with some Kipling:
There are 9 and 60 ways
to recite tribal ways
and every single one of them is right.
The challenge is balance. Regarding sentimentality, one thought is that we sense some disproportion, or some grating by a preconception which excludes our sense of what we consider "worthy". Poems are mirrors,
and remind us that we are constantly changes, and our responses shift in turn.
20 minutes on Merwin, which left me a sense of people really enjoying the poem. I found it easy to find questions -- whether about a favorite line, or considering the "you" as someone other than the New Year.
Responses: the poem is like a grace at the beginning of a meal (year); the sounds and stillness the poem conveys allows possibilities which will come out by themselves...
our age sounds like "hour rage"-- is it modern times out of hand, our inner psyche...
in our "new age” how little we know:
"our knowledge such as it is"
-- is not so much a cliche as hinting that knowledge could be something other than it is-- perhaps unbidden
and "our hopes such as they are"
hints beyond the ordinary.
The final lines combine a great sense of the untapped, and unforeseeable, but with a sense of optimism.
invisible before us
untouched and still possible
**
After reading the pithy "inner poems" and ending on Mary Oliver's "Mindfulness, her poem to some seemed facile, not one like Merwin's which keeps growing and multiplying in layers. But this brought the group to a discussion about our subjectivity -- today, or this moment, this "now", like a new year, is only one instance in our perception of things.
In the New Yorker issue of this week (Jan. 13) Jennifer Grotz has a poem called "Apricots".
You might want to substitute the word "Apricot" with "Poems" -- we judge them carefully, as though we "have been given the charge to determine/which are good or bad" -- and finding goodness in all the variations... in and out of the tree... "each one tastes different, like a mind having/erratic thoughts." The ending trance..
"halfway between eating and thinking
the thought of an apricot, the apricot of a thought,
whose goodness occurs over time, so that
some had been better earlier, others soon
would become correct, I mean ripe."
There is no "correct"... and can we all agree about "ripe"?
From the First Book of Far Away by Eileen G'Sell: (coming to grips w/ separation)
The discussion included noting the details of "broken", the one long latinate word, "fastidious"
and the idea of sound sweeping us, with a vague idea of sense, but certainly not "pegged" or, as in the poem, Apricots "correct". It is as if we need to be constantly adjusting our understanding.
The poem elicited these comments:
David: Wilde's "Do you understand everything you just said?"
Judith: Auden: "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?"
Ilona's Eyelids -- also by Eileen G'Sell stirred up a lot of discussion -- again the music of the sounds,
and how the poem traced a story of innocence to loss of faith. It is an exquisitely layered poem starting with the name, Ilona, the idea of eyelids, (not eyes) and proceeding from dolls to "mean martinis" ending with a stygian slant:
"A fake boat, bereft of sound.
The soft, cold lips of belief."
Karen Whalley's "In the Lap of a Stranger" gives us a mirror of the "there but for the grace of God, go I" and a chance to reflect on how we relate to each other and what this means about us as humans.
Her other poem, "As If" also painted a heart-wrenching story --where "death circled without landing."
Perhaps Joyce's idea of wanting just one more line was to have a sense of closure or clearer context.
All in all, it was one of the more animated discussions we have had at open, and certainly not finished!
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Poems for Dec. 26
This is a bit of a sneak preview for a very exciting library program entitled “Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here” — Look forward to hearing more about this in the new year!
Keep Searching -- from the Masnavi III: 1445-1449 Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
Ghazal 322 (Rumi)
What! Out of senseless Nothing -- FitzGerald's translation from The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam
Discipline – George Herbert (3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633)
Ovid in the Third Reich-- Geoffrey Hill
Introduction to Philosophy by Carl Dennis
I started off showing the book "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem (Arabic: mushkilah): Being Young and Arab in America Paperback" by Moustafa Bayoumi. My son, Christophe knew him and it was a pleasure to have him visiting and able to read the title in Arabic for us. Bayoumi is a history professor at Brooklyn College and interested in finding stories which paint a non-monolithic view of the Arab world.
Each section of the book starts with a quote from a poem -- at poetry day in May we'll discuss some of these.
Choices by Nikki Giovanni (p. 83)
Reconnaissance by Arna Bontemps (p. 47)
Grand Army Plaza by June Jordan (p. 151)
Peace by Langston Hughes (p. 117)
from “Arabesque” by Fred Johnson p. 190
The Dancer by Al Young (p. 221)
What starts a conversation? Which kind of conversation? Are we not searching for something as we reach out to another? Perhaps as in the first Rumi poem, we start with an inkling, small as a tiny ant,
and look for someone else also seeking. Perhaps it brings us back to the importance of curiosity,
fundamental to our drive to understand what we label as divine.
Whether Rumi or Al Young (see above/below), it is an eternal quest.
The Dancer by Al Young p. 221
Ah, Allah,
that thou hast not forsaken me
is proven by the light
playing around the plastic slats
of half-shut venetian blinds
rattling in this room on time
in thie hemisphere on fire.
Notes to myself: the question that provided puzzlement : are conqueror and seeker the same? Whether looking at history of Solomon's wisdom, questions lead to inspirational thoughts, not answers and require persistence of faith.
The Ghazal: the translation will not do justice to the repeated last word in the couplet, the rhyming and meter. Most of the Ghazals, "couplets strung like pearls on the common thread of the last word",
run like a gazelle, were written by Rumi after he met Shams of Tabriz and are ecstatic in nature.
What do we need to know about a poet, his times, the cultural, religious and linguistic background?
Can we be moved 8 centuries later as non-Sufi readers? Some of the ideas brought up: just as a Christian would not consider a Mormon of the same faith, so it is with Muslim and Druze or Sufi. Who understands what? But this poem is not about sects, degrees of religious conservatism, but a sense of the possessiveness of the Beloved-- and the adoration the Sufi feels to be in true love with God.
The problem of understanding continues as we shift languages and centuries. What is the time period and just who and for what reasons is doing the translation? In the case of Omar Khayyam, many spurious attempts exist, and I pointed out the problem of the mid-19th century style of Fitzgerald. Different illustrations will also support,or not, the originals. Having a trilingual text from 1949 and a Persian friend helped me to see a sly satire in the verses:
What is heaven but just that moment of peace (ease) -- we bring upon ourselves an unnecessary torch of suffering. The illustration shows loving couple, but the man's hand motions to a jug from which all manner of people emerge like a smoke of genies. Are they unleashed by the woman's hand inside the jug?
The George Herbert brings us back to English and a recognizable conversational style. The lines in "Discipline" are short, monosyllabic, with the third line compressed to 3 syllables which seems to point to the jist of the poem: God, please use love as the great corrective!
O My God / I aspire/ But by book/ Yet I creep/For with love / ... (and can shoot/brought thee low)
Thou art God.
For the Geoffrey Hill title, the reader finds an odd juxtaposition between Ovid's metamorphosis and the Third Reich. The Epigram comes from Ovid's Elegy for the Dead Tibullus, referring to confession of fault and interrogation of God, as someone distant and difficult. It is up to us to avoid looking down on the damned.
What a relief to arrive in our own time with a poem by Carl Dennis, which takes us to a philosophy class.
Are the unlucky granted a second chance... and if not, what do we do?
The silence allows us to go back to seek better understanding...keep searching, says Rumi...
Keep Searching -- from the Masnavi III: 1445-1449 Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
Ghazal 322 (Rumi)
What! Out of senseless Nothing -- FitzGerald's translation from The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam
Discipline – George Herbert (3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633)
Ovid in the Third Reich-- Geoffrey Hill
Introduction to Philosophy by Carl Dennis
I started off showing the book "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem (Arabic: mushkilah): Being Young and Arab in America Paperback" by Moustafa Bayoumi. My son, Christophe knew him and it was a pleasure to have him visiting and able to read the title in Arabic for us. Bayoumi is a history professor at Brooklyn College and interested in finding stories which paint a non-monolithic view of the Arab world.
Each section of the book starts with a quote from a poem -- at poetry day in May we'll discuss some of these.
Choices by Nikki Giovanni (p. 83)
Reconnaissance by Arna Bontemps (p. 47)
Grand Army Plaza by June Jordan (p. 151)
Peace by Langston Hughes (p. 117)
from “Arabesque” by Fred Johnson p. 190
The Dancer by Al Young (p. 221)
What starts a conversation? Which kind of conversation? Are we not searching for something as we reach out to another? Perhaps as in the first Rumi poem, we start with an inkling, small as a tiny ant,
and look for someone else also seeking. Perhaps it brings us back to the importance of curiosity,
fundamental to our drive to understand what we label as divine.
Whether Rumi or Al Young (see above/below), it is an eternal quest.
The Dancer by Al Young p. 221
Ah, Allah,
that thou hast not forsaken me
is proven by the light
playing around the plastic slats
of half-shut venetian blinds
rattling in this room on time
in thie hemisphere on fire.
Notes to myself: the question that provided puzzlement : are conqueror and seeker the same? Whether looking at history of Solomon's wisdom, questions lead to inspirational thoughts, not answers and require persistence of faith.
The Ghazal: the translation will not do justice to the repeated last word in the couplet, the rhyming and meter. Most of the Ghazals, "couplets strung like pearls on the common thread of the last word",
run like a gazelle, were written by Rumi after he met Shams of Tabriz and are ecstatic in nature.
What do we need to know about a poet, his times, the cultural, religious and linguistic background?
Can we be moved 8 centuries later as non-Sufi readers? Some of the ideas brought up: just as a Christian would not consider a Mormon of the same faith, so it is with Muslim and Druze or Sufi. Who understands what? But this poem is not about sects, degrees of religious conservatism, but a sense of the possessiveness of the Beloved-- and the adoration the Sufi feels to be in true love with God.
The problem of understanding continues as we shift languages and centuries. What is the time period and just who and for what reasons is doing the translation? In the case of Omar Khayyam, many spurious attempts exist, and I pointed out the problem of the mid-19th century style of Fitzgerald. Different illustrations will also support,or not, the originals. Having a trilingual text from 1949 and a Persian friend helped me to see a sly satire in the verses:
What is heaven but just that moment of peace (ease) -- we bring upon ourselves an unnecessary torch of suffering. The illustration shows loving couple, but the man's hand motions to a jug from which all manner of people emerge like a smoke of genies. Are they unleashed by the woman's hand inside the jug?
The George Herbert brings us back to English and a recognizable conversational style. The lines in "Discipline" are short, monosyllabic, with the third line compressed to 3 syllables which seems to point to the jist of the poem: God, please use love as the great corrective!
O My God / I aspire/ But by book/ Yet I creep/For with love / ... (and can shoot/brought thee low)
Thou art God.
For the Geoffrey Hill title, the reader finds an odd juxtaposition between Ovid's metamorphosis and the Third Reich. The Epigram comes from Ovid's Elegy for the Dead Tibullus, referring to confession of fault and interrogation of God, as someone distant and difficult. It is up to us to avoid looking down on the damned.
What a relief to arrive in our own time with a poem by Carl Dennis, which takes us to a philosophy class.
Are the unlucky granted a second chance... and if not, what do we do?
The silence allows us to go back to seek better understanding...keep searching, says Rumi...
Monday, January 6, 2014
O Pen : Poems for Jan. 6
Full Moon by Elinor Wylie
What the Heart Cannot Forget by Joyce Sutphen (see also comments Dec. 16/2013)
First Snowfall in St. Paul by Katrina Vandenberg (see also comments Dec. 16/2013)
Selective Service by Carolyn Forché (see also comments Dec. 16/2013)
Ode to Repetition – by Ellen Bass (see also comments Dec. 16/2013)
Ode to my Suit -- by Pablo Neruda
What I love about our discussions is the way 19 people can gather and share a wealth of insight...
The formal rhyme scheme, with the last line of each stanza hammering 4 beats, the density created by the spondees create a foil to the ephemeral and hidden nature of the moon, perhaps as inner wolf call.
Judith and Donna both lent their knowledge of Elinor Wylie, whose rather tragic life echoes in the first poem -- and David summed up the uncanny sense of conflict between the outer "flesh" and inner "bones"
as "unfittingness" which Neruda's Ode counterbalances with the integration of man and suit.
Threads of political unrest in Neruda, summed up by Kathy as "unbearable lightness of being", do not incriminate as the anti-war, anti-warrior tone of Forché's poem, with its graphic details of dead bodies in trash bags. Unlike a man speaking to his suit, even a suited man being buried, her poem takes as point of departure the making of snow angels, ending with their imprint as corpses. A flight of innocence ending with what feels like the death of hope...
What do we make of "ritual" coupled with coffee and regret... the black and white collapse of hours? "In what time do we live that it is too late/ to have children. In what place/
that we consider the various ways to leave? The question shifts. "We'll tell you." -
You were at that time
learning fractions. We'll tell you
about fractions. Half of us are dead or quiet
or lost. Let them speak for themselves.
We lie down in the fields and leave behind
the corpses of angels."
Even if we were to lie down in fields like fallen soldiers, it is equivalent to tracing only their souls in the snow.
**
What does the heart remember? What can it not forget? These are two very different items.
Sutphen reconstructs a history of the earth in an animistic manner -- rock, cloud, turtle, how a tree bears witness and re-members in the next to last stanza, which like the opening one contains two sentences:
And the skin remembers its scars, and the bone aches
where it was broken. The feet remember the dance,
and the arms remember lifting up the child.
Judith came up with the concept of how the final stanza "positivizes" the "negativizing" of the title.
What do we praise? Would you think of praising "repetition"? Ellen Bass' poem balances
phrases containing details with a more lyric foil for the sea, or moonlight "rinsing parked cars".
Shifts in tone, point of view, that point to the richness of what we might think is "the same old".
What is familiar, and how anything can ever be the same becomes a celebration of how we allow ourselves to enjoy "repeats".
"One morning
one of us will rise bewildered
without the other and open the curtains"
reminds us of our mortality, and the same "...faultless stars
going out one by one into the day."
Back to my suit, for a little conversation about what is worn... what wears... how it is that words can trigger such a wealth of feelings and memories, allow us to look again at all that can be reflected in the mirrors of poems.
What the Heart Cannot Forget by Joyce Sutphen (see also comments Dec. 16/2013)
First Snowfall in St. Paul by Katrina Vandenberg (see also comments Dec. 16/2013)
Selective Service by Carolyn Forché (see also comments Dec. 16/2013)
Ode to Repetition – by Ellen Bass (see also comments Dec. 16/2013)
Ode to my Suit -- by Pablo Neruda
What I love about our discussions is the way 19 people can gather and share a wealth of insight...
The formal rhyme scheme, with the last line of each stanza hammering 4 beats, the density created by the spondees create a foil to the ephemeral and hidden nature of the moon, perhaps as inner wolf call.
Judith and Donna both lent their knowledge of Elinor Wylie, whose rather tragic life echoes in the first poem -- and David summed up the uncanny sense of conflict between the outer "flesh" and inner "bones"
as "unfittingness" which Neruda's Ode counterbalances with the integration of man and suit.
Threads of political unrest in Neruda, summed up by Kathy as "unbearable lightness of being", do not incriminate as the anti-war, anti-warrior tone of Forché's poem, with its graphic details of dead bodies in trash bags. Unlike a man speaking to his suit, even a suited man being buried, her poem takes as point of departure the making of snow angels, ending with their imprint as corpses. A flight of innocence ending with what feels like the death of hope...
What do we make of "ritual" coupled with coffee and regret... the black and white collapse of hours? "In what time do we live that it is too late/ to have children. In what place/
that we consider the various ways to leave? The question shifts. "We'll tell you." -
You were at that time
learning fractions. We'll tell you
about fractions. Half of us are dead or quiet
or lost. Let them speak for themselves.
We lie down in the fields and leave behind
the corpses of angels."
Even if we were to lie down in fields like fallen soldiers, it is equivalent to tracing only their souls in the snow.
**
What does the heart remember? What can it not forget? These are two very different items.
Sutphen reconstructs a history of the earth in an animistic manner -- rock, cloud, turtle, how a tree bears witness and re-members in the next to last stanza, which like the opening one contains two sentences:
And the skin remembers its scars, and the bone aches
where it was broken. The feet remember the dance,
and the arms remember lifting up the child.
Judith came up with the concept of how the final stanza "positivizes" the "negativizing" of the title.
What do we praise? Would you think of praising "repetition"? Ellen Bass' poem balances
phrases containing details with a more lyric foil for the sea, or moonlight "rinsing parked cars".
Shifts in tone, point of view, that point to the richness of what we might think is "the same old".
What is familiar, and how anything can ever be the same becomes a celebration of how we allow ourselves to enjoy "repeats".
"One morning
one of us will rise bewildered
without the other and open the curtains"
reminds us of our mortality, and the same "...faultless stars
going out one by one into the day."
Back to my suit, for a little conversation about what is worn... what wears... how it is that words can trigger such a wealth of feelings and memories, allow us to look again at all that can be reflected in the mirrors of poems.
poems for lunch: Dec. 19
Selective Service by Carolyn Forché (see also comments from Jan. 5)
Frankly by Naomi Shihab Nye
Surprises by Maxine Kumin
Ode to Repetition by Ellen Bass (see also comments from Jan. 5)
From A Timbered Choir, Sabbath Poems by Wendell Berry
Perhaps the holiday season is a good time to take the image of printing snow angels
and transfer it to the cold facts of war, or Herod's response to a messiah. Published in 1981, "Selective Service" smacks of the Vietnam war, burning draft cards, and the slaughter of innocents. The idea of
an older generation speaking to the younger one, "learning fractions" at the time, cannot be dissolved in "the black and white collapse of hours". The image of fragments, the once-living packed in trash bags,
juxtaposed by the questions, "In what time do we live that it is too late/... to have children. In what place/ ... that we consider the various ways to leave.
Lighter in tone, "Frankly" answers what the living do. What is the greatest pleasure of life?
What purpose do we ascribe to our "work".
Kumin's "Surprises" starts out with teasing enjambments talking about failure and success with peppers, only to wind to a memory of a mother more interested in her roses than her child. Nothing/too small to remember, nothing too slight/to stand in awe of,
and then comes "her every washday///
and the final couplet, ending on the title, with every scrap stuffed in, just as in the poem.
Ellen Bass's Ode reminds me of Pablo Neruda's delightful odes to common things, except that repetition is not usually up for grabs on what to praise. And yet, surprisingly, we are led along from the image of the sea as perpetually changing, to the "fixed town"in your own life. Lamposts, parked cars are illumined by halos in the fog, rinsed by moonlight and then you realize indeed, one day we will not repeat the rise and shine -- and the ode turns into a love poem recognizing the bewilderment we feel,
when someone dear is gone, and we look out. Faultless stars, sounds like "vault" -- under which
hangs the last line where the stars...one by one, are effaced by day repeating, as if to honor the individual light, yet acknowledge the truth of the endless repeating.
The Wendell Berry excerpt picks up a bit of Frankly, as well as Ellen's Ode, the tasks lying, where they were left, asleep like cattle. What is afraid of me... what am I afraid of ... and then "mute in consternations" -- the quiet song... the stirring of the soul.
I had a little poem at the end remembering the sudden brightness that replaced my father's vacant stare in his old age -- how he could laugh without needing to understand the words.
Frankly by Naomi Shihab Nye
Surprises by Maxine Kumin
Ode to Repetition by Ellen Bass (see also comments from Jan. 5)
From A Timbered Choir, Sabbath Poems by Wendell Berry
Perhaps the holiday season is a good time to take the image of printing snow angels
and transfer it to the cold facts of war, or Herod's response to a messiah. Published in 1981, "Selective Service" smacks of the Vietnam war, burning draft cards, and the slaughter of innocents. The idea of
an older generation speaking to the younger one, "learning fractions" at the time, cannot be dissolved in "the black and white collapse of hours". The image of fragments, the once-living packed in trash bags,
juxtaposed by the questions, "In what time do we live that it is too late/... to have children. In what place/ ... that we consider the various ways to leave.
Lighter in tone, "Frankly" answers what the living do. What is the greatest pleasure of life?
What purpose do we ascribe to our "work".
Kumin's "Surprises" starts out with teasing enjambments talking about failure and success with peppers, only to wind to a memory of a mother more interested in her roses than her child. Nothing/too small to remember, nothing too slight/to stand in awe of,
and then comes "her every washday///
and the final couplet, ending on the title, with every scrap stuffed in, just as in the poem.
Ellen Bass's Ode reminds me of Pablo Neruda's delightful odes to common things, except that repetition is not usually up for grabs on what to praise. And yet, surprisingly, we are led along from the image of the sea as perpetually changing, to the "fixed town"in your own life. Lamposts, parked cars are illumined by halos in the fog, rinsed by moonlight and then you realize indeed, one day we will not repeat the rise and shine -- and the ode turns into a love poem recognizing the bewilderment we feel,
when someone dear is gone, and we look out. Faultless stars, sounds like "vault" -- under which
hangs the last line where the stars...one by one, are effaced by day repeating, as if to honor the individual light, yet acknowledge the truth of the endless repeating.
The Wendell Berry excerpt picks up a bit of Frankly, as well as Ellen's Ode, the tasks lying, where they were left, asleep like cattle. What is afraid of me... what am I afraid of ... and then "mute in consternations" -- the quiet song... the stirring of the soul.
I had a little poem at the end remembering the sudden brightness that replaced my father's vacant stare in his old age -- how he could laugh without needing to understand the words.
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