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.

Poems for August 25

How do we remember -- what details help unleash a story, "the taste of a hush from far away" (see Merwin's poem "Drinking Tea in the Small Hours"... how do we perceive "Loss" -- like a last name, a brother named, then taken away, the nearness sensed, in words that do not belong to us, (and as reader, feeling they breathe...)

from APR, July/August 2014
Locked by Jennifer Grotz (note last line: "I mean the man" not "I mean the mean"
three of the Nine poems by W.S. Merwin
The Laughing Child
Cowbell
The Mapmaker
World Without Glass by Pamela Sutton (correction: worship, not worship)
Swift Trucks by Erika Meitner

the selection of poems also echoes some of the themes of last week: “It’s never the aboutness of anything but the wailing underneath it” (Frank X. Gaspar.)

Line up: a young poet reading her poem stanza by stanza; 3 poems by an older poet using the "suspended, unpunctuated line" -- read line by line; A poem squeezing meaning out of stone; a composite poem starting with trucks. (the last two poems read stanza by stanza).
Forgive the typos-- lately I have been making interesting ones... Female Futurity became “female futility”… and there were several in the poems. Reading out loud is a good check!

Discussion:
We started by saying outloud "the taste of a hush from far away” -- a little magic to sprinkle into the idea of 5 Thurs; 5 Fri; 5 Sat. and 5 Sundays in the month of August, only to set the tone of energy into 5’s which morphed into a small excursion of polyhedrons … I love a group that can be comfortable with such a start!
There were multiple points where we quoted Steiner's “All acts of communication are acts of translation” as we took words, crafting ideas about a poet’s intention and our own ideas to match to them…

Locked: Martin pointed out the psychological, David and Judith the lack of craft of the metaphysical poets…yet a poem working the sound and conceit as if to follow their footsteps. David said about this line:
"but now there is nothing left to be solved like a riddle" (“If it had been my student, I would have said, take more force than finesse—) DS

Other points of intrigue about this inner landscape poem-- how it ends, bringing in God -- how He only loves the "strong thief /I mean the man who breaks his heart for God

(strong…. is the important word — like Donne’s "batter my heart”— but thief implies a different cunning and there's a discordant unrest of the urgency of breaking the locked heart--to seize "what is left". we don't know the why behind the lurching from what the speaker "thought I wanted to be" -- not the key, but the instrument for the key... we sense her awareness of something dramatic holding her away from life... Many felt the rhyming trees/key; lock/block/ sends/ascends detracted from the strength, as if she were having more fun with sound play than crafting an image.

**
Merwin’s poems have the mark of experience the abstractions of the first poem lacked and brought forth a lot of meaningful memories and good discussion.
In the first poem, the innocence of childhood, the wisdom of experience looking back combine using the perspective of the mother and retrospective "later" used twice more. The idea of wicker, and “wick” as “quick” or life… the shaking of the carriage layers a "shake of memory" to imagine the instant, and how it was captured in words-- and ending on the feel of being that happy child, laughing.

Cowbells too “rang” lots of echoes…including a reference to
Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae by Ernest Dowson:
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind...[7]

The idea of sound shepherding memory...
the sound of it will make you remember (implies "you’re from around here; I give this bell to you")

My question to the group: how does Merwin earn the last lines…
" he did not tell me that there is no question
in its sound and no place or promise
only the calling of one note at a time"


They seem to flow, naturally, without imposition. Is it the double negative… or two different things. one note: present in moment— one note: sound of the plurality of the legacy.
We enjoyed discussing this, the singularity of being called, outside of a crowd of memories, hints of forbears, history...

In Merwin’s “Mapmaker” he references Vermeer’s geographer — we didn’t discuss the nuances of the differences — of what does a map maker does in the 20th c. that is different from what a geographer in the late 17th c. would do. Vermeer used the same light from a corner window in his paintings; For us, the window frames the inside man and map, outside world: interiority/exteriority ( and the shape of the cosmos imagined in 1668–1669).

John brought up this story: Richard Powers: Galatea 2.2
2 patients – the one by window tells what he sees. Day after day, a story evolves. One day he falls extremely sick and the second patient doesn’t say anything, because he wants the “window bed”. When he is moved there all he sees is a brick wall.

The geographer has to imagine what can’t be seen. The poem is “stilled” in the present suggestion of future, calling on the past.

In Sutton’s poem, David filled us in on the excerpt of Frost:
“between the woods and frozen lake
the darkest evening of the year.”
("stopping by woods…” was written on a June evening — maybe the longest day of the year —anniversary of the death of his daughter. allure of the darkness. giving it all up.)
Quite a bit of discussion about associations with stone… the stoning of women, the “braided stone” (Scottish, says Judith: braid= broad) - how we carve stone vs. print on it… the allusions in the beginning of the poem of glass… something to see out of, into, shattered, the desolation without any vision at all… vs. the end of the poem, in a world without glass, but a crystalline morning… and shattering of wings by wars.

We looked at the last poem from the viewpoint of the composite poem — how the poet captures a chaos, a disturbingness.
We could have discussed all afternoon.
Alan Watts... spontaneity vs. caprice...
Tony Hoagland: Characteristics of the Composite Poem:
1. it likes information; range of realms.
2. aims to capture the irregular character of experience, it’s lopsidedness and illogic. disproportionate and disheveled by design.
3. relative tonal impersonality, offering an appearance of detachment.
4. it refuses the paradigm of a singular heroic speaker... instead brings together diverse voices and sources which exist in counterpoint and , only collectively, create a field of knowing.
5. when the composite poem fails, it might be from an over-indulgence of randomness... susceptible to a lack of progression or to passivity. ideally the parts must complicate and activate each other.
p. 38 – Tony Hoagland – Towards a Postmodern Humanism – APR Mar/Apr. 2014

poems for August 11

The Tuft of Flowers by Robert Frost (to read and think about -- we won't have time to discuss it but do thank David for mentioning it 8/4!)
Yhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173540

Poems allow us to project, lay claim on the world, without being chained to any one truth. I look forward to our discussion and sharing of next weeks poems.


Living With The News by W.S. Merwin
(We grow accustomed to the Dark) #428 - Emily Dickinson
What Gorgeous Thing by Mary Oliver
A Poem – by Wisława Szymborska
Before and Every After – Marianne Boruch
**
What does it mean to "be the daylight" and what is darkness?
The first poem with its suspended lines, can be read line by line slowly, or one voice in a big whoosh...
What news? That someone has died, that your moment of death is coming near, or some news that grabs you with a tenacious immediacy.. In this 17 line poem, only the second line does not complete a phrase.
tide keeps///
coming in faster

Who is this someone, who happens to be me? The poem gives clues that lead into different directions. We particularly enjoyed "real estate" as in reading the paper, right before the obits.
**
Dickinson with her inconsistent Capitals, M-dashes, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, allows us to enter, or exit darkness, as one person remarked, rather like the experience of a bi-polar person.
**

Juxtaposed next to Oliver, the question of craft comes up -- which for Oliver is whether it is strong enough to save her from sentimentality"?
Some thought yes. One thought no. Look at the proposed revision and discussion below.

— ing rings through out the poem, even in “pin…k” She is not preaching, and uses the G of gorgeous, a rather flamboyant word, to end with G of grateful at the end.

With condensing, does this poem reach the reader more directly?

"I do not know what
the bluebird keeps saying.
Sometimes
it seems the only thing in the world
that is without dark thoughts
without questions."
**
Szymborska's poem brought up a host of ideas with her use of double negatives and perspective of an "otherworld".
Who is "you" -- and what miracle is it that there is nothing/usual in being brought together.
Carmin shared a poem her sister had written, written at her memorial. The gist is this:

“Our moment in time.”
In a nanosecond, (3 hundred billion+ years from now)
will your molecules and mine collect together into you and me again
for a brief reunion...
and wonder if we’ve lived countless other lives before and after.

Other thoughts:
form is emptiness and emptiness is form... nothingness and everythingness...
Robert Graves: inside out ...
John brought up “The night inside me.” Jackson Brown...
"I used to lay out in a field under the Milky Way
With everything that I was feeling that I could not say
With every doubt and every sorrow that was in my way
Tearing around inside my head like it was there to stay

Night in my eyes, the night inside me
There where the shadows and the night could hide me
Night in my eyes
Sky full of stars turning over me
Waiting for night to set me free"...


when we exist we occupy space... miracle that we disappear back into non-space...
title: ars poetica... how a poem comes into being... Chapman’s Homer. David quoted the final stanza of Frost's Desert Places:
"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."

Judith quoted Pascal and we could have continued all afternoon.

**

The final poem
is complex, rife with the history of the world. Kathy kindly shared a context of medical students brought into contact with art. It is the kind of poem that needs a group -- for instance... Bertram is not Bertrand in the "what would Russell do" -- but I shared the quotations on this site which shed their light on the poem.

http://www.mkpotter.com/2012/05/what-would-bertrand-russell-do.html


Much more to say on all the poems, but as ever, a quite enjoyable read aloud and discussion.