last post of 2015

It's been another wonderful year of sharing poems...
On January 6 David Sanders will lead a discussion about the “biblical-modern interactions”: from The Gospel According to Matthew: 2. 1-12 and TSE's Gift of the Magi. The notes on the opening line:
"Adapted from a Nativity Sermon by Launcelot Andrewes at Winchester on Christmas Day of 1623: “A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farther off, in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter.”

Why do certain images recur, charged with emotion?

In this season of winding up the old, preparing the new, I sent "A Short Testament" by Anne Portera for your private reflection. I will be glad to use it Jan. 12 as well!

For Marcie, I shared this poem, with condolences for the passing of her sister Salli over Christmas. Marcie arrived in time to find her awake and aware. In Marcie’s words: "We took her to an amazing Hospice facility - looked like an upscale resort - on Sun where I stayed with her until she died on Wed am."

I share with you the poem, Curtains by Ruth Stone, that makes me think of Marcie’s feisty spirit, and the loyal bond she has with her sister, the difficulty of digesting the fact that Salli’s long bout with cancer is over.

December 10

Happiness by Raymond Carver (also Dec. 9)
Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbury (12/9)
Sanctuary by Jean Valentine (12/9)

Major to Minor -- by Andrea Cohen (12/16)
Inspired by O Antiphons, a Dreidel, Shiva’s Third Eye, Peace Flag Symbol (12/9)
A Poem by Rumi (12/16)
Pelicans in December by J. Allyn Rosser (12/16)

This is a fine season for meditation. I received this one today.
“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

See Dec. 9 for the first 3.

For Sanctuary: it might be an interesting ice breaker to ask "What is it like for you... ask where "there" is, ask what fears.

We were running out of time, so only read quickly the poem from the New Yorker. I like the play on major/minor and how we distinguish them, and how observant we are of shifts and subtle chance. Twin beds, two ice bergs -- even July doesnt know how to melt.

We also read quickly the Rumi -- the importance of each person as part of a larger whole, but precious and unique.
Imagine if everyone would sing a love song to your existence!

The final poem evokes endings... the gawky pelicans, rickety... "old-world feathers"... weary of calling out... like an old couple...
it is difficult to stay dignified... gulls, scattered sand... quietly lodged complaints.

We'll need to start the year with a stork!

Poems for December 9

Dec. 9:
Happiness by Raymond Carver (thank you Carmin)
A Christmas Carol – by Christini Rossetti (Thank you Mary)
Introspection Leaking Out by Judith Judson (her original)
A Puzzler by Paul Brennan (his original)
Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery (Thank you Don)
Sanctuary​ by Jean Valentine (Thank you Kathy)
Inspired by O Antiphons, a Dreidel, Shiva’s Third Eye, Peace Flag Symbol by yours truly


Carmin picked the Carver poem as she was reminded even when there is so much bad news in the world, if you stop to pay attention, you find good things. We were reminded of his poem, "Last Fragment" -- And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

That "even" is such an important word and reappears here, towards the end, in that minute, where "death and ambition, even love" don't enter. So, the given (we all die); the drive and "how" of engagement (ambition) and even the universal sacred without a contradistinction, cannot touch a singular moment when one feels a sense of "oh boy" (Judith's reference to Kipling's expression for the inexpressible "wow", part eureka of discovery, part delight without any strings attached).
Just as the boys "come on", so does "happiness/
unexpectedly and goes beyond, really"...
and back to the early morning talk, the usual early morning stuff milling in the mind.


The observation of the two boys hints at their happiness, but it is more a projection of the speaker of the poem.
There they are, delivering newspapers, together, perhaps an implied jauntiness with the caps and sweaters, one with a bag on his shoulder... and regardless if the reader is male or female, a memory of innocence, an idealization of childhood,
comes to mind. The boys are more alive than the news in the paper, deliver something extraordinary in the ordinary act of their job. Grace comes unbidden... Maura reminded the group of Dag Hammarskjold's remarks: a chase after happiness is like pursuing a butterfly-- the harder you seek to capture it, the more it eludes you.



At Rundel, Jim brought up the juxtaposition between the ordinary [newspapers (the headlines, the drudge of fact)], and the extraordinary, of an unbidden moment allows us to leave our "umwelt" of a private bubble to experience how we imagine the feeling we project onto the blithe togetherness of the boys. Oh Boy!


Mary's choice of the Rossetti, known in the setting of the music as a popular Christmas carol, was to offset the commercialization of Christmas with the original circumstances of Christ and the story of his birth. Indeed, what is the best gift we can give? Our hearts.

The next two poems speak to the spirit of amity and friendship. The context was merely that Paul was still talking when we started up discussion and Judith took his comment "... oh it’s just “introspection leaking out” to cummings-eque heights, replete with a dramatic performance. As he put it, Judith has provided him with the most artful way he's ever seen for being told to "shut up".

His poem reflects a fascination with puzzles and palindromes -- who can resist "racecar" as a symbol for life... Opening with "somebody" reminds me of Dickinson's "I'm Nobody who are you" -- or Cummings, "Everybody? Never met him."


From wit to surrealistic challenge. Ashbery in his inimitable way, plays with language, so the entire poem is a paradox, built of smaller paradox... The poem is concerned with language... but one step further -- concerned with language on a very plain level. However, he doesn't stay there. He plays with "it" as pronoun, with several possibilities of "you" (speaker to himself; understood you; you the reader of the poem; you the poem itself; an I in the second stanza, and the final stanza embracing both I and you, but still teasing... Try reading the poem backwards, and it makes just as much, if not better sense. The longer one spends with the words, the more one feels on the edge of understanding and yet, the rational part of the brain has difficulty with this...
How can you "pretend" to fidget? And how does this choice fit with a look out a window when "it" talks to you-- and which "it" is it? the poem, language? Is "it" the same throughout, or just as slippery as language, the poem and you? How do we change in our subjectivity and attitudes?
Unlike "happiness" is there something important or insubstantial being put into words? Is the main point the steam and chatter of putting it into being? Delightful, annoying, intriguing or perhaps maddening... but one takes away questions about what anything is "deeper outside", inside, dreamed, doubted, now you see it, bird in the hand, now you don't, the hand is the bush...


Kathy's pick of Sanctuary also picks up on the pronoun "you" -- who is speaking, and how does the "other" listen, or is it a divided self. Without the title or epigram would you find it a scary poem? Each word becomes a house, without one's own constructed house. Scattered appears three times -- twice in reference to the Antiphon 12 "Spare O Lord, your people so we do not scatter the voices" -- and the risk of "scattering life", not having listened, not having asked...
To die without having lived is to die without having created relationship.


My little poem is a gift of an ornament -- lots of numerology there -- but also, combining 4 religions and symbols
in this season of light and miracles as yet more unrest continues on the memorial of Pearl Harbor and this year the shared celebration of Diwali and Armistice Day.

Poems for Dec. 2

Pittsford:
Perfect for Any Occasion by Alberto Rios (and Rundel)
Thanks by W.S. Merlin (and Rundel)

At Rundel we also discussed poems by attendees whereas at Pittsford we also discussed
The People of the other Village, by Thomas Lux
Not Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Jennifer Hecht

**
A perfect post-Thanksgiving poem, and think about what it is we do, what we say... Perfect for Any Occasion -- whether it be Thanksgiving, Winter Solstice, any time we celebrate some ritual, any time we don't... How many expressions do you know with "Pie"? Easy (simple) as... apple pie order... pi... American as apple pie... pie in the sky...
and what do we do with pies? bake, eat, throw in a face, throw together whatever there is and cover with a crust...

Rios takes all these meanings of pie and organizes a two part poem. As one person said, it's a free-ride on acceptance, and part 2, of rejection; an exploration of fitting in or not, anthropomorphism of a pie as immigrant...
There is so much that is pleasing about this poem. We know immediately Mr. "I-can-do-no-wrong" and how funny he is a pecan pie... Think of Marie Antoinette in the French Revolution saying, "let them eat cake" -- although a pie has the rounds of a revolution, the 3.14 circular existence, sliced in so many ways.

Merwin's poem is much harder to follow as he provides a disturbing mix of "thank you" both like a prayer or supplication, and automatic habit, like the polite smile we paste on when we're scared. First stanza, we have no problem with the general, generic thanks... but the second stanza, thanks seems to be about personal survival, third, the news of the day, perhaps a "thank goodness it wasn't me", and by the fourth stanza, with the entire earth falling apart, as chaos of growing cities, felled forests, and no one listening, the darkness of such disconnection still has the ember of "thank you"... Gratitude is a powerful gift... what allows us to continue, sustains us. How do you read it-- as Candide filled with optimism in face of all the cruelty in the "best of all possible worlds" or as a Kafka-esque dirge where thank you is the one salvation... Listen.... we are saying thank you //... nobody listening...we are saying thank you...
How do you feel about saying "thank you" now? How do you feel about being more attentive?

"The People of the Other Village" starts out with an observation of someone not of that village... simply, "they hate us".
Three times the formula of doing this/that is repeated, but with a subtle change of pronoun:
We do this, they do that.
They do this, we do that.
We do this, they do that.

What happens before this is said? Both sides do harm to the other side. The final line:
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.

10,000 years spelled out; written as numbers; doubled B of the paradoxical brutal/beautiful -- without any example of the beautiful-- this is a dark poem, in which "beautiful" is nothing more than a word which has not stopped, will not stop the brutality. And how will you act after reading this?

Not Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by Jennifer Hecht gave me pause, until I read more about her, her work to help people contemplating suicide. Brilliant parody of Frost, a hint of Dante's dark woods, and deft turning of words.
David gave us some insight with this background: "Stopping by woods" was written in June on the anniversary of the death of his 4th child who died after a few days... Originally titled “New Hampshire” the long original turned into the familiar rhymed verse we have come to know.
Hecht takes it a step further, by deforming the familiar "promises to keep" to the opening "Promises to keep was a lie."
That it ends on "It doesn't matter where I sleep." stresses the fact that "home" as focal point is not the goal. Staying alive is.


"On Reaching the Age of Two Hundred" announces a mythical situation, reinforced by mention of the Sibyl at Cumae.
What is he trying to say?
What happens if you live forever...
perhaps it is a curse along the lines of "may you have 100 mansion with 100 bedrooms"
Given what happens to the speaker of the poem, living to age 200 requires either a large amount of acceptance or denial to want to continue another minute.


Dec. 3

The Rundel group admired Mike's long poem "Full Circle 2 -- Connectivity". Using the conceit of "one to one";
man to man' toe to toe, eye to eye, face to face, moment to moment, hand to hand, he takes us through a life, ending with dust to dust.
His poem, "And He calls Himself a Father" is a touching anecdotal poem with a surprise twist.

We saved Kathy's poems until she returns.

poems for Nov. 18

Sent in body of Email:
When Giving Is all we Have -- Alberto Rios
**
from APR - Nov-Dec 2015
The Sun Got All Over Everything Gabrielle Calvocoressi
To the People of 2060 by Carl Dennis

from Poets.org:
Around Us by Marvin Bell
What Was Told, That Jalal al-Din Rumi, 1207 - 1273

**
Liberty by Edward Thomas, 1878 - 1917
Going Away by Howard Nemerov

For Rundel: the first 5.

**
A meaty series in which to contemplate light and dark as we inch towards winter solstice...

I am grateful for contemporary voices and the American Poetry Review who provides 6 issues a year for sampling them. With climate change increasingly on the radar, it is refreshing to see how many ways one can use "Sun" -- perhaps in the first poem, there's a bit of 16th century John Donne, who calls the sun unruly for different reasons than "making a mess of a day". The conceit of the sun, acting like something sticky that has spilled over everything starts as a visceral and sensual heat, that interferes with a girl's plan to grieve, which we find out at the end, is her mother.

When Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) coined the term metaphysical poets, he meant it as an insult: "Metaphysical poets" such as Cowley and Donne, he wrote, used their conceits to present "heterogenous ideas ... yoked by violence together"; "they were not successful in representing or moving the affections.
What would he have to say about the penultimate lines, the juxtaposition of "somewhere my mother was dying"/and someone was skinning a giraffe. Calvocoressi picks up on incongruity,
the "ridiculously" blue sky, the way some remember the sky on 9/11. The incongruity of forgetting a death entirely, along with forgetting about the global consequence of icebergs melting leaving polar bears without a place to stand. This is highly successful and moving.
In the same way, the colloquial tone, "so broke" (and the distraction of buying groceries she can't afford), the appointment with anguish, forgotten because of the sky... with the cracked yolk of sun all over it.

The conversation between sun and girl, the response of the sun pouring over the girls, the erotic instead of the yahrzeit candles, the pull of living against remembering the dead...
The poem affirms life by putting grief on the table...
Elaine shared her research on the poet, whose mother committed suicide when she was 13.

The sun scorches in a different way for the people writing to the people 45 years hence.
How much emotional juice, and how much narrative cleverness? I love the play in the 5th stanza, "as a problem we're free to pass on". Although not everyone agreed it was a successful poem, it did bring up anecdotes of how we used to plan for the future... and the necessity to continue to do so. But is the heart moved? One person brought up Hayden Carruth's poem: I could take:
I could take
two leaves
and give you one.
Would that not be
a kind of perfection?

But I prefer
one leaf
torn to give you half
showing

(after these years, simply)
love's complexity in an act,
the tearing and
the unique edges —
one leaf (one word) from the two
imperfections that match.

But that's a different goal and message.


Around us, by Marvin Bell seems also a poem addressed to the future, although there is no sense of urgency. The line breaks seemed arbitrary, just as "whatever good we did" sounds a little too facile. I'm not sure that if we keep pines, silvery stream, a smooth bed of pine needles, someone will necessary give a sound of thanks, although I do love the sound of of "a zipper or a snap"-- but it's too vague to think we have saved nature, done any good. One person offered that a practicing poet is a dancer" -- in this case dancing around nature, gliding through the twilight and hoping it will be there. How would you read "whatever good we did" -- equal weight on "good" and "did", "good- we -did", or a slur without emphasizing "did" at all?

The Rumi, regardless of what one says about translation, is a lovely psalm of praise for the Creator. The placement and lineation of "What was" gives a beautiful sense of oneness in a convincing wrap of mystery.

For the Thomas: the rhyme weaves between pattern and liberty from pattern, the moon, both white and dark... a meditative piece of poet and moon, capturing the darkness of war, the darkness of loss, the importance of not to be shackled by inaction.

The Nemerov is a metaphoric war,"Keeping our faces to the front, there is
A moment, after saying all farewells,
when we taste the dry and bitter dust
of everything that we have said and done
for many years, and our mouths are dumb,
and the easy tears will not do."
as he faces exile, forced to leave one position for another --

Poems for Nov 11-12

My Life Was the Size of My Life by Jane Hirschfield
Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky
I have not disappeared by Major Jackson
There's Nothing Like the Sun -- Edward Thomas
Small Philosophical Poem - by Anne Stevenson
Arrowhead by Tasha Cotter


We read through both the Hirschfeld and the Thomas, line by line. I love how certain poems invite such a slow procedure... voice after voice chimes in. In the case of the Hirschfeld, it underlines the phrasing, the recurring commas and periods, on each line until the 10th:
"It ate, it slept, it opened/
and closed its hands, its windows.
How might this spot in the poem prepare us for the unpunctuated, breathlessness:
we could not keep/
our hands off our clothes on
our tongues from

The tick-tock sameness of phrases, sentences has gone; the predictable s-v
disappears without a verb in the last three fragments. I find the conceit humorous --
as one would not ask, "what size life do you have", or "what kind of rooms feel "room-sized" to you? Imagine, each soul, the same soul-sized, traveling through the everydayness of traveling.
Why are length and depth different than "size". The poem invites me to ponder on what parameters determine my life-- how am I part of determining it, working with it, and then I remember hearing "I'm sick of my life" -- what makes us say that? It's not the same as "I'm sick of living"... perhaps it takes leaving, trying out someone else's life-- but finding nothing to add -- only the hunger of appetite... without spelling out desire.
Some labeled it dramatic... tautology... [(I had to look it up: (rhetoric), a self-reinforcing pretense of significant truth. Tautology (grammar), the use of redundant words. Tautology (logic), a universal truth in formal logic.]
Pleasing, playful, but serious, and even reassuring...


The Thomas also used commas, periods, two hyphens and one colon which gives a sense of "stop-start". It also allows a slower pacing, and accentuates the enjambment:
whistling what/
once swallows sang. But I have not forgot/
that there is nothing, too, like March's sun...
the rhyme is unusual
abab//cdeecffd gg hh i g-2 g-2 i

Note how he works the title, completing its phrase in three different ways:
There's nothing like the sun : 1) as the year dies; 2) that shines today; 3) till we are dead.

The negatives are also interesting: "Yet never shone the sun as fair as now" introduces the rich alliteration of sweet-last-left damsons... spangles of the morning's sort drop down... This is a beautiful moment of flex and compression, rhythmic variability. In David Rivard's article in APR, he notes how these lines have "something of the heightened perception of a haiku." and quotes John Ruskin's famous comment about painting: "composition is the arrangement of unequal things."

The starling, a well-known mimic also brings to my mind Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", flocking and attacking. replaces the "cheedeep" of the graceful, swallow, known for its aerial-courtship. To quote Rivard again, "Hearing it, you feel the truth of Pound's claim about space and time being stretched by an image."

"That there is nothing, too, like March's sun" -- the "too" falls in a strange way, followed by the listing of all the months, all with equal days, (unlike the child's rhyme to learn the unequal assortment of days)... how are they all different from November?… I return to the phrase, “Yet never shone the sun as fair as now”… That he is caught in this moment, instead of merely describing it, he makes the light of the sun that much more precious “as the year dies”. The premonition of death is clearly there; we know he will die in world war I in 1917 -- but how wonderful that he felt the warmth of the sun, heard the song, witnessed the sweet ripeness.
Moments like these are precious, and I feel grateful for those who share them.

**
For Samurai song, the repeating anaphors, and juxtapositions (roof/audacity; care/order; temple/voice; tactic/strategy) verbs associated with nouns (eyes listened/ears thought/absence of thought/waiting; no enemy, body opposed work to create a portrait of the detached Samurai life. The one place where there is no "when":
"I have /no priest, my tongue is my choir. calls attention to the loneliness, the terse discipline, reliance on a strict internal discipline.

I find it an intriguing poem, but am left wondering why Pinsky wrote it, and what he wanted readers to find in it.

**
For Major Jackson's poem, the anaphor, "I have not disappeared" works well, especially when it disappears in the 6th and 8th stanzas. These are the two places there is no "I". It is interesting that Poets.org lists the poem with a different title: "On Disappearing".
David offered, tongue in cheek Mark Twain's quip: “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” But, here, one senses the weight of the Black American life, the "shrug of a life in a sacred language" (poetry). Yes, the poet shares with the reader how he goes into his depths and being... a mysterious journey, but many felt too long and wordy.

**
Anne Stevenson's "Small Philosophical Poem" has nothing "small" about it -- as potent as any size glass of doubt! She is a clever daughter of a philosopher, and clearly enjoys playing with double meanings, and two well-placed "but".
It is tempting to go through line by line, and explain, here, I see this... here I understand that... how much should we be thinking about Jungian terms, or power plays of Dr. Animus, vs. his untitled wife, Anima; yin and yang at work... how do you read "there" when the plates lie
(do they negate truth, or simply placed) there and there -- "just where they should lie."
Who gives that conditional imperative? He eats his un...
In the version on the internet, it did read "pour his a small glass of doubt" -- but it makes more sense to read "pours him..." What is observation of him, (smacks and cracks) and what is conjecture (the world is pleasure of thought" passes into what might be. And that second "but" arrives, announcing Anima's hunger... she fills the room with love. And fear. And fear.
Twice. Brilliant and fun, and not at all self-evident.

**
The final poem evokes American Indian tales... a slight difficulty in two places for the syntax. Arrowhead to understanding the word enemy? or Arrowhead (title) To understand (cut the gerund) the word enemy.
But what about the arrowhead? Instrument in hand (whose hand... ) Tiny monster -- is arrowhead also?
Strange little poem, perhaps with intentional "non-sequiturs"...


However, wonderful discussions!

Poems for November 5-6

The Exile by Michael Wasson
How the Milky Way was Made by Natalie Diaz (From American Poet, Fall/Winter 2015)
The Circus Animals’ Desertion by William Butler Yeats
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll (mock medieval ballad... 6 feb. 1888)
Permanently by Kenneth Koch
Sop Préacháin [A Crow's Wisp] by Aifric Mac Aodha translated by David Wheatley

I am so glad to see American Indian voices in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets!
The Exile demonstrates the power of a poem to make this point: If you cut out the native tongue, you make a culture disappear. The crafting is intriguing, with the long open spaces,
a sprinkling of Indian words (with translation at the end of the poem) and choice of a footnote-sounding epigraph at the beginning (mention of the Chilocco Indian School, Oklahoma, 1922 and the words of the disciplinarian).
I find myself wanting to copy out the poem-- with notes. It MUST be read. If you haven't read it, get a copy of the Fall/Winter 2015 issue, Vol 49, and let's hope it appears in Poets.org.

To give you a flavor:
The words in the Indian tongue (not identified) translated in the first section:
just in sudden silence;
sound of bones and flesh;
sound of a mouth breaking;

And then the image of a season disappearing, layers into the cutting between a victim self and oppressor self in two languages in the second section:
"half an autumn
rusting the edge of winter that is

knifing between me & 'iin" (the pronoun "I" in this Indian language)

"you& 'iim 'ee" (the pronoun "you" with emphasis)

This is followed by a mini-drama, "boy/ have you forgotten us"
indeed it is NOT what the oppressors are saying --
but then, there is a subtle hope -- this is almost a century later, and the "choreography of bones" is followed a third section that starts
"mouth your birthplace"
with this sprinkling of words in the native tongue (at the heart; intimate word for mother;

The penultimate section -- "You are torn & you are what song fills... " the color of carved out tongue..." (again the ampersand used for the dual "duel" of English and Native American)

And finally, after "the unbreakable/taste of ash/blown among the stars

the "Milky Way", known as "the ghost's trail -- which shivers with embers able to keep alive memory of those who were persecuted, speaking a language that is "brightly echoed."

The final word in the Native American is "The Ghost's Trail/Milky Way" and these two lines:

"so, there had to be breathing

there had to be."

**
A very different celebration of Native Indian traditions, is the poem by Natalie Diaz.
She makes the point that the incorporation of native language is more than a craft choice, (language, verb,) or some "naked" folk-art, referring to something ancient, primitive and dead.
When she performs poems, she is commended for a "good reading" -- as if she didn't "toil over her poems, but simply performed her nativeness".
"... poetry is a place to remember, a place to challenge the world, elegize our loved ones, a place to be hopeful and grateful, a space that simultaneously encompasses the past, present and future."

That being said, Her poem is more than a "creation myth" and indeed, the crafting is evident.
The short staccato bursts in the opening couplet; the sounds of the fish, "up there they glide, filled with stars... god-large, gold-green sides... galaxy road... hundred-thousand light year roads"; the moon-white belly, breast, sweet milk body, throat, thighs of the milky way,
how Coyote "unzipping the salmon's silken skins with his teeth"...
A blend of cosmic with overtones of politics of water, exuberance and desire, a feel of living endlessness...

The Yeats poem has a primal feel among its many layers, in spite of the end-rhyme.
Three parts; Parts I and III only one stanza. Part II three stanzas. Curious that the first line "I sought a theme and sought for it in vain"-- and the middle line of the last stanza
"old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut..." do not have end-rhymed counterparts--
and yet, "vain" is repeated 3 times in stanza 1 part 2; "old" is repeated five times--
the line before "Old iron", (Old Kettles, old bottles) old is replaced the third time by "broken", keeping the dark O.

Again, it is hard to resist the temptation of asking you to simply take out this poem --
note the repetitions, (how clever, how the sound of 3rd line of the first stanza, "broken man" is repeated in 4th line final stanza "broken can"); note how Stanza 2 + 4 are all end-rhymed; Stanza 3 has end-words "destroy" and "enough" that have no rhymed counterpart;
Such craft choices are not random.
I love the metaphor of "circus animals" -- the things caged and put on display -- but loses in his brain... the way one tries to recreate epics and preserve heroes... but what does a poet
do in climbing a ladder towards the sacred altar of "big P" Poetry?
Without the ladder, one returns to the essential emotions. Foul is a strong and unusual term but the counterweight to elevate it, lies in the heart (where all ladders start).
No more need for lofty epics, myths. Words don't save our epic heroes, and perhaps as Auden said in his elegy for Yeats, "poetry makes nothing happen". Yet Yeats also wrote "to the cracked tune that Chronos sings, words alone are certain good"... Perhaps here, we go back to the line about "Players and painted stage took all my love,/and not those things that they were emblems of". Start again... use those poet-tools... ground them in the heart. This is a meditation from an older, wiser Yeats on what all this (life, poetry) is about.


Jabberwocky... ah! The pleasure of the sounds of words! Frabjous can indeed be fabulous and joyous; Uffish, a bit uppity and offish, a fuming and furious match up in furious, but even without stretching "suitcase" words, one understands the epic story: The proud father welcoming home his son who has slain the monster... Paul gave us the story of the girls who wrote Lewis Carroll to have permission to use "Jabberwocky" as name of their newspaper -- especially appropriate as wocor has its roots offspring and jabber as – excited and voluble – much excited discussion -- although Carroll worded it more masterfully (see Websters). What I like best of all, is remembering how our senior High School class threaded the poem in our yearbook... and Elaine shared that her class had a newspaper called "The Bandersnatch"! Oh Calloh! Callay!

Permanently is a brilliant poem -- not just personifying parts of speech -- but using them to demonstrate relationship... with a pun on the only adverb used as title "permanently" --
nothing is... except the announcement of something that is... back to Yeats' rag and bone shop of the heart. The singularity of a kiss... helps untwist the contradiction of conjunctions which by nature should not be lonely, isolated as single words... and the shifting sense of nouns, flavored by adjectives... the power of the verb to drive sense...
back to the Indian poems about what lies in the root of our tongues and mouthed from the heart.

For Pittsford, we closed with a delightful reading in the Irish the poem by A. McGee
or so Paul said that's how you pronounce Aifric Mac Aodfha. This opened a parenthesis about
Gaelic script – how the Celts brought it from Baltic... development of the language. How silence improves lipstick...(I wrote that down -- but relationship?) and definition of a crow’s wisp... woman a man has dropped... some other crow will snatch up to add to its nest ... Africa is Poetry editor of the Stinging Fly...

The translation was witty in and of itself, but did not mirror the original in the last stanza
There’s no thanks, and no-thanks-but-frisky—
If that makes me Adam, then you must be ...

Perhaps that's why the poem in the Irish original had the final line in English
"No thanks, I’ve read the Bible."

We could have spent hours more discussing. For Rundel, we didn't discuss the first or last poem, which allowed a more thorough appreciation of the Koch.

poems for October 28-29

Frequently Asked Questions : 10 by Camille T. Dungy
The Gaffe by C. K. Williams
Fall by Edward Hirsch
Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City -- Jennifer Grotz


What expectations and assumptions do we bring to poems? How does a poem share associations particular to the writer, and how do these match those of the reader? As Doris says, the answers we give are formed by the questions we ask.

So we start with Dungy's poem. Apparently, even if we didn't know, she's had a lot of offensive questions. There's a universal on which to hang the personal. Most of us have had a few baffling questions that invade our boundaries. It's one thing to ask genuinely, "could you tell me a little about you and your family" vs. the question #10. "Do you see current events differently because you were raised by a black father and are married to a black man?"

What? What are the circumstances, configurations, motivations and agendas in this question?
I love that it takes a poem to answer such a question. A poem which takes grackles, those invasive, noisy, crop-destroying birds, as metaphor for people who ask such questions.
A mob of them... that attack the feeder... the mess of hulls they leave.
Let's just dwell on that for a minute -- a literate person who knows the latin name for the common grackle prepares a "complement of unanswerable questions". The hulls are like empty shells of guns... and the tongue-in-cheek response of the (black) father, mentioning a different kind of seed... well, what if only racist-spawned look-alikes and populars were around...
The language trips us to a certain frame of mind, and the intention of grackle attacking is "hurtful loud". Paul noted that the sheets could be white... as the husband remarks "crackles", and the crackle of the sheets pulled apart, and the static that stings.
Details such as longevity of a black man, less than that of a white... and the passerine claws,
the father, facing back, the poet, her husband and daughter facing forward... are also grackle,
bright within their blackness.

A deft and brilliant poem -- and there's a podcast to go with it, with a reading by the poet followed by an interview. https://soundcloud.com/poetryfoundation/poetry-magazine-short-takes-camille-t-dungy-reads-frequently-asked-questions-10

CK Williams passed away in September just before his 80th year. I picked "The Gaffe"as a tribute to him, as it also deals with questions --when are they appropriate, and how to put them... and when. How a comment cannot be taken back, and leaves an indelible layer. Mike shared how people try to correct themselves in front of his blind daughter, although what has been said doesn't bother her. Story after story of a "gaffe" rolled out... how among the layers of ourselves, is a recriminatory voice. How does one deal with grief? And don't you want to tell the child in the poem, that it is common to laugh as well as cry when someone dies and it's all part of the cathartic stop and sob, sob and start. All we want is someone to explain... we just want to feel we haven't made a gaffe... The poem itself offers a compassionate understanding, not a flip "welcome to the club" but a sensitive understanding for the someone you are, not yet you, always with you, as you are, who keeps on to be the you, you will be.


The pairing of the Hirsch poem to Marsden Hartley painting is a totally different conversation -- and many felt it didn't correspond to the feeling tone of the poem.
We read it line by line, which further slows down the unfolding of a poem, allows repetitions and sounds to sink in. Definitely a feeling tone... not just a description, although there are plenty of adjectives. How do they do their work? the maples are "long-haired" with "veiny hand-shaped" leaves. They embellish different ways red enters the picture, in the season of "odd, dusky congruences"; the bruised cloud; winter's hard revision; twilit pockets; brief, startling moment...
invisible and weightless are not connected to a noun...and there lies a key to the poem..
the pause in the middle of a long walk home... the touch of fall, as metaphor, as season, as change; changing.

The final poem had a poet's statement which begs the question -- is this necessary, and since it is there, does it help understand the poem ? Are poems meant to achieve something?
Is it "registering what it feels like to pass through time"? I was reminded that any poem is an act of courage, and much as I might lend a critical eye, it is important to try, in this case, to see as the self-portrait is seeing. Glimpse, surface, look. Loneliness and the enigmatic "you. I only wish that last line were not there. It's as if the speaker of the poem could not get out of the way, and we are left with an anonymous portrait. No real details... of the street or anything to elucidate " Myself estranged is how I understood the world.
My ignorance had saved me, my vices fueled me,". Foreign indeed.

response to request to know more about Gibbons/Mandelstam

Don Share, editor responded to my letter to the poem "from 'dark honey' that appeared in the October 2015 issue of Poetry.
"It was actually slated for a translation issue, so you’re quite onto something. But really, it’s a version, or what Robert Lowell (and Dryden) might call an “imitation.” An homage, really, tho’ a close and (I’d say) deep one." He shared these notes from Gibbons.
I understand how hard it must be to determine which poem has the podcasts "Poetry" makes available each month. It would have been helpful!

Gibbons comments:

"I have been reading Osip Mandelshtam’s poems in every available English-language translation for many years, and also have returned to his essays, especially the “Conversation about Dante.” I have learned from working on translations with Russian poet Ilya Kutik that the movement of Mandelshtam’s poems (as in some other poets of his generation, such as Marina Tsevetaeva and Boris Pasternak, and in certain later poets, including Kutik himself) is a repeated opening, within a poem, of what seems to the reader (and was for the poet also) an unforeseen way to what poetic thinking can discover and foresee. “The poet begins from a point far away—and then goes further,” to paraphrase Tsvetaeva. What I have tried to do in the sequence to which these poems belong is to move my poems in something like the way such Russian poems move—on the basis of the sound or morphology of a word, or on the back of a metaphor that produces another metaphor (see below), and to throw some of my poems, too, off what might have seemed to be the courses they had chosen and into new ones, the real ones, the ones that make the discoveries, and from within the new course do this again.

In Mandelshtam’s “Conversation about Dante” (1933), he writes that “Dante’s thinking in images” creates what Mandelshtam calls “convertibility or transmutability… [J]ust imagine an airplane (ignoring the technical impossibility) which in full flight constructs and launches another machine. Furthermore, in the same way, this flying machine, while fully absorbed in its own flight, still manages to assemble and launch yet a third machine. To make my proposed comparison more precise and helpful, I will add that the production and launching of these technically unthinkable new machines which are tossed off in mid-flight are not secondary or extraneous functions of the plane which is in motion, but rather comprise a most essential attribute and part of the flight itself, while assuring its feasibility and safety to no less a degree than its properly operating rudder or the regular functioning of the engine” (translated by Jane Garry Harris and Constance Link).

Neither my purpose, in my homage to Mandelshtam, nor his conception of the “flight” of the image (and of metaphor) and then the subsequent flight of the image (or metaphor) that it produces out of itself, may matter, finally, to an English-language reader, unless, as I hope, my poems in homage to Mandelshtam move in a way that’s interesting in English. But out of my sense of gratitude to the Russian poets whom I can’t read in their own language, I offer this explanation, as well as the poems, in these pages of Poetry. In some of the poems in this sequence, I have used or adapted a few images, phrases, and figures from Mandelshtam’s poems, and the last poem in my sequence, “For your sweet joy, take,” is a translation of a complete poem, albeit altered in format."

Poems for October 22-23

Keeping up with keeping up:
http://bostonreview.net/blog/stephen-burt-sherman-alexie-best-american-poetry


What attracts you to a good poem? Sometimes, we can identify echoes of other poets, sometimes, in the act of translating from one language to another, we "steal" a different glimpse of universals both as readers and writers.
In October’s issue of Poetry, last week, we read the William Jay Smith, this week, a memoriam to Charles Tomlinson, and poems that are inspired by translation,
including an adaptation by Franz Wright from the original notebook fragment written by Rainer Maria Rilke in Spain, 1913, a lengthy poem by UR Professor James Longenbach http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/250958 inspired by the 15th century Italian 1st booke of the Courtier of Count Baldessar + Castilio.

from "Dark Honey” by Reginald Gibbons
In homage to Osip Mandelshtam
Eye Test by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Dream – by Naomi Shihab Nye
Flyleaf by Michael Gessner
Fourteen Lines, Resisting by Lisa Zimmerman

see October 23 review of Reginald Gibbons.

By using the terminology "good poem", I realize I have entered treacherous territory.
What is a "good" poem? Can it bridge both individual preferences for what satisfies the ear, the eye, and soul and meet a level of universality?

I am eager to read Reginald Gibbons newest book, "How a Poem Thinks". In workshops I've attended, tricking the "self" out of the way, so the poem can guide the way, provides a good exercise especially in the review process. Does the sound support the sense? Does the poem want a special or restricted audience, and does that matter? Is the form/pattern pleasing? Is there something surprising? etc. Garrison Keilor in his introduction to "Good Poems" says this about the poems he selects to read on the radio. "Most poems aren't memorable, in fact they make no impression at all. There are brave blurbs on the back cover... but you open up the good and they're like condoms on the beach, evidence that somebody was here once and had an experience, but not of great interest to the passerby."

And then, he also admits, sometimes one is dead wrong... I agree... after several readings and thinkings, or in the case of the Gibbons poem, where I could not help but try to find out more, as the poem tickled my puzzling bone, a poem seems to take on a life of its own, and to return to Keilor, "offers a truer account than what we're used to getting."

Naomi Shihab Nye does this with "Eye Test". The use of the word "test" instead of chart allows the first line to evoke school, and the letter D, for poor, and the desperation of the student who receives it. Letters mirror back to us desires and traits. We stumbled on the repeated story, story,/Can you read me-- until the lack of pause (like P between thoughts) where story
bumps into the interrupted question, "story, can you read me?" because of the line break,
mimics the difficulty of "reading" someone else. The secret? It is not thumped out or explained. How do we befriend a squinting boy? How do we deal with our fatigue of meaning nothing to another?
What an amusing way to sketch complicity of letters and a boy into a message of hope.

Her next poem, "The Dream" also addressed the commonplace, the idea of a dream that flattens... whether in sleep, in the subconscious or what the first stanza sees to set up, the dream that you wished for, which hits you when it becomes true. It's not just a "be careful what you wish for" as an exploration of what dreams open up... the persistance of dream... the largeness of a dream that calls forth a part of you, perhaps forgotten. The second stanza plays the pronouns, of I and you. "I liked it better before" allowing the "you" a presence that could both be someone other than the reader of the poem, as if eavesdropping on someone else's dream, or a more objectified internal dialogue between dream and dreamer which invites in the reader of the poem.

The "In Memoriam" (no title) brought us back to the theme of another poet facing death, or writing about writing and how to preserve it. "It" is a powerful pronoun... It points to poetry, but also something mysterious and unnamed. Don pointed out the ear rhyme of "Gauds" and "Gods"... how easily "haven" could be "heaven", and "Hallows" as "hollows".
How many ways can you read "Without excess, it betoken haven, an ordering, theAs darkness held but not dismissed." What is gained with the words in parenthesis, in this case, barred from entering the poem? We thought of the ox-head A in the Gibbons poem, plowing furrows in stone... but in this case, the process of an individual -- sealed... preserved after death...
I don't mean to paraphrase. This poem is enjoyable to read, examine from many directions.

Flyleaf, was an interesting reflection on how a book is put together... with a bit of discordance for some in some of the images. We all pronounced "creation" to test out if it crinkled... but the "twig that bows" took some of us out of the poem. Perhaps the poem could have ended without the 4th stanza.

I would love to steal "angels jostling in awe" and the round syllables.

I was of two minds with the Zimmerman poem.
On one hand, brilliant personnification of sonnets, their constraints, and a conversation between form and content. Not pretentious, and a clever way of addressing the difficulty of saying the truth. On the other hand it felt a bit like an exercise... and the vague reference to missing a teenaged boy and mother did not pull at my feelings.
Who... blue... son/guns.. sisters and insisted... lose, choose, find, kind as crossed end lines are good, but is this enough to really evoke empathy in the reader?

As always, many angles for a rich discussion in both groups.

Reginald Gibbons in October 2015 Poetry

I picked Reginald Gibbons’ poem in the October issue of Poetry to give the group the challenge of a poem that had no footnotes yet uses an unidentified, non-attributed translation. I was intrigued what we might learn, just from the way the poem was set up.

As it turns out, I ended up doing a lot of research both on Mandelstam and Gibbons whose biography in the back of this issue of “Poetry”, only states that his book “How Poems Think” was published in 2015.

But allow me to backtrack. This is what the reader sees:
3 stanzas, followed by 5 stanzas of a translation of Mandelstam in quotations. The title of the poem: “From ‘Dark Honey’ followed by an epigraph In homage to Osip Mandelshtam. After reading the poem, I do not know why ‘Dark Honey’ is in quotations in the title. Is it something written by Mandelstam, or something written about him?

My question is how to access such a poem. Is this a poem that wants an academic audience clearly versed in Mandelstam? Or is the lack of reference a comment about attributions and references? If so, how and what is the reader to know?
Could the poem be self-sufficient as a three stanza poem by Gibbons? What is the rapport with the 5 stanzas of Mandelstam?

I looked up other translations to see if there were a clue to the one Gibbons selected. The same message seems to come across, with “flavor” differences – but it did take some work to find out the title of the poem. I did not find a correspondence to what Gibbons put in quotations and the available translations. I was not even sure if perhaps Gibbons was masking his own translation, but using quotations. Nor am I left with an idea what the relationship of Gibbons to Mandelstam is, or how he envisages this homage. What does he want the reader to understand?

Let us turn to the poem. First stanza. I’m intrigued by the juxtaposition, “I am sure”
the line break between “do” and “not believe”. I’m intrigued by the image of a pencil pulled through a white field pulled by a team of... but here you may need to know the term Boustrophedon . So, as you turn the stone and inscribe mirrored writing, indeed, the ox-headed A becomes plow. An effective image for the blank page and the ravaged earth.

The second stanza starts out like a description of abstract art, “conceiving its infinite in-”
which I find an amusing double play on “in”, as inside the cranium, and broken ‘in-
complete’. It is equally amusing to see in-/complete perfection:
followed by an impressive list from Zeno back to the A, (upside down) that includes twine (not string) theory in 19 lines (one sentence.) Perhaps the idea is to address the exhaustion of possibilities throughout time that words provide in one crowded room.
Or running the plow the opposite way?

Finally, the third stanza is in parentheses, with a complicated embroidery (Tuscan to T’ang) around this message: “tell me how to go into the grave as if made of air”.

Then come five stanzas in quotations, which after research I find is called “For the Joy of my Hands” — if the google translator for the Russian is to be trusted. It is curious that the translations insist on “time” and not “thyme” in the part about the bee’s diet of lungwort, meadowsweet.

Professor Gibbons, at Northwestern has written, translated and thought carefully about poetry, and one review pays him respect for his knowledge about Greek and Russian translations, among other things.

On the back of this issue of Poetry is a quotation from Ange Mlinko. “Language itself is a character in the story, perhaps the closest thing we have to an omniscient one, containing all time and history, obfuscating and revealing at whim.”

One of the participants said the poem felt like a tuxedo on a horse; another said it felt like hot buttons on a computer; others perceived a meditation on writing poetry, with a sense of relief arising with the Mandelstam stanzas at the end.

A challenge from time to time is good for the mind. But it did prompt me to write the editor of Poetry. In the spirit of connection, might it not be kind to give some help for those in the audience who are not enrolled in courses of the various professors whose poetry appears in the magazine?
It felt to me to be an ambitious issue, and I requested the consideration of an introduction, and footnotes, so that lay poets can participate more fully.

**
footnote: for a review: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-poems-think-reginald-gibbons/1120965033#productInfoTabs

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways—guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry’s stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, poetry has diversified poetic traditions, and some of poetry’s ways of thinking begin in the ancient world and remain potent even now. In How Poems Think, Reginald Gibbons presents a rich gallery of poetic inventiveness and continuity drawn from a wide range of poets—Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. Gibbons explores poetic temperament, rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry as modes of thinking and feeling. In celebration and homage, Gibbons attunes us to the possibilities of poetic thinking
Introduction: How Poems Think

1 This Working against the Grain
2 Fortunately, the Marks on the Page Are Alien
3 On Rhyme
4 On Apophatic Poetics (I): “Teach Me That Nothing”
5 On Apophatic Poetics (II): Varieties of Absence
6 The Curious Persistence: Techne
7 Simultaneities: The Bow, the Lyre, the Loom
8 Onyx-Eyed Odalisques
9 “Had I a Hundred Mouths, a Hundred Tongues”

Afterword: A Demonstration
(/ˌbaʊstrɵˈfiːdən/ or /ˌbuːstroʊˈfiːdən/; from Ancient

follow-up poem -- 2 versions

In the poems for October 14, some saw the three solo I!'s in Piercy's poem as an echo of the 3 mentions of gates; Another saw in the Simic poem the sense of “measly” as a way to convey small, in a world of abundance; The sharing about these poems hopefully will be on-going and enriching . To quote Primo Levi,
“The aims of life are the best defense against death”. They invite us to re-examine intentions, our choices, level of awareness. Bernie shared the Amichai poem below.


A Man In His Life by Yehuda Amichai (differences in parentheses)

A man in his life doesn’t have time to have
a time for everything.
He doesn't have enough seasons to have a season (seasons enough)
for every purpose. Qohelet * didn’t get it right when he said that. (*Ecclesiastes)

A man needs to love and hate in the same instant, (moment)
to laugh and cry with one and the same eyes,
with one and the same hands to throw stones,
and with one and the same hands to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.

To hate and forgive, to remember and forget, (and to hate and forgive...)
to arrange and confuse, to eat and digest
what history elongates
over a great many years.

A man in his life doesn’t have time. (A man doesn't have time.)
The moment he lets go, he seeks.
The moment he finds, he forgets.
The moment he forgets, he loves.
The moment he loves, he begins to forget.

His soul is skilled, (his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.)
his soul is very efficient.
Only his body remains an amateur (remains forever/
forever. It tries and errs, an amateur. It tries and misses
it doesn’t learn, it gets confused, gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains.

He will die as figs do, in autumn, (as figs die in autumn.)
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
leaves dessicating on the ground, (leaves growing dry on the ground
bare branches already pointing (the bare branches already pointing to the place)
to the place where there's time for everything. (where there's time for everything.)


Version 2


A Man In His Life by Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything

Poems for October 14-5

I love what Naomi Shihab Nye remarks about poetry — that it celebrates curiosity about each other’s lives…
calling attention to the variety we access, looking through/into/out of/ a window of someone else’s world…
Why would we want to be with people just like us? how dull! Here just a sampling of different voices.

Poems:
Ne'ilah by Marge Piercy
October Arriving by Charles Simic
Interior by William Jay Smith (from Poetry, Oct. 2015-- in memoriam)
Enough by Ellen Bass
Mosquito by Jane Hirshfield
Next Time Ask More Questions by Naomi Shihab Nye
Unfinished Business by Primo Levi translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galas


So, we start with a poem whose title in Hebrew means "closing the gate" and an invitation to ponder what happens in the Jewish High Holy Days, or any ritualistic beginning. A gate allows access, can swing in two directions, open, close, which echoes the first noun of the poem: hinge. We read it sentence by sentence, and most people did not hurry as one does in a sentence to complete a thought, but like the third line's "slowly slowly". Repetition such as I! I! I! loses power if hurried. The prayer-like "I kneel before what I love / imploring that it may live" pauses on after "I love", giving it the gravity a pause can confer.
Short lines with many I's, 3 mentions of gates (opening / (hanging) /closing swing to the first plural pronoun. We are not alone in our failing and broken promises. But this poem pierces to the core of the need to accept, recognize and hold the "sharp shards" of them. Powerful.

One person saw broken tablets of the ten commandments, the swing of the thou shalt, with thou shalt not.

Charles Simic, who wrote "poems at 3 am", shares a more interior, windowless poem for the speaker of the poem and the "measly ant". In the second stanza, there is a momentary confusion (reverse effect of Frost's comment that a poem provides a momentary stay against confusion!)
between ant and winter. Perhaps the variety of responses speaks to the multiple layers created. My question was how he "peopled" the rooms of each stanza --
first the speaker/ant... the idea of others not there, who instead of an ant, have religion, even clouds... Second: the possibility of winter (in October) and feel of loneliness, the only end rhyme in the poem: hide/decide; third: a continuation of indecision with a "he" that could be speaker of the poem, ant, against a blank wall (winter's white?); The final quatrain is filled with sibilant sound-- and unusual way of thinking of trees losing their leaves, the shuffle of them on the ground, perhaps death, that lies before the speaker of the poem.

Different people tried to paraphrase... or connect the stanzas, and the more we discussed it, the more people who weren't so found of the poem, became drawn into it.


"Interior" was first published by Poetry magazine in April 1957. (Curious that the other "in memoriam" for Tomlinson was also published in that issue.)
The first thing people noticed was the flavor of reading a series of Emily Dickinson poems such as "I couldn't stop for death, but he kindly stopped for me".
In the final stanza, there's an echo of Rilke's panther, and the amazing image of "life's veined ore" -- both lode, and loaded; (I think of Gregory Orr's advice -- load each riff with ore) and a return to gates -- but not like Piercy's, where everything hinges, and we are left holding sharp shards, but gates that open quietly, to reveal (with a final echo of Dickinson)a hearse, waiting. Very different tone than Simic's "sly, sea-surging sound" that erases!
Universe (taken in), Ocean (exterior), emotional Interior, perhaps a sense of being in a lighthouse;
The poem is irregular in rhythm, length of line, irregular, but noticeable rhyme. Again, like the Simic, for some the first response was "that it was jarring". And yet, the more you stay with it, the more you discover.

Jane Hirschfield's poem is a delightful exploration of pronouns. Here, Piercy's I!I!I!
lines up as a pair, sandwiches you, he, and I is astonished, as ice, by water...
the self-centered, with an ant (perhaps Simic's "measly" one?) who makes its own sound on the earth (have you heard it?) with the pitfalls of mis-reading...

The largesse in the Algebra: x (large whale); x (the tiny organisms it eats) told in "little Red Hen" fashion,
"solve for y -- says the ocean, then multiply by existence. Just like an unanswerable "why",
can we let a pronoun alone as it dozes? Which one does?

Naomi Shihab Nye likewise intrigues us to think beyond "I" with a thought-provoking title:
"Next Time Ask for Questions".
What happened? What is the situation that will have a "next time"?
The couplets string along like observations with advice as if someone is talking to him or herself. "...desperately thirsty people wait to drink ... when you say yes or no?... "I don't think so."
"When they say "crucial" -- well maybe for them"
What's good for you, might not be good for you... think before you leap... images of bungee jumping in Hong Kong -- and you would do this because... ? What is critical?
And there comes the hinge, as in the Piercy poem. Who's in charge of your life?
How do you mix the present moment, "I am" with all that has happened before it, the "where I wanted to be" -- perhaps like Smith's panthers in the brain -- pacing out the limits...

This doesn't necessarily mean you are happy that what you once wanted is what you want now.
But it's what you have, who you are... and an opportunity to think of what questions might help you for a next time...


I did not share the Ginsberg with Rundel, as there is a larger time constraint... This is the poem selected for Poets Walk, on University Avenue. Just as the title announces, there are 136 syllables, including the title. Rule-breaking Ginsberg, writes the lines as if a block stanza, but each should be read Haiku style — It reminded people of two versions of mindfulness inspired by blossoms by Li-Young Lee, James Wright, (not to mention Ginsberg’s “Oryoki”) and the power of the Native American poem about “going home”… also on Poets Walk.
(Li-Young Lee's poem on Poets Walk is called "One Heart").

Nor did I share Enough by Ellen Bass with the epigram by Arthur Rimbaud (from "Depart").
I actually disagree with Ashbury's translation. Sound is creating the "tunes" we hear, the sounds of the city are not just physical rumblings, but "rumors", based on conjecture, hearsay.
How to interpret "enough". Basta. The plenitude of what has been lived.

Enough seen….Enough had....Enough…
—Arthur Rimbaud

To start a poem with the word "No." Continue the first line: "It will never be enough".
This is a very different sense of "Enough already, stop."
The last line of Rimbaud's poem: Départ dans l’affection et le bruit neufs ! (affection – as in tenderly loved, not affectation; the adjective "new" is neuf not nouveau which means new to the owner. The word for "rumor" is also the word for "noise" and Rimbaud switches from "rumeur" to bruit" with "neuf" -- new, as in a “brand new—sense of discovery...)
I would translate it as "off into tender affection and new sounds".

Ellen captures the desire for more sensuous "thatness of that". Rimbaud's last line captures that -- no more "assez" -- but going into a new place.

Each detail feels authentic:
"Oh blame life. That we just want more.
Summer rain. Mud. A cup of tea.
Our teeth, our eyes. A baby in a stroller."

The matter-of-fact way she tells the suicide she views through the "small window of my laptop",
a man sitting at the table and drinking poison with his wife.

Haven't we all felt a version of "I've had enough"? And recognize the "and yet..."
note the stanza (and line) break:
"...And yet…

this little hat of life, how will I bear
to take it off while I can still reach up?"

I love the tongue-in-cheekness of "giving the body what it wants" -- oxygen...
then brings the poem back to the beginning.
But I must say no—
enough, enough
with more tenderness...

and an overwhelming interplay of images -- newborn and death.

The final poem, "Unfinished business" is a brilliant satire on "work". Or as Marcie said at first, winner of the "best suicide note". The job of living... the lost opportunities, the relinquishing of self-importance... Why do we accept to do the things we do?
Who is talking ? How do you recognize yourself in this accounting? What plans have you failed to do.

Back to gates. The hinges. Our choices. Endings.

Discussion October 7-8

I opened with a few reflections from BOA poet. Nickole Brown.
beauty and truth, called as unnecessary,in the same category of friendship which we know gives value to survival. When we read poems out loud, we can taste the word music... what feels like “uncanny butter on the tongue-- stains it ... / thickens the saliva. Laure Bosselaer's choices: plethora, indolence, damask, lasciviousness...
At O Pen: a few offered these words: cellar door/salubrious/marmelade...

I am so grateful for our fostering of community! the poems we carry with us...
and demand our awareness ... like a spiritual devotion to paying attention...

The poems this week except for 2 had a prose-poem look of block text. Why this choice and how does it affect the poem's working?
Flowering Olives, by James Wright
Regret for a Spider Web, by James Wright
From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee
136 Syllables at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center by Allen Ginsberg
Going Home by Maurice Kenny
Einstein's Clock (1905) by Campbell McGrath


3 of the poems came from the APR Sept/Oct. issue. How different the tone of James Wright from Campbell McGrath... how different again the use of blossoms, with Wright's olive blossom, Li-Young Lee's peach blossom, both folding layers of mindfulness into them...
How clever of Ginsberg, celebrated for his reading of "Howl" this week, to take 136 syllables in haiku technique ... and another poem from Poets Walk by Maurice Kenny who captures the heart-wrenching experience of going "home" in winter, and what "home" means when returning to an Indian reservation. We end with a prose poem that winds the energy of science in 1905 with a bit of tongue-in-cheek about just what mass and energy, and touch of hunger for a bit of sausage, rye, apples and tea.

oh... as Lee says, impossible... referring to the blossoms-- but also how the 30-odd people reading and sharing these poems each draw a different depth of meaning from them--meaning is perhaps unpinnable, but like blossoms, regenerative, as it cycles from a look at nature, being human, spiders and poets weaving webs of meaning.

The first lines of the poems are wonderful points of departure:
It is futile to pretend...
Laying the foundations of community...
From blossoms
Tail turned to red sunset
The book lay unread in my lap
Something is ticking


But I am not being fair to the poets. The first line involves deep looking; the second, the solitary labor of a spider and a humble poet observing the web she is making over him;
In the third poem an evocation of jubilance of peach, which came from a blossom.
In the fourth poem, my next to favorite line is "A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitos" which resolves my favorite : Mad at Oryoki (mindfulness) in the shrine-room-- thistles blossomed late afternoon. Nothing to do with the lone magpie in the opening line. Except, the alone-ness shared by the spider.

By the time we arrive at the Native American poem, filled with adjectives like "tired" for rivers; "closed" for mills; "cold" for graves, "steaming and frozen" for horses and earth;
and the unrecognizable "home" with gossipy aunts and unknown faces, we are back in recognizable poetry territory. Lines that strike at emotion of one man's story, and a wondering about those door "my father shut" which ends the poem. A little peep into someone else's life, which makes you want to count your blessings for connections in your live.

The last one is a heaping of leaping strokes of history-- 15th century clocks along with 1905-- with a mention of Marie Curie's 1911 work; paradox of radium; David quoted Stevens' famous line about surrealism: invents without discovery. Certainly that feel of an endless wading through an encyclopedia, but not without a sense McGrath is having a lot of fun.

The more I read it, the more I can chuckle at it, but I confess, it took a while to get in the mood to appreciate such a relentless block of text. Is it a prose poem? It is more than a self-absorbed list poem... how does it grab you?

Fun discussions both days -- do read the poems and share your responses!

Poems for October 7 (Rundel for Oct. 8) + commentary on Prose Poem

Flowering Olives by James Wright
Regret for a Spider Web by James Wright
From Blossoms, by Li-Young Lee
136 Syllables at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center by Allen Ginsberg
Going Home by Maurice Kenny
Einstein’s Clock (1905) p. 21 APR, Sept/Oct 2015*by Campbell McGrath

I include Campbell McGrath's "Prose Poem" below--
How do you read a block of words like this? After reading, are there phrases you return to?
what meanings appear to you? Discussion will be mainly on the James Wright poems, as prose pieces compared to the McGrath. In contrast, a lyric/narrative/epiphany by Li-Young Lee, a beat poet experiment, an American Indian poem
The Prose Poem
Campbell McGrath

On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, though driving past you would hardly notice it, this boundary line or ragged margin, a shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence, though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands of fallen wire taken by the dust. To the left a cornfield carries into the distance, dips and rises to the blue sky, a rolling plain of green and healthy plants aligned in close order, row upon row upon row. To the right, a field of wheat, a field of hay, young grasses breaking the soil, filling their allotted land with the rich, slow-waving spectacle of their grain. As for the farmers, they are, for the most part, indistinguishable: here the tractor is red, there yellow; here a pair of dirty hands, there a pair of dirty hands. They are cultivators of the soil. They grow crops by pattern, by acre, by foresight, by habit. What corn is to one, wheat is to the other, and though to some eyes the similarities outweigh the differences it would be as unthinkable for the second to commence planting corn as for the first to switch over to wheat. What happens in the gully between them is no concern of theirs, they say, so long as the plough stays out, the weeds stay in the ditch where they belong, though anyone would notice the wind-sewn cornstalks poking up their shaggy ears like young lovers run off into the bushes, and the kinship of these wild grasses with those the farmer cultivates is too obvious to mention, sage and dun-colored stalks hanging their noble heads, hoarding exotic burrs and seeds, and yet it is neither corn nor wheat that truly flourishes there, nor some jackalopian hybrid of the two. What grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected, even in winter, when the wind hangs icicles from the skeletons of briars and small tracks cross the snow in search of forgotten grain; in the spring the little trickle of water swells to welcome frogs and minnows, a muskrat, a family of turtles, nesting doves in the verdant grass; in summer it is a thoroughfare for raccoons and opossums, field mice, swallows and black birds, migrating egrets, a passing fox; in autumn the geese avoid its abundance, seeking out windrows of toppled stalks, fatter grain more quickly discerned, more easily digested. Of those that travel the local road, few pay that fertile hollow any mind, even those with an eye for what blossoms, vetch and timothy, early forsythia, the fatted calf in the fallow field, the rabbit running for cover, the hawk’s descent from the lightning-struck tree. You’ve passed this way yourself many times, and can tell me, if you would, do the formal fields end where the valley begins, or does everything that surrounds us emerge from its embrace?

poems for September 23

Life is Beautiful by Dorianne Laux
Embedding the Cancer Port by Robert King
Veterans Day, 2014 by Jared Harel
Days of Heaven by Carl Dennis
RAS Syndrome by Adam Fitzgerald


Life IS beautiful... and Dorianne Laux reminds us how. "Life is beautiful...
and remote, and useful,"
but stop for a minute to think how these three adjectives work. The effiency of flies, which we wish remote, the whole process of waste and maggots,which normally we do not view as part of "beauty"... Reading outloud, how can you not love the wording... the g’s...verb choices...
Indeed, when you don’t have a ton of people, you see each individual as an individual....
We want flies and worms and garbage remote... and perhaps shun how they might be useful, miss the beauty...
These lines capture the sound and pulse of what lies outside and inside of us:
"hear the dull thrum of generation's industry,
feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us."
Indeed, "We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous." the first two adjectives so visceral, and leading us to a throaty exclamation of beautiful.

The next poem draws a metaphor of a cancer port to the commerce and trade of a harbor, the balancing act of positives and negatives, exotic goods associated with trade routes and antiquity, and contemporary scientific terms for chemo; line breaks sail like ships
"the narrow street can reach the marketplace
of the aorta, receptive to any

incoming ship," ...
with the first period coming at the end of the 3rd stanza.

Don explained the port to us, and the delicate balance of the chemo so this sentence echoed with real fact --

"I carry it secretly under my skin
because it is easier."

The final sentence weaves lightly through 7 lines provoking a sense of mystery of what we carry..as well as the sense of what it is like watching a port inside of you, bringing its "goods and evils".

Veterans Day, which won the Stanley Kunitz prize captures a ragged feel to mood swings and contradiction. The broken lines, repetitions, jarring juxtapositions, sports language enthusiasm applied like PDQ Bach’s mock sportscast of Beethoven’s 5th, clearly had an almost bipolar sense of thoughts/counter thoughts. The shock of watching a beheading on the news, then doing crunches on a clown-nose-red exercise ball, the ironic "never before had I felt
so damaged, so lucky" which packs in survival at a cost... the stray wallet, could be the stray bullet... the happenstance of accident, luck of the game, whether baseball or war.

The Carl Dennis poem is a marvelous look at Gods and Humans, and how really, it might be good if we finally "got over ourselves". Days of Heaven, of course, applied to humans could get us into trouble, especially when the Gods cease to be immortal, and mirror back our inescapable headstrong will, quick anger, slowness to forgive. He plays with the metaphor in a humorous way:

Every death means a divine occasion
Has been taken from us, a divine perspective,

and certainly turns the vocabulary that could adopt a sacred tone into a tongue-in-check look, where the breeze ruffles our divinity and creates a halo of cloud... I love that brother sun sets at the end of the poem, "Undarkened by accusation or disappointment
Or the thought of something he’s left undone."


The final poem was fun in a much lighter manner. RAS means (short for "redundant acronym syndrome syndrome") refers to the use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym or initialism.

September 30

Yesterday I had mentioned "Poets’ Corner” by John Lithgow, available from Rundel as a 5 CD collection that selects poets from Chaucer to present day with biographical material and a sample poem. I like the serendipity of listening to this after just having just read for O Pen some Ben Jonson, (Lithgow calls “The passionate poet” and describes “the tribe of Ben), Robert Herrick (Lithgow calls “The Cavalier Poet) and Filing Station which he selects to demonstrate the art of Elizabeth Bishop (he calls the poets’ poet).
David has kindly offered to moderate next Wednesday’s session with the Wordsworth and Bishop poems from Sept. 9: To wit, The Fish, (read but not discussed), In the Waiting Room, and her villanelle, One Art.

poems for September 9 (see Sept. 30)

David has kindly offered to lead discussion of these poems by Elizabeth Bishop (and one by Wordsworth)
Filling Station
The Fish
My Heart Leaps Up (Wordsworth)
In The Waiting Room
One Art


What a program of poems... it does not surprise me that in the hour and a half, only Filling Station was discussed, and The Fish read.

The Filling Station gives me shivers -- the surprising ending -- how after the relentless repetition of dirty, the station, suit, family,the dog (who is comfy) the pervasive oil, the warning --"Be Careful", the attention to detail, including the taboret, the dim doily (embroidered with daisy stitch...)Bishop might be called "a poets' poet" -- certainly she works her vocabulary carefully -- no one would speak of a "hirsute begonia", which sounds like an "extraneous plant" which indeed has no reason for being in this dirty station.
And then, the final stanza brings in "somebody" -- like an unidentified mystery
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the cans

for this uncannily soft whisper "es so (it is so), so - so
(not so-so, as not important at all)but so, as in, so it is, which rhymes with sew,
the way our lives are stitched together... how we are, indirectly like those "high-strung automobiles." to which the cans whisper... And then the final "somebody" --
Somebody loves us all.

Rundel : Sept. 17

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963 (see Sept. 2)
And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name by John Ashbery (see Aug. 3)
Breezeway by John Ashbery (see Aug. 3)
The Blues by Billy Collins (see Aug. 3)
My Heart Leaps Up by William Wordsworth, 1770 - 1850 (see Sept. 30)
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop (see Sept. 30)


I love the first John Ashbury poem which I have used previously -- and I love that I can bring the same poem at a different time, to a different group of people, and listen to an entirely different discussion.

For me, the idea of personifying the Horatian advice, "as in painting, poetry" is sheer delight, as that is one of my most favorite things to present in lectures and share, blending my work as docent at the MAG and as poet, especially with the Poets Walk, outside the MAG.

Since the poem came hard on the heels of I, I, I and Frostian choices, the you, you, you, and avuncular advice about what is more or less an ars poetic applied to a poem-painting, seemed rather pretentious with a slightly irreverent tone.
Well... I thought it was funny... tongue-in-cheek, looking at the richness in a world of possibilities -- and a desire to communicate it(the longest line in the poem -- not just desire, but this contradictory "Rousseau-like foliage of an empty mind's desire" --
and this idea of understanding you, deserting you, and the idea of an endless realm of creation, with the act of understanding understood to be something once begun, as an undoing.
Back to that opening line: You can't say that anymore.

Breezeway also struck people as surreal, with everything on a dangling thread.
and one person wondered if it was a way of addressing the need for empathy.
Imagine if we didn't club someone because we don't get along with that view of the universe...
imagine if we weren't like a new catalogue from which a Batman promptly turns away.

The contrast in the easy manner of "The Blues" bringing a healing sense of feelings was much appreciated.

Leaving behind the late 20th and early 21st century, it was pleasant to return the the rhyming of the romantic Wordsworth (1770-1850) -- the poem "surprised by joy" and whose heart leaps up at the sight of a rainbow. Such confidence and exuberance in the exclamation point!
The paradox of being still a child, even in our adult selves, the blending of natural world to spiritual... isn't there some of the Noah seeing the rainbow as God's promise?

We ended on the villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop -- this too was not so well-received...
which put a damper on my ability to coax the deeper layers -- the "aster" as the star in disaster; the contradiction of saying losing is an art not difficult to master, when it is anything but easy. Intellectually, we can say losing keys, 3 houses, a watch, cities, realms, is perhaps a regrettable loss... but to turn to the you, to lose a lover, may look like disaster. And so she writes it, a fourth time, balanced with the four times "the art of losing isn't hard to master". From the impersonal, loss is no disaster; missed opportunities, neither will bring disaster; it takes two more stanzas and an accumulation of losses to arrive at
"I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster". Are you convinced by the final stanza of the necessity of mastering the art of losing?

September 16

Telescope by Louise Glück (Rundel: 9/24)

Three poems referred to in Tonight, I am in love by Dorianne Laux
Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount by Ben Jonson 1572–1637
Whenas in Silks by Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
from The Temple (1633), by George Herbert: Dulnesse

Tonight, I am in love by Dorianne Laux

You Make the Culture – by Amy King
A Sweet Disorder by John Ashbery
A Sweet Disorder – by Robert Herrick (1591–1674)

The first poem is the sort to be read several times in different ways, and after a third reading, I started to experiment with ending the poem in different places, as if the poem were two separate poems: one addressing an otherworldliness, to which a telescope links us,
the other, a problem of understanding, how it is not perception, but our relationship to it that is difficult. Whether read as a philosophical, psychological, cosmological poem, there is a hint of Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" in the cold hill... and his famous "negative capability" -- that is being able to hold uncertainty, mystery, doubt.
What is our field of vision, as we focus on a far-away object... can we be lost in this the same way without the telescope? How do we bring things into our vision?

For the poem by Dorianne Laux, I selected three of the references, which reminded us of why a delicious use of word and image makes us glad for it. Ben Jonson, as the passionate poet, brings us the slow, slow... the four drops... the tearing tears (eye rhyme producing a sense of torn and teary)and the heavy fall of grief. If you couldn't imagine the grief of Echo and Narcissus, Ben provides you with it. Love, pining, pining away...

The Herrick shimmers with the physicality of silk,the texture of "taketh me" filling the mouth as if kissing... Discussion included the time period of Herrick -- the idea of bringing science into poetry, such as "liquefaction" (applied to garments slipping). A Sensuous read aloud indeed!

The Herbert brought up Bakhti Yoga, (Love of God in personal way); and restlessness in the Gita which asks us to do the work only to which you are you entitled, not the fruit thereof"
Donne: but that you ravish me... batter my heart 3 person god.
Herbert also wrote the Pulley.. God with a glass of blessings...withholds the blessing of rest.
The poem for me rests on this:
Where are my lines then? my approaches? views?
Dulness... next door to the melancholy. Herbert seems to include the reader as he implores God to help him learn to praise Him.

I love Dorianne's poem... indeed, I am in love... with poetry -- which the richness, and love how she weaves in lines from other authors, leaving the feeling her own imagination is infused with them. The pacing, sounds, work like a beautiful jazz improvisation on all poetry provides, has provided, will continue to provide.

Amy King's poem calls on contemporary culture, a very different tone, as if piecing together shards of what is broken. "I break bread with the handwriting of words." -- we commune, breaking a larger spiritual piece, to join together...

The two "Sweet Disorders" made me want to put Ashbery with Herrick in the same room to see who could outwit whom, and who would have more fun doing so! Both have a marvelous conversational flow as they address the imagination.

Summary of Rundel:
The opening poem, Telescope set the tone for the sense of things going in one direction, then changing to another.
References to the Dorianne Laux poem also included Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and George Herrick… but her words, wound around the inspirations of the old, translate the emotion of what draws us to love…

Ending with two poems with the same title, but over 400 years apart completed the plate. Ashbery/Herrick: Why enter into a surrealist dream, except that the out-of-context conversation leaves you feeling that you recognize something you too understand in terms of emotional response to a situation? Is Ashbery presenting a bad dream or a movie about a bartender and person ordering a “Surely Temple” and all the layers of cherry, Shirley… a flashback about a once lover… Pardon my sarong becomes Pardon my past… and a poke at the idea one should be, look, act a certain way. Do I wake or sleep… and on to odes to Nightingales and Keats…
And Herrick’s disorderly couplets sustaining what Dean Young might call “The Art of Recklessness”.

Poems for September 2 -- Frost

David kindly has offered to lead the discussion of the following poems by Robert Frost:
The Road Not Taken (discussed at Rundel on 9/17)
Directive
The Oven Bird
Never Again Would the Birds Song Be the Same
A Winter Eden
Nothing Gold Can Stay


For The Road Not Taken, the book by David Orr of that title gives a thoughtful 184 page discussion on the various interpretations and misinterpretations... commentary on choice and American culture. Taken from the Amazon review:

"It doesn’t accept or reject its myth of choice but sets us up to feel the tensions involved in having to choose, as if each reader were the traveler. His ­decision might have been arbitrary, it might have been meaningful. It might have changed him deeply, it might not have. The options “blur and merge,” Orr writes; they are “like overlapping ghosts.” As he evocatively puts it, “Two potential poems ­revolve around each other, separating and overlapping like clouds in a way that leaves neither reading perfectly visible.”

It’s a good time to look not only at what we choose— but the how of choice, or even the state of not choosing, balancing and holding of paradox.

I have always been troubled by the last sentence-- the rhythm of "all the difference" has an extra limp...
The rhyming is clever -- not the usual jousting of a crossed rhyme, but four stanzas where the initial rhyme repeats both 3rd+ 4th line, to make 5-line stanzas.
ABAAB
It could have been a sonnet... and one wonders about Frost's choices.
In the Rundel discussion, we looked at the repeated pronoun "I"
I could not... I could, // I doubted, if I should
I shall/ and I (vs. the diverging paths)... I took...
a scenario as Jim put it of an "invitational I" in a "what if" scenario about choice.

August 24

A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman (Jan's pick)
Tomorrow by Charles Wright (Kathy's pick)
Mirrors by Tada Chimako (translated by Jeffrey Angles)
The Composition of the Text by by Adriano Spatola, translated by Paul Vangelisti
If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish
Song for the Last Act by Louise Bogan

What poems move us? Why? What poems beg an explanation from the poet, and leave us by the roadside? Tomes have been written about craft, the reader being the instrument to bring alive any sound of sense, but the questions remain.

Whitman's two stanzas are satisfying as they link in free verse, a natural world with lovely metaphors that transfer with ease to the spiritual plane of the soul.
Spoken aloud, the rhythm captures our ears the way the repetitions and alliterations do.
But for me, the joy is the sound of the words miming the spider/soul at work
You cannot hurry through the first line: A noiseless patient spider, z-ss-sh-s...
the sibilants are already at work, weaving.
Vacant vast surrounding. vv s rr d
Nor would you use machine gun fire for "filament, filament, filament"
The links of reeling / speeding with the bright ee is also woven with "tireless", a silent music joining noiseless.

Like ceaselessly... and the consonants threading the longest line of the poem:
musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
z / v/ tsch/ thr/s/sf/ arriving at the occlusive /k/ of connect, the "ct" feeling like a good sticky glue...

Jan explained she didn't like other things by Whitman,which to her feel overly effusive and claustrophobic, but enjoyed the spareness of this poem and the comparison of human spirit throwing out questions to a noiseless, tireless spider.
The topic of music came up -- what would this sound like set to music? And other references came up... and Jan has sung Ned Rorem's setting of Frost – stopping by woods. It's yet another way to appreciate the words. Poems have their own music... and good ones can stand on their own. It might inspire good music -- but not do the poem any service.


Kathy's pick, from Wright's Sestets, balanced the Whitman with an even more spare use of line, breath. The pull of the title "Tomorrow" and the density of the images, compressing time
sunrise (named) sunset (transformed to drop of blood in evening trees)
further transformed (a drop of fire).
Whether or not you agree that you are darkness if you do not shine, and the future merciless,
that is not the point. we join as names inscribed on that flyleaf of the "Book of Snow".
Images of snow as flake, each one different, gathering, only to melt, disappear.
Lovely idea of layering together, yet impermanent...

Kathy's comment: she never reads this poem the same way.. always learning from it.
Paul added he thought the first line was going to go to a playful place.
David wondered if the first line made the poem any clearer.
Indeed, Wright transformed the quotidien into the extraordinary. Kathy shared with us:
“If you can’t delight in the everyday, you have no future here... and if can, no future either.
We're only on the flyleaf...and that too is no guarantee...
You’re on your own now, together with everything.


The next poem, in three parts:Mirrors by Tada Chimako (translated by Jeffrey Angles)
We did check the Japanese and read the katakana for "Lacedaemon".
Judith gave us a good dose of Japanese culture: sun, sword, mirror and a memory of Cocteau's film, Orphée. Vitrier... I shared this quote about mirrors:
"Warning: Reflections may be distorted by socially constructed ideas of beauty."
A poem to read again... person and mirror as conversation -- who starts-- how we breath a mist onto the mirror-- does it absorb us, or do we absorb something from it? There is just one gravestone -- and not for our mirror!

The next poem we dutifully read and concluded it was an experiment with more pleasure for the writer than the reader. Difficult to read, because so many lines could be read differently, with no help of punctuation.

Echoing the mirror is the Darwish:
I as other... and I as other within myself. I'd love to see the original and have that explained. The translation allows us a message about doubling... expanding yourself... be your best self... but also the nuance "who I am is also part of you... And the pull,

If I were another on the road, I would have said
to the guitar: Teach me an extra string!

begging to be taught how to play an extra string, but also humbled knowing everyone has the same distance.

We ended with a marvelously-crafted poem by Louise Bogan.
Did she think up the repeating lines first? Or simply have three strong opening lines with an echo at the end. Rhyme without sounding "twee".

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.


What a pleasure all these sharings. Thank you all for the contributions!

favorite poems... August 17

Favorites:
III from Tristan (Edna St. Vincent Millay) (from Judith)
ITHAKA by C. P. Cavafy (from Carmin)
Inniskeen Road: July Evening by Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) (from Paul)
The Faces at Braga - David Whyte (from Bernie)
When Death Comes - Mary Oliver (also from Bernie)

in the email: mentioned
Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver

And looked at a file which had Elizabeth Bishop’s “Something I’ve meant to write about for 30 years”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/03/06/something-ive-meant-to-write-about-for-30-years
Linda Gregg, “The Problem of Sentences” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/14/the-problem-of-sentences
Wislawa Szymborska, “Could Have” https://www.english.upenn.edu/~traister/szymborska.html
And “Some Trees” by John Ashbery written when he was a student at Harvard, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/some-trees.html

With Al Filreis’ comment: “just attend to the words… the relationship is formed by arbitrary connection… we have left the world and how have connection in the poem…”

What makes a “favorite” — which poems do we return to… and what connections have we made to poems tucked away in a special place because they tug at our being? Feel free to make a list and share!


Judith shared with us a different aspect Millay, so often described as “twee” (excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental.)
(the first Fig in Figs and Thistles
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
Source: Poetry (June 1918)

Here, Tristan is speaking... and Millay, as poet of the outdoors brings us wonderful names--
"alkanet" and "costmary"-- they were fresh and brash and fragrant, but a man
can forget / All names but one. I was not alone in the room.
A "heady" setting for a night with Isolde... It's the sort of poem where you can't miss the building and binding passion. Then the sudden shift... Tristan back on his boat (late)...
"Women there,
With sea-wind slashing their hair into their eyes, were drying
Long net and long net and long net.

like the herbs Tristan and Isolde meant to have tied... and the two other association in the repeated monosyllables, a sense of long net cast into the sea of the story, capturing the
rhythm of waves...


I love how myth captures the universal placing it in perfectly modern settings. Such it is with Ithaca and the return of Odysseus to regain his kingdom. As opposed to the passion/pressure in the room containing Tristan and Isolde, this poem captures a journey, and a bit of well-wishing to make the most of it. Perhaps, as one person brought up, Odysseus is the symbol of the spiritual incomplete,but substitute "Ithaca" for the there: "Arriving there is what you are destined for." Without the Trojan War, Odysseus would never have had the ten years of difficulties to return home. The poem encourages us to accept all that comes on our path as we set out and return in our birth-death trajectory...
Let go... allow experience its due... and enjoy the ride.
"Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean."

I love how Graves trusts that by the end of our lives will will have accumulated enough experience to understand what Ithaca means, as Kingdom before the war, kingdom to return to, and all that might not be Ithaca when you do. How do you find your haven?

Paul shared the liveliness of language with Kavanagh's Inniskeen Road: July Evening. He sums up his pick this way: "
This is not my favorite, but a favorite of the moment. Kavanagh's poetry, here, reflects an inner loneliness he felt throughout his life and he pictures in this work the motion of bicycles, the coming fellowship and expectation of the joy of a Saturday night barn dance....one that he is not going to, and then, the solitude of the empty road: not even a shadow thrown. Alexander Selkirk was the model for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. What better example of being cut off from one's fellow men."

This little sonnet indeed shares "the wink-and-elbow language of delight" but the question for me is why the poet could not also join in the fun? What does "A footfall tapping secrecies of stone" mean for him. Who is the audience?

Bernie's pick: The Faces at Braga - David Whyte from Many Rivers Meet. (1960’s)
From the Medieval realms of Britain to antiquity in the Mediterranean, to perhaps mid-20th century Ireland, we arrive in Nepal, and a Buddhist parable about carving.
"If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carver's hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers"...
how wood contains imperfections, yet can be carved into something beautiful -- how the world carves us, and how we respond ... When we fight with our failing...
we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself.
Wonderful poem about letting go... the importance of "Ithaca" as experience, the starting point and an opportunity.

The world as our carver... and our choices in understanding what might feel as blows.
Do we fight, hide, or use the blows as opportunities?

The final poem by Mary Oliver "When Death Comes" ends with "I don't want to have felt I have just visited this world."

It reminded Judith of this poem by Millay:
An Ancient Gesture

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope…
Penelope, who really cried.

**
Favorite poems remind us of what tugs at our hearts, reminds us we have only one life, and encourage us to keep on going, remembering there is always amazement.