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.