Friday, October 30, 2015
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."
Sunday, October 25, 2015
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.
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.
Friday, October 23, 2015
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
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
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
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
“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.
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.
Friday, October 9, 2015
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!
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!
Thursday, October 8, 2015
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?
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?
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