The Oxymoron Sisters by Tom Lux
Snowflakes by Jennifer Grotz
Sundials by Jennifer Grotz
In the Congaree by Samuel Amadon
Cattail History by Noah Warren
They Accuse Me of Not Talking by Hayden Carruth
The Birth of Superstition by Lynn Pedersen
Thomas Lux describes contemporary American poetry as “Burgeoning, chaotic, many, many good poets, a growing cultural profile, a healthy, squawking, boisterous, fractious, inclusive, tradition and (true) innovation marrying or colliding.”
Simultaneous with this, I think of the podcast I heard about "fact-checking poetry"...
how fact does matter, with or without intent of the poet...
Oxymorons... One astute reader quoted Lux as saying: "“I like to make the reader laugh and then steal that laugh right out of his throat."
tragedy right next to humor...
He achieves this with his poem -- replete with wonderful sounds.
Acetylene to snowflakes, and a composite hodgepodge of denticulate dandelion and patter of t's
felt a bit affected. Sundials then measured with the feel that these two poems told rather than showed,
with a preference for Sundials which created visual images of roundness.
The poem commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Imagine Your Parks grant also left us a bit cold. Why this?
By then, the group was ill-disposed to workshop Warren's poem.
They Accuse Me of Not Talking is a curious title and we enjoyed delving into the poem. North/South...
"To which love can you speak
the words that mean dying and going insane
and the relentless futility of the real?"
Here we gather faithfully week after week... and at this point I felt I had gathered poems which didn't do justice to the group -- but could resurrect a sense of order with these lines.
What do poems do? If we only read poems, would that be enough to confront the futility of the real?
Ending with a poem addressing the birth of superstition... the lack of certitude, understanding, fact...
Logic is my son’s kite, good so long as you have
wind, string,
something heavier than hope
to tether you.
It felt like a discussion of kites in the wind... different people offering their logic...
not needing hope to be heavy, but simply enjoying the challenge of tethering meaning as we could
in a convivial group.
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Poems for December 21
Poem for the New Year by Devin Johnston
Home Town by William Stafford
The Man-Moth by Elizabeth Bishop
I am Waiting by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Writ on the Steps of Puerto Rican Harlem by Gregory Corso
The Bee Carol by Carol Ann Duffy
As we draw close to Christmas and the end of the year, what statistics do you keep?
What memories of your home town? What accidents and mistakes have produced turns in the path of your life you might not have predicted? What do you wait for? How do you respond to Greg Corso's poem, feed the cluster of shivering bees?
For the first poem: The group commented on the density; regular rhythm; irregular stanza length ... One person commented that
he looks back on the old year, no plans for the new. Then again, it behooves us to reckon with the old before plunging into the new. Dorothy Thompson: first journalist tossed out of Germany. Sinclair Lewis: It can’t happen here...
We are living in a time where we need to look carefully at what has happened...
The 2nd stanza reference to Tao te Ching or book of changes helps stabilize "each dawn a color wheel
to gauge the shifting moods". There is also a shift in tone -- almost humorous if you don't know the Eastern sages.
"each day brings more
and more of less
less and still less
with no end to nothing
and nothing left undone"
From there to the third stanza, where emptiness filled with sound -- of silence, of trucks, planes, the wording is arranged so that simultaneous readings layer together in a shrinking sense of loneliness.
Even here in Bellefontaine
along a winding street
silence brings an interval
holds the less and less
of yet more distant sound
trucks along the interstate
a plane behind the clouds.
One reading: silence brings... holds... trucks along--it
becomes a geometry behind clouds.
We are familiar with "the less and less of yet more distant sound"; trucks and planes can be vehicles producing sound.
The mood is foreboding... a sense of "has been" as if visiting a cemetery.
**The William Stafford poem paints a home town "Norman Rockwell" style -- which is not to say without odd angles,
such as the "bombshell" library. It reads as a prayer for bestowal of goodness.. Peace ON... not "Peace be with..."
Stafford, a conscientious objector – wrote this as a young 28 year old in WW 2...
We admired the line-up of adjectives : safe/comforting/impersonal immensity
continuous/ hidden/ efficient (Sewer system)
Sharp/ amazed/ steadfast regard on the judging ones of the citizenry...
those nosy/incredible/delicious neighbors
I love the "moon-gilding" of "regular breaths of old memories"...
the old whispers, old attempts, old beauties, ever new.
Then ending with the little town, haze-blessed/sun-friended
under the "world champion sky" -- as if to remind us we all live under it.
It brought up the song, "Your State Name's here".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX9p50MIexs
**
The Bishop poem, inspired by a typo, allows the artist to juxtapose Man with this hybrid, imaginary creature
who observes him. Perhaps autobiographical. One person commented that it sounds a little drunk.
Surreal...and so lonely... The struggle to reach what may well destroy, like the moth drawn to candle flame.
Moon, only a reflection of the sun's light... just as words and poems are only reflection of reality...
Moon, as realm of imagination, vs. Sun as realm of reason...
Indeed, one waits... and applauds Ferlinghetti's marvelous use of anaphor and refrain... awaiting a "rebirth of wonder"...
The power of such a refrain multiplies as each stanza leads up to it in a different way, "rounding a different corner."
Comments: Imagine Trump voters this way... they too are yearning and wishing and needing. The absurdity of what is waited for...
Wonder reborn with every child, but harder to maintain... as one gets older... wonder is at risk of being callused.
Re-birth of wonder – that’s the answer... but will it ever be possible for a collective?
How different from the Corso poem -- where "Writ" could be noun, or vernacular verb.
The disparity between what could be -- like a sense of wonder... and what is...
This line goes straight to my heart.
"Because I want to know the meaning of everything
Yet sit I like a brokenness"
God, death, and hard, hard, hard.
Beautifully read by this teen for Poetry Out Loud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2cE1Xh4KkE
The Bee Carol with its soothing music brought us out: Same rhythm as Rosetti sung to "I heard the bells on Christmas day".
The golden jar of honey, to feed the bees, to allow them to continue. Be mindful of their shivering cluster.
**
It is getting harder and harder to summarize and capture all the various commentaries each week.
I hope that people read these poems, imagining our large and multi-faceted group, the richness of the reading aloud, the sharing of craft noticed, associations triggered.
poems for Dec. 14-15
Dust of Snow by Robert Frost
Holidays by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Red Brocade Naomi Shihab Nye
The Year by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Fiction by Howard Nemerov
Jerusalem by Naomi Shihab Nye
Poem for the New Year by Devin Johnston
The first poem is only one sentence, divided into two parts the groups quickly grasped as external cause/internal effect. Some were definitely of the “a crow is a crow is a crow” and some tried for crow as depression. David felt compelled to write this:
"Here was this little poem, lovely and mysterious, refusing to explain what it claimed, a bit haiku-like but more complex for its layering of time and its Frostian qualification: what that bird did "Saved some part of a day I had rued." The earlier feeling was changed by this small event--though not altogether, it seems.
Simple as it is, this little poem reminds me of what's I like about rhyme, the mystery of words so alike in sound but so different in meaning and even part of speech? A good rhyme is akin to a good pun. Here it's ordinary rhymes --crow/snow (noun/noun) and me/tree (pronoun/noun)--leading to a more interesting one-- mood and rued. Who even uses that verb? But mostly I love the way that Frost gives rich meaning to a mere fact in the story. Just as in "A Time to Talk" that hoe set to stand upright in the soft ground becomes a kind of effigy and place-holder for the poet taking a break from his labors, so here, in an even subtler way, all those slight and slender motions--the shifting of the bird's weight on the branch (whether alighting or taking off or just shifting position), the movement of the branch that dislodges the powdery snow, the snow's drift downward, the feel and sight of this delicate snowfall on the speaker ("on me")--together create a beautiful analog for an inner change, a change not even of idea but just of mood. It's another, deeper kind of rhyming. This series of actions, some named, others implied, and none described in detail, dramatizes the poem's very claim that the event that began outside the speaker continued inside him. Meanwhile, the event's delicate beauty befits the small but crucial nature of the inner change. The herb rue has a bitter taste, which says something of the feeling it's named for. Anything, however small,rescued from that feeling is a saving indeed. And how was that done? By the sheer beauty of this action, by the speaker's good luck in being where he was, and by his greater good fortune of having the capacity to receive this accidental gift."
The Longfellow sonnet starts with a universal, and winds up with the idea of fairy tales finding us... The group sensed the poem coming from a dark place... perhaps written after the death of his wife, who burned to death... See "Cross of Snow" -- remembering his wife 18 years after her death... like the mountain bearing a cross of snow... Holidays... and what is sacred,
we keep close in our heart. The tight rhyming abba / abba/cde/cde, the slant rhyme of holidays and unclouded; three times white, for sail (fairy tale); cloud (more f's of floats, fades to echo "full," "feeling overflows""flames");
and for the whitest lily. Laced with l's "holiest, holidays, silence" join the f + l combinations; and sweep along to swallows; gleam; sail, land, lovely landscape.
Both the Red Brocade and Jerusalem allow us to consider the Arab culture and rules of hospitality. Imagine if we took time
to understand each stranger! Imagine if we did not hide behind "busy", did not have to pretend we have a purpose in the world.
We did pick up on the use of the past verb tense "The Arabs used to say," and also, "That’s the armor everyone put on/to pretend they had a purpose/in the world. Is this to contrast with the rest of the poem... the "Let's go back to that" -- the "No, I was not planning to be busy"... I love how poetry asks us to pause, reflect, probe. The poem's title
Red Brocade, returns with the mention of a red brocade pillow, rice, pine nuts, and ends with mint, something to be "snipped together".
Ella Wheeler Wilcox's most enduring work was "Solitude", which contains the lines "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone. Her rhyming couplets are not hackneyed. Using the word burden with its double meaning as musical refrain... and weight, repeated emotions of being human provided a delightful surprise.
Nemerov, Poet Laureate and brother of Diane Arbus, also provides us with surprises. What is reality in a poem called "fiction"?
The elevator metaphor brought up many stories and memories of the first elevators... I love that he "planed" us into 2-D,
... carried us "up." Who are we in 3-D life? How will we "rise and fall" -- are we ready when our number comes up?
The final poem "Jerusalem" is helped by knowing that it means "City of Peace". The epigraph by Tommie Olafsson
addresses inner and outer peace:
“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
We discussed the word "riddle" -- as in whatever is at hand, shot through with hints to be unraveled.
"... the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Pears looks like "tears" which could be noun or sound like the verb. The explanation is that the boy grew wings--
that only come from understanding he was not the target. What vulnerable spots do we each have? How do we explain their riddle? Why not have an olive tree (symbol of peace) become the son slain in war... Without saying, "Love can do such miracles..." the reader might conclude this. The "monumentally" associated with our slowness to understand, is swiftly
followed by soldiers stalking a pharmacy... The last line, "Everything happens next." has also a riddle-like quality--
all we have done, has effect on the next. Everything is all-inclusive and inescapable.
The poems chosen gave us all rise for lively discussion, mirrors with which to look at ourselves, share our reflections.
Not one laid out "truth" in a way one could summarize; all laid out details which point to it, the way good poems do.
Everyone tells me how grateful they are for these weekly discussions-- indeed! I am a lucky one to have such a group.
Thank you all who attend who might read this.
Holidays by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Red Brocade Naomi Shihab Nye
The Year by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Fiction by Howard Nemerov
Jerusalem by Naomi Shihab Nye
Poem for the New Year by Devin Johnston
The first poem is only one sentence, divided into two parts the groups quickly grasped as external cause/internal effect. Some were definitely of the “a crow is a crow is a crow” and some tried for crow as depression. David felt compelled to write this:
"Here was this little poem, lovely and mysterious, refusing to explain what it claimed, a bit haiku-like but more complex for its layering of time and its Frostian qualification: what that bird did "Saved some part of a day I had rued." The earlier feeling was changed by this small event--though not altogether, it seems.
Simple as it is, this little poem reminds me of what's I like about rhyme, the mystery of words so alike in sound but so different in meaning and even part of speech? A good rhyme is akin to a good pun. Here it's ordinary rhymes --crow/snow (noun/noun) and me/tree (pronoun/noun)--leading to a more interesting one-- mood and rued. Who even uses that verb? But mostly I love the way that Frost gives rich meaning to a mere fact in the story. Just as in "A Time to Talk" that hoe set to stand upright in the soft ground becomes a kind of effigy and place-holder for the poet taking a break from his labors, so here, in an even subtler way, all those slight and slender motions--the shifting of the bird's weight on the branch (whether alighting or taking off or just shifting position), the movement of the branch that dislodges the powdery snow, the snow's drift downward, the feel and sight of this delicate snowfall on the speaker ("on me")--together create a beautiful analog for an inner change, a change not even of idea but just of mood. It's another, deeper kind of rhyming. This series of actions, some named, others implied, and none described in detail, dramatizes the poem's very claim that the event that began outside the speaker continued inside him. Meanwhile, the event's delicate beauty befits the small but crucial nature of the inner change. The herb rue has a bitter taste, which says something of the feeling it's named for. Anything, however small,rescued from that feeling is a saving indeed. And how was that done? By the sheer beauty of this action, by the speaker's good luck in being where he was, and by his greater good fortune of having the capacity to receive this accidental gift."
The Longfellow sonnet starts with a universal, and winds up with the idea of fairy tales finding us... The group sensed the poem coming from a dark place... perhaps written after the death of his wife, who burned to death... See "Cross of Snow" -- remembering his wife 18 years after her death... like the mountain bearing a cross of snow... Holidays... and what is sacred,
we keep close in our heart. The tight rhyming abba / abba/cde/cde, the slant rhyme of holidays and unclouded; three times white, for sail (fairy tale); cloud (more f's of floats, fades to echo "full," "feeling overflows""flames");
and for the whitest lily. Laced with l's "holiest, holidays, silence" join the f + l combinations; and sweep along to swallows; gleam; sail, land, lovely landscape.
Both the Red Brocade and Jerusalem allow us to consider the Arab culture and rules of hospitality. Imagine if we took time
to understand each stranger! Imagine if we did not hide behind "busy", did not have to pretend we have a purpose in the world.
We did pick up on the use of the past verb tense "The Arabs used to say," and also, "That’s the armor everyone put on/to pretend they had a purpose/in the world. Is this to contrast with the rest of the poem... the "Let's go back to that" -- the "No, I was not planning to be busy"... I love how poetry asks us to pause, reflect, probe. The poem's title
Red Brocade, returns with the mention of a red brocade pillow, rice, pine nuts, and ends with mint, something to be "snipped together".
Ella Wheeler Wilcox's most enduring work was "Solitude", which contains the lines "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone. Her rhyming couplets are not hackneyed. Using the word burden with its double meaning as musical refrain... and weight, repeated emotions of being human provided a delightful surprise.
Nemerov, Poet Laureate and brother of Diane Arbus, also provides us with surprises. What is reality in a poem called "fiction"?
The elevator metaphor brought up many stories and memories of the first elevators... I love that he "planed" us into 2-D,
... carried us "up." Who are we in 3-D life? How will we "rise and fall" -- are we ready when our number comes up?
The final poem "Jerusalem" is helped by knowing that it means "City of Peace". The epigraph by Tommie Olafsson
addresses inner and outer peace:
“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
We discussed the word "riddle" -- as in whatever is at hand, shot through with hints to be unraveled.
"... the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Pears looks like "tears" which could be noun or sound like the verb. The explanation is that the boy grew wings--
that only come from understanding he was not the target. What vulnerable spots do we each have? How do we explain their riddle? Why not have an olive tree (symbol of peace) become the son slain in war... Without saying, "Love can do such miracles..." the reader might conclude this. The "monumentally" associated with our slowness to understand, is swiftly
followed by soldiers stalking a pharmacy... The last line, "Everything happens next." has also a riddle-like quality--
all we have done, has effect on the next. Everything is all-inclusive and inescapable.
The poems chosen gave us all rise for lively discussion, mirrors with which to look at ourselves, share our reflections.
Not one laid out "truth" in a way one could summarize; all laid out details which point to it, the way good poems do.
Everyone tells me how grateful they are for these weekly discussions-- indeed! I am a lucky one to have such a group.
Thank you all who attend who might read this.
December 7-8
Birdhouse by Tony Hoagland
I am In Need of Music by Elizabeth Bishop
Flock by J.R. Tappenden
Rupi Kaur -- poem with drawing
Learning to Float -- by J.R. Tappenden
Wildfire Moon (Summer, L.A. 2016) by Carol Muske-Dukes
Thinking About Basho by Bacha K. Sharp
The first poem, published in The Sun magazine, October 2016 has a range of possible tones from assertive to apologetic, mildly sarcastic yet with a delightful opening question about that 20 foot extension ladder, which transforms at the end of the poem into the measurement of time-- the 20 foot distance between this predator which we know will have the final word.
The poem could have been written as prose, however, the stanzas allow a sense of poetic carpentry, addressing a birdhouse as abode that progresses from domicile to a residence with a private entrance, a mysterious piece of "real estate" to chateau with an amusing color scheme, (painted blue with orange spots on it). This is no birdhouse, but a peek at how memory works, how we hope that something we have built in our lifetime will last and remind people of who we are.
Some thought it a love poem, others a simple parallel between a place for flying thoughts to land, (implication, become memorable) with two of the enjambed stanza breaks (made with my hands// on a specific afternoon; I took the trouble// to hang that little domicile...)matching the metaphorical third (You might say that memory itself//is a piece of real estate,).
Hoagland contrasts the relationship of outer world, the observable mother bird, the baby birds whose open mouths present "a ferocious pink bouquet" with the inner more mysterious workings of what shelters memory; the specific, individual particulars of the tree on which a birdhouse will be hung; the timing, vs. the generalized "some kind of wire strapping", if I am not here for "some" reason...
Both groups thoroughly enjoyed the romp of reading and discussing this poem.
For the Bishop Sonnet, offered by Elaine R. as one of her favorites, both groups enjoyed the alliterative sounds, the
slow rhythm... Judith remarked on the Millet and Eleanor Wylie influence. The Octet contrasts the trembling/quivering
with the yearning for the the lulling magic of melody which appears in the first line of the sestet. Something about "butter-tainted lips" I find rather off-putting, which the 3-syllable "melody" in the DEF / DEF pattern of the sestet rescues,
with the sibilance of "subaqueous stillness of the sea". Comments included: this is an Ars Poetica... asking for inspiration... devotional... otherworldly... baptism by music...
Flock is a one-sentence column of words that establishes a simile between starlings and smoke, as what allows us to distinguish currents in the air, what is/in it. What is pleasing is the shift to the abstract idea of allegiance, which smoke, unlike the
starlings, cannot hold. Comments : density of what is earth-bound; smoke is inanimate... but starlings not.
fire... of life itself...
something up in the air...
meditation...
air the mind: starling smoke our thoughts...
The poem with the drawing shows a woman's back, her head, with the hair like wisps of smoke. The words:
Our Backs
tell stories
no book
has the spine
to carry
Enigmatic and pleasing... one learns a lot from a back!
We had discussed the Jen Tappenden poem, "Learning to Float" on Nov. 9, however, it fit nicely with the grouping so we discussed it again. As an aside, what I love about these library groups, is that there is never a set attendance, so the 20-odd people present allow multiple discussions to maintain a sense of freshness.
In the December discussion, we commented on the mouth sound, and how the poem's layout addresses surface... below surface...
the lines flow like water.. the image of ribbons, yarn, skeins, reeds weaving contrast with the trees and vines. The brilliant line break, "memory holds// our mentors" -- as if to point out the contrary, in the constant "re-learning", unlearning, in a shifting world.
https://jrtappenden.com/about
The next poem by Carol Muske-Dukes is personal reflection on specific event: the wildfires in L.A. mirrored by blood moon, the revolving star of the red light on a police car, childlike drawings that look finger-painted. "She" as pronoun operates
for artist, first capturing what the sun sees:
The horizon brazen as
the great fool’s gold
jet landing on sparkler
wheels. She catches it.
The poem acts as a tribute to art as the way of capturing, rendering an experience as unique and unrepeatable.
The final poem, "Thinking about Basho" is exactly that. He is definitely a wonderful Haiku master to think about...
But is it enough, just because we revere Basho... to quote him to pin down wandering thoughts?
I would be curious what the APR editors thought of if.
I am In Need of Music by Elizabeth Bishop
Flock by J.R. Tappenden
Rupi Kaur -- poem with drawing
Learning to Float -- by J.R. Tappenden
Wildfire Moon (Summer, L.A. 2016) by Carol Muske-Dukes
Thinking About Basho by Bacha K. Sharp
The first poem, published in The Sun magazine, October 2016 has a range of possible tones from assertive to apologetic, mildly sarcastic yet with a delightful opening question about that 20 foot extension ladder, which transforms at the end of the poem into the measurement of time-- the 20 foot distance between this predator which we know will have the final word.
The poem could have been written as prose, however, the stanzas allow a sense of poetic carpentry, addressing a birdhouse as abode that progresses from domicile to a residence with a private entrance, a mysterious piece of "real estate" to chateau with an amusing color scheme, (painted blue with orange spots on it). This is no birdhouse, but a peek at how memory works, how we hope that something we have built in our lifetime will last and remind people of who we are.
Some thought it a love poem, others a simple parallel between a place for flying thoughts to land, (implication, become memorable) with two of the enjambed stanza breaks (made with my hands// on a specific afternoon; I took the trouble// to hang that little domicile...)matching the metaphorical third (You might say that memory itself//is a piece of real estate,).
Hoagland contrasts the relationship of outer world, the observable mother bird, the baby birds whose open mouths present "a ferocious pink bouquet" with the inner more mysterious workings of what shelters memory; the specific, individual particulars of the tree on which a birdhouse will be hung; the timing, vs. the generalized "some kind of wire strapping", if I am not here for "some" reason...
Both groups thoroughly enjoyed the romp of reading and discussing this poem.
For the Bishop Sonnet, offered by Elaine R. as one of her favorites, both groups enjoyed the alliterative sounds, the
slow rhythm... Judith remarked on the Millet and Eleanor Wylie influence. The Octet contrasts the trembling/quivering
with the yearning for the the lulling magic of melody which appears in the first line of the sestet. Something about "butter-tainted lips" I find rather off-putting, which the 3-syllable "melody" in the DEF / DEF pattern of the sestet rescues,
with the sibilance of "subaqueous stillness of the sea". Comments included: this is an Ars Poetica... asking for inspiration... devotional... otherworldly... baptism by music...
Flock is a one-sentence column of words that establishes a simile between starlings and smoke, as what allows us to distinguish currents in the air, what is/in it. What is pleasing is the shift to the abstract idea of allegiance, which smoke, unlike the
starlings, cannot hold. Comments : density of what is earth-bound; smoke is inanimate... but starlings not.
fire... of life itself...
something up in the air...
meditation...
air the mind: starling smoke our thoughts...
The poem with the drawing shows a woman's back, her head, with the hair like wisps of smoke. The words:
Our Backs
tell stories
no book
has the spine
to carry
Enigmatic and pleasing... one learns a lot from a back!
We had discussed the Jen Tappenden poem, "Learning to Float" on Nov. 9, however, it fit nicely with the grouping so we discussed it again. As an aside, what I love about these library groups, is that there is never a set attendance, so the 20-odd people present allow multiple discussions to maintain a sense of freshness.
In the December discussion, we commented on the mouth sound, and how the poem's layout addresses surface... below surface...
the lines flow like water.. the image of ribbons, yarn, skeins, reeds weaving contrast with the trees and vines. The brilliant line break, "memory holds// our mentors" -- as if to point out the contrary, in the constant "re-learning", unlearning, in a shifting world.
https://jrtappenden.com/about
The next poem by Carol Muske-Dukes is personal reflection on specific event: the wildfires in L.A. mirrored by blood moon, the revolving star of the red light on a police car, childlike drawings that look finger-painted. "She" as pronoun operates
for artist, first capturing what the sun sees:
The horizon brazen as
the great fool’s gold
jet landing on sparkler
wheels. She catches it.
The poem acts as a tribute to art as the way of capturing, rendering an experience as unique and unrepeatable.
The final poem, "Thinking about Basho" is exactly that. He is definitely a wonderful Haiku master to think about...
But is it enough, just because we revere Basho... to quote him to pin down wandering thoughts?
I would be curious what the APR editors thought of if.
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
Poems for November 30/December 1
Sent out w/ email:
However you celebrate Thanksgiving, may it be a time for gratitude. I will look forward to our meeting a week from tomorrow. Since we are not meeting this week, I share with you a podcast link from the Poetry Foundation: “Poetry in the Aftermath”. 0https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audio/detail/91385?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Poetryfoundationorg%20Newsletter&utm_content=Poetryfoundationorg%20Newsletter+CID_f321d2a7115bc08d1a068fc66e2e8e9b&utm_source=Campaign%20Monitor&utm_term=Poetry%20in%20the%20Aftermath
If you listen to it, You will hear also a poem by Fanny Howe. Although it is not available to “nab” this one is: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/loneliness-
I found all of it interesting, but wanted to share something a little more upbeat for discussion, hence the first Whitman poem. Although it is a share picked by Carolyn Forché from podcast this poem calls for courage; a time to pay attention and choose ways to be daily and continually attentive.
Her other poem pick: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/91413
from We Lived Happily During the War BY ILYA KAMINSKY
Long, too long America BY WALT WHITMAN
How wonderful by Irving Feldman
Amphibians by Joseph O. Legaspi
November by Maggie Dietz
Poem by Muriel Rukeyser
The Leaving by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
The Traveling Onion by Naomi Shihab Nye
7 poems is a lot to discuss in a short amount of time... but given Thanksgiving, we are missing a week.
I also sent to the Pittsford bunch the podcast link from the Poetry Foundation where I found the Whitman,
chosen by poet Carolyn Forché. Her other poem pick: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/91413
from We Lived Happily During the War BY ILYA KAMINSKY
podcast link from the Poetry Foundation: “Poetry in the Aftermath”. 0https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audio/detail/91385?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Poetryfoundationorg%20Newsletter&utm_content=Poetryfoundationorg%20Newsletter+CID_f321d2a7115bc08d1a068fc66e2e8e9b&utm_source=Campaign%20Monitor&utm_term=Poetry%20in%20the%20Aftermath
If you listen to it, You will hear also a poem by Fanny Howe. Although it is not available to “nab” this one is: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/loneliness-
The Whitman poem calls for courage; a time to pay attention and choose ways to be daily and continually attentive.
**
Discussion:
Whitman: It is worth reading and re-reading this part of Leaves of Grass. How does it fit into the whole? This snippet reminds us that we are full of opposites... makes us wonder who we are as "en-masse" -- what has changed since the time of slave-holders and abolitionists in our country? How do we learn, conceive of the next step? A timely snippet.
"How Wonderful" plays with sound, repetitions, contradictions as if in a Buddhist dream scratching the dreamer to irritation... Literate light to light litter of falling words is brilliant.
It feels like an agreeable spoof on us, reading the poem as if at a large Thanksgiving dinner
whirling with conversations explaining, agreeing, disagreeing, but how wonderful -- or is it,
that here we all -- and to hang on to how you can "quietly be yourself"...
Amphibians -- as immigrants and cleverly and thoughtfully portrayed...
\
the toughening of the passage.. the shell-less eggs as metaphor... amphibian as being on "both" sides and morphing from one culture to another, adapting.
November: Fun and cleverly set up with slant rhymes and end-rhymes a/b/a
do/moon as sandwich bread for cries which sets up the next tercet:
trees/bees setting up the next tercet with "foliage"
forage/gorge
etc.
I love the last tercet's opening: "The days throw up a closed sign around four...
but she takes it to a universal -- this isn't just about daylight savings... or mindfulness of the moment, but about the part of us that wants something, and realizing now's not the time. And did we even notice the fool's good we could have wanted? Are we ever "dazzled enough" ?
For Rundel, we'll discuss the Rukeyser and Kelly next week.
For Naomi Shihab Nye: a lovely sense of history, geography and an onion...
as one of the small forgotten tears worth shedding
We don’t cry unless we cut into something...
onion as metaphor.
onion is a newspaper.
Onion as lesson on how to add to the stew, yet be silent.
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
email for send out of poems for November 16 and 17
Next week’s selection has a bit of many things. A soothing poem posted in response to the elections; Lyrics of Leonard Cohen, a Villanelle written a few years ago using his lyrics, a little reprieve from Billy Collins, and a sample from a fine writer I just discovered in APR. Enjoy —
Line up:
Good Bones by Maggie Smith
Going Home by Leonard Cohen
Listen to the Hummingbird by Leonard Cohen
To Leonard Cohen -- A Villanelle – by Barbara Braverman
Steer your way, Leonard Cohen
1960 by Billy Collins
what the window said to the black boy by Clint Smith
**
Leonard Cohen. In tribute, I share the links to the lyrics of songs mentioned in the David Remnick article in the New Yorker:
“Bird on the Wire http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/birdonthewire.html
“Suzanne” http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/suzanne.html
“The Stranger” http://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-the-stranger-song-lyrics
The Famous Blue Raincoat https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%E2%80%9CFamous+Blue+Raincoat+%2B+lyrics&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
For Clint Smith you can read his other poems in American Poetry Review (APR Nov/Dec 2016) published.. All very compelling.
“Something you should know”
“The Boy and His Ball”
“what the fire hydrant said to the black boy”
“what the window said to the black boy”
“On Observing My Home After the Storm”t
You might enjoy exploring his latest book: Counting Descent. https://aombookshop.mybooksandmore.com/web1/actions/searchHandler.do?userType=MLB&tabID=BOOKS&key=BTKEY=0018862670&nextPage=similar&parentNum=13237&similarNext=booksDetails&zoneID=BD72
https://www.ted.com/speakers/clint_smith
Clint Smith: How to raise a black son in America is one of the TED talks.
**
The first poem :
Good Bones by Maggie Smith
The refrain, "but I keep this from my children" works quite effectively to consider truth, what to share with children, and how to reconcile a world that may offer them the 50% terrible... Of course children do not necessarily have to know that life is short, or how an adult shortens it. But the tongue in cheek becomes more serious when she repeats mid-way, "Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you..." The long line makes it hard to balance the more positive 50% one wants to sell as "real-tor". How to you sell the world is perhaps not the question so much as "what would make the world sellable". She asked first the question, whether it could be beautiful, but ends with an moral imperative--
you COULD make it beautiful. Are you? Re-read the sentence putting an accent on "You", the the verb, "make" the the ultimate goal, "beautiful."
I love that Rundel Library has inscriptions on the outer walls: http://www.libraryweb.org/rochimag/architecture/SpecificBuildings/Rundel/Inscriptions.htm
ERECTED ANNO DOMINI MCMXXXIV FOR THE USE AND ENJOYMENT OF ALL PEOPLE. MORTON W. RUNDEL
SO CHERISHED THE FINE THINGS OF LIFE THAT HE WAS INSPIRED TO SHARE THEM BY HIS GRACIOUS BEQUEST
TO THE CITY OF ROCHESTER WHERE HE LONG MADE HIS HOME.
~KNOWLEDGE AND BEAUTY ILLUMINE THE WORLD~
He made it beautiful.
Leonard Cohen's going home allows us to think not just about life on stage, adopting a suit/costume/role
but to think about how we are who we are. David brought up St. Paul, Corinthians... see through glass darkly...
Enigma of the public persona and the intimate private self, as if Leonard/I go back between a
deep reality speaking all the time... and the voice which says you are missing the mark.
Hummingbird captures the same idea -- don't listen to me -- but the bigger voice of God.
The Pittsford group got into a long discussion about the impact of lyrics taken alone without music; what makes some songs work so well, others not; We enjoyed the Villanelle – by Barbara Braverman, which brings up another problem of form vs. meaning. Yes, clever use of lines (given new context) from different songs, but as thread
on which to hang the meaning, it wasn't enough for many.
The muse/girl/infuse... long and short vowels, with a variation of plurals on the second rhyme didn't seem to support an underlying meaning. Two enjambments actually felt off-putting instead of multiplying the layers:
"Cracks in everything let light infuse
your songs...
A wondrous feeling begins to suffuse
my dreams- ..."
but how is this an offer one can't refuse?
Rondel did read "Steer Your Way" and glad for it. Here the end-rhyme works in an additive way: rot/bought/God or not/probably forgot/ he will be shot/gradually forgot...
1960 by Billy Collins is a fun poem but not without poking fun at couples, at people who don't listen, the possibility in our age of recording that an anonymous man, can become part of someone's listening, (which brought up the "canned laughter" phenomenon... ) I wouldn't say empathy oozes out at the end, but there's an edge of sympathy.
We ended with a discussion of "what the window said to the black boy" by Clint Smith, and I read aloud as well the "What the Fire Hydrant Said to the Black Boy" as well. The perspective is perfect... the metaphor right on--
glass shatters... but that's not the end of the story, much as the boy is labeled as "broken material" from the start...
The last two sentences leave us with a feeling of hope: Each individual counts. Together, no one is invisible.
to show how many of you there are
that none of you are the same
that the more shards there are
the more ways there are
to refract this light
that envelops us each day.
Line up:
Good Bones by Maggie Smith
Going Home by Leonard Cohen
Listen to the Hummingbird by Leonard Cohen
To Leonard Cohen -- A Villanelle – by Barbara Braverman
Steer your way, Leonard Cohen
1960 by Billy Collins
what the window said to the black boy by Clint Smith
**
Leonard Cohen. In tribute, I share the links to the lyrics of songs mentioned in the David Remnick article in the New Yorker:
“Bird on the Wire http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/birdonthewire.html
“Suzanne” http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/suzanne.html
“The Stranger” http://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-the-stranger-song-lyrics
The Famous Blue Raincoat https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%E2%80%9CFamous+Blue+Raincoat+%2B+lyrics&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
For Clint Smith you can read his other poems in American Poetry Review (APR Nov/Dec 2016) published.. All very compelling.
“Something you should know”
“The Boy and His Ball”
“what the fire hydrant said to the black boy”
“what the window said to the black boy”
“On Observing My Home After the Storm”t
You might enjoy exploring his latest book: Counting Descent. https://aombookshop.mybooksandmore.com/web1/actions/searchHandler.do?userType=MLB&tabID=BOOKS&key=BTKEY=0018862670&nextPage=similar&parentNum=13237&similarNext=booksDetails&zoneID=BD72
https://www.ted.com/speakers/clint_smith
Clint Smith: How to raise a black son in America is one of the TED talks.
**
The first poem :
Good Bones by Maggie Smith
The refrain, "but I keep this from my children" works quite effectively to consider truth, what to share with children, and how to reconcile a world that may offer them the 50% terrible... Of course children do not necessarily have to know that life is short, or how an adult shortens it. But the tongue in cheek becomes more serious when she repeats mid-way, "Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you..." The long line makes it hard to balance the more positive 50% one wants to sell as "real-tor". How to you sell the world is perhaps not the question so much as "what would make the world sellable". She asked first the question, whether it could be beautiful, but ends with an moral imperative--
you COULD make it beautiful. Are you? Re-read the sentence putting an accent on "You", the the verb, "make" the the ultimate goal, "beautiful."
I love that Rundel Library has inscriptions on the outer walls: http://www.libraryweb.org/rochimag/architecture/SpecificBuildings/Rundel/Inscriptions.htm
ERECTED ANNO DOMINI MCMXXXIV FOR THE USE AND ENJOYMENT OF ALL PEOPLE. MORTON W. RUNDEL
SO CHERISHED THE FINE THINGS OF LIFE THAT HE WAS INSPIRED TO SHARE THEM BY HIS GRACIOUS BEQUEST
TO THE CITY OF ROCHESTER WHERE HE LONG MADE HIS HOME.
~KNOWLEDGE AND BEAUTY ILLUMINE THE WORLD~
He made it beautiful.
Leonard Cohen's going home allows us to think not just about life on stage, adopting a suit/costume/role
but to think about how we are who we are. David brought up St. Paul, Corinthians... see through glass darkly...
Enigma of the public persona and the intimate private self, as if Leonard/I go back between a
deep reality speaking all the time... and the voice which says you are missing the mark.
Hummingbird captures the same idea -- don't listen to me -- but the bigger voice of God.
The Pittsford group got into a long discussion about the impact of lyrics taken alone without music; what makes some songs work so well, others not; We enjoyed the Villanelle – by Barbara Braverman, which brings up another problem of form vs. meaning. Yes, clever use of lines (given new context) from different songs, but as thread
on which to hang the meaning, it wasn't enough for many.
The muse/girl/infuse... long and short vowels, with a variation of plurals on the second rhyme didn't seem to support an underlying meaning. Two enjambments actually felt off-putting instead of multiplying the layers:
"Cracks in everything let light infuse
your songs...
A wondrous feeling begins to suffuse
my dreams- ..."
but how is this an offer one can't refuse?
Rondel did read "Steer Your Way" and glad for it. Here the end-rhyme works in an additive way: rot/bought/God or not/probably forgot/ he will be shot/gradually forgot...
1960 by Billy Collins is a fun poem but not without poking fun at couples, at people who don't listen, the possibility in our age of recording that an anonymous man, can become part of someone's listening, (which brought up the "canned laughter" phenomenon... ) I wouldn't say empathy oozes out at the end, but there's an edge of sympathy.
We ended with a discussion of "what the window said to the black boy" by Clint Smith, and I read aloud as well the "What the Fire Hydrant Said to the Black Boy" as well. The perspective is perfect... the metaphor right on--
glass shatters... but that's not the end of the story, much as the boy is labeled as "broken material" from the start...
The last two sentences leave us with a feeling of hope: Each individual counts. Together, no one is invisible.
to show how many of you there are
that none of you are the same
that the more shards there are
the more ways there are
to refract this light
that envelops us each day.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
discussion the day after elections...
To quote from the Nation:
"The immediate response to Trump’s election is one of opposition—we commit to obstructing, delaying, and halting any attacks on people of color, women, or working people that may come from a Trump administration. But we must also understand why millions are angry and anxious, and why they voted for the cruel hoax that is Trumpism."
In our group, Bernie reminded me of the saying: in the morning do something to make someone happy;
in the afternoon, do something to relieve someone's suffering. I typed up his poem... and now,
can't find it...
Thank you all for the thoughtful discussion today. Herewith some uplifting “shares” from the group.
From Bernie:
"This American Life asked Sara Bareilles (Broadway’s “Waitress”) to imagine what President Obama might be thinking about the current election and Donald Trump, but can’t say publicly. Leslie Odom, Jr., performs the song.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI8TCA3fJcs
From Emily: (and Carmin)
"Anthem" by Leonard Cohen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDTph7mer3I
from Maura, enclosed, “Pause”.
I also read The Expatriates by Anne Sexton
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53112
And Judith shared excerpts from Carl Sandburg: 4 Preludes
http://www.bartleby.com/231/0401.html
I do hope you’ll consider attending the PUSH performance on Nov. 16 at Kodak Hall.
Here’s info about it: http://www.esm.rochester.edu/news/2016/10/eastman-school-of-music-presents-the-world-premiere-of-dont-blame-anyone/
Also p. 10 of this week’s City Paper.
It’s all about artists… how you create art.
**
NY New York's official state motto is simply Excelsior (Ever Upward)
And what mottos perhaps need changing?
poems for November 9-10
United by Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952
A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg
Kites by Stephen Burt
Learning to Float -- by J.R. Tappenden
maggie and milly and molly and may -- E.E. Cummings
Mr. Pratt by Myla Cohn Livingston
For the day after elections, it is great to read a poem called "United" where each state's motto points to how disunited we are as a country.
NY New York's official state motto is simply Excelsior (Ever Upward)
Let's hope we can keep in that direction!
I love the tone of the poem -- the puzzlement... and the conclusion: "How wrong we are about one another." I love that Naomi asks "Idaho's motto (“Let It Be Perpetual” ) what the "it" is?
"Who chose these lines?
How many contenders?"
could be asked of each state.
New Mexico, “It Grows As It Goes”—now this is scary.
Two dangling its.
A little humor, for something quite serious seems to be the tenor of most of the poems.
(Especially the Cummings and Livingston at the end.) Ginsberg too, in spite of the thread
of loneliness.
It might be trite to ask: Which poet would you invite to go shopping at Wegman’s with you?
But the key in my mind lies in the final verse: "what America did you have" -- perhaps we don't have an image as did the Greeks of Charon and the River of Forgetfulness that runs in the underworld... but just before we die, what America did we have?
I love how Ginsberg's lack of punctuation heightens the ambiguity of phrases like
"lost America of love past blue automobiles". America of love + love past blue + automobiles
and America's love of automobiles.
The poem starts out with Whitmanian sense of world teeming with abundance...
followed by reference to disconnectedness of being homosexual... but even there in this part:
"I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?" this could be 3 separate questions Walt poses to 3 different grocery boys, as well as the "you" being us asking such questions.
What did you have Walt Whitman... what do we have here...
It is a haunting poem, literally with a ghost of the Great Democratic Bigness of our poet who Sings America..
**
For the next poem, if you look up Stephen Burt, you will find he is a cross-dresser, but totally comfortable about it, without jeopardizing his relationship with his wife. Nationally known, he has given TED talks about poetry well worth a listen.
The Kite is a delightful poem -- a feel of swooping here and there gathered. The two shortest lines:
"you try"
"to keep us"
Of course, the strings attached are the contexts:
The beginning:
Complete in ourselves,
we look like scraps of paper anyway:
left alone, we could tell
our mothers and one another our owners’
flimsiest secrets and play together all day
until we became intertwined, which is why
you try
to keep us permanently apart.
last stanza:
"It seems to be up to you
to keep us
up in the air, and to make sure our paths never cross."
A small reference to Longfellow, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44640
My Lost Youth -- which starts by the sea and in the beginning quotes an anonymous 'lapland song' :"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
It's the sort of poem filled with luscious sounds, pleasant to say, follow, feeling one almost
understands something, but without need to peg it further, even though knowing there is something more for sure, to understand.
Learning to Float -- by J.R. Tappenden (Jennifer) is also a "mouth feel" of a poem.. with reference to the Aesop's fable of the great Oak and the bending reed...
The wide open spaces... silences and suspensions... create a journey -- perhaps a bit like Joseph Campbell's man with a thousand faces... Bernie brought up Haroun and the sea of stories--
not one phrase seems awkward... familiar is turned, the way times change... and we need to rethink
and unlearn our roots, stop clinging to what was to better choose how to stay afloat.
A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg
Kites by Stephen Burt
Learning to Float -- by J.R. Tappenden
maggie and milly and molly and may -- E.E. Cummings
Mr. Pratt by Myla Cohn Livingston
For the day after elections, it is great to read a poem called "United" where each state's motto points to how disunited we are as a country.
NY New York's official state motto is simply Excelsior (Ever Upward)
Let's hope we can keep in that direction!
I love the tone of the poem -- the puzzlement... and the conclusion: "How wrong we are about one another." I love that Naomi asks "Idaho's motto (“Let It Be Perpetual” ) what the "it" is?
"Who chose these lines?
How many contenders?"
could be asked of each state.
New Mexico, “It Grows As It Goes”—now this is scary.
Two dangling its.
A little humor, for something quite serious seems to be the tenor of most of the poems.
(Especially the Cummings and Livingston at the end.) Ginsberg too, in spite of the thread
of loneliness.
It might be trite to ask: Which poet would you invite to go shopping at Wegman’s with you?
But the key in my mind lies in the final verse: "what America did you have" -- perhaps we don't have an image as did the Greeks of Charon and the River of Forgetfulness that runs in the underworld... but just before we die, what America did we have?
I love how Ginsberg's lack of punctuation heightens the ambiguity of phrases like
"lost America of love past blue automobiles". America of love + love past blue + automobiles
and America's love of automobiles.
The poem starts out with Whitmanian sense of world teeming with abundance...
followed by reference to disconnectedness of being homosexual... but even there in this part:
"I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?" this could be 3 separate questions Walt poses to 3 different grocery boys, as well as the "you" being us asking such questions.
What did you have Walt Whitman... what do we have here...
It is a haunting poem, literally with a ghost of the Great Democratic Bigness of our poet who Sings America..
**
For the next poem, if you look up Stephen Burt, you will find he is a cross-dresser, but totally comfortable about it, without jeopardizing his relationship with his wife. Nationally known, he has given TED talks about poetry well worth a listen.
The Kite is a delightful poem -- a feel of swooping here and there gathered. The two shortest lines:
"you try"
"to keep us"
Of course, the strings attached are the contexts:
The beginning:
Complete in ourselves,
we look like scraps of paper anyway:
left alone, we could tell
our mothers and one another our owners’
flimsiest secrets and play together all day
until we became intertwined, which is why
you try
to keep us permanently apart.
last stanza:
"It seems to be up to you
to keep us
up in the air, and to make sure our paths never cross."
A small reference to Longfellow, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44640
My Lost Youth -- which starts by the sea and in the beginning quotes an anonymous 'lapland song' :"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
It's the sort of poem filled with luscious sounds, pleasant to say, follow, feeling one almost
understands something, but without need to peg it further, even though knowing there is something more for sure, to understand.
Learning to Float -- by J.R. Tappenden (Jennifer) is also a "mouth feel" of a poem.. with reference to the Aesop's fable of the great Oak and the bending reed...
The wide open spaces... silences and suspensions... create a journey -- perhaps a bit like Joseph Campbell's man with a thousand faces... Bernie brought up Haroun and the sea of stories--
not one phrase seems awkward... familiar is turned, the way times change... and we need to rethink
and unlearn our roots, stop clinging to what was to better choose how to stay afloat.
Saturday, November 5, 2016
O Pen -- poems for November 2
Morning by Bernard Shore
A Blessing by James Wright
As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter, I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor by James Wright
Testimonial by Rita Dove
Seasons v. Seconds by Steven Deridder
The Plain Sense of Things by Wallace Stevens
Owed to Pedagogy by Joshua Bennett
It is rare that one can receive a long explanation from the poet, but Bernie explained the first one and I received a long email from Steven Deridder Seasons v. Seconds. (see below).
Having two groups reading the same bunch of poems with different results testifies to the malleability of poems to resonate with circumstances. With the James Wright and Wallace Stevens poems, it would be fun to have them come and tell us just what was going through their minds. I'll save discussion here, as much has already been written about them.
Rita Dove's poem works sound, repetitions, a sense of biblical before the story started.
Joshua Bennett's poem (which appeared in the October issue of Poetry Magazine) is likewise a skillful working of line and stanza breaks. The sister's switchblade // eyes is a great example. Confusion of the voice, tension along with mathematical terms... abstractions balanced with a story of a boy, his mother, sister, in steadily flowing tercets
ending up with the unknowns.. how we deal with them.
Deridder's comments:
"It can be a love poem or not, it doesn't matter much for the meaning. Love has a funny way of finding a way into anything of compassion :).
The person who saw humans as fruit is on point with their ideas, though the fruit itself doesn't have to be human. Living things rot in time, some need a helping (or loving hand!), and they all gravitate toward perfecting their 'biologically preprogrammed' purpose (for lack of a better term).
The whole set up of the first three stanzas is a kind of an enticement + shaming of the reader to pick the speaking fruit, but in the final two stanzas, the fruit finally admits it can only wait the night.
Forth stanza is a personification of a split (of personality, of desires, of whatever buzzword). After attempting to shame / entice the reader, the fruit (human or life symbol) disassociates its own traits from its conscious self (maybe, out of self-consciousness?). Anyways, when the light of the sun goes out, it takes all forms of visual beauty. Even the fruit knows it can't be plucked, tasted, and wanted (or loved or useful, thus have a purpose) if it can't be seen. Which leads in to the last stanza: the 'good tastes' of its musical insides will become embittered by time and neglect (though in actuality, both are only vehicles for its own shallow, 'plastic' vanity, but that is the next level of subtext).
All of this is trying to imply that biology, or the nature of things, plays a role in the inner rot of the soul, as it so naturally happens to many humans, and even the domesticated animals I've seen. The first three stanzas introduce 'nature' in the general sense, show how it fattens things up just to kill them, while also building up the character of the fruit, as it is like a shaming salesman for its self, and being incredibly vain. Though in that forth stanza, it seems to have a higher level awareness of just that, then it warns the reader in the fifth that it can only wait the night. 'Bitter comes faster than anything of this Earth' = not much of a choice (at least for it, the fruit that wants to be plucked and wanted and tasty).
Oh, quick note: I think I may be using the word 'vain' in a different way than it is usually used. Basically, I mean it in that the fruit only thinks (thus cares) about how to get what it wants, only acts and speaks toward this regard, though it is being a poetic salesman and doesn't come off as feeling or sounding very vain... which was intended, but because of that, I am unsure if I should or can call it vain"
A Blessing by James Wright
As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter, I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor by James Wright
Testimonial by Rita Dove
Seasons v. Seconds by Steven Deridder
The Plain Sense of Things by Wallace Stevens
Owed to Pedagogy by Joshua Bennett
It is rare that one can receive a long explanation from the poet, but Bernie explained the first one and I received a long email from Steven Deridder Seasons v. Seconds. (see below).
Having two groups reading the same bunch of poems with different results testifies to the malleability of poems to resonate with circumstances. With the James Wright and Wallace Stevens poems, it would be fun to have them come and tell us just what was going through their minds. I'll save discussion here, as much has already been written about them.
Rita Dove's poem works sound, repetitions, a sense of biblical before the story started.
Joshua Bennett's poem (which appeared in the October issue of Poetry Magazine) is likewise a skillful working of line and stanza breaks. The sister's switchblade // eyes is a great example. Confusion of the voice, tension along with mathematical terms... abstractions balanced with a story of a boy, his mother, sister, in steadily flowing tercets
ending up with the unknowns.. how we deal with them.
Deridder's comments:
"It can be a love poem or not, it doesn't matter much for the meaning. Love has a funny way of finding a way into anything of compassion :).
The person who saw humans as fruit is on point with their ideas, though the fruit itself doesn't have to be human. Living things rot in time, some need a helping (or loving hand!), and they all gravitate toward perfecting their 'biologically preprogrammed' purpose (for lack of a better term).
The whole set up of the first three stanzas is a kind of an enticement + shaming of the reader to pick the speaking fruit, but in the final two stanzas, the fruit finally admits it can only wait the night.
Forth stanza is a personification of a split (of personality, of desires, of whatever buzzword). After attempting to shame / entice the reader, the fruit (human or life symbol) disassociates its own traits from its conscious self (maybe, out of self-consciousness?). Anyways, when the light of the sun goes out, it takes all forms of visual beauty. Even the fruit knows it can't be plucked, tasted, and wanted (or loved or useful, thus have a purpose) if it can't be seen. Which leads in to the last stanza: the 'good tastes' of its musical insides will become embittered by time and neglect (though in actuality, both are only vehicles for its own shallow, 'plastic' vanity, but that is the next level of subtext).
All of this is trying to imply that biology, or the nature of things, plays a role in the inner rot of the soul, as it so naturally happens to many humans, and even the domesticated animals I've seen. The first three stanzas introduce 'nature' in the general sense, show how it fattens things up just to kill them, while also building up the character of the fruit, as it is like a shaming salesman for its self, and being incredibly vain. Though in that forth stanza, it seems to have a higher level awareness of just that, then it warns the reader in the fifth that it can only wait the night. 'Bitter comes faster than anything of this Earth' = not much of a choice (at least for it, the fruit that wants to be plucked and wanted and tasty).
Oh, quick note: I think I may be using the word 'vain' in a different way than it is usually used. Basically, I mean it in that the fruit only thinks (thus cares) about how to get what it wants, only acts and speaks toward this regard, though it is being a poetic salesman and doesn't come off as feeling or sounding very vain... which was intended, but because of that, I am unsure if I should or can call it vain"
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
Rundel - October 27
A Time to Talk -- Robert Frost
The President Has Never Said the Word 'Black' by Morgan Parker
Life is fine by Langston Hughes
Lines Written Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey by Billy Collins
The Kite by Joyce Carol Oates
All Hallows Night by Lizette Woolworth Reese
See October 19 for the first three; -- no O Pen, but discussion at the Jewish Home, bringing poetry to Bernie.
See Oct. 26 for the next two.
I put in "All Hallows Night" for fun...
April-clear (Spring Cleaning) to prepare to ghosts is an intriguing idea...
But instead of "ghosts of the year", only one appears...
How we encounter ourselves...?
Poems for October 26 + two discussed Oct. 27
Beginning by James Wright
Goods by Wendell Berry
Big Bend Park says No
to All Walls -- by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Anti-Grief by Marianne Boruch
Lines Written Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey by Billy Collins**
The Kite by Joyce Carol Oates**
The last two were also discussed at Rundel on October 27.
From Wordsworth's LINES WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY
"The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
‘Mid groves and copses"
**
Beginning by James Wright:
Note how the moon drops the feathers INTO not ONTO the field.
How the short sentences per line ask us to stop. How "now" hangs as one word on a line followed by a period. His beginning seems to start when he perceives the wheat, leaning back to "its own darkness". The mood is reverent, tentative, ethereal and holds us... gently.
Goods.
Merlin increases his syntactical units and alliterative green growth... gayety... good which made some think of Andrew Marvell's "Green thoughts and green shade".
Maura shared her picture of a Percheron ... one does indeed shudder at the size... and we discussed
"shudder" as a response to being deeply moved by awe as well as by horror or fear.
Intimations. Thanks to the human heart... thoughts that lie too deep for tears... Wordsworth
Naomi Shihab Nye: Big Bend Park says No
to All Walls
The title is laid out this way on two lines... with a brilliant result of a poem in the voice of Big Bend not just to express personal concerns of the park, but also an address "To All Walls".
One senses a strong persona in this highly political poem which allows the power of landscape to speak. Big Bend, and eternity... vs. man's clocks (Big Ben without the D) and rules saying who is to govern, get along, etc. What kind of "big bend thinking" do we do, or not? Big Bend as place, river... witness of time. A sense of psalm 23, and although written in 2011, feels freshly penned. The javelina, some mentioned for those who might not have looked it up, is a wild pig...
The comment on The Anti-Grief by Marianne Boruch -- She speaks of the little things that matter... what to cry over...
On the page, many found this poem irritating... but aloud it comes alive. I love this passage
"Alarm and Should Have, two roads
he would not cross, and Consequence
a street over, he ignored completely. Always
an eye out for the great
small peculiar."
an eye out... both in sense of knocked out, (ignored) and looking out -- again both for the "great"
and the "great small peculiar".
Lines Written Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey by Billy Collins.
As one participant said "he cocks a snook at everything..."
Collins having fun on our culture’s view of time...
poking fun at poets and their dismay, " the kind that issues from poems
the way water issues forth from hoses,
the way the match always gives its little speech on fire."
Wordsworth's poem was one of the first to experiment with looking at an important historical place, but instead of calling on the history, brings his own experience of what he sees the river... and how this makes a difference in how he perceives what is happening to him. No mention of King Henry, as the scene is to tell how the poet has changed.
According to David, Collins is making fun of a genre.
The dialogue continues with Joyce Carol Oates in her poem, The Kite
(For Billy Collins). The form of the poem, in the shape of a Kite, and echoes of familiar lines...
something there is (but does not say "doesn't like...a wall"), but instead takes the tack of
in the American
soul that soars with
kites that soar!
The wording is tricky as she proceeds "Something there is not/in the American soul"
but a paraphrase is not possible. There is a sly layering of simultaneous opposites,
soaring repeated until the kite's tail encounters TV antenna, (tuttingly aliterated)
the kite
in a
heap
Fun to read, re-read. Although published in 2003, I feel it is an accurate view of 2016.
Monday, October 31, 2016
Warsan Shire ... and Eureka... Thoughts on the last day of October
One of the responses to Bob Dylan’s Nobel nomination was, “why not Warsan Shire”. Her performance, like Dylan’s, reminds us that poetry is not just for the page, but to be voiced, gesticulated.
I played the excerpt for Rundel on Thursday, Oct. 27, and sent it to O Pen as well.
Born in 1988, Kenya, Ms. Shire has grown up in London. In 2014, she was nominated London's Young Poet Laureate. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/warsan-shire
"To many readers, Ms. Shire’s clear voice in the online cacophony felt transformative."
Beyoncé (in a voice-over in the film, lines derived from Ms. Shire’s poem.
the unbearable weight of staying - (the end of the relationship).
https://warsanshire.bandcamp.com/track/the-unbearable-weight-of-staying-the-end-of-the-relationship
the unbearable weight of staying (1:34) (transcript below)
EUREKA
How different a smooth sound of a voice, try to follow one person's rhythms.
I will be talking Nov. 10 about Eureka and why it matters. It reflects discovery, and a borderline sense of joy one wants to rush out to share with someone.
Listening to someone's story doesn't produce "Eureka"... but talking with others about a poem or story will.
**
Here is a clip from Warsan... released February 14, 2012
"I don’t know when love became elusive. What I know, is no one I know has it,
My father’s arms around my mother’s neck, fruit too ripe to eat a door half way open when your name is just a hand I can never hold everything I have ever believed in becomes magic.
I think of lovers as trees … growing to and from one another searching for the same light my mother’s laughter in a dark room a photograph graying under my porch (?)
this is all I know how to do
carry lust around until I begin to resemble every bad memory every terrible fear any nightmare anyone has ever had
I ask , did you ever love me.
You say of course of course so quickly that you sound like someone else I ask you are you made of steel? are you made of iron?
You cry on the phone. My stomach hurts.
I let you leave. I need someone who knows how to stay."
**
Another short phrase of hers was perfect in expression shared with me by Carmin:
"I had to leave.
I felt lonely when he held
me"
Carmin mentioned how it might be interesting to read and discuss some of Bob Dylan's lyrics later in the coming year. She printed 5 pages from the Guardian, Thursday 13 October 2016 titled,
Are these the lyrics that won Bob Dylan a Novel prize? by Richard Williams and Alexis Petridis.
I put him in my Shakespeare talk yesterday with one picture next to these lyrics:
The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say
I should refuse you
The cracked bells
and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
But it’s not that way
I wasn’t born to lose you . . .
I want you, I want you .
— with the question -
Will we be listening to him 400 years from now? Would you take him with you on a desert island?
What experiences and discussions produce a sense of "Eureka"? Which stories pave the way for you to
the moment when "aha" seems to lift invisible but yet perceived impressions of veils?
I played the excerpt for Rundel on Thursday, Oct. 27, and sent it to O Pen as well.
Born in 1988, Kenya, Ms. Shire has grown up in London. In 2014, she was nominated London's Young Poet Laureate. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/warsan-shire
"To many readers, Ms. Shire’s clear voice in the online cacophony felt transformative."
Beyoncé (in a voice-over in the film, lines derived from Ms. Shire’s poem.
the unbearable weight of staying - (the end of the relationship).
https://warsanshire.bandcamp.com/track/the-unbearable-weight-of-staying-the-end-of-the-relationship
the unbearable weight of staying (1:34) (transcript below)
EUREKA
How different a smooth sound of a voice, try to follow one person's rhythms.
I will be talking Nov. 10 about Eureka and why it matters. It reflects discovery, and a borderline sense of joy one wants to rush out to share with someone.
Listening to someone's story doesn't produce "Eureka"... but talking with others about a poem or story will.
**
Here is a clip from Warsan... released February 14, 2012
"I don’t know when love became elusive. What I know, is no one I know has it,
My father’s arms around my mother’s neck, fruit too ripe to eat a door half way open when your name is just a hand I can never hold everything I have ever believed in becomes magic.
I think of lovers as trees … growing to and from one another searching for the same light my mother’s laughter in a dark room a photograph graying under my porch (?)
this is all I know how to do
carry lust around until I begin to resemble every bad memory every terrible fear any nightmare anyone has ever had
I ask , did you ever love me.
You say of course of course so quickly that you sound like someone else I ask you are you made of steel? are you made of iron?
You cry on the phone. My stomach hurts.
I let you leave. I need someone who knows how to stay."
**
Another short phrase of hers was perfect in expression shared with me by Carmin:
"I had to leave.
I felt lonely when he held
me"
Carmin mentioned how it might be interesting to read and discuss some of Bob Dylan's lyrics later in the coming year. She printed 5 pages from the Guardian, Thursday 13 October 2016 titled,
Are these the lyrics that won Bob Dylan a Novel prize? by Richard Williams and Alexis Petridis.
I put him in my Shakespeare talk yesterday with one picture next to these lyrics:
The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say
I should refuse you
The cracked bells
and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
But it’s not that way
I wasn’t born to lose you . . .
I want you, I want you .
— with the question -
Will we be listening to him 400 years from now? Would you take him with you on a desert island?
What experiences and discussions produce a sense of "Eureka"? Which stories pave the way for you to
the moment when "aha" seems to lift invisible but yet perceived impressions of veils?
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Rundel Write up Oct. 13 with original of Neruda poem.
Blackberries, with all the adjectives, ripe p’s and b’s punctuating
Blackberries, and the crossed arrangement of black art + blackberry-making; black language + blackberry-eating!
The doubling and opposing,then melding contradictions of Li-Young Lee’s story; melding of past/present; the pauses
And discoveries. I shared the fact that in Chinese, one doesn’t use just one word for instance for Moon (Yue) but
Yu Liang, which literally means bright moon — not that that MEANS the moon is bright. So a subtle doubling,
Reflected as well in the mother’s referral to persimmon as containing a sun; and the cardinal singing the sun, the sun.
It mimics the confusion of persimmons and precision; the persimmon experience at home and school; the actual persimmon and brush and ink drawing of it; How some things never leave a person; sight/insight… all revolving around the multiple memories of
Persimmons.
I hope you all giggled at the rhyme… how would you rhyme:
I’ll take vanilla.... said the ...
chocolate...
etc.
the the surprise at the end.
For the Frost, this was the only poem in North of Boston that was not written in Blank Verse. Anapestic Tetrameter, or the galloping rhythm (think Night before Christmas) is handled in a natural way, creating a real sense of place, and peopled with real characters. The exaggeration
at the end makes a fitting image for wet blueberries... and the desire for them, old Loren still holding his secret and straight face.
The final poem was difficult. Here is the original Spanish.
How good a job did Dennis Maloney do in translating it?
Tal vez ésta es la casa en que vivÃ
cuando yo no existà ni habÃa tierra,
cuando todo era luna o piedra o sombra,
cuando la luz inmóvil no nacÃa.
Tal vez entonces esta piedra era
mi casa, mis ventanas o mis ojos.
Me recuerda esta rosa de granito
algo que me habitaba o que habité,
cueva o cabeza cósmica de sueños,
copa o castillo o nave o nacimiento.
Toco el tenaz esfuerzo de la roca,
su baluarte golpeado en la salmuera,
y sé que aquà quedaron grietas mÃas,
arrugadas sustancias que subieron
desde profundidades hasta mi alma,
y piedra fui, piedra seré, por eso
toco esta piedra y para mà no ha muerto:
es lo que fui, lo que seré reposo
de tu combate tan largo como el tiempo.
How do we understand the Earth houses us,
and how we house something?
Ask a few English speakers what they think of the poem.
Then ask a few Spanish speakers.
Tell me what you find out.
**
I shared the mystery of penning words to paintings with a writing exercise:
Blackberries, and the crossed arrangement of black art + blackberry-making; black language + blackberry-eating!
The doubling and opposing,then melding contradictions of Li-Young Lee’s story; melding of past/present; the pauses
And discoveries. I shared the fact that in Chinese, one doesn’t use just one word for instance for Moon (Yue) but
Yu Liang, which literally means bright moon — not that that MEANS the moon is bright. So a subtle doubling,
Reflected as well in the mother’s referral to persimmon as containing a sun; and the cardinal singing the sun, the sun.
It mimics the confusion of persimmons and precision; the persimmon experience at home and school; the actual persimmon and brush and ink drawing of it; How some things never leave a person; sight/insight… all revolving around the multiple memories of
Persimmons.
I hope you all giggled at the rhyme… how would you rhyme:
I’ll take vanilla.... said the ...
chocolate...
etc.
the the surprise at the end.
For the Frost, this was the only poem in North of Boston that was not written in Blank Verse. Anapestic Tetrameter, or the galloping rhythm (think Night before Christmas) is handled in a natural way, creating a real sense of place, and peopled with real characters. The exaggeration
at the end makes a fitting image for wet blueberries... and the desire for them, old Loren still holding his secret and straight face.
The final poem was difficult. Here is the original Spanish.
How good a job did Dennis Maloney do in translating it?
Tal vez ésta es la casa en que vivÃ
cuando yo no existà ni habÃa tierra,
cuando todo era luna o piedra o sombra,
cuando la luz inmóvil no nacÃa.
Tal vez entonces esta piedra era
mi casa, mis ventanas o mis ojos.
Me recuerda esta rosa de granito
algo que me habitaba o que habité,
cueva o cabeza cósmica de sueños,
copa o castillo o nave o nacimiento.
Toco el tenaz esfuerzo de la roca,
su baluarte golpeado en la salmuera,
y sé que aquà quedaron grietas mÃas,
arrugadas sustancias que subieron
desde profundidades hasta mi alma,
y piedra fui, piedra seré, por eso
toco esta piedra y para mà no ha muerto:
es lo que fui, lo que seré reposo
de tu combate tan largo como el tiempo.
How do we understand the Earth houses us,
and how we house something?
Ask a few English speakers what they think of the poem.
Then ask a few Spanish speakers.
Tell me what you find out.
**
I shared the mystery of penning words to paintings with a writing exercise:
Friday, October 7, 2016
Rundel Oct. 13
see poems from Oct. 5
Blackberry Eating -- by Galway Kinnel
Persimmons – by Li-Young Lee
Blueberries by Robert Frost
+ House by Pablo Neruda
from list from Library Program Oct. 6 below:
the poet Galway Kinnell liked to use words that he said had “mouth feel.”
How does this line-up "taste" to you?
What makes a fine poem, a funny poem, an illuminating poem?
What poems do you recall as “glittering gems” filled with surprise and delight?
The first three all have fruit… Note: What looks to be a long poem in page-length, gallops along when spoken outloud.
I am hoping we will have time for the last two which were part of the program yesterday, and contrast sharply.
For those who couldn’t make the Poetrymusic: Colleen O’Brien and Chris Lee performed the following poems. I am curious how you felt the music and poetry with images worked for you.
1. House by Pablo Neruda :
HOUSE
Perhaps this is the house I lived in
when neither I nor earth existed,
when all was moon or stone or darkness,
when still light was unborn.
Perhaps then this stone was
my house, my windows or my eyes.
This rose of granite reminds me
of something that dwelled in me or I in it,
a cave, or cosmic head of dreams,
cup or castle, ship or birth.
I touch the stubborn spirit of rock,
its rampart pounds in the brine,
and my flaws remain here,
wrinkled essence that rose
from the depths to my soul,
and stone I was, stone I will be. Because of this
I touch this stone, and for me it hasn’t died:
it’s what I was, what I will be, resting
from a struggle long as time.
—translation by Dennis Maloney
2. Last Paragraph of Jack Kerouac: On the Road
3. 4 poems by Emily Dickinson: starting with : A Light Exists in Spring
ending with Wild Nights! Wild Nights!
4. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
5. Daffodils by William Wordsworth: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/daffodils
6. Sonnet 28 by Elizabeth Browning: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/43740
7. Wave by Gary Snyder: http://www.primalmates.com/track/636730/wave?feature_id=120822 the actual performance!
8. Autumn by Toshiyuku no Fijiwara: https://crashinglybeautiful.tumblr.com/post/1121466377/when-autumn-came-my-eyes-clearly-could-not-see
the words on the screen and sung in performance were different:
To my eyes it is not clear
that autumn has come
but the chill whisper
of the invisible wind
startles me to awareness.
9. Sonnet 60 by William Shakespeare
10. Where everything’s music by Rumi: http://www.flutopedia.com/lit_rumi.htm
Blackberry Eating -- by Galway Kinnel
Persimmons – by Li-Young Lee
Blueberries by Robert Frost
+ House by Pablo Neruda
from list from Library Program Oct. 6 below:
the poet Galway Kinnell liked to use words that he said had “mouth feel.”
How does this line-up "taste" to you?
What makes a fine poem, a funny poem, an illuminating poem?
What poems do you recall as “glittering gems” filled with surprise and delight?
The first three all have fruit… Note: What looks to be a long poem in page-length, gallops along when spoken outloud.
I am hoping we will have time for the last two which were part of the program yesterday, and contrast sharply.
For those who couldn’t make the Poetrymusic: Colleen O’Brien and Chris Lee performed the following poems. I am curious how you felt the music and poetry with images worked for you.
1. House by Pablo Neruda :
HOUSE
Perhaps this is the house I lived in
when neither I nor earth existed,
when all was moon or stone or darkness,
when still light was unborn.
Perhaps then this stone was
my house, my windows or my eyes.
This rose of granite reminds me
of something that dwelled in me or I in it,
a cave, or cosmic head of dreams,
cup or castle, ship or birth.
I touch the stubborn spirit of rock,
its rampart pounds in the brine,
and my flaws remain here,
wrinkled essence that rose
from the depths to my soul,
and stone I was, stone I will be. Because of this
I touch this stone, and for me it hasn’t died:
it’s what I was, what I will be, resting
from a struggle long as time.
—translation by Dennis Maloney
2. Last Paragraph of Jack Kerouac: On the Road
3. 4 poems by Emily Dickinson: starting with : A Light Exists in Spring
ending with Wild Nights! Wild Nights!
4. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
5. Daffodils by William Wordsworth: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/daffodils
6. Sonnet 28 by Elizabeth Browning: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/43740
7. Wave by Gary Snyder: http://www.primalmates.com/track/636730/wave?feature_id=120822 the actual performance!
8. Autumn by Toshiyuku no Fijiwara: https://crashinglybeautiful.tumblr.com/post/1121466377/when-autumn-came-my-eyes-clearly-could-not-see
the words on the screen and sung in performance were different:
To my eyes it is not clear
that autumn has come
but the chill whisper
of the invisible wind
startles me to awareness.
9. Sonnet 60 by William Shakespeare
10. Where everything’s music by Rumi: http://www.flutopedia.com/lit_rumi.htm
poems for October 5 (Rundel will be Oct. 13)
the poet Galway Kinnell liked to use words that he said had “mouth feel.”
How does this line-up "taste" to you?
Blackberry Eating -- by Galway Kinnel
Persimmons – by Li-Young Lee
Ice Cream Stop by Shel Silverstein
Blueberries by Robert Frost
What makes a fine poem, a funny poem, an illuminating poem?
What poems do you recall as “glittering gems” filled with surprise and delight?
It's funny how the selection this week reminded so many of the fun of children's poetry...
The sounds and rhymes of Dr. Seuss, for instance, "And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street",
the anapestic tetrameter of "Blueberries" the only poem in "North of Boston" that Frost didn't write in blank verse (think "Night before Christmas" and the galloping of the midnight ride of Paul Revere)...
Such a fun time with these 4 poems! It brought Judith to recite her poem about butter,
and "How the helpmate of Bluebeard Made free with a door" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/how-the-helpmate-of-blue-beard-made-free-with-a-door/.
John shared Dr. Seuss, "And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street" which we read at the end.
But to discuss:
Billy Collins criticized the use of adjectives, and if Galway Kinnel had listened to him,
Blackberry Eating would be a poem without juice... these are "the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries", the stalks are "prickly" and black returns again as "black art" and "black language"
which is also "icy" -- sharp, perhaps clear, perhaps slippery as
ripe turns to "ripest" and squinched expands to a "many-lettered, one-syllabled" verb of "squinch"
as the last word is "late September" which was pegging the season in the first line. The one "s" adjective commonly attributed to fruit that is missing, is "sweet". No Hallmark sugar in this poem!
Indeed, mouth feel is operative... and so many blackberry memories came up, I would say, even if
one didn't have the experience of eating and picking them, the experience was offered to us,
as one of the "musts" of living...
Persimmons is quite a different poem, but the "Chinese Apple" of this fruit, works as thread,
where between the pauses, he is discovering things. And yet, even though there is a risk of diminished "continuity" on the second read, there is a narrative we discover of the speaker of the poem,
his childhood, maturity, reflections on aging of his father; how the initial confusion of "persimmon" and "precision" is echoed by the confusion of "fight" and "fright" and opposition of his mother's view of the fruit (sensual) and that of the teacher's (unripe and authoritarian with no knowledge of the inner possibility to come). How when we arrive at the old age of the blind father, it is persimmons, the ones the mother describes as containing suns, representing the old Chinese culture,
where brushes are made of wolf-tail, and the practice of painting can be done without need of physical sight, the importance of the fruit become the " song, a ghost" the father yearns for, given by his son,
"swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love."
The poem continues, as time goes on, and the son realizes the importance -- even though words may have been forgotten, his father's eyesight gone, language a slippage linking two cultures, "Some things never leave a person". Read the poem, you will find more layers.
Comments from the group: comparing Persimmon/precision to the one ball and cue ball in pool;
the poem as silent and beautiful as a foreign film where images create the story with few words....the words are the sand which makes the pearl... melting together... how memory is often like that, our memories melded with feelings...
Shel Silverstein's poem brought up the element of fun... and that poetry for children doesn't need to exclude humor, or adults!
For the Robert Frost, for a poem that looked like it would last for pages, it literally galloped by, filled with anecdotal portraiture with an overshadowing of haves vs. have-nots and juxtaposition of pleasure
of berry picking with survival.
Other comments: Frost believed the "village gossip mill... the perfect way to get a slice of people’s feelings... get to know the community" as gossip is a way of trading values...
New England rural speak... pacing.
Chewink, by the way, bird species also known as the rufous-sided towhee. See towhee. Eastern, or rufous-sided, towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus). Frost compares the Lorens to birds, which allows yet more connotations...
How does this line-up "taste" to you?
Blackberry Eating -- by Galway Kinnel
Persimmons – by Li-Young Lee
Ice Cream Stop by Shel Silverstein
Blueberries by Robert Frost
What makes a fine poem, a funny poem, an illuminating poem?
What poems do you recall as “glittering gems” filled with surprise and delight?
It's funny how the selection this week reminded so many of the fun of children's poetry...
The sounds and rhymes of Dr. Seuss, for instance, "And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street",
the anapestic tetrameter of "Blueberries" the only poem in "North of Boston" that Frost didn't write in blank verse (think "Night before Christmas" and the galloping of the midnight ride of Paul Revere)...
Such a fun time with these 4 poems! It brought Judith to recite her poem about butter,
and "How the helpmate of Bluebeard Made free with a door" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/how-the-helpmate-of-blue-beard-made-free-with-a-door/.
John shared Dr. Seuss, "And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street" which we read at the end.
But to discuss:
Billy Collins criticized the use of adjectives, and if Galway Kinnel had listened to him,
Blackberry Eating would be a poem without juice... these are "the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries", the stalks are "prickly" and black returns again as "black art" and "black language"
which is also "icy" -- sharp, perhaps clear, perhaps slippery as
ripe turns to "ripest" and squinched expands to a "many-lettered, one-syllabled" verb of "squinch"
as the last word is "late September" which was pegging the season in the first line. The one "s" adjective commonly attributed to fruit that is missing, is "sweet". No Hallmark sugar in this poem!
Indeed, mouth feel is operative... and so many blackberry memories came up, I would say, even if
one didn't have the experience of eating and picking them, the experience was offered to us,
as one of the "musts" of living...
Persimmons is quite a different poem, but the "Chinese Apple" of this fruit, works as thread,
where between the pauses, he is discovering things. And yet, even though there is a risk of diminished "continuity" on the second read, there is a narrative we discover of the speaker of the poem,
his childhood, maturity, reflections on aging of his father; how the initial confusion of "persimmon" and "precision" is echoed by the confusion of "fight" and "fright" and opposition of his mother's view of the fruit (sensual) and that of the teacher's (unripe and authoritarian with no knowledge of the inner possibility to come). How when we arrive at the old age of the blind father, it is persimmons, the ones the mother describes as containing suns, representing the old Chinese culture,
where brushes are made of wolf-tail, and the practice of painting can be done without need of physical sight, the importance of the fruit become the " song, a ghost" the father yearns for, given by his son,
"swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love."
The poem continues, as time goes on, and the son realizes the importance -- even though words may have been forgotten, his father's eyesight gone, language a slippage linking two cultures, "Some things never leave a person". Read the poem, you will find more layers.
Comments from the group: comparing Persimmon/precision to the one ball and cue ball in pool;
the poem as silent and beautiful as a foreign film where images create the story with few words....the words are the sand which makes the pearl... melting together... how memory is often like that, our memories melded with feelings...
Shel Silverstein's poem brought up the element of fun... and that poetry for children doesn't need to exclude humor, or adults!
For the Robert Frost, for a poem that looked like it would last for pages, it literally galloped by, filled with anecdotal portraiture with an overshadowing of haves vs. have-nots and juxtaposition of pleasure
of berry picking with survival.
Other comments: Frost believed the "village gossip mill... the perfect way to get a slice of people’s feelings... get to know the community" as gossip is a way of trading values...
New England rural speak... pacing.
Chewink, by the way, bird species also known as the rufous-sided towhee. See towhee. Eastern, or rufous-sided, towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus). Frost compares the Lorens to birds, which allows yet more connotations...
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Poems for October 12 / some of which for Rundel October 20
Bavarian Gentians by D. H. Lawrence (1929)
Sonnet 60 by William Shakespeare*
Propositions Related Poem by Stephen Dunn*
Speculations about “I” – Toi Derricotte*
Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning by W.S. Merwin *
Love at First Sight by Jennifer Maier
Sonnet 137 by William Shakespeare
*Discussed at Rundel October 20. a few more comments below.
What is meditation, and what is poem? How does time influence the way words work?
Who was "I" in 1929 or in Shakespeare's time? What specifics please the universal ear?
Bavarian Gentians:
A little background:
Autumnal : Michaelmas, or the Feast of Michael and All Angels, is celebrated on the 29th of September every year. As it falls near the equinox, the day is associated with the beginning of autumn and the shortening of days; in England, it is one of the “quarter days”. Gentians + death. believe in the blood wiser than the flesh... Gentian... bitter taste and yet medicinal qualities...
Discussion:
The opening line: "Not every man has gentians in his house" could be interpreted as "not everyone knows how to be truly alive in the flesh /beauty like flowers..."... and we discussed the Jungian slant of the unconscious and how not everyone ready to explore it... It is difficult to explore the dark. (someone mentioned, "with bit and briddle for intellect... vs. passion. ).
Laurentian: loves to talk about way we are full of opposites. flower as voice of underworld in this world... darkness inside us... Thinking about his own his dying...
Sonnet 60:
First Quatrain: waves end on a pebbled shore; Second Quatrain: life crawls to maturity, light suffers crookèd eclipse; 3rd Quatrain nature scythed down finally the couplet: addressing the enemy time with the one thing wave, life, nature cannot do: only worth can survive, to be praised by verse .
There are reversed initial feet: (not the usual iambic pentameter): Like as
So do, Crawls to, Crookèd, Time doth, Feeds on, Praising... which according to Helen Vendler in her magnificent book, draws attention to the hastening of the waves, the attacks by eclipses and by time only to return to the iambic in the couplet... and nothing stands. The final beat: shall stand is an unshakeable confirmation of the strength of verse Stand is twice accentuated by the stress.
The idea of exchange -- past/present, and constant flux appears in the language...
luscious language:
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth sensuality
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth, delicicious and delicate...
Thy -- both individual addressed in sonnet and incorporates all of us.
Sonnet 73, same idea, but more intimate.
Propositions Related Poem by Stephen Dunn..
A terrifically fun poem -- performance. This / not this. BUT.
I asked... would you memorize this? Judith no. no mouth feel.
would it be possible...? It would be as difficult as the poem points out
difficulties about being honest...The long, sentences imitate the real in life which happens in the back and forth.
humor as we identify ourselves.
Comparing Shakespeare ((richness of language) to Dunn (richness of concept/idea)... we return again to what is poetry... how we deal with uncertainty.
Toi Derricotte:
John said it had a hypnotic effect on him and reminded him of Trout Fishing in America – Richard Brautigan.
13 ways of looking at... a blackbird, or "i" and the I's story.
Intricate, beautifully intimated... G-d and T-i and the idea of I as part of God, i
as the particular...
David quoted Richard Eberhardt. "If I could only live at a pitch of madness. immaculate ego.vs. one w/ world self-consciousness... ( confession of a psychotic...)
Somewhat confessional... the story of being Afro-American as well as the personal story perhaps?
operation of id / ego/superego...
toi – (you)in French, sounds like toy in English -- only language which capitalizes “I”.
Writing vs. I – the being that is not expressed...
The Merwin: comes from his new book: At first, it seemed like meditation to me...
but reading it line by line one can sense the thoughtful calm he creates and transmits.
Kathy gave a fine review and referred to his poem "The Laughing Child"... in his mother's memory... as infant, laughing, at nothing, so hard it jostles his carriage... which changes his mother..."
"The writing is limpid poetically tuned to autumn tones, some repetitions of t and u but nothing pyrotechnic.
Often Merwin says things we know but in just the way to make you look at them afresh, as in his poem “The Wings of Daylight”.
… There is a lot of remembering in the poems, persisting, believing in a good world going on beyond him and after him. "A national-treasure-level talent for hope:"
Love at First Sight by Jennifer Maier: we read, but it was a full docket, so we didn't discuss.
Sonnet 137: I asked David why he said this was not one of Shakespeare's better sonnets.
As a response to Maier's poem, "Blind fool love... The eyes "know what beauty is, see where it lies, Yet what the best is take the worst to be."
but we concurred, the sonnet has too much intellect not enough heart...
(not everyone has gentians in his house...)
**
SONNET 60 by William Shakespeare
Propositions Related Poem by Stephen Dunn
Speculations about “I” – Toi Derricotte
Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning by W.S. Merwin
I love having two groups... both of whom bring different takes. See above
The Rundel group heard Sonnet 60 set to music and performed by Chris Lee, Colleen O’Brien
from Poetrymusic on Thursday October 6. The duo illustrated in song, vibraphone and pizzacato cello,
the musical textures of Shakespeare’s meditative spin on time.
The hard /k/ sound... like... contend... crawls... crown'd. crooked, resound in the first two stanzas.
the 8th line "And Time"
returns on the 9th line, "Time doth" and luscious f-v sounds in the 3rd quatrain.
The Dunn poem was lots of fun, and we noted the verbal conventions... How do we deal with uncertainty?
The long sentences imitate real life with the back and forth.
The group was less intrigued with the Toi Derricotte... but picked up on the importance of the "who I am" spider-man effect.
Merwin: Longest line : "I remember what are called the old days and there is..."
Sonnet 60 by William Shakespeare*
Propositions Related Poem by Stephen Dunn*
Speculations about “I” – Toi Derricotte*
Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning by W.S. Merwin *
Love at First Sight by Jennifer Maier
Sonnet 137 by William Shakespeare
*Discussed at Rundel October 20. a few more comments below.
What is meditation, and what is poem? How does time influence the way words work?
Who was "I" in 1929 or in Shakespeare's time? What specifics please the universal ear?
Bavarian Gentians:
A little background:
Autumnal : Michaelmas, or the Feast of Michael and All Angels, is celebrated on the 29th of September every year. As it falls near the equinox, the day is associated with the beginning of autumn and the shortening of days; in England, it is one of the “quarter days”. Gentians + death. believe in the blood wiser than the flesh... Gentian... bitter taste and yet medicinal qualities...
Discussion:
The opening line: "Not every man has gentians in his house" could be interpreted as "not everyone knows how to be truly alive in the flesh /beauty like flowers..."... and we discussed the Jungian slant of the unconscious and how not everyone ready to explore it... It is difficult to explore the dark. (someone mentioned, "with bit and briddle for intellect... vs. passion. ).
Laurentian: loves to talk about way we are full of opposites. flower as voice of underworld in this world... darkness inside us... Thinking about his own his dying...
Sonnet 60:
First Quatrain: waves end on a pebbled shore; Second Quatrain: life crawls to maturity, light suffers crookèd eclipse; 3rd Quatrain nature scythed down finally the couplet: addressing the enemy time with the one thing wave, life, nature cannot do: only worth can survive, to be praised by verse .
There are reversed initial feet: (not the usual iambic pentameter): Like as
So do, Crawls to, Crookèd, Time doth, Feeds on, Praising... which according to Helen Vendler in her magnificent book, draws attention to the hastening of the waves, the attacks by eclipses and by time only to return to the iambic in the couplet... and nothing stands. The final beat: shall stand is an unshakeable confirmation of the strength of verse Stand is twice accentuated by the stress.
The idea of exchange -- past/present, and constant flux appears in the language...
luscious language:
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth sensuality
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth, delicicious and delicate...
Thy -- both individual addressed in sonnet and incorporates all of us.
Sonnet 73, same idea, but more intimate.
Propositions Related Poem by Stephen Dunn..
A terrifically fun poem -- performance. This / not this. BUT.
I asked... would you memorize this? Judith no. no mouth feel.
would it be possible...? It would be as difficult as the poem points out
difficulties about being honest...The long, sentences imitate the real in life which happens in the back and forth.
humor as we identify ourselves.
Comparing Shakespeare ((richness of language) to Dunn (richness of concept/idea)... we return again to what is poetry... how we deal with uncertainty.
Toi Derricotte:
John said it had a hypnotic effect on him and reminded him of Trout Fishing in America – Richard Brautigan.
13 ways of looking at... a blackbird, or "i" and the I's story.
Intricate, beautifully intimated... G-d and T-i and the idea of I as part of God, i
as the particular...
David quoted Richard Eberhardt. "If I could only live at a pitch of madness. immaculate ego.vs. one w/ world self-consciousness... ( confession of a psychotic...)
Somewhat confessional... the story of being Afro-American as well as the personal story perhaps?
operation of id / ego/superego...
toi – (you)in French, sounds like toy in English -- only language which capitalizes “I”.
Writing vs. I – the being that is not expressed...
The Merwin: comes from his new book: At first, it seemed like meditation to me...
but reading it line by line one can sense the thoughtful calm he creates and transmits.
Kathy gave a fine review and referred to his poem "The Laughing Child"... in his mother's memory... as infant, laughing, at nothing, so hard it jostles his carriage... which changes his mother..."
"The writing is limpid poetically tuned to autumn tones, some repetitions of t and u but nothing pyrotechnic.
Often Merwin says things we know but in just the way to make you look at them afresh, as in his poem “The Wings of Daylight”.
… There is a lot of remembering in the poems, persisting, believing in a good world going on beyond him and after him. "A national-treasure-level talent for hope:"
Love at First Sight by Jennifer Maier: we read, but it was a full docket, so we didn't discuss.
Sonnet 137: I asked David why he said this was not one of Shakespeare's better sonnets.
As a response to Maier's poem, "Blind fool love... The eyes "know what beauty is, see where it lies, Yet what the best is take the worst to be."
but we concurred, the sonnet has too much intellect not enough heart...
(not everyone has gentians in his house...)
**
SONNET 60 by William Shakespeare
Propositions Related Poem by Stephen Dunn
Speculations about “I” – Toi Derricotte
Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning by W.S. Merwin
I love having two groups... both of whom bring different takes. See above
The Rundel group heard Sonnet 60 set to music and performed by Chris Lee, Colleen O’Brien
from Poetrymusic on Thursday October 6. The duo illustrated in song, vibraphone and pizzacato cello,
the musical textures of Shakespeare’s meditative spin on time.
The hard /k/ sound... like... contend... crawls... crown'd. crooked, resound in the first two stanzas.
the 8th line "And Time"
returns on the 9th line, "Time doth" and luscious f-v sounds in the 3rd quatrain.
The Dunn poem was lots of fun, and we noted the verbal conventions... How do we deal with uncertainty?
The long sentences imitate real life with the back and forth.
The group was less intrigued with the Toi Derricotte... but picked up on the importance of the "who I am" spider-man effect.
Merwin: Longest line : "I remember what are called the old days and there is..."
no o pen October 19
but these poems to share with Bernie.
A Time to Talk -- Robert Frost**
The President Has Never Said the Word 'Black' by Morgan Parker**
It Means Shadows by Pablo Neruda
Be Glad your Nose is on Your Face — Prelutsky
Life is fine by Langston Hughes**
First ten to sign up:
David Emily
Don Rich
Carmen Jan
Elaine Olson Bernie + his friend Michelle
Paul
**Discussed at Rundel, October 27
I love Frost's easy-going rhyme and colloquial rhythms which don't hit you on the head.
Sure, "road/hoed", walk/talk; around/ground what is it / friendly visit, tall/wall.
a,b,c, a,d,b c e, e, d
10 lines, and at exactly the half-way point, the pattern is broken, partly resumed (b,c,)
the hoe and wall rhyming, sharing as their functions do, farmland references.
The title, repeats, couched in the negative "no, not that there is"... and yet, that very title
wins out -- just as there is a time to sow, a time to reap... there's a time to talk... even if one
does so ploddingly, hoe stuck in a clod work-side up.
David sent a PS to the discussion of the idea of "hoe" as general tool for fertility...
how, thrusting it in blade-end up makes it not only easier to find, but more easily ready to use.
A Hoe is also in "A Time of Cloudburst"... the stone wall... here, a place for a friendly time to talk... as in Ecclesiastes, where everything has a season... as opposed to Mending Wall, where a neighbor can't manage.
Both groups enjoyed the President Has Never Said the Word "Black", where the title seems to run into the first stanza. Each couplet contains a different thought... What's broken? Insinuations of brass knuckles, breaking open pocketbooks and teeth with and brass tacks...
Twice the colloquial use of "like"... In Stanza 3, "bleep-hand side" an amusing way to indicate silence; Stanza 4, the omission of "black" and spoken in black and poor style; Stanza 5, lofty language and omission of black between "fellow / Americans". Stanza 6. Great divide between President and us. Is "us" part of the US? The play nobodies as moveable / and "feasts". Television, color vision, and visions -- no black and white...
Color... the absence of which is black... as is the unspoken, the void in which you find that last image of starving chameleon.
For Rundel, Life is Fine followed, which was highly effective.
People were reminded of Langston Hughes poem, "I too sing America" which ends on the line,
"I am America"
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun...
or explode.
The crafting of the poem is compelling... The almosts, and repeats... the survival from belief that "for living' I was born... though you may hear me holler (which he did in the cold, and the thought of the suicidal jump). The cry so strong.
**
The Prelutsky was a perfect antidote for the Neruda.
Jack Prelutsky was the first poet laureate of children’s literature...who says
doggerell is the twinkie of poetry... Imagine -- no nose on your face -- no eskimo kisses...
How different from Neruda. Of course, in translation, you miss the sounds...I did give 3 of the Spanish words in the opening stanza.
omen, presagio
helplessness desamparo
stars of death estrellas de la muerte
The group had a sense of a slow receding sense of self...
but at peace with the idea... last 2 stanzas.
his work... will bear witness... and stimulate the same conscience...
What is “it”... ?
Tantalizing poem... just out of reach and yet one senses its importance...
image of desolation... hoping to find permanence in impermanence.
A Time to Talk -- Robert Frost**
The President Has Never Said the Word 'Black' by Morgan Parker**
It Means Shadows by Pablo Neruda
Be Glad your Nose is on Your Face — Prelutsky
Life is fine by Langston Hughes**
First ten to sign up:
David Emily
Don Rich
Carmen Jan
Elaine Olson Bernie + his friend Michelle
Paul
**Discussed at Rundel, October 27
I love Frost's easy-going rhyme and colloquial rhythms which don't hit you on the head.
Sure, "road/hoed", walk/talk; around/ground what is it / friendly visit, tall/wall.
a,b,c, a,d,b c e, e, d
10 lines, and at exactly the half-way point, the pattern is broken, partly resumed (b,c,)
the hoe and wall rhyming, sharing as their functions do, farmland references.
The title, repeats, couched in the negative "no, not that there is"... and yet, that very title
wins out -- just as there is a time to sow, a time to reap... there's a time to talk... even if one
does so ploddingly, hoe stuck in a clod work-side up.
David sent a PS to the discussion of the idea of "hoe" as general tool for fertility...
how, thrusting it in blade-end up makes it not only easier to find, but more easily ready to use.
A Hoe is also in "A Time of Cloudburst"... the stone wall... here, a place for a friendly time to talk... as in Ecclesiastes, where everything has a season... as opposed to Mending Wall, where a neighbor can't manage.
Both groups enjoyed the President Has Never Said the Word "Black", where the title seems to run into the first stanza. Each couplet contains a different thought... What's broken? Insinuations of brass knuckles, breaking open pocketbooks and teeth with and brass tacks...
Twice the colloquial use of "like"... In Stanza 3, "bleep-hand side" an amusing way to indicate silence; Stanza 4, the omission of "black" and spoken in black and poor style; Stanza 5, lofty language and omission of black between "fellow / Americans". Stanza 6. Great divide between President and us. Is "us" part of the US? The play nobodies as moveable / and "feasts". Television, color vision, and visions -- no black and white...
Color... the absence of which is black... as is the unspoken, the void in which you find that last image of starving chameleon.
For Rundel, Life is Fine followed, which was highly effective.
People were reminded of Langston Hughes poem, "I too sing America" which ends on the line,
"I am America"
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun...
or explode.
The crafting of the poem is compelling... The almosts, and repeats... the survival from belief that "for living' I was born... though you may hear me holler (which he did in the cold, and the thought of the suicidal jump). The cry so strong.
**
The Prelutsky was a perfect antidote for the Neruda.
Jack Prelutsky was the first poet laureate of children’s literature...who says
doggerell is the twinkie of poetry... Imagine -- no nose on your face -- no eskimo kisses...
How different from Neruda. Of course, in translation, you miss the sounds...I did give 3 of the Spanish words in the opening stanza.
omen, presagio
helplessness desamparo
stars of death estrellas de la muerte
The group had a sense of a slow receding sense of self...
but at peace with the idea... last 2 stanzas.
his work... will bear witness... and stimulate the same conscience...
What is “it”... ?
Tantalizing poem... just out of reach and yet one senses its importance...
image of desolation... hoping to find permanence in impermanence.
Poems for October 12
Bavarian Gentians by D. H. Lawrence (1929)
Sonnet 60 by William Shakespeare*
Propositions Related Poem by Stephen Dunn*
Speculations about “I” – Toi Derricotte*
Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning by W.S. Merwin *
Love at First Sight by Jennifer Maier
Sonnet 137 by William Shakespeare
*Discussed at Rundel October 20.
What is meditation, and what is poem? How does time influence the way words work?
Who was "I" in 1929 or in Shakespeare's time? What specifics please the universal ear?
Bavarian Gentians:
A little background:
Autumnal : Michaelmas, or the Feast of Michael and All Angels, is celebrated on the 29th of September every year. As it falls near the equinox, the day is associated with the beginning of autumn and the shortening of days; in England, it is one of the “quarter days”. Gentians + death. believe in the blood wiser than the flesh... Gentian... bitter taste and yet medicinal qualities...
Discussion:
The opening line: "Not every man has gentians in his house" could be interpreted as "not everyone knows how to be truly alive in the flesh /beauty like flowers..."... and we discussed the Jungian slant of the unconscious and how not everyone ready to explore it... It is difficult to explore the dark. (someone mentioned, "with bit and briddle for intellect... vs. passion. ).
Laurentian: loves to talk about way we are full of opposites. flower as voice of underworld in this world... darkness inside us... Thinking about his own his dying...
Sonnet 60:
First Quatrain: waves end on a pebbled shore; Second Quatrain: life crawls to maturity, light suffers crookèd eclipse; 3rd Quatrain nature scythed down finally the couplet: addressing the enemy time with the one thing wave, life, nature cannot do: only worth can survive, to be praised by verse .
There are reversed initial feet: (not the usual iambic pentameter): Like as
So do, Crawls to, Crookèd, Time doth, Feeds on, Praising... which according to Helen Vendler in her magnificent book, draws attention to the hastening of the waves, the attacks by eclipses and by time only to return to the iambic in the couplet... and nothing stands. The final beat: shall stand is an unshakeable confirmation of the strength of verse Stand is twice accentuated by the stress.
The idea of exchange -- past/present, and constant flux appears in the language...
luscious language:
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth sensuality
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth, delicicious and delicate...
Thy -- both individual addressed in sonnet and incorporates all of us.
Sonnet 73, same idea, but more intimate.
Propositions Related Poem by Stephen Dunn..
A terrifically fun poem -- performance. This / not this. BUT.
I asked... would you memorize this? Judith no. no mouth feel.
would it be possible...? It would be as difficult as the poem points out
difficulties about being honest...The long, sentences imitate the real in life which happens in the back and forth.
humor as we identify ourselves.
Comparing Shakespeare ((richness of language) to Dunn (richness of concept/idea)... we return again to what is poetry... how we deal with uncertainty.
Toi Derricotte:
John said it had a hypnotic effect on him and reminded him of Trout Fishing in America – Richard Brautigan.
13 ways of looking at... a blackbird, or "i" and the I's story.
Intricate, beautifully intimated... G-d and T-i and the idea of I as part of God, i
as the particular...
David quoted Richard Eberhardt. "If I could only live at a pitch of madness. immaculate ego.vs. one w/ world self-consciousness... ( confession of a psychotic...)
Somewhat confessional... the story of being Afro-American as well as the personal story perhaps?
operation of id / ego/superego...
toi – (you)in French, sounds like toy in English -- only language which capitalizes “I”.
Writing vs. I – the being that is not expressed...
The Merwin: comes from his new book: At first, it seemed like meditation to me...
but reading it line by line one can sense the thoughtful calm he creates and transmits.
Kathy gave a fine review and referred to his poem "The Laughing Child"... in his mother's memory... as infant, laughing, at nothing, so hard it jostles his carriage... which changes his mother..."
"The writing is limpid poetically tuned to autumn tones, some repetitions of t and u but nothing pyrotechnic.
Often Merwin says things we know but in just the way to make you look at them afresh, as in his poem “The Wings of Daylight”.
… There is a lot of remembering in the poems, persisting, believing in a good world going on beyond him and after him. "A national-treasure-level talent for hope:"
Love at First Sight by Jennifer Maier: we read, but it was a full docket, so we didn't discuss.
Sonnet 137: I asked David why he said this was not one of Shakespeare's better sonnets.
As a response to Maier's poem, "Blind fool love... The eyes "know what beauty is, see where it lies, Yet what the best is take the worst to be."
but we concurred, the sonnet has too much intellect not enough heart...
(not everyone has gentians in his house...)
Sonnet 60 by William Shakespeare*
Propositions Related Poem by Stephen Dunn*
Speculations about “I” – Toi Derricotte*
Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning by W.S. Merwin *
Love at First Sight by Jennifer Maier
Sonnet 137 by William Shakespeare
*Discussed at Rundel October 20.
What is meditation, and what is poem? How does time influence the way words work?
Who was "I" in 1929 or in Shakespeare's time? What specifics please the universal ear?
Bavarian Gentians:
A little background:
Autumnal : Michaelmas, or the Feast of Michael and All Angels, is celebrated on the 29th of September every year. As it falls near the equinox, the day is associated with the beginning of autumn and the shortening of days; in England, it is one of the “quarter days”. Gentians + death. believe in the blood wiser than the flesh... Gentian... bitter taste and yet medicinal qualities...
Discussion:
The opening line: "Not every man has gentians in his house" could be interpreted as "not everyone knows how to be truly alive in the flesh /beauty like flowers..."... and we discussed the Jungian slant of the unconscious and how not everyone ready to explore it... It is difficult to explore the dark. (someone mentioned, "with bit and briddle for intellect... vs. passion. ).
Laurentian: loves to talk about way we are full of opposites. flower as voice of underworld in this world... darkness inside us... Thinking about his own his dying...
Sonnet 60:
First Quatrain: waves end on a pebbled shore; Second Quatrain: life crawls to maturity, light suffers crookèd eclipse; 3rd Quatrain nature scythed down finally the couplet: addressing the enemy time with the one thing wave, life, nature cannot do: only worth can survive, to be praised by verse .
There are reversed initial feet: (not the usual iambic pentameter): Like as
So do, Crawls to, Crookèd, Time doth, Feeds on, Praising... which according to Helen Vendler in her magnificent book, draws attention to the hastening of the waves, the attacks by eclipses and by time only to return to the iambic in the couplet... and nothing stands. The final beat: shall stand is an unshakeable confirmation of the strength of verse Stand is twice accentuated by the stress.
The idea of exchange -- past/present, and constant flux appears in the language...
luscious language:
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth sensuality
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth, delicicious and delicate...
Thy -- both individual addressed in sonnet and incorporates all of us.
Sonnet 73, same idea, but more intimate.
Propositions Related Poem by Stephen Dunn..
A terrifically fun poem -- performance. This / not this. BUT.
I asked... would you memorize this? Judith no. no mouth feel.
would it be possible...? It would be as difficult as the poem points out
difficulties about being honest...The long, sentences imitate the real in life which happens in the back and forth.
humor as we identify ourselves.
Comparing Shakespeare ((richness of language) to Dunn (richness of concept/idea)... we return again to what is poetry... how we deal with uncertainty.
Toi Derricotte:
John said it had a hypnotic effect on him and reminded him of Trout Fishing in America – Richard Brautigan.
13 ways of looking at... a blackbird, or "i" and the I's story.
Intricate, beautifully intimated... G-d and T-i and the idea of I as part of God, i
as the particular...
David quoted Richard Eberhardt. "If I could only live at a pitch of madness. immaculate ego.vs. one w/ world self-consciousness... ( confession of a psychotic...)
Somewhat confessional... the story of being Afro-American as well as the personal story perhaps?
operation of id / ego/superego...
toi – (you)in French, sounds like toy in English -- only language which capitalizes “I”.
Writing vs. I – the being that is not expressed...
The Merwin: comes from his new book: At first, it seemed like meditation to me...
but reading it line by line one can sense the thoughtful calm he creates and transmits.
Kathy gave a fine review and referred to his poem "The Laughing Child"... in his mother's memory... as infant, laughing, at nothing, so hard it jostles his carriage... which changes his mother..."
"The writing is limpid poetically tuned to autumn tones, some repetitions of t and u but nothing pyrotechnic.
Often Merwin says things we know but in just the way to make you look at them afresh, as in his poem “The Wings of Daylight”.
… There is a lot of remembering in the poems, persisting, believing in a good world going on beyond him and after him. "A national-treasure-level talent for hope:"
Love at First Sight by Jennifer Maier: we read, but it was a full docket, so we didn't discuss.
Sonnet 137: I asked David why he said this was not one of Shakespeare's better sonnets.
As a response to Maier's poem, "Blind fool love... The eyes "know what beauty is, see where it lies, Yet what the best is take the worst to be."
but we concurred, the sonnet has too much intellect not enough heart...
(not everyone has gentians in his house...)
Saturday, September 24, 2016
September 21
September Is by Mary Jo Bang* (discussed at Rundel on 9/29/16_
Ever After by Joyce Sutphen
Metaphors Of A Magnifico - by Wallace Stevens
At the Moment by Joyce Sutphen
Pluto by Maggie Dietz,
Magdalene Afterwards, Marie Howe
compare her work with that of her mentor, Stanley Kunitz. I attached this passage of the "testing tree" to the packet.
you might enjoy reading how she came about writing them: at the top is “more” which if you click on it will take you to “about this poem” https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/magdalenet
You might wish to compare her work with that of her mentor, Stanley Kunitz –
below the final stanza of his poem, The Testing Tree
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.
Where is my testing-tree?
Give me back my stones!
**
Just looking at the titles, where does your mind go? How would you write a poem to follow the words?
I love that a poem could be fiction as well as truth, but what nabs us is the telling.
Kathy's comments:
---Mary Jo Bang poem, September Is --- her recursive use of memory, enigma, in trying to understand the unreality of a terrible loss. We thought part of its power was that it could express our collective cultural loss after 9-11 and also express the very personal loss of the author's young adult son to an overdose , or anyone's deep personal loss.
---We were glad you gave us the Pluto poem (humor) and the 2 Joyce Sutphen poems ( accessible and meaningful).
Wallace Stevens poem, Metaphors of a Magnifico left us scratching our heads but most agreed the tone was ominous although couldn't say specifically why.
---Marie Howe's Magdalene Afterwards ---how does Magdelene look throughout history, across cultures, for women today? What does it mean? What does one do, after a tragic death to get to transcendence?
---Some of us were familiar with Kunitz's Testing Tree and thought it deserved looking at the whole poem. Jan B. mentioned this link which I said I would pass along for you to send to the group. Kunitz's Testing Tree (full poem), his preface on poetry (if you want to skip the blogger comments at the beginning, scroll down to the words "...Before the poem itself - a prose bit from Stanley, which I hope is also evocative and useful ..." )
September 14-- Open (some of these for Rundel for September)
Strike-Slip by Arthur Sze
The Sense Of The Sleight-Of-Hand Man - Poem by Wallace Stevens
Preamble to the Instructions on How to Wind a Watch by Julio Cortázar
A Disillusionment Of Ten O'Clock - by Wallace Stevens
The Street Octavio Paz
Gettysburg by Robert Schultz
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Night by Robert Schultz
Green Man by Robert Schultz
The Arthur Sze, selected because he is reading at MCC on September 29.
The three Robert Schultz because of the current exhibit at the MAG, "War Stories"
If you have not been to the MAG to see the exhibit “War Stories”, I highly recommend it. It is two parts: 45 textile works “Afghan War Rugs” and “War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal by Binh Danh and Robert Schultz. The last three poems are by Robert Schultz, copied from the exhibit.
I will look forward to hearing how you respond to the poems… it is a rich tapestry, with smooth upsides and knotty undersides. If you do not get to all the poems, slate them for the following week. If someone could take notes and let me know the main points of discussion I’d appreciate it.
**
Strike-Slip was discussed at Rundel on 9/29/16.
It is a sound poem.. the clack of prayer beads, the coelacanth (pronounced seel-a-canth)
and the glowing eel in the darkness... enjambments layering possibilities and a sense of geographic jumping around.
Also the 3 Schultz poems:
Gettysburg: hard not to read "corpse" as copse of trees...
Green and bronze... as in medals as in keeping alive perhaps... The book "Murdering Angels" came up.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Night: strong verbs draw me in: jabs. broods. jets crying down. gape (like tunnels) sobs, cling, climb... The first part describes an approach; the second part, imagining the lives of those commemorated.
Green man: favored per. 4 lines per stanza.
First sentence ends on the first line of the second stanza. Second sentence. "His wife stil grieves". Third sentence, repeat of the first two lines. Powerful. War... what would make us commit to loss of life? Subterfuge of green in camouflage; hiding in green jungles yet killed.
Leaves as noun and verb.
Narrowed conversation.
We loved the humor in the Cortázar. Gift? ironic view of time as retiree's watch... but more...
the turn of the last sentence calls you to think about gift.. and what you have to offer...
The Sense Of The Sleight-Of-Hand Man - Poem by Wallace Stevens
Preamble to the Instructions on How to Wind a Watch by Julio Cortázar
A Disillusionment Of Ten O'Clock - by Wallace Stevens
The Street Octavio Paz
Gettysburg by Robert Schultz
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Night by Robert Schultz
Green Man by Robert Schultz
The Arthur Sze, selected because he is reading at MCC on September 29.
The three Robert Schultz because of the current exhibit at the MAG, "War Stories"
If you have not been to the MAG to see the exhibit “War Stories”, I highly recommend it. It is two parts: 45 textile works “Afghan War Rugs” and “War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal by Binh Danh and Robert Schultz. The last three poems are by Robert Schultz, copied from the exhibit.
I will look forward to hearing how you respond to the poems… it is a rich tapestry, with smooth upsides and knotty undersides. If you do not get to all the poems, slate them for the following week. If someone could take notes and let me know the main points of discussion I’d appreciate it.
**
Strike-Slip was discussed at Rundel on 9/29/16.
It is a sound poem.. the clack of prayer beads, the coelacanth (pronounced seel-a-canth)
and the glowing eel in the darkness... enjambments layering possibilities and a sense of geographic jumping around.
Also the 3 Schultz poems:
Gettysburg: hard not to read "corpse" as copse of trees...
Green and bronze... as in medals as in keeping alive perhaps... The book "Murdering Angels" came up.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Night: strong verbs draw me in: jabs. broods. jets crying down. gape (like tunnels) sobs, cling, climb... The first part describes an approach; the second part, imagining the lives of those commemorated.
Green man: favored per. 4 lines per stanza.
First sentence ends on the first line of the second stanza. Second sentence. "His wife stil grieves". Third sentence, repeat of the first two lines. Powerful. War... what would make us commit to loss of life? Subterfuge of green in camouflage; hiding in green jungles yet killed.
Leaves as noun and verb.
Narrowed conversation.
We loved the humor in the Cortázar. Gift? ironic view of time as retiree's watch... but more...
the turn of the last sentence calls you to think about gift.. and what you have to offer...
poems for September 7
September 1913 by William Butler Yeats
Crows by Marilyn Nelson
Last August Hours Before the Year 2000 by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Secret in the Mirror by Alberto RÃos
I Am Merely Posing for a Photograph by Juan Felipe Herrera
VII by Mark Strand
The poems this week did not peel their layers easily, but rather required a prerequisite tolerance for opacity. What makes a poem accessible? What do we each want to see in a poem – and does every poem have to have it?
Starting with the Yeats, this is perhaps not one of his lyric masterpieces, with the repeating lament, in the “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.” which changes to a mournful resignation:
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
They’re with O’Leary in the grave.
Considerations on the end of one way of life continue with Marilyn Nelson’s poem which starts out reminding us to notice each “is” (as opposed to emptiness...) the crow’s scavanging has a neologism, “food’s here”- where the “is” is contracted to food... man-made contrasts with the with the larger idea of the earth’s awareness – which perhaps is like Rios’ poem about the mirror. Naomi’s poem considers the roots of old as a new millenium arrives. Rios notices more than his own reflection, but a sense of decoding a secret in “daily detritus” and smears in the mirror. Who is this small self, living in this man-made world where the perceptions of codes, like the self, are like codes to be understood.
Perhaps we are used to such poems with good sounds, a little enigma, but not too much.
The Herrera took more work, perhaps like many Latin American poems laced with surrealism, a sense of a narrative, then leaving a narrative about an illegal immigrant.
Back to identity... and being in a place by accident... like you – how are any of us “native” to land? Eyes. Colors. Listen closely. How does he mean “amber” as in thighs and serum... which comes after the blinding “white gray rubble “
how many ways can you understand, “wait, I just thought—what if this is not visible”
We ended with the Mark Strand... A good poem cannot be paraphrased... but he does earn the final lines:
“To feel yourself wake into change, as if your change
Were immense and figured into the heavens’ longing.”
.
Report of discussion of poems Sept. 14 + 21
Sep 14.....................13 stalwarts present for a super lively session. The gift of the watch was easily the favorite , eliciting lots of comment. Marcie and Judith led the charge for the ladies with great stuff, anecdotes and memories. I think it was Carmen who, after much table talk on one of the poems, asked Martin for his thoughts on the piece. Well ! He had us in stitches and got laughing along with us. Now too long ago to recall the specifics, but the usual breaking into possibilities and hidden meanings ( whether regarding the poet or the personal burrower).
Sep 21.....................About 17 gang members there for another lively session of interpretation, appreciation and general calling for the appearance of the Muse. I know I felt the presence of Madame Blavatsky, particularly when in the spell of a Judith rendition. Bernie was erudite, Don was great and the ladies had some wonderful translations, maybe transmigrations.......There were some favorites....again, so much was wondered upon, and I am away from my notes at the moment. I believe we completed all the poems and group discussions after hours went on 'til nearly 2 PM. David was here, back from NYC for a few days and added more good stuff . You will appreciate that Kathy told me to be quiet as I was interrupting. 5 minutes in the Hall was punishment . No one came to tell me when 5 minutes was gone. Another successful therapy session was, as they say, had by all.....
Sep 21.....................About 17 gang members there for another lively session of interpretation, appreciation and general calling for the appearance of the Muse. I know I felt the presence of Madame Blavatsky, particularly when in the spell of a Judith rendition. Bernie was erudite, Don was great and the ladies had some wonderful translations, maybe transmigrations.......There were some favorites....again, so much was wondered upon, and I am away from my notes at the moment. I believe we completed all the poems and group discussions after hours went on 'til nearly 2 PM. David was here, back from NYC for a few days and added more good stuff . You will appreciate that Kathy told me to be quiet as I was interrupting. 5 minutes in the Hall was punishment . No one came to tell me when 5 minutes was gone. Another successful therapy session was, as they say, had by all.....
Friday, September 9, 2016
Poems for August 31
Alexander James
UNDERNEATH A CAR ON THE HIGHROAD BETWEEN ABERGAVENNY AND BLAENARVON
The August Preoccupations by Catherine Barnett
August Morning, Upper Broadway by Alicia Ostriker, 1937
The Order In Which Things Are Broken by Desirée Alvarez
A Virginian Anniversary by Lianne Kamp
Impossible Friendships by Adam Zagajewski; translated by Clare Cavanagh
Cake by Noah Eli Gordon
Sea Lily by H. D.
Poems sent with this email:
Lucille Clifton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM7q_DUk5wU
January Gill O’Neil https://soundcloud.com/poets-org/january-gill-oneil-on-being-told-i-look-like-flotus-new-years-eve-party-2014
Don recommended this — filled with poetic references: ... A tale of love and darkness by Amos Oz.
poetic descriptions...
Judith thought of Carl Sandburg -- 4 preludes on playthings of the wind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luYcfH_za-U
and also Stephen Vincent Benet “By the Waters of Babylon.”
what eats us up...
**
The first two poems, one an ekphrastic response to a colorful painting, the other, a stream-of-consciousness survival kit of sorts, share responses that avoid anger. What is the usual first response to a broken axle?
Not to write a poem that has lines with a break in the middle... a confusion of green and a rusty part.
The second is an elegy for someone who is no longer, without mentioning the name, rather like following
a Jackson Pollack painting with a strange list of unconnected "obsessions" where "waiting" appears twice, as
does "Lincoln" on the $5 bill. Indeed, we did check our wallets to find the $5 bills to look for the stars...
they are there.
But that aside, the first poem was selected in Rattle's ekphrastic challenge because it went beyond simple
description and association to a narrative. An abstract blotch of white becomes a cairn, and something
about the wide brushstrokes patching the canvas allowed the poet to create the scene of a car breakdown in Wales.
The list of "obsessions" are attached to August -- the last month of summer -- we know nothing about the "you"
who is on this list, along with despots, telescopes, beauty, anonymity, comedy-- but those words point to a flavor of the lover or partner or maybe even father... Why Lincoln-- is it the only bill that has stars on it?
Now, the reader too enters into an obsessive inspection...
what makes a poem hang together...?
In the selection, we start with a breakdown, move into summer, where perhaps “august” could mean not just end of summer, but and the third poem announces a holiday – not a “vacation” but the old-fashioned idea
of a Holy-Day which casts an antique tone, for the metals. Many were reminded of Shelley’s sonnet, Ozymandias. Nothing remains.. not even
mention of anything but loud sun and crowds.
How different from the Ostriker poem which reminded many of us of Gregory Orr’s “Concerning the body of the beloved” where he discovers the Beloved in everything, everywhere, and reconnects us—in the tradition of Rumi and Hafiz—to our emotional lives The formula, “.As...X is a window” exhorts us to imagine. It allows the comparison of “the body of the beloved” to the vastness of universe ;or comparesr a listless man selling as window, his fruits creating a window not unlike that of a cathedral. Finally, the whole scene is a window... the ordinariness of a summer day surpassed, if the reader can imagine how a paradise might be... and suddenly, we are thrown back in time.
The next poem provides more reference to the old breaking in the next poem, sounding a bit like
a grave robbery, finding what shards are left, the intimacy of two people
recovering what thrown away...
The elegy of a young black man’s life, how his life was “packaged”
is a strong poem reminding me of the book, “The Enchanted” by Rene Denfeld. Was Mitchell mad before he was put into prison? And is prison the right response for a little shoplifting?
“Impossible friendships” makes me think of relationships – and how a little tongue in cheek humor allows for anything from teacups, to the more grandiose with “this world” – “ever more perfect” contradicted by the parentheses (if not for the salty smell of blood). How at the root of impossible friendships one arrives, not to stay at a ball or a beheading
the stanza before, but the impossibility of friendship with yourself.
The next poem was fun and worth reporting in its entirety:
Cake by Noah Eli Gordon
Look, you
want it
you devour it
and then, then
good as it was
you realize
it wasn’t
what you
exactly
wanted
what you
wanted
exactly was
wanting
awareness... beware of what you wish for...
We ended with Sea Lily, understanding more about this crinoid,
a graceful and unusual animal which has been around for 450 million years... The name comes from the Greek word krinon, "a lily", and eidos, "form".
UNDERNEATH A CAR ON THE HIGHROAD BETWEEN ABERGAVENNY AND BLAENARVON
The August Preoccupations by Catherine Barnett
August Morning, Upper Broadway by Alicia Ostriker, 1937
The Order In Which Things Are Broken by Desirée Alvarez
A Virginian Anniversary by Lianne Kamp
Impossible Friendships by Adam Zagajewski; translated by Clare Cavanagh
Cake by Noah Eli Gordon
Sea Lily by H. D.
Poems sent with this email:
Lucille Clifton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM7q_DUk5wU
January Gill O’Neil https://soundcloud.com/poets-org/january-gill-oneil-on-being-told-i-look-like-flotus-new-years-eve-party-2014
Don recommended this — filled with poetic references: ... A tale of love and darkness by Amos Oz.
poetic descriptions...
Judith thought of Carl Sandburg -- 4 preludes on playthings of the wind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luYcfH_za-U
and also Stephen Vincent Benet “By the Waters of Babylon.”
what eats us up...
**
The first two poems, one an ekphrastic response to a colorful painting, the other, a stream-of-consciousness survival kit of sorts, share responses that avoid anger. What is the usual first response to a broken axle?
Not to write a poem that has lines with a break in the middle... a confusion of green and a rusty part.
The second is an elegy for someone who is no longer, without mentioning the name, rather like following
a Jackson Pollack painting with a strange list of unconnected "obsessions" where "waiting" appears twice, as
does "Lincoln" on the $5 bill. Indeed, we did check our wallets to find the $5 bills to look for the stars...
they are there.
But that aside, the first poem was selected in Rattle's ekphrastic challenge because it went beyond simple
description and association to a narrative. An abstract blotch of white becomes a cairn, and something
about the wide brushstrokes patching the canvas allowed the poet to create the scene of a car breakdown in Wales.
The list of "obsessions" are attached to August -- the last month of summer -- we know nothing about the "you"
who is on this list, along with despots, telescopes, beauty, anonymity, comedy-- but those words point to a flavor of the lover or partner or maybe even father... Why Lincoln-- is it the only bill that has stars on it?
Now, the reader too enters into an obsessive inspection...
what makes a poem hang together...?
In the selection, we start with a breakdown, move into summer, where perhaps “august” could mean not just end of summer, but and the third poem announces a holiday – not a “vacation” but the old-fashioned idea
of a Holy-Day which casts an antique tone, for the metals. Many were reminded of Shelley’s sonnet, Ozymandias. Nothing remains.. not even
mention of anything but loud sun and crowds.
How different from the Ostriker poem which reminded many of us of Gregory Orr’s “Concerning the body of the beloved” where he discovers the Beloved in everything, everywhere, and reconnects us—in the tradition of Rumi and Hafiz—to our emotional lives The formula, “.As...X is a window” exhorts us to imagine. It allows the comparison of “the body of the beloved” to the vastness of universe ;or comparesr a listless man selling as window, his fruits creating a window not unlike that of a cathedral. Finally, the whole scene is a window... the ordinariness of a summer day surpassed, if the reader can imagine how a paradise might be... and suddenly, we are thrown back in time.
The next poem provides more reference to the old breaking in the next poem, sounding a bit like
a grave robbery, finding what shards are left, the intimacy of two people
recovering what thrown away...
The elegy of a young black man’s life, how his life was “packaged”
is a strong poem reminding me of the book, “The Enchanted” by Rene Denfeld. Was Mitchell mad before he was put into prison? And is prison the right response for a little shoplifting?
“Impossible friendships” makes me think of relationships – and how a little tongue in cheek humor allows for anything from teacups, to the more grandiose with “this world” – “ever more perfect” contradicted by the parentheses (if not for the salty smell of blood). How at the root of impossible friendships one arrives, not to stay at a ball or a beheading
the stanza before, but the impossibility of friendship with yourself.
The next poem was fun and worth reporting in its entirety:
Cake by Noah Eli Gordon
Look, you
want it
you devour it
and then, then
good as it was
you realize
it wasn’t
what you
exactly
wanted
what you
wanted
exactly was
wanting
awareness... beware of what you wish for...
We ended with Sea Lily, understanding more about this crinoid,
a graceful and unusual animal which has been around for 450 million years... The name comes from the Greek word krinon, "a lily", and eidos, "form".
Friday, August 26, 2016
August 24
A Quiet Poem by Frank O'Hara
Bridge by Jim Harrison
won’t you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton
Checks and Balances at the Grocery Store by Lianne Kamp
Good Hair by Sherman Alexie
On Being Told I Look Like
FLOTUS, New Year’s Eve
Party 2014 by January Gill O’Neil
We discussed the impact of knowing something about the time period and biography of the poet – how often it can enhance our understanding. In "A Quiet Poem" – eye and ear work to establish quiet... the coin of sound of a motor dropping to the sea vs. the coin of “loud” sun nicks the air... how when we close our eyes, we invite a quiet stillness... more in tune with our hearts. "Now" enjambed to the final stanza, where two things happen: The heart breathes to music, and the two singular coins lie together in the wet yellow sand.
A bridge is a great image for exploring connections. Perhaps we start out on one shore, and start building... thinking we will arrive “somewhere”... The living of life happens on the bridge – not the houses we would build upon it. We had fun with a few jokes, like the one of the Zen coroner. What was the cause of death? Birth, life. Just like the quiet poem, music enters, along with Machado.
What beauty in this the darkest music over which you can hear the lightest music of human
behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.
Oh to be able to say, “This is my job, to study the universe
from my bridge.”
Just wag your feet as you sit on the bridge...
We listened to Lucille recite “won’t you celebrate with me” with her vibrant and strong voice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM7q_DUk5wU
Another bridge to sit on... between starshine and clay
It is not a requirement to celebrate with her – but an invitation, as she models how she came to celebrate her struggle to be herself. Celebrating struggle might seem an unusual
and surprising response especially as the poem ends on "everyday, something is trying to kill her—"
line break -- and the aha moment, "but fails". Comments: it is better to celebrate than to be celebrated...
Be yourself – everyone else is taken. Judith brought up Alicia Alonzo... now in 90’s danced with grandson... she was blind by 19 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Alonso
The next poem describes a scene with Mark the bagger, a cashier, told from the point of view of the customer. Delightful, because of the language, how an every day comment is juxtaposed with a product sold at the grocery store. We came up with one:
“Oh that’s a wonderful new hairdo... steel wool...”
Is Mark an old man? a handicapped youth? No matter, he repeats the same stories and platitudes but the twist in the story is how his predictable moments remind us all, “what keeps/us all rooted together.”
Sherman Alexie braids questions “Hey, Indian boy, why (why!) did you slice off your braids?”
with an overpowering sense of repetition of “braids” each question laden with increasingly insulting adjectives. One person commented that the questions act like a tortured litany of condemnations.
If vanity equals vice, then does vice equal braids?
The neologisms, “cut-hair-mourned” and “ceremony-dumb” as in mute, and no longer connected to rituals make the cut of the questions even sharper.
Has your tribe and clan cut-hair-mourned since their creation?
Did you, ceremony-dumb, improvise with your braids?
What is “good” hair – for whom? How do we fit in?
We ended with “January-Gill O’Neil’s 14 line poem. After hearing her recite the poem,
the tone reflects a tiredness of not being accepted for who she is. More formal than Lucille’s poem, without the rage, and a clever play of “complement” and “compliment” .
poems for Aug 17
The Black Woman’s Tears Swap Meet Is Open Every Day by Douglas Kearney
My Luck by Joyce Sutphen
Enemies by Wendell Berry
The Chairs That No One Sits In by Billy Collins
To Tell of Bodies Changed to Different Forms by Jorie Graham
Note with the poems: For those of you who missed David’s selection on Wordsworth, you missed a good discussion on the thoughtfully-prepared material he prepared. The discussion did not seem to want to leave what poetry is , can do— and how it has changed…
This week, we looked at how some contemporary poets “walk a line”… and the taste of contemporary poems of very different flavors… What would Wordsworth say? Frost? And you?
I treasure the insights shared in these weekly discussions.
Poems for August 17
The first poem is a masterful elegy that maximizes on the possibilities of the English language sounds (homonyms, load/lode;) and spellings. “Tears” can be noun, verb, or both (torn calendar tears) and is supported by the unusual form, where sentences have an unexpected cut off, just like bursting into tears for no reason. One person noted the large
amount of white space through which the black letters fall. The “unfinished” phrases, omissions (“she peers/through the wide between her &. “) contrast with a sense of on-going, ceaseless quantity of the amazing variety of tears.. The truncated “she always finds them in the / finds them in / finds them,” mimics a sobbing, persistence which echoes the “run-on” where tear is a “run” in a stocking. The rich metaphors and descriptions of tears, including , a multiple choice pick of tears, slant allusions to Helen of Troy (whose eyes launched the ships) and Cassandra, where tears sink the ships...
is masterful. One person commented, like “jailhouse rock”; another felt the rhymic pull, like a call and response. Rattle a scabbard of tears... tears of Mondays, Marches, 29ths, 91s, 83s – calendars-full until “wicker bin choke, shredder hacks”.
Although it is a black lament, and one feels the history of slavery, mistreatment, Kearney
paints a history of grief – who would you like to swap tears with – is someone else’s sorrow any easier to bear – or just part of the endlessness of grief.
I asked people how many ways they could pronounce the title of the next poem (by Poet Laureate of Wisconsin (check)
My Luck. Neutral descriptive. my LUCK. vs. my misfortune. MY luck – as in woe is me... Tongue-in-cheek, fun because of the element of surprise, but also you trust the speaker of the poem, even though the examples seem improbable that she knows something about luck. Carmen brought up the Chinese story about what seems like a misfortune (the son breaks a leg) but turns into a blessing (but therefore, does not have to go to war). What happens is simply what happens, and luck, perhaps that ball that hasn’t dropped yet, but very well could.
The Wendell Berry poem is quite cyclical – what is an enemy? What happens when you try to love them as yourself, -- can we love what is our enemy? Forgive ? But what exactly is forgiveness ? The poem starts with equal sorts of opposite monsters...
The key seems to lie in the brief moment described as “sun on a green branch”.
Free from them... all is well, until you think of them again... understanding you are both kinds of “monster” – indifferent, or unable to love your enemy.
The next poem Billy Collins could have referred to as “The empty chairs” or
“The vacant chairs” or even “Why you never see people sitting on their chairs on the front porch” , but he is more clever than that. “The chairs that no one sits in” doesn’t include “any more” – but simply invites us to wonder what people would look at...
if they did sit in them. Evocation of quiet/ Beauty of twoness... But on a second read, it is quite clearly a “waiting for death” poem.. He leads us gently to the turn when the clouds are “high and massive” when he imagines what is deserved to be looked at... Perhaps a tongue-in-cheek pondering about what the sound of one hand clapping could be – in this case, the sound of looking, wondering if the anthropomorphized details of the two bird calls might be joy, or warning.
Is life then, simply a case of distraction while waiting? Best not to sit in a chair
if this thought depresses you.
Jorie Graham picks up this idea in her free-flowing poem. It reads easily although it covers several pages. Although it feels to flow in a stream of consciousness, nothing ever stable – even the “subline with massive firm edges” – quickly followed between dashes “albeit under erosion” – like “men at work” and things “under construction”. Aren’t we all – and as soon as we think, we know what we are dying to be, (this question posed twice) we already a forced to “withdrawal from an occupied terrain” – the who we are then, is already replaced by the who we wear now, soon to be replaced.
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