Poems for March 23

The Fiddler of Dooney by W.B. Yeats
The Host of the Air by William Butler Yeats
Girlhood by Jonathan Galassi
Ithaca by C.P. Cavity (Emily brought up)
Two Husbands Meet in Heaven by Susan Dworski Nusbaum

The last two poems are grouped this way in Eureka Street: "Mortality made articulate : Two Comments"
Following me, old footprints by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
A deceptive calm by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

A father's tenderness, seeing what's ahead for his girl, the taste of"the color of crushed time"; the multiplicity of "Ithaca" which gives you reason for the marvelous journey; the fun of imagining 2 husbands, with a snapshot of their wife (and
I trust the group will enjoy Nusbaum's volume "What we Take with Us".).

I chose the Galassi is because Katha Pollitt used an epigram he provides in her poem Archeology we discussed 3/9
"Our real poems are already in us, and all we can do is dig.”
-Jonathan Galassi : http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jonathan-galassi

I will not be there except in spirit...

A note about Yeats from Elizabeth Bodien: “The Host of the Air,”
the host of the air are the Sluagh Gaoith (versus the host of Sidhe).
And the host of the air that lived in clouds and mist were the worst,
apparently said to steal brides.
Yes, notes indicate that the story is based on an old Gaelic ballad
from a woman in Balissodare in County Sligo
but it also may be that the host of the air may be interpreted more generally to refer to the
shared heritage that floats in the air of Ireland, the heritage that Yeats was so eager to breathe.



Summary by Kathy:
Paul gave us a lovely reading/recitation of the 2 Yeats poems. He also played a recording of Yeats himself reading his work. The group was split about discussion of Ithaka as some remembered reading it before. Bernie provided a solution - we listened to Sean Connery reading Ithaka on YouTube We spent the most time on Galassi's Girlhood and thought it a poem worthy of more attention. Lastly, we enjoyed ending the session with the humor of Two Husbands.

Poems for March 16-17

Reading Plato - by Jorie Graham
Among Women by Marie Ponsot
Windchime by Tony Hoagland
Anti-Anxiety Poem by Carrie Shipers
Dirt by Jo McDougall


What happens with poetry,or any art, when you slow down, break it into sections, piece it together in different ways... The word "practice comes to mind... Right now I am working on a difficult prelude (Rachmaninoff #2, op 16)which requires slow, deliberate practice that doesn't sound at all the way it will once I take it up to tempo. But without it, the beauty of the fabric of the piece will be at risk with sloppy mistakes, missed notes and only an approximation of the piece.

We can read essays about poets, see their honors, but to find a poem and stay with it for 45 minutes in a group, allows discoveries (not answers). We took Jorie Graham's poem first line by line, which felt fragmented; the second reading, we read two lines at a time, allowing the phrasing to come out. The third reading was stanza by stanza. The group agreed, without such an approach, we might have read it, enjoyed it, but missed out on so much.

First, the title... What does Reading Plato have to do with making flies for fishing?
"Lie" and "lures" are first words... with "flies" rhyming with the unspoken plural of "lie".
A cursory summation would be the idea of fish taking the flies for something "real", and Graham's skill in creating a reflecting world.
As a big picture person, I love the idea of a well-crafted poem where each details adds to a satisfying unity of an important idea. She does this. Plato's allegory of the cave, recreated for fish... how "ideas" and imagination are what keep us afloat... how knowledge "skips across the
surface"... dis - member / re- member, as in put back together.
Comments from the group:
flashes... intentionality... consonants... fragmentations... like a fish... underwater...
what is reality... people in the cave only see the shadows...
rhythm... the fly fisherman’s rhythms...
mosaic (not abstract art)... they add up... water refracts.
fuzzy: where fish stop and men begin. like Escher drawing.
take what we learn from the group...
misrepresentation... fly.. men...
vivid... old man (perhaps going blind)... on his way to death... transfiguration deer hair
far in the lifespan of man... and specific man...
garden. symbol of the Virgin Mary. Eden: beautiful lie... What is your tiny garden?
ambiguous without being obfuscating.

The next poem also has an intriguing title. How do you understand "Among Women" -- exclusionary to men, or what it is like, "among women" as in Achilles, hiding so as not to fight... an unfinished reference of who among women is blessed...
The contradiction in line two is marvelous, calling on the various meanings of "wander" -- both physical and mental. Not many (physically impossible, restricted). All (escape in the imagination-- Dickinson's "No frigate like a book" comes to mind.) the close sound of "wander" and "wonder". The Peddler is allowed to wander, and brings the smell of the wild, unpegged life,
"sleep where you will... do whatever when, choose your bread and company...

Another enigmatic line: The Grandmother warning, "Have nothing to lose"... No one can steal your thoughts if you keep your mind intact, private and active.
How do you read the repeat of endure? to endure "endure", or simply the repetition of survival surviving. The parallel with the wild, once young man, and the imagination of his wife, "smelling" the lifestyle of the peddler. Reminiscent perhaps of the Raggle-taggle gypsies.
Curious how "man" is the end word rhyming with the final word of the poem. "as best they can" (women)

Tony Hoagland's poem is a tender love poem, speaking to that most annoying detail that endears someone to us. We had a good laugh when Paul shared his laugh about the wind chime inserted in the nightgown! Two stanzas of description. Then, the reflection of the poet... and the entry of the idea of absence of sound... that soundless urgency of trying to do something, with the "unfinished" business haunting us. That turn of thought allows the poem to dwell on why the poet will stay with this woman... the delicious language "problem scrunched into her forehead/the little kissable mouth/with the nail in it." Perfect encapsulation of opposition -- I love you, not.. I don't love you, but do...

The anti-anxiety poem gave us rise of laughter, perhaps in part, because it was filled with useless worries, and being told not to worry about them. But does it work? Is there intrigue?
Could the poem have ended on "nameless dread you'd do anything to avoid"? Perhaps a different title then... How to read the last line: Don't worry that worry might be all you have.
Glib? Moralizing -- don't waste your time worrying. But how is that "anti-anxiety"?
I far preferred Carrie Shipers' poem we discussed last week (In your next letter,/
please describe)



Following up on Jo McDougall from last week, ("This morning") we read the three sentences in this 7 line poem. Fierce... final. Dirt having arrogance...brings out a primal emotion.
Carmin brought up the song "Dustbowl Dance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvnhPhrqEag&index=2&list=RDKNLCKuz4EVs Mumford & Sons

Dirt, knowing she's from the dustbowl... a culture and life we don't know. Dirt... metaphor for what one goes through losing a daughter.


Each week, I write these notes, for me, to recreate in my mind the amazing energy of 17-23 people gathered, sharing the reading aloud of poems. I need to tell the poets how much we enjoy reading and sharing their words. How they are our honored guests.

Poems for March 9-10

Aristotle by Billy Collins
Abuelo by Cecilia Llompart
Archeology by Katha Pollitt
In your next letter by Carrie Shippers
Untitled – E.E. Cummings ("next to of course god america i)

This week's poems brought up the topic of accessibility - and its corollary, what gives us pleasure in poetry. Billy Collins has a knack for producing accessible poems, but most, I might hazard the guess, come from a very knowledgeable ledge where feet hang
in the deep waters of "telos", that wonderful Greek term for an ultimate object or aim.
What is it we seek to understand, seek to practice, achieve in our stories? How do we tell the beginning, the middle, the end? Using this as starting point, Collins provides us both an ars poetica of the creative process. The images for the "anything can happen" are pulled from bible, science, a humorous jab with "the first word of Paradise Lost" (which happens to be "Of" [ OF MAN’S first disobedience]) the letter A, which of course is the first letter of Aristotle, and a reference to the opening of a play.
Does it matter that it be a scene of Endgame with the heavy curtain rising, or Hemingway?

Indeed, the poem has many references which could act as large parentheses to explore...who are Miriam and Edward, and does one need to look up the comments about Sylvia Plath's suicide or know the story of St. Clement? The poem does not require us to know that Aristotle was a famous Greek philosopher, interested in the theory of causes,
or even to know the term "telos" which can be opposed to "techno" or rational method.
However, starting the poem with his name, and ending it with a six line sentence,
"This is the end, according to Aristotle", having watched an opera and a climbing party progress from beginning to middle to end, along with countless details. But, if you probe the end too deeply, you might lose the charm. Namely, the end, as what we wait for? (hmmmmmm...) what everything comes down to (pun?), the destination we cannot help imagining (fear?, reassurance to imagine how we will die?) -- perhaps a streak of light in the sky... but he leaves us with something familiar. We all can imagine someone's hat hung on the peg... still there after they are gone... we all understanding about falling leaves.


Abuelo is a beautiful poem which pays hommage to a Grandfather, filled with repetitions of "it is / here is" but broken deftly with line break. Here/
is your body...

It is// broken second line, of opening and penultimate stanza.

The tongue is not made OF stone, but "is made stone" ; the heart, a stone...
There is a mix of accessible, but also a sense of distraction -- what is the fortress without walls? what overturns what because it has loved it most? The ending image of the sky lowered to walk with the departed is beautiful.

Katha Pollitt spells "archaeology" with the middle A, and in two stanzas gives us a "you" that may well be an archeologist himself, but perhaps the reader or writer as well. What do we dig for? The epigraph by Galas (President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus, Giroux, translator and fine poet who reminds us that most poetry is destined to be forgotten) reminds us that the essential is to dig deep inside ourselves. The piling up of the dry sands, winds, the shards, the "random rubble you'll invent" mimics the creative process, but also the piecing together we do as we live our lives.

Carrie Shipers is a new poet for me, and all of us delighted by her fine poem, which captures a palpable longing, and the "stuff" that indeed makes "no place like home".
One person referred to it as "an artefact of nostalgia". What do we miss? Why does that last line strike home?

McDougall, like Shipers, also follows the technique of using the title as part of the first line. The set up of ordinary, and the sudden appearance of the daughter who "steps out of the radio" and grief, about which we don't know much, but feel catching in the throat by the end of the poem.

The Cummings which blends patriotic songs in a breathless 13 lines in quotations,
completes the sonnet with a line describing the man delivering them, and his rapid swallow of water. Much can be said of the political satire here. Pittsford will open next week with it.

Poems for March 2-3

Gratuitous Oranges by David Shapiro (read at Pittsford, but not Rundel)
Lullaby in Fracktown by Lilace Mellin Guignard
Cloud Fishing by Phillis Levin
Imaginary Morning Glory by C. D. Wright, 1949 - 2016
For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Candle Hat by Billy Collins
the Pittsford group also read the poem by Lia Purpura: Solitude

In this group of poems, we are treated to the power of form.
The first poem, with its whimsical title, takes the "unrhymable" word, "orange"
in a villanelle variation where it appears in every stanza but the penultimate one, and twice in the 2nd and final stanzas.
Orange/tinge/cringe
orange/garage/orange
orange/storage/cinge
binge'impinge/orange
linge/binge/cringe (although linge, in French, will sound have the one ugly vowel sound
in the language
expunge/orange/orange/cringe

A little surrealism (Earth is like a blue orange); rich rhyme (orange/orange -- and aren't you (oh, aren't chu) glad I didn't say orange again?)Irish playwrights and a suspicion that orange stands for a rather narcissistic opinion of food for gods alone with some entanglement with philosophy.
Fun, but one of those poems one reads, once, laughs, returns to to chuckle, but goes in the brain with knock-knock jokes until you look up the epigram and find out more about S.Y. Agnon, the nom-de-plume of a Hebrew Nobel prizewinner. http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/shai-agnon-a-mystery-wrapped-up-in-an-enigma/3/

There's more to oranges than meets the eye -- especially coupled with the adjective "gratuitous" !

This limerick added by Judith who helped edit the original by Steve Kirkpatrick
Limerick on Words

When a rhyme for orange is sought,
It’s much tougher than [when] first thought.
[If] a task’s [very] tall
We should start [rather] small
Rhyming kumquat, loquat and complot.

Judith's note: I have changed his rhyme scheme—the interpolated words are mine, to conform to the more usual limerick form. The If in the third line replaces his when, to avoid two of ‘em.


Lullaby in Fracktown is another villanelle:
shoes/lollipops/lose
kazoos/mountaintop/shoes
kangaroos/flip-flop
snooze/dropped/shoes
school/gumdrops/lose
coos/unstopped/shoes/lose

The word play, alliterations, mock-advice, overtones of the song, "Hush little baby" tell the story of people who work in fracktowns -- the hope of a job -- but under the shadow of here today, gone tomorrow. Hush, like the lullaby sings, "don't say a word, Mama's going to buy you a mockingbird... and if that mocking bird don't sing, mama's going to buy you a diamond ring... and if that diamond ring turns to brass, mama's going to buy you a looking glass..." all those promises, crooned to soothe what we know is dangerous.

Cloud fishing has a marvelous hour-glass form, with the arrangement of 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 line in each stanza, with slant rhyme. sky/swimming by/refraction catching its eye.
looking down, to looking up out of the deep.

The CD Wright was difficult. The repeat 7 words; fragments, allusions and the idea of "Imagination" which we will see in the Collins' interpretation of the light around Goya's head, or the idea of the "glory" which people see in the sky -- either Godlike, or perhaps connected to that "telluric" light. Enigmatic, layered, complex.

Thank you Kathy for sharing this essay by C.D. Wright: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_wright_concerning.php

I highly recommend it! This passage particularly struck me, in the context of poetry embracing doubt, vs. searching for answers.
"Poetry should not be the default for every writer's mess. Otherwise, it is a poem if I say it is.
.... Poetry dissolves boundaries—it is the finite that puts us in touch with the infinite—and, as languages and species vanish every day, it is a crucial vehicle by which we apprehend the urgency and precarious splendor of existence.”

The next 19-line poem plays with words that end with "philous", but also helps the reader by providing definitions without ever seeming pedantic. The interconnectedness, the swell of Greek to a line that reads like a film of a black man. Love/that: (darkness, stories). "Love that" repeated again as first two words, on the 11th line... (corner room/whatever is not there/all the clutter you keep secret).
The clutter of words is filled with love... a complex interweaving of unlike, living near each other. It could be black/white or male/female or simply a me/you or all three.
Please listen to the recording (follow this link: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/242480
of “For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers”. It allows us to imagine more than someone in love with words— a real person, and an invitation to guess his story. How do you see the poem after being touched by the voice?


How does the edgy C.D Wright compare with Billy Collins? Did Goya have a candle hat, or is that also part of the imagination? Note verbs such as he "appears" and you can only "wonder what it would be like" and you only have to "imagine him"... and three more invitations to "imagine". The power of such a poem lies in the power of the poet's imagination to re-interpret what is seen. Whether, in this case, a painting, or possibilities -- it leads to a broader, more generous interpretation of the world.
I did find quite a few enlargement/close-ups of Goya in the portrait provided, that show, indeed, a candle hat -- but he would not have had them lit. According to his son, when Goya painted his portraits, he worked “in only one session, sometimes of ten hours, but never in the late afternoon. The last touches for a better effect of a picture he gave at night, by artificial light” or candlelight."

I missed the discussion of Solitude, the last poem, and did not read it with Rundel.
The line "what a luxury/ annoyance is" attracts me with the 3-syllable words pulling at each other. The longest line is the final six-syllable one, but so cleverly given --
the annoyance is what gives us a bite of just enough of "what I think/I want to be endless". It allows a peek at annoyance, which often counters our subjective desires.
Peace, sure, all alone, but it is not until the dog barks that the poet re-considers it.

Judith had proposed to read Bumbershoot:
Bumbershoot

Night, a gun-blue umbrella tricked with distant suns and planets
Is not to be opened indoors—more bad luck, or worse.

Hold it to the mind’s sky, finger the trigger in its handle.
A meteor bullets the firmament. The universe falls shut with a whoosh.

Shake the drops of the stars from the loose skin of the darkness.
Think of nothing for which to wish. Step into a different house.

--Howard Hendrix

Judith's note:The author was written six novels, several short story collections
and a “whole bunch of poems.” He teaches English and creative
writing “at the college level” but the blurb in the anthology
did not state where.

The Nebulas are annual awards given by members of SWFA, the professional organization of science fiction and fantasy writers. The annual poetry awards are
named for the fictional poet Rhysling, a character created by Robert Heinlein back in the forties in a story first published in, believe it or not, the Saturday
Evening Post—where I remember reading it. He wrote several stories for that mag, which probably paid a helluva lot better than the genre magazines of the time!!!
(The irony is that Rhysling’s poetry, when given by Heinlein, is Kipling-and-water and more water than Kipling. Never mind…)

And from Paul:
I ran across a quip by W.B. Yeats last night and thought it would tranquilize some misgivings that I or we ( the Group ) have about dissecting the mental states of poets , correcting what they present and straightening their scrambled thought processes.

" If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility".