Poems for May 25-6

"Good poetry enlists the participation of the reader in the construction of meaning; it's not meant to be passively consumed." Ben Lerner

"Art is never about its content; it's always about its scaffolding." Chris Abani

Poems for May 25-6 — perhaps more than we’ll get to… Kim Dower, is a terrific poet I met in a workshop with Tom Lux. I quote her from her interview with Garrison Keilor that appeared this morning, "Readers forget the poet’s voice is often a persona, a character she has created. She’s not telling her own secrets she’s inventing someone else’s. What’s “real” are the emotions conveyed in the poem, not necessarily the situations, details, or events. And the feelings that those heartbreaking or hilarious moments in the poem stir in the reader are what connect the reader to the poet. The emotions become autobiographical for both.” “… I try to offer moments and observations, the way I see them — often funny, sometimes sad — that people can relate to and be moved by. I have no “process,” except to write. The key for me is to be open to seeing and to get the idea down on paper the moment it hits me.”

Which are the poems that speak in the voice of an old, trusted friend who knows you, who has come to visit and remind you of who you are and what a life is all about? I picked a few from an anthology of well-known poets who introduce the essential poems that captivated & inspired them. Feel free to email some of your favorites!

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Poetry -- by Ruth Stone
Three Aubades by Rita Dove
-- from The Georgia Review : http://garev.uga.edu/spring16/dove.html

3 poems from a book of poems accompanied by short essays by the poets about why they fell in love in words. First Loves, edited by Carmela Ciuraru.

-- The Flea by John Donne (Here is a pick by Billy Collins who, marvels at how the speaker combined logic and silliness to weave his seductive argument around the appearance of this tiny insect ‘where we almost, nay more than married are.’ How the woman’s presence and her responses were contained in the white spaces between the stanzas in this intimate battle of wits. (p. 63)

-- Where Go The Boats -- R.L. Stevenson (W.S. Merwin’s pick p. 171)

-- Diameter of the Bomb -- Yehuda Amichai (Thylia Moss)

Snow for Wallace Stevens – Terrance Hayes
(from recent article about Stevens in American Poet, by Dan Rader)

The Cypress Broke by Mahmoud Darwish

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The first poem did not strike most people as "an old trusted friend" coming to remind you of
who you are... why is "terrible" associated with "phonemes"? Is "gravel" meant to be grovel...
why all this fragmentation under a title "Poetry"? A sense of the uselessness of putting a poem together without a reader, ending on a cynical note with a taste of melodramatic chaos.

The idea of a shibboleth and passwords using phonemes that another language doesn't have, came up.
The sounds work well, but to make what kind of sense? Many found it annoying and pretentious.

The Three Aubades, on the other hand delivered much satisfaction -- the overriding structure,
with mention of the origin of the word "ghetto" -- originally a foundry where Jews were confined in 1516. The first Aubade: The Constitutional, brings us back to Leone de Modena, a Jewish scholar (1571-1648 -- colorful character to look up) walking about Venice -- "why then am I unhappy, / when all around me /the human pageant whirrs?
He is able to turn his thought to the canals and paths as "promise with no perimeters, // my foot soles polishing the scarred stones."

This leads to Aubade: West, "Ferguson, Missouri" and a different type of ghetto... the sounds, the dare to leave, inability to do so. An echo of the concentration camps with the words "final solution"applied to "cracked cradle of Somalis". The third, Aubade: East, "Harlem, a.m." is in the voice of a young man, I imagine a rapper-surfer on his way to the basketball courts, feeling good -- with an inverse of the Aubade as the dawning of a new day, breaking a long amorous night, but rather,
the sun will head home... with no hint of what the night will bring.

All three sound like males, the last two black, each aware of the sun's light and possibility, each one with a different personality and attitude but caught in their own world...
The language is enticing... "skitters as a bug crossing a skillet"... the contrast of water (as if it ever told one good truth) and being high and dry on the street/running straight as a line of smack... the undercover power-suit... the East River twerking her bedazzled behind while the sky spills coin like a luck-crazed Vegas...

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The next few poems come from a book of poems accompanied by short essays by the poets about why they fell in love in words. First Loves, edited by Carmela Ciuraru.
The Flea, selected by Billy Collins who marvels at how the speaker combined logic and silliness to weave his seductive argument around the appearance of this tiny insect ‘where we almost, nay more than married are.’ How the woman’s presence and her responses were contained in the white spaces between the stanzas in this intimate battle of wits. The English is mind-boggling, the argument a real "tour de force".

Stevenson's Where Go the Boats was picked by Merwin, which makes sense given the metrical, hymn-like style. As David commented, Robert Frost said, "Style is the way a man takes himself."
RLS apparently takes himself as an entertainment – not seriously. A pleasant poem I memorized as a child, not a great poem but one with such clear images, and the sounds flowing just like the river.

Amichai's "Diameter of the Bomb" was chosen by Thylias Moss, who teaches at the University of Michigan and won numerous awards. She too was influenced by hymns, aware of the rhythms words take on. Mother Goose, and a line from Gwendolyn Brooks' poem, "a song in the front yard" --
"a girl gets sick of a rose." She heard Amichai read "The Diameter of the Bomb" when she attended Oberlin and likened the calm and unfaltering quietness of his voice with her first lullaby.
Unlike the measurable, scientifically honest diameter of the bomb however, the poem allows concentric circles to expand ad infinitum --no end and no God. The structure is not demanding, it is short, bomb only appearing in title and first line. As she puts it, "the poet refuses to mention the complete devastation, refuses to risk also devastating the reader. It is mentioned just to clarify what the reader is being spared from."

The Terrance Hayes came from an article by Dean Rader about Wallace Stevens. We discussed the clever manipulations of references in the poems, the "decorations in a Nigger Cemetery" the rhythms, and how Hayes points out the danger, of using language as tool of the imagination -- in the case of Stevens, the remoteness his brand of imagination engenders.

We spent some time on the epigraph of the poem by Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah. Cypress as symbol of eternity... Including the title, "The cypress broke" is repeated 8 times.
Grief... the "chapped shadow" on which the broken cypress sleeps... no one hurt... (2)
overheard conversation, did you see the storm. line break And the cypress/broke.
the two children hold opposing conclusions because it broke: the sky is complete; the sky is incomplete.
The speaker of the poem calls out to the reader -- as if to say, don't you see? Neither mystery nor clarify -- and repeats the fact, the second time, it will be up to the reader to interpret the exclamation point. How do we respond to platitudes when we are grieving?

The final poem brought up the instance of familiar to many of resisting change, but once it happens, one is glad for it. From "hutch and hatch" of the cozy eaves... the trunk-lid fit (like a coffin?), the second stanza opens up with the skylight-- "the sky entered and held surprise wide open". The analogy of the bible story of the man lowered through the roof, then healed (inverse process) works beautifully.