poems for November 30-December 1, 2017

Preamble Redux: Caki Wilkinson
Audience: Connie Wanek
Home: Bruce Weigl

Pear Trees on Irving Street: Richard Widerkehr

Radical Scent: Sharon Wang
The New Higher: John Ashbery
Hoping to Hear from You:  Athena Kildegaard
The Maidens Came: Anonymous (came up with discussion of TSE, Burnt Norton)

In this selection of poems the Pittsford Group picked up on a theme of inner and outer, surface and depth.  Kathy kindly offered a link to an article about how to read an Ashbery poem, which is helpful
for the Wang and Kildegaard as well.  What is it we expect from poetry and how do our expectations influence our understanding?

In the first poem, the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence is "exploded" with the rest of the poem separating "We the People of the United States" from "in order to form a more perfect union".  The alliterative quality (force financed ferment) calls attention to a predominance of "f"  (left, few, fed, flatten, freedom) final consonant proof (afoot, perfect).  What is a redux?   A redaction, in this case, transmogrification of the original sense.  A timely poem.  One person remarked recently
that it feels we are living in Narnia under the reign of the Snow Queen.

Audience takes the perspective of sparrows in the third stanza, the "group" phenomenon which
doesn't necessarily corroborate the opening statement of human beings as being "kind"-- followed immediately by the mention that someone might hope a tightrope break, which sounds pathological.
How do we deal with what bores us, shocks or offends us?  Minnesota Nice has its qualities...
and the end seems to confirm it...

and want to find a way to like you.

If they can sit through winter's sermons,

they can sit through you.

 How do you "sit through someone"?  How do you understand this?

"Home" starts out with a marvelous line:  "I didn't know I was grateful" ...  a perfect poem to address gratitude at Thanksgiving.    One person mentioned the author is a Vietnam Vet, which puts

a different spin on "home" and the "music" that translates the world.  The "stumbling block" of the poem were the two fragments at the end:
How do you read "I believe"? The translated music transforms the loneliness?  Is  strangeness (exiled and unraveling) now part of him?

Pear Trees:  beautiful lyric piece... starts with "float" and ends with buoyancy... that reassurance
that trees, unlike humans, just go along with the flow... no regrets...

Radial scent is a much more difficult poem... hard to fathom... starting with the title... is this a scientific term -- a separation between air and water?  is scent not a smell but rather a "whiff  of ascent and descent" traveling surfaces? The crux of the poem seems to lie in this:
Everything alive aching/

for more aliveness. 

The poet's comments help us understand this  highly personal poem.

“The final lines came first. I wrote the others thinking of spring, which tends to make me aware of how slow and quiet one’s insides can be, in comparison to the environment. I wanted to spin a cocooned space in the poem to expand into and be. It’s like the aliveness of breathing into your own chest.”

The Ashbery poem, rife with "air" rhymes, there, where, anywhere, stair, chair and the deft mixing of
I and you, feels like eavesdropping on an important conversation through a window where you
can't see exactly who is involved.  The reassuring part of reading an Ashbery poem is that it doesn't matter -- we observe an experience of some sort of experience, with an undertone of someone with a good sense of humor who refuses to be judged as good or bad, or  pegged as such and such.   One person "heard" the new "hire" in the title... and I suppose, the homonym of "stare/stair", where
as location, noun, and perhaps defining a moment like clothing to wear, as a shifting, changeable.

The next poem seemed written in the same sort of surrealistic vein, written in response to a Magritte letter.   My favorite line, "We yearn                    

for news from elsewhere,"

why does our curiosity push us beyond "here"? Perhaps the clue is in the word...   

A mailbag weighs more                  

than sincerity.

What does sincerity have to do with Magritte, Icarus,desire, connection?  I'm left with the image

of a myth -- the impact of hubris... the desire to understand what is hidden  but don't feel part of the "we" yearning for "cross-

wise winds smelling of death."  What does that mean?  Unlike the Ashbery, where I am content

to amble through time running short, a window between you and me... feeling somewhat grounded in the voyage, I am not convinced that this other poem includes everyone, but rather is a glimpse

of the poet in her world of reading Magritte's letters.

We ended with the medieval "Lay" or "Lai" as this lyric poem/song is called.  The rhythms,

sounds are seductive.  Love, death... and a connection to that window of which Ashbery speaks...

where the sun hides in the case of Kildegaard's poem.

As ever I am grateful to the perspicacious readings and attention both Rundel and Pittsford groups bring to these poems.   I feel like signing as amateur secretary, "respectfully submitted... " but knowing these small notes in this blog do not do justice to the multi-layered and thoughtful sharing.