Jan. 2, 2019

Ancient Music by Ezra Pound

A Walk Around the Property by Tony Hoagland

In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke

Silver Filigree  by Elinor Wylie

Things We Carry on the Sea  by Wang Ping

What Counts in the End by Carol Flake Chapman

Pound: He is having fun with the mid 13th century song, "Summer is I-cummin in" --
to survive the winter.  We played the music of the summer song, with the  growing seed and meadow bloom, cavorting farm animals, bursting woods.  Indeed, the "ancient" song is like a medieval wiki site, with reference to medical texts, herbs... although, what we retain is the refrain,
"sing cuccu".

Hoagland. Brilliant gem of a poem!  The title sets up the idea of "what is proper to man" --
a sort of self-assessment, in the midst of disconnection and loneliness... What brings us to the  "heart of the matter" -- but feeling... in spite of doubt, fear of being abandoned, the repeated "heart" in the
final stanza reminds me of the ivory carvings of an elephant, within an elephant, within an elephant... how, beyond the small talk, we continue inside, to carve... Love that the poem comes from a book
called "Priest Turns Therapist
Treats Fear of God".
It is not a sermon, nor a therapy session, asking us to "Sing a Song of the World", but a poem
showing how we construct narrative, replete with satisfyingly deft craft.

Roethke:  Like Hoagland, knows how to manipulate sound, metaphor.  Starts out like Dante... the quest, the search.  Depression has a way of distilling things to their essence... "A man goes far to find out what he is..."
Which I is I?  Again, a sense of one, nestling in the larger One.

Wylie:  We will have a session which shows the brilliance off this poet, who like Millay, unfortunately was relegated to a minor status in anthologies as a ladi-da, trivial rhyme-ster.
That aside, both on and beneath the surface of icicles, Wylie (1885-1928) celebrates art and beauty.

Wang Ping:  The anaphor, "We carry" morphs into "We're orphans, refugees" and a poignant plea
that others know the experience of leaving homeland, filled with words of hope in the mother tongue-
a sense that love, peace, hope, also is drifting in rubber boats, searching for a poem.

Chapman:  What counts?  How do we bank our experiences?  How does this change us?
How can I show you my experience?  Not just the pretty memories, but the hidden nuggets which wait to be "panned like gold".

Highly satisfying discussion in both groups.  

poems for Dec. 20-21, 2018

1. Just Delicate Needles ---by Rolf Jacobsen

2. A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day by John Donne

3. Lines for Winter by Mark Strand
4.  Basho Haiku

5. Winter is Good (1316). by Emily Dickinson

6. A Spell Before Winter    by Howard  Nemerov

7. Birds At Winter Nightfall (Triolet) by Thomas Hardy

8.  Departed Days by Oliver Wendell Holmes
9.  Winter Complains  by Ogden Nash

1.  Just Delicate Needles

Such a beautiful poem… but written by a nazi supporter in Norway.  So… does the poem change once we know that fact?

What if he wrote it before the war -- or what if he revised his stand?  I wish I knew the actual Norwegian version-- whether

"Just" is adjective, as in, "fair" with the paradoxical "needle", (sharp, perhaps painful ) and "delicate" (as in fine, a sense of seeing through beautiful stitchery of pine needle).  

The poem immediately corrects any implication in the title.  This is a poem about light-- needles of light, 

in the huge vastness of dark...  Be gentle with "it" -- cherish "it", focusses on a way of being.  "We hope" as last line

can stand independently, and is associated with this gentle cherishing that makes hope possible.

2.  A Nocturnal:   Difficult poem -- perhaps more understandable knowing Donne was in his metaphysical stage...having a romp with negativity?

I had the group respond with a question for Donne... why are you writing this?  What is this really about?  What do you

want us to understand?  St. Lucy: light; and Lucifer, the angel cast out of heaven... again, dark and light.  

Martin proposes the "I" of the poem is the voice of the old year passing, and St. Lucy the hope of the new year.

3.  Lines for Winter:

 Strand seems to have taken the idea of dark, to write to "you", perhaps his friend for whom he wrote the poem, perhaps the reader, perhaps himself, encouraging "us" to go on.  Our positive messages to ourselves help us survive.  Carmen shared a story of her friend who used this technique -- when things fall apart, really fall apart, and it feels nothing is left -- the body has fallen apart, everything 

one loves to do is no longer possible, everything one has is taken away... you still have the power to

"tell yourself... that you love what you are."

4. "When the winter chrysanthemums go,// there is nothing to write about// but radishes. 

Basho seems to be tongue-in-cheek.  Visual beauty gone, but you can still eat Daikon.

Perhaps up to us to make even the lowly root vegetables a  worthy subject? 

5. Winter is Good

 Winter is good - his Hoar Delights

Italic flavor yield 

... a certain slant of light... critique of "good"... contradictory quality 

Generic as a Quarry                       

And hearty - as a Rose - 

6.  A Spell Before Winter 

I love how the first two stanzas weave a magical "spell" and end with

The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

The abrupt transition from "nature" to  our human nature, with the arrival of a capitalistic Santa Claus is jarring.  Our human need to believe in him 

Conceals the thinness of essential hunger, brings out our own

Vanity and the void.

The 4th stanza with the prism-like meanings of suffer, as in pain, but also to invite, 

and overtones of Christianity, is followed by a vicious couplet which stabs at corruption

of religious intent -- as if to confirm the mention of the Bishop of Myra degraded into the fat gift-bringer in the preceding lines.

7. Triolet

The form and Hardy's treatment, give a light treatment of winter from a bird's point of view.

I love the description of the indoor human as "crumb-outcaster" and  different treatments

of "flakes fly faster" and all the berries gone -- same words, but the arrangement and punctuation make all the difference!

8.  Departed Days

Chosen by guest editor, Carmen Giménez Smith,  who curated the Poem-a-Day series for December.

Final line asks the perfect question on which to meditate: Day breaks,—and where are we?

The poem suggests that memory cannot restore old hopes as we are  drawn further away from ourselves… Discussion included mention of the Native Indian vision pit:  when come out… have your name.

9.  Ogden Nash

How to have fun-- let the winter cold speak!

  

 

poems for Dec. 12-13

1. Only as the Day Is Long, by Dorianne Laux
2.  13 Questions for the Next Economy, by Susan Briante
3.  Approach of Winter, by William Carlos Williams
4.  The Last Word of a Bluebird, by Robert Frost
5.  The Last Thing, by Ada Limón
6.  Perennials, by Maggie Smith
7.  To the New Year, by W.S. Merwin

Only as the day is long… 

There is something haunting in the title, that reminds us that nothing lasts forever. 

The six-line first sentence filled with analogies of who “she” or any of us, will be once

We die, is followed by an octet of a second sentence filled with anaphora of atoms which point 

To the not-quite vanished life ending with the word “slippers”. A final question, repeats that final word,  which tumbles out of the string of liquid sounds – laughter, cruelty, lies, lilies, to slippers.

The group had images of abandoned shoes, gathered in a bin in the holocaust museum.  Slippers… the most intimate footwear, which “she” will not need – but echo our human concern

About finding where we have put things we use daily, but cannot find… as if with her death,

She has taken even this reminder of who she is.

As Rita Dove describes it, “it is a sonnet, albeit unrhymed, still singing,

A fitting vessel for this litany of conflicted sorrow.  Indeed, we are all bags of contradictions…

juxtaposition of what is circling the earth with what is not:  boozy atoms, with piano concerto atoms…   Evanescent, yet permanent, the poem provides more than broad look at humanity… 

with an inventory of particulars of a specific person

13 questions:  13 is a number rife with associations… the 13^throll in a dozen (lagniappe);

Jesus and his 12 apostles… 13 ways of looking at a blackbird..  

“The next economy” identifies the measurement of a time period not by the reign of a monarch,

But what drives the social order:  money. Large spaces leaves holes in some of the couplets;

The line breaks create suspense but also uncertainty.  What metaphor// (line and stanza break)

(indentation) can I use to describe …

The spaces pull apart – as the poet says, she is not interested in “smoothing over crisis”

And wonders if there is potential for transformation in staying within what’s uncomfortable.

What would YOU cross out, on this list of questions? 

My favorite sound is the fragment: “a break-the-state twig-quick snap” (referring to a revolution

The group responded with these observations:

Feels like a warning. Uses questions in times of crisis…. to open mind.

poem of oppressed… French revolution… 

gestures through her examples – what is around her… turns into ominous symbols… 

Measure for measure… I’ll tell everyone… will you believe it anyway???

Omission of sentence… What price, salvation now?

WCW: The poem is an 11-line sentence, also filled with l’s.

(The unpronounced one in “half”), all, leaves, flutter, drily, let, hail, bitterly, fall, salvias, leaf.

Play with plural to singular, all falls… leaves fall… 

The r’s also lend a liquid sound: stripped, trees, struck, together, drily, driven, stream, hard, carmine bare garden.

The line breaks provide some pauses, and then the m-dashes mark a hard finality 

of a final resting place. The group summarized, “when hard times come, the best you can do is hold on.”  The rhyme of the red carmine, like living blood, and the garden, waiting for the

bareness of winter.

The last word of a bluebird: delightful scene between a wise Crow, and the fair-weather

Bluebird that Robert Frost wrote to his young daughter. The assemblage of advice ends with the delightful “And do everything!” which captures the       spirit of the poem

There is no predictability that the bluebird will return… the “perhaps” softens such certitude

With the conditional in the final line:  “He would come back and sing.”  A sense of “God willing”.  Not up to us to say what will be.

The Last Thing:  The title announces a sequence, and the first three details set a scene with a jay, a mouth, and a roaring quiet.  The jarring note is that these are not “happenings” so much

As “noticings” in the mind of the poet shared with “you”.  By the end of the poem, it

Feels not so much as eavesdropping on a dream than overhearing a dying mother talking to

a child, or  someone being visited in a nursing home; two old people. The confessional “I” does not discount her own “big deal” of noticing. The term “love poison” came up. 

It is an unsettling poem as if on purpose, and makes me wonder, about what I would want

To notice as the “last thing” in my life, in another’s, or simply in a day, a passage of time…

Perennials: Two lines at a time: slows us down… as we take in ghost towns… and wind, praise of ruin, what survives and this real voice of a child calling to her mother in a real garden, “pretend I’m winning”.  Effective set up to address the need for someone to bear witness.

To the New Year:  W.S. Merwin talks to the New Year as gently as to a new born.

Each line, suspended without punctuation.

First light of the New Year, still… a dove, whether or not anyone is aware,

The here and newness, our hopes such as they are, still possible.

poems for Dec. 5-6, 2018

1. The Poem Said, by Michael Dickman (New Yorker, Nov. 26, 2018 issue)
2. Transubstantiation by Susan Firer
3. In This Country, I Hear, by Bertolt Brecht. (translated in new volume of his poems, 2018; 11/12/18
4. Autumn Passage by Elizabeth Alexander
5. Equinox by Esther Morgan
6. A New National Anthem, by Ada Limon
7.Let America be America Again, Langston Hughes
(I too,
Spanish next to the English translation of Roque Dalton, "Like You"

**
Comments:
1,  I love the title -- it's the poem that said these things --
so what does that mean about words and how we use them?  about poetry.
Hallucinatory quality -- is grass marijuana, lidocaine, a numbing street drug,
ramen and coke a substitute for rum and coke or cocaine... breathe sugar--
Like Kubla Khan, the sounds weave around... and there's a pleasant sense of entering a bath of wit.

The experience of waking up in the morning.


2.  The next poem got caught up in petrichor

And one thing becoming another, until

rain ribbons the windows, and rocks

deepen and shine their colors in the rain,

the smell of the rain like ichor, which runs

in the veins of the gods.

The tone felt baptismal, sacred... but the lineation and sound was not very poetic.

A cycle of life... finding beauty in sorrow.

3.  Long discussion about how "not-smiling" is apathologized in America.

Role of sales in America.  That this is an old poem, written by a social activist

who wrote 3-Penny Opera... reprinted in the Nov. 12, 2018 New Yorker. 

The jab of the poem is the problem with blind acceptance... "buying into" a culture
without question, at risk for self-deceit.  What is happiness?  What traps us into
believing something is "successful"?  If we all hide behind the mask of a pleasant smile,
we cannot distinguish the reality of people.  We dare not not smile.

4.  A totally accurate description of the beginning of death.  The repetition of the fragment introduced by "on" has a feel of an ode.  Unusual juxtapositions:  miraculous dying body; dazzling toddler; the body magnificent as it dims, shrinks, turns to something else.  A sense of autumn, the glory (repeated 3 times) of the vibrant colors, passing into death of winter... On… as in onwards… through the passage… urging… 

5.  A totally accurate description of the innocence of a baby sleeping-- and beautifully poised
with 8 lines about a child balancing on "I feel the earth's pause" (see title) followed by 8 lines, all about nature.  Love the "lifelong tilt...."

6. The start is "ineloquent" but when she starts to speak about the flag, and all that needs saying
in a true National Anthem -- that could be sung in all countries if we could understand "my bones
are your bones..."  Wonderful poem.

7.  I had the group read the words in parentheses like a chorus.  No black people attended.  We were like trespassers, adopting the words of black people like outsiders.  We also read "I too Sing America" written 9 years before, in 1926 which was more hopeful.

8.  The Roque Dalton -- the Spanish revealed the problem with translation in the opening lines.
I love love. vs.  Like you I love love, life.

Haitus: from June 6- November 14 2018

This year was around May, for some reason, blogger made it difficult to post write-ups, so I just stopped.
That's not to say 6-7 poems were not sent out, sometimes 14 different poems between the two groups.
New members came, regulars swelled like tides coming in, always 20, just never the same...

I was grateful for the hiatus, as it was a challenging year with big changes.
Two memorials for my father; a visit in the summer to see my father-in-law, who also passed away,
almost a year after my father.

My husband's retirement, and re-peated, "almost" retirement all summer.

In addition to life at home, we made many trips to visit friends... saw our family as best we could, as
everyone seems super busy.
When not traveling, we did a lot of hosting, and thoroughly enjoyed our sister city contacts, with a visit to Rennes in March, and receiving a delegation in May.

International travel:
March and Aug visit to London;
March in Brussels (as well as London and France);
Trip to Portugal : Aug. 29-September 8.
Trip to Japan : Oct. 21- to Nov. 11

Talks at Rundel (Jan. + April 18) NYSAFLT (March); book launch (May);  Twilight Venus !!
Happy to provide details.

French found increased use moderating tours at MAG from October 6 on for the special exhibit on Monet as well as moderating The French architect (11/14).

I am not sure if writing up the poems makes a difference in my life or not.
It's rather like playing the piano every day -- I don't do this in preparation for a concert, but
for the pure pleasure of being in contact with something that feeds my soul.

I will be using this blog more like a personal sketch book --  but please know I welcome comments.

Poems from Oct. (November:no meeting 10/17, Pittsford)
Thanks to Kathy Button, David Sanders and Elaine Olsson for facilitating 10/24; 10/31 and Nov 7.

Poems for November 14:
Like You, Roque Dalton
The Names, Billy Collins
Names of the Lion -- a selection from David Larsen's translation of Ibn Khalawayh
This is not a Small Voice, Sonia Sanchez
The Blessed Angels, Toi Derricotte
Keeper of Sheep, Alberto Caeiro (one of the many names used by Fernando Pessoa.)
Deleting Names -- a Decaying Sestina, Lawrence Schimel
When Giving is all we have,  Alberto Rios

Poems for November 21:
Thanksgiving in the Anthropocene, 2015 : Craig Santos Perez
The Pumpkin, John Greenleaf Whitter
Peace Path, Heid E. Erdrich
Crows, Marilyn Nelson
The House on Moscow St., Marilyn Nelson
The Moment, Marie Howe
The Moment, Margaret Atwood

O Pen - Poems for June 6

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen

Remember by Joy Harjo

Prayer by Galway Kinnell, 1927 - 2014

Experience by Carl Sandburg

To You by Walt Whitman

poems for May 30-31

Ritual Object by Tsitsi Ella Jaji

Touched by Deborah Tall

Answers  by Virginia Lee Hines

 The Laws of God, the Laws of Manby Alfred Edward Housman

What The Dickens?  by Cortney Lamar Charleston

Broken Sonnet For The Decorative Cotton For Sale At Whole Foodsby ASHLEY M. JONES

 Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats

See poems for commentary

May 22-23, 2018

see poems for commentary 

Poem for South African Womenby June Jordan

Commemoration of the 40,000 women and children who, August 9, 1956, presented themselves in bodily protest against the “dompass” in the capital of apartheid. Presented at The United Nations, August 9, 1978.

from Passion (1980). (see Interview p. 66; March 21, 1979: Poetry in Person)

 

Sunday Lemons by Derek Walcott

[1]p. 122 Poetry in Person.  "London. wondeful line, -- marvelous exactment… is it in the music? the metaphor? in the rhythm that moves as the line moves…"

Walcott:  This is going to be very detailed, what I'm going to say:  I don't like that line anymore.

… the pitch of a line is where one tests the honesty of a poet… reality is the vibration that happens differently to millions and millions of people over generations, and that is where the validity of the thing is. 

… That line is one extra key, one extra pitch up that is not true to the harmony, or maybe the modesty, or what is being painted."  modesty of speech: plain words, not necessarily the right ones. p. 123

vague (wave in French). the joyous torment all your life, doing the wrong thing… "ruin a fine tenor voice for effect that bring down the house". (Auden, In Praise of Limestone)

Water by Philip Larkin2

chemotherapy by Lucille Cliftonthe right hand column shows words from the original versions. Poetry in Person p, 158-9)

La Chapelle. 92nd Division. Ted. by Rita Dove (September, 1918)

Love is smoke stardust-like but smoke nonetheless. – Kamakura, Sayumi

https://soundcloud.com/larry-goldings/its-only-smoke-1

Like a ghost that dances from the tip of a lit cigarette
I know what romance is, but it hasn't happened yet
Watch it floating up to heaven only knows
Disappearing before you get too close

It's only smoke
You might say a flame is burning
Only smoke
But my heart is more discerning
Only smoke...

Eyes are hypnotizing when they hold you within their embrace
Words are mesmerizing even when they've got nothing to say

The game is charming in an empty kind of way
What's the harm in asking me to play?

It's only smoke
You might say a flame is burning
Only smoke
But my heart is more discerning
I keep dreaming of a fire, but when I wake up to the cold
It's only smoke

Nov. 28

November 28-29

Thanksgiving by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Rhapsody by Aditi Machado

portraitures and erasures by Chiwan Choi

Instructions on Not Giving Up Ada Limón

Images by Jaime Manrique

Style of 19th century... familiarity of form... tucking in message; 
fun of choices... Rhapsody or rhubarb? and where do you go when you leave familiar behind?
sounds... Ashbery-like...
dream-sequence... passionate, personal; memory and what it is like for parents to leave homeland,
and lineage ends with their children... legacy and they die on foreign soil.

Fine then... I'll take it.  (Whatever it is.). A sense of confidence of who this tree, leaf, being, is.  
Images:  photographs... imagining the stories.

Here are a few more thoughts from the group:

" I realized when I thought about class that it is no wonder we all were so responsive to the poem "Instructions on Not Giving Up"! We did talk about searching for "roots" and the significance of family "trees". And then the idea of legacy and how a tree drops it's seeds in abundance as it nears the conclusion of it's life cycle. We humans might not be able to understand how we drop, and receive, seeds of our life to and from family and friends. And even if there isn't progeny to carry on a family name, there is the progeny of us, of the essence of us, which lives on in our friends and in our family as we have interacted with them. And then as a dropped seed, it lives on in the legacy of themselves. All of that cannot be chartered in the DNA!! Maybe it could be in the interstitial fluid that Bernie talked about as if we filter each moment of the day through the subliminal essence our entire being!??!!"

The “I” in the poem that talks about all that over-the-top headiness of spring so beautifully captured in the sonics,

almost seems to grow into a “we” — so it’s not that only  the tree seems to say, “I’ll take it all” —

it’s a contagious, inclusive spirit for all of us.

From Maura’s Grandpa Fred Goerdes:

Don’t you be 

        what you ain’t,

If you isn’t 

        what you am,

Then you ain’t

        worth a damn.

May 16-17

One Heart - by Li-Young Lee

From Blossomsby Li-Young Lee

Micro-minutes on Your Way to Work by Brenda Hillman

Species Prepare to Exist After Money by Brenda Hillman

Between the Wars by Robert Hass

 The Song of the Banjo by Rudyard Kipling

In Poetry in Person edited by Alexander Neubauer, which Carolyn brought to class,
the interview with Li-Young Lee speaks about interiority-- the pilgrimage in search
of self.  For him, writing is an act of love... so this search for the self has nothing
of Byron's solipsism... His poems are shapes of love.  So it is with the first poem,
which opened and closed the session.  He captures the "one-ness" and connection,
the sounds of ethereal "f"'s (flying, first, freedom, fastening, falling) threading
the sense of release in the "work of wings" as we are born, journey to the end of life.
Note the past tense -- the work was always freedom...
The use of "even" -- it is not just flying that is born of nothing -- everything is --
very much like a Zen Koan.

After ending with long and rather tedious Kipling describing the Boer war, we returned
to Li-Young Lee after speaking of Kipling's contradictory story of sending his legally blind
son to the front... the conflict of patriotism and wanting himself to serve, and projecting that
on his own child, he willingly sacrifices.  How do you resolve that?

Li-Young Lee perhaps allows us to examine the I, which preoccupies him, without using
the pronoun or giving a sense of the poem as a mirror as Hillman does when she reduces herself to
little i (Species prepare to exist after money).  Who is I, in a culture, in the inexactness of the self
we live with yet, also the I which is the universe... where all small i's are extinguished.

From Blossoms, allows us the journey of the peach from blossom to the fruit savored from hand to mouth--as if ripe juice were running through our fingers and chin...  Sensual, the gentle mix of
outward sign (Peaches, painted) and inner "jubilance".  Little English glitch... the brown paper bag
does not come from blossoms... From blossoms comes peaches in a brown paper bag...
the b's and p's (blossom, brown, bag, bought, boy, bend... boughs... bite, full circle to repeat of "blossom" accentuating the miracle of peach (4 times mentioned, and "eaten" in the 4th and final stanza... peach as eternal life in Chinese culture, allowing joy.

We enjoyed the first Brenda Hillman poem... the title is a wonderful hook..  We explored "silver"
and "nothing" the repeat where the two words are separated... the blend of lyric and prosaic...
the sense of moonlight, flash of feather, a distant ice age, and "caged" stars.  In the end, it felt
we were rewarded with increased enjoyment.  Less so for the second poem, which also contained
counting -- seven tiny silences... like the 5 zeroes + one.  There was a cleverness to it but I am
reminded  of Auden's comment:  "Poets who want to change the world tend to be unreadable."

Robert Hass:  His poetry doesn't push beyond the normal breath.  His image of "whole notes of a requiem the massed clouds croaked" could be referring to redwings, cattails, or details of Polish history.  Odd "lifeline" effect of the opening line repeated line 15.  No stanza break, everything smashed together...which gives a feeling of assault.  Night as beggar; two different ways...
first, with silence in tatters; secondly simply dressed as beggar only to end on  children begging chocolate.  Unsettling.

Between wars... 1922 ...

Kipling's style seems incongruent with the horrors of war with "pilly-willy-winky-winky popp"
and tump-tumpa-tumpa-tump... tunka to tinka, plunka with a tara-rara-rara.  We discussed at length the contradictions of his personal life.

May 9-10

Hymn to Timeby Ursula K. Le Guin

Adios by Naomi Shihab Nye

Being but Men by Dylan Thomas

Paradise  by George Franklin

The Two by Philip Levine

Against the Kitchen Wall  by Eleanor Ross Taylor

In a letter to my mother, not sure when, I describe to her the idea of "O Pen" as a chance 

for people to respond to how a poem is "working on them".  For me, what counts is a poem

which pries open an angle that allows a bit of light to glimmer on the complexity of being human.

Today's selection certainly provides food for thought!

Le Guin:  Peaceful tone, and a "sense of complete thoughts expressed without the benefit of grammar" as Jim phrased it.  Strings of words, familiar, like "Let there be" --

and the mind continues... "light" -- but the poem insists that time, not God, is making 

a declaration about the 4th dimension where time, light, energy swirl in being.

Both groups thought of the song, "Turn, turn, turn"-- with a thought that when a poem is set to music, usually, it is the music that takes the upper hand.  A Hymn to time -- a praise song... without

the usual trimmings or need for music... Instead, there is a subtle crafting which develops a sense

of "all-ness" :the four fragments that start with "And" and end with

a period; the repeat of radiance; the rhyme of dance/expanse/chance... the sandwich of slant rhyme of room/home/returning to "womb"... the tiny reality of gnats juxtaposed with radiance...

Le Guin is versed in the Tao, having worked on its translation and here, captures the spirit.

Comments: Round of life… Tale for the time being… Japanese Buddhist Monk… or Heidegger,

Time and Being... 

we're all "timed" beings.. 

role of time.  Story of the trapped miners and only one miner had  a watch and lied about time. 

He knew how long they had, the others didn't, and was the only one who didn't survive.

We don't understand anything until we have distance from it…

Adios:   In English "goodbye" was "God be with you" -- the final farewell... be with God...

The advice, 3rd line: Use it. Learn where it begins,-- the small alphabet : a... of departure.

The opening stanza seems to point to how we communicate... the importance of wishing
each other well... like a blessing... commending, commitment,  benediction.  
Juxtaposed with the sensual, smelliness of decay... the liquid "l" of linger, leaves, smell, mold...
how leaves is both noun and verb.  In a way, a poem of finality... 
Like the sound of earth on a coffin in the final its... followed by silence.

At first I didn't think this was one of her strong poems -- but on spending time with it, 
I admire how she treats difficult subjects lightly…with feeling.
I sense a long voyage -- she  takes us way out w/ goodbye and yet keeps you close.

Each line allows a pause… 

Being but men seems to start with our human-ness, our fears.. The role of "afraid"--

or is it merely descriptive... the w's whisper in a world of wings and cries... wonder watching the stars.  He tells the aim... but that changes nothing.  The opening line repeats as last line. 

Walk into trees, as opposed to climbing them.  Contrast of adults/children, a sort of Wordsworthian celebration of innocence, which allows "ascent" as opposed to walking into obstacles... Role of

"noiseless" and rooks -- careful not to wake up the dark... able to transcend...

We wondered if this were written about the the rumblings of world war 2 ... 

The word "soft" -- for syllables and for ascent... the sibilance repeated in bliss and stars... 

The Franklin was a delightful parody... what do we wish for with "paradise"?  We do not know

the outcome of Mephistopheles...  O Pen diverged into a long discussion about Job... Jung, Noah's Flood and John provided this link to lyrics.

https://www.google.com/search?q=before+the+deluge+lyrics&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari   

Oasis enjoyed the pokes at "perfection" where poets "mumble, make last minute revisions on the marble"  (staircase to heaven?).

The story of "The Two" is masterful in its complexity.  Who are these "two"-- a "he" and a "she"

unsure of what to become... the parallel of Fitzgerald, who started as an Ad man (hence the famous

one-liner "we keep you clean Muscatine"...  Oasis felt it was like a writing exercise... like describing a Hopper painting, making up a solution for. a problem... but addressing the mystery of love.

By the end "Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write" takes on large proportions--

life in America... what work is... what betrayal of the American Dream... 

Eleanor Ross Taylor: for me a poet I didn't know, but happy to have stumbled upon.

We are on the edge of a story -- a sense of being in a secluded prairie with a posse of evil

men about to lay waste to this woman's home... and yet, she is the one who accuses herself

of being the one who "laid waste".  The adjectives bankrupted, malpractice... give the sense

of abortion... the "gifted wheat" -- money?  Sacred pear-- "life".

A satisfying poem, even though left with unresolved mystery.  

my FIFTH book-- Launch May 5

**
So, the last  entry on this blog, I was too tired to be able to articulate much of anything...
My fatigue by last night was so great, I couldn't even stay awake for the
 delightful presentation of pictures, bringing humor to the "stuff of everyday life"--
I do recall the selfies... someone hailing a cab, but all you see are the arms doing an
"I'm a little teapot dance".

Perhaps the exhaustion aside from little sleep and too many projects, is also the
looming question of why I write the blog... no one reads it, as far as I know... rather
like me writing morning pages of words... they are little bridges to thoughts... most
of which are temporary scaffolds in which to imagine beautiful buildings...

We returned from Europe, family, friends and Rennes (sister city) connections...
followed by my presentation at the NYSAFLT conference on livening up the French class with poetry...  and Michael Czarnecki's new book, and my query to him about publishing my
new and revised.  The answer was yes -- and let's do it for poetry month -- so the ms went
to him March 25.  Since then:
April 14: Pittsford Library Talk : When Words Come Alive
April 15: Nice Boots Collaboration
April 18: The Fun of Nuts & Bolts & Possibilities (Rundel)
April 23: MCC French Club -- poetry
April 26: Ad Hoc at W&B
April 28: Poetry, Potluck

Hosting of Chinese Film Maker, Ermao Zhong April 25-29
2 sessions prepared for W&B, but cancelled April 21, 28
ready for May:
May 5:  BOOK LAUNCH!!!
May 9 : Garden Club tour of the MAG
Teacher In-Service on using Centennial Park and Poets Walk

Here is the flyer the library put together for me.  Picture is from 2010 I believe...
same picture as the one used by Susan Trien in her write up about O Pen...




I have been up sometimes before 4 am, thinking poetry... looking at the voices in my head
who nag me about why I think I should even consider putting a book together.
I try to treat them with kindness.  They come from feelings I gathered along the way
that I didn't matter, was not important, forgetting that indeed, although there was a time
when my mother couldn't be herself, much less a mother, there was also a time she gave
me the gifts I enjoy so much:  enthusiasm and energy to connect people (her teaching
of Sunday school; my writing of poems for Church holy days when a choir member 2 years ago)
my joy of teaching French, art and poetry appreciation; her joy of teaching tennis, and being a counselor at Aloha Hive with nature puzzles...

So many parallels... and finally, I can separate from her -- not be afraid that her struggle indicates
my struggle -- that I will have failed for 20 years not to be the mother my children deserved...
that the next step is to be institutionalized for another 25 years in a locked ward.  How she
maintained her dignity and was able to survive is an inspiring story.

The poems in Twilight Venus do not dwell on her, on my working out of complex relationships,
but reflect the work of a poet eager to mediate the ability to see the sacred in the natural world
with the ability to view injustice, pain and sorrow with greater compassion.

I learn from the generosity of the people who wrote blurbs-- as I steal from MJ above and from
Bart: Oh yes, I'm mercurial, but also capable of writing an ode to a broom, "making room to mirror
time's sweep... in time with each heartbeat, making room for the quiet...

and from Tony: resplendent, elegant surfaces... to encircle life's bone-stark realities, says Tony...
all of us wanting-- our exquisite longings that lead us further than we thought we had a right to go.

and Sylvie:  colors, rhythms, images gathered through my love of music, visual arts, personal life journey.

I push my humble rock of poetry up the slopes...  do not childe myself for having chosen this route,
but feel like a seven year old... curious and eager to see where I am going next.

**
People who know me like my book.  People who don't know me well don't ask about it...
What to make of that?

Poems for May 2-3

The Writer byRichard Wilbur, 1921 - 2017

 The Habits of Lightby Anna Leahy

My God, It’s Full of Starsby Tracy K. Smith

Disobedience- AA Milne

pi by Wisława Szymborska
The Republic of Poetry by Martin Espada

The opening poem  develops both an insight into the writing process as well as a tender father-daughter sentiment many of us as parents have felt, observing our children... knowing they are the ones who need to navigate their boat;  What do we wish for them?  Wilbur, with  his balance of elegant craft and authentic emotion, wishes her "lucky passage" -- as he develops the metaphor of the ship, on a journey.  He, the writer, knows the path of a writer, and brings up the story of a trapped  starling-- akin to what it is a writer wants to free into writing, put into the world.  Watching her, this wish for her "lucky passage" is also a celebration of writing as a process... Wishing this "harder" is not the same of wishing this "even more" -- but has an idiomatic ring along with the sense of "hard" -- which is the nature of finding the road, surviving the voyage...  The door that separates the Father from the daughter is akin to the starling trying to to find an open window...
There is so much to admire about this poem-- how he pauses, then the daughter pauses, the parallel
of the seasoned writer with one just starting out... the sounds, and the lovely build-up of rhythms:
4 adjectives in a row... 3 one-syllable ones with the 4th one, with 4 syllables separated by line break:
We watched the sleek, wild, dark       
And iridescent creature      

-- Interesting that a starling, whose feathers are indeed iridescent, is not native to America... but introduced because of the remarkable plumage, and now, like violets in a garden, is overpopulated.

The next two poems were taken from "Brain Pickings" -- a weekly, generous helping of ideas-- see: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Popova

Habits of Light... and some thought of nuns and their black and white uniform... others shared information about the woman astronomer...  Henrietta Leavitt, astronomer : how she measured the distance from Earth to stars; discovered 2400 of them, yet was not recognized.

Who are we?  What does it matter that we are recognized or not? Her poem is dense and addresses
relationship -- the old school relevance of poet and astronomer who consider vastness, and try to
pin it down. Back to Nemerov and "The Makers": masters of interval relationship and scale.There is a  completeness… yet one can't isolate details. 

Here, an obscure astromer not noticed until finally through time  her discoveries seem to matter.

A sort of  stealth poem about the physics of life.  how things are not noticed… 

We loved the Tracey K. Smith poem, learning about her father, and discussed the glitches and mistakes of the hubble... the oversights and overconfidence, the hubris of launching it without

testing... the cost of the repair.  Smith gives us a portrait of her father... and also a portrait of the times...The last line points to our need to understand what comprehension is all about...

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.   

The A.A. Milne was a breath of levity... with its underpinnings of menace.  Fun to read and hear.

Pi... another brilliant poem by Szymborska-- her imagination is so great -- weaving numbers

with  story... as one person put it, like reading a double helix...

The "plot line" becomes clear when you  skip the numbers--

finally what is interrupted or connected as these two languages, one of decimal system and the other for calculating spatial geometries... Can they communicate?  be translated? 

… 

We read the Republic of Poetry -- apparently not quite the right version.  Jan will bring it next session.