War and Peace -- Chana Bloch (" ")
Evergreen--
How every Happens (Based on a study of the wave) -- May Swenson
Mirror -- Sylvia Plath
A Miracle for Breakfast -- Elizabeth Bishop
Frederick Douglass is Dead --Joshua Bennett
[Insert Smile] by Emma Corwin
Season to Season: Big theme, casually said... the end- rhyme "fools" us a little, just
as the poem's start confesses about the poet... "When does dying begin?" is not a usual
question... but the poem lends itself to address this as subject rather than "what is life all about..."The poem doesn't announce itself as a "how to" handbook... but reminds us of things
we all know: "eventually time tells you everything" -- even if we don't look up at a winter sky
and see the sky "like a taped tactical descent/of pocket paratroopers"...
The poem is infused with curiosity about what could happen, embracing "the trick: to stay in doubt".
This prompted some people to go into the role of doubt... how the opposite is not faith, but rather
the limiting role of certitude.
I love the complexity of the final stanza... this man, a cancer survivor, writing as if to
hint that he could write his obituary and be at peace with it-- regrets and all. Judith quoted: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ to consider you might be mistaken" – Oliver Cromwell…
If you are alive... well, the deal is to recognize life is still ticking with you involved in it.
"And you might still be here, if life that cast you still needs a dying man". What does that mean
to each of us? What part do we play, season by season,not knowing when we must exit the stage?
Mention of Tagore came up: ": I shall die again and again to prove that life is inexhaustible."
War and Peace... Venus (love) or Mars, which, like low-flying planes also are not "stars" to wish on...
but planets and mythical gods. What is the "Way to the Future" to hope for?
What would be your one BIG wish? Bloch uses the past tense to describe what feel like wishes that do not turn out... overtones whether Biblical (foxes that spoil the vine...), child-like (apples as birds that fly away) or sarcastic (marriage like a ship scraping rocky strait of Gibraltar) bring us to the delusion of a war's "conclusion". Flag and shovel... planting -- bodies? new crops ? The adjective "elated" jars when you think of the losses, the price paid by "winners". Swords into ploughshares takes on a different spin. Expectations, perceptions are just like wishes.
Evergreen: "What still grows in Winter?" The poet asks this twice. The talk of witches and "femmes"makes more sense when we know the poet who wrote this is transgender... and read his note about why he wrote the poem. However, many felt the poems was written by someone in an insane asylum...
As Mike said, "how confusing do we allow a poem to be until we call the poet on it?"
On the other hand, many found this poem intriguing, calling on associations with organic flow
of rivers... possibilities of trains... escape? adventure? ready-made journeys?
I was intrigued by this sentence: The river rock dig into my shoulders
like a lover who
knows I don’t want/ power.
I'm not sure I understand it -- the rock is something solid/permanent… and I sense relationship with no need for power. The note alludes to the presidential election and the river giving itself over to ice each day and the way he drafted the poem...
How to understand the last sentences?
"I could belong to the evergreen.
Safety is a rock I
throw into the river.
My body, ready. Don’t even think
a train run through this
town anymore."
However it is... I like the mystery... the isolation -- the sense that no matter the circumstances,
we remain alive, challenged to find aliveness...
If you start the Swenson poem and read up, "When nothing is happening"...
then return to the second sentence starting with "when it happens..." and read down,
you follow the flow of a wave... the smaller "something" stacks up" / nothing pulls back/
and that pause, "then nothing is happening.
The final sentence starts with "Then... something stacks up..."
Lovely concrete poem which does indeed, imitate a wave... Mark Doty used it in his book, "The Art of Description" (2010) although its publication dates 32 years back in American Poetry Review.
Old is often so good. Mirror, by Sylvia Plath is one such. The first stanza sounds like a riddle and captures the mystical quality of mirrors... It is one of the three jewels to carry mentioned in the Chrysanthemum and the sword... and one covers a mirror when
someone dies…
it can swallow whatever it sees... no judgement only exact "truth"...
The tone changes when it is compared to a lake in the second stanza. There is a biblical sense to
"terrible" fish, like Jonah and the whale... a sense of self-reflection over time... the importance
of self-examination (I'm looking at the man in the mirror...)...
The Calligramme captures the idea of mirror as what one wishes to see... which, much as it looks
enclosed and alive, is not what is imagined... in a circular text.
The Miracle for Breakfast is a marvelous sestina which tells a story. Judith proposes this:
Bishop is simply capturing a happy feeling about her life in Brazil.
I love it because of the way the repeating end words drive the narrative with unexpected twists.
Frederick Douglass is dead -- is a brilliant poem that spills in tercets with abrupt enjambments--
My favorite moment:
Frederick in the White/
House kitchens, Frederick in the faucets//
Frederick posted up at every corner
of the Oval office, shredding documents
invisibly, a blade in each of his eighteen
laser hand.
Frederick, separated from his family name. Refusing to ride until we are ready. Until//
our prayers are knives or sheets of flame.
The same need then as now... a sense of found poetry.
The final poem is brilliant as well. The disconnection of the break between the two parts of
the poem is like the mask of a smile saying "I'm fine" when the truth is I'm [...] not really/
fine...
the context turns the tables at the end in this non-conversation.
I'm fine. (every time you ask? Of course not. Because
You smile. (just as brightly
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