O Pen March 28 + first 3 poems discussed Rundel April 5

the clean up from March 21 was phenomenal!

— poem by Michael Czarnecki that I read before starting from his new book YOU.

(there is an inner self/mostly hidden from others/mostly hidden from our own self)

— Paul Brennan’s “synopsis” of the Szymborska poem, “Plato, or Why on Earth”

— a re-formatting of the William Bronk poem to reflect John Weisenthal’s “call and response.

Provided from Judith:

from Watt by Samuel Beckett  (1953)

who may tell the tale

of the old man?

weigh absence in a scale?

mete want with a span?

the sum assess

of the world's woes?

nothingness

in words enclose?

+

"The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days and the new-mown hay and the wood-pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting over again."

On the slate for 3/28:

what if a much – E.E. Cummings

Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Zero Circle, translated Rumi, by Coleman Barks. (see March 29, 2018)

The Past Suffers Too by Ben Purkert (see March 29, 2018)

Slateku by John Lee Clark.   an invented form by John Lee Clark.  He calls it a "slateku". It is a poem that is written, or could have been written, with the classic Braille slate and stylus. The slate has four rows of twenty-eight cells each. Some think of it as writing backward, pressing down right to left to make dots stand up on the other side, but I think of it as writing forward in a different direction.

Spring!  Beckett's one long sentence captures the feel not only of the return of Spring... but the larger sense of the cyclical nature of life, and the sense of the wheel of the universe that is also in the Cummings and Rumi.
The Purkert gave a sense of a 21st century Rumi... the past, which we think might be buried, is condemned to be repeated... the poem addresses the difficulty of staying in the "now".

**
On April 5, we discussed the passage from Watt by Beckett at Rundel and Martha thought he wrote this after WW II.  This gives a different emphasis to "the whole bloody business starting over again"-as WWI was supposed to be the war to end all wars.  We remarked that not much time was given
to Spring either at the beginning and end... perhaps it is the shortest season... and pummeled about
by winter, pushed aside by summer...

We enjoyed very much the clever use of language and wonderful sounds of the Cummings.  The breathy "wh" to "give truth to summer's lie"... perhaps starting in Spring, but the 2nd and 3rd stanzas are winter...   Contrasts of opposites, (king/beggar; friend/fiend/ life/death)
similarities of form (2nd and 4th lines rhyme; 6th line in parentheses).
How do we measure things?  space, time, seasons, positions... but what is man, but living
on our "hugest home"-- and this enigmatic last line:  the most who die, the more we live...
Does it help to understand it given its context  of 3rd and final stanza that starts : a dawn of a doom of a dream... ?  What if such a dream bit the university in two...  What if the choice were forever, where  never resurfaces...

Sympathy:  as in compassion shared... not empathy, compassion felt for another...
Dunbar takes the image of caged bird... first stanza, What is feels (what it knew outside of the cage and how that felt... ) Second stanza, why he beats his wing... Third, why it sings.
It is an uplifting poem, although the idea of taking freedom away from a bird is depressing,
troubling.  Interesting that the rhyme scheme in the first stanza is abaabcc.
the scent of flowers "steals" as in, sneaks through barriers... rhymes with feels.
The exclamation after "Alas!" first line is not the same as the last word of the stanza, feels!
I too, whether in a cage or not, know these signs of Spring, nature.

The exclamation after "beats his wing!" resounds with the "ing" sounds that are in 1, 3, 4, 6, 7.
The sorrow of chains, the blood, the pain, the scars, do not keep the trapped wings of spirit from beating.

The third stanza proposes the song as prayer, plea... the fact that if you sing, the message
goes beyond the bars... maybe someone else will hear it...

In contrast, Maya Angelou's poem, "Caged Bird" inspired by the Dunbar, takes on a different dimension.  What associations with "fearful trill"?  Is it the sound the bird makes, that expresses
the bird's fear, or that of those who hear it?  Unlike Sympathy, which draws on universal spirit,
this poem emphasizes the importance of freedom.