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.