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.