The Butterfly Houseby Frank Ormsby
My Father in English. by Richard Blanco Listen to audio https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/11/my-father-in-english.
High Dangerous by Catherine Pierce
Eating Grapes Downward by Christian Wiman
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We read the first poem Oliver by stanza, which for all its ambling quatrains, is only in three sentences. The first sentence has two end-line commas, and a third separating "is" from "is".
The second contains one colon, one comma. The third, a colon, two semi-colons, a comma between the repeated "to let it go". Although the line breaks at first seem arbitrary, both groups agreed
the short lines, frequent stanza breaks give a quiet sense of flow, a simplicity of form and is less forbidding to read.
The enjambments act as springboards that land lightly as if to paint the images:
,,, treesinto pillars
of light
**
tapers
of cattails
...ffloating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds
A lovely meditation on specifics observed in nature (you love, hold onto with all your life)
and when it's time, to let go. The transience of life, passage of named to nameless... the mystery
of beginnings, passages, where nothing is forever. Salvation, like the scent of cinnamon
blended with fulfillment, is not something we can know.
The Butterfly House we also read by stanzas. In the first quatrain, we are introduced to an almost overabundance with the drama of the enjambed "They spend their days..." floating through the stanza break to "being exquisite in a history without wars." We are able...
and wouldn't you love to read, "capable of such exquisite existence"... but no... an un-named snake
appears, and we forget its existence because of the beauty of the butterflies.
In the tercet, any negativity of "too many butterflies" becomes "a thousand bright sails opening"--
a sense of transcending danger, emerging like the butterflies, often a symbol for the soul.
Do listen to Richard Blanco read "My Father in English". This You Tube gives you the start:
The New Yorker link https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/11/my-father-in-english
may or may not work if you have used up the "free articles..." The gentle, lilting tone as he reads Spanish in the first six lines is filled with the beauty
of nature in Cuba... a long pause after "island home he left" although there is no stanza break,
em-dash or indication or the long pause before the 7th line begins
"to spell out the second half of his life in English--" which does have the directive to pause because of
the em-dash.
Each six lines, we see a different part of his story.
His life in New York, in six lines... which includes learning 15 new words each day. The play
on indeed, where he practices them mixed in with Spanish. Another six lines, we hear the repeated
misuse of indeed, and the fact that he refuses to use English to tell his wife I love you.
Curious that the enjambment of that line is such that you wonder how or if he expressed his true feelings to others aside from his wife.
indeed, the husband who refused to say, I love you
in English to my mother, the man who died without
true translation.
The last six lines, the son translates indeed for him. The wording is such that a true translation is the truth the son tells of his father.
The poem is shaped like a rectangular container, with no breaks, no breathing space, which
made me think how it must feel to live in a reduced space in a city filled with skyscrapers,
neon, glass, and a job polishing steel 12 hours a day.
On the 31st line, indeed has the last word. It left many of us moved to tears.
High Dangerous by Catherine Pierce is a marvelous "mondegreen" http://www.uh.edu/~mbarber/mondegreens.html
say slowly: Hy- drangeas... and it does sound like hi dangerous...
Later "tender age shelters" sounds like ten (and under)age; elders. "district-policy" sounds like "this strict policy".
What do you have in your "fear-box"? What are we teaching our children about trust, stewardship of the planet? About beauty?
"Eating Grapes Downward" is a delightful romp of what might be found in a writer's note-book,
which does not usually follow any common sense order. The language such as vile up speaking
of political opinions... and the description of the cousin who sounds like a fearsome karate champ.
We could feel the sun slamming the blacktop, the pump jacks beaking like prehistoric crows
down there in Midland, Texas in 1973...
The mention of Samuel Butler, 19th century author of the satirical novel Erewhon, and his passage
about eating grapes, https://biblioklept.org/2015/03/31/always-eat-grapes-downwards-samuel-butler/
As reader, we want to repeat the line "In truth, I don't quite follow the logic..."
and then go on to read the final stanza which romps through four more things in the notebook...
Most of us ended the poem in stitches... happy to have petted the impossibility of a half-baked ironic symbol... but, knowing full well, the wounds we might feel come from the absurd sorrow in the present in which we live.
