March 6: Elaine O. kindly led the discussion:
At a Window by Carl Sandburg
Poetry and the Weather by Tom Speer
Errata by Tom Speer
The Oystermen by Joanne Clarkson
Sonnet 18. Retold (by James Anthony) to Left, Original, R.
At a Window by Carl Sandburg
On Why I Must Decline To Receive The Prayers You Say You Are Constantly Sending
by Tony Hoagland
After He’s Decided to Leave by Elizabeth Acevedo
I Never Figured How to Get Free by Donika Kelly
I Stop Writing the Poem byTess Gallagher
Poems in the Tribute to Tony Hoagland in The Sun, March 2019
Candlelight
America. (use March 21-2)
The Social Life of Water
Special Problems in Vocabulary
Message to a Former Friend
Birdhouse
He trusted the reader to understand that there is ugliness and beauty in all of us.
"Into the Mystery: : published a little more than a year before his death, Tony writes of
"a time of afternoon, out there in the yard
an hour that's never been described.
... Now you sit on the brick wall in the cloudy afternoon and swing your legs,
happy because there never has been a word for this."
He gave us words to describe that for which we have no words.
**
The first stanza of the Sandburg is surprising. "Give me hunger" sounds like it will go the way of Emma Lazarus and the statue of liberty speaking to immigrants, but doesn't. Instead, Sandburg intensifies the hunger, adds pain, want, shame, failure and finally clubs the hunger with superlatives, "shabbiest, weariest." One arrives at the second stanza, feeling full relief of the BUT...
What a technique to set up "love", which in turn is meekly requested only for "a little".
The diction and imagery also become more textured: "in the dusk of day-shapes"
and the changing shores of shadow... and inverting the watch to day-shapes of dusk...
the wait. The W's of window, wandering, western star... the liquid l's "little love, long loneliness...
blurring... the small engine sounds of ch-ch-ch in touch, shapes, watch all add to the pleasure.
**
The first stanza of the Sandburg is surprising. "Give me hunger" sounds like it will go the way of Emma Lazarus and the statue of liberty speaking to immigrants, but doesn't. Instead, Sandburg intensifies the hunger, adds pain, want, shame, failure and finally clubs the hunger with superlatives, "shabbiest, weariest." One arrives at the second stanza, feeling full relief of the BUT...
What a technique to set up "love", which in turn is meekly requested only for "a little".
The diction and imagery also become more textured: "in the dusk of day-shapes"
and the changing shores of shadow... and inverting the watch to day-shapes of dusk...
the wait. The W's of window, wandering, western star... the liquid l's "little love, long loneliness...
blurring... the small engine sounds of ch-ch-ch in touch, shapes, watch all add to the pleasure.
The discussion focussed on suffering as a necessary component to understand compassion, recalling
Horace, "If you would have me weep, I must shed the tears."
One has the sense of daylight fading to black and white…
The quite formal title contrasts well with the tongue-in-cheek tone and wry humor of the Hoagland, and brought up the discussion of the difficulty of expressing sympathy, the trite excuses and language of Hallmark cards.
I don't know which I prefer: the 2nd stanza:
Prayer as a radar-guided projectile mounted on the hinged-together wings of several good intentions,
propelled by the flawed translation of a Rumi poem
or, after the arrival of the mother wren in the mailbox who sets to work, to mention of the idea of prayers with the feature of "endoplasmic vibrational voltage in the fifth stanza.
Indeed... in this day of "virtual reality" it is refreshing to blame "poorly aimed prayers" for
causing late tires on the freeway. I love that he sneaks in "bees wax" at the end...
yes, we do need to "work our shit out"... and make time to sit still, watch the colors of the changing sky. It's high time to leave behind empty phrases and automatic responses that contain little emotion.
How patronizingly apt to put it this way:
I understand that you are doing your best
to hoist yourself up toward a spiritual life,
even if it is through the doorway of a kind of pretending.
Lonsinger's poem weaves together both a real fox and Fox News. I found it so amusing that
in cutting and pasting it, deception's d printed as c l... there is no cleception!
It's hard not to mention current politics with such a poem... Kathy brought up a new collection of poems in the book Urban Nature :
Poems About Wildlife in the City [Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Emily Hiestand
The Acevedo poem brought up a long discussion trying to sort through the ambiguity and confusion experienced by the Poet X a champion spoken word poet who tells her story in a novel composed of such poems.
"I Never Figured How to Get Free" brings up the guilt of being American, and all the undeclared wars in which America engages. As the poet expresses, "I wanted to write about how it felt to be a citizen of a nation seemingly always at war when the war is distant and on a screen, and the ringing distortionI felt while being financially comfortable for the first time and living in isolation in Western New York.”
She does, but it didn't feel so much a poem, as a diary entry... without really exploring how one "learns" freedom
if one does not have control of the circumstances.
The final poem is a touching elegy... Gallagher's surprising title "I stop writing the poem" makes sense after reading what goes into the folding. She blends memory, as a woman, folding her deceased husband's shirt, remembering their shared tenderness. She uses the future tense to mention she'll get back to the poem and being a woman.
Then in give short lines, the size of her grief... the giant shirt, meets her smallness as a little girl, going back in time
watching her mother, to see "how it's done". We are left holding emptiness, grief with her.
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