Kiss of the Sun by Mary Ruefle
America by Tony Hoagland
Rooms by Billy Collins
There was a child went forth every day by Walt Whitman - 1819-1892
The Road to Hateby Patrick Kavanaugh
Fear And Love by JIM MOORE
Laura Da's poem is masterful--the difficult syntax echoes with powerful ideas. Indeed, her "ink bellows"... the images are compelling, as is the use of language as she paints a picture of what once was Shawnee, and the meaning of homeland as something "conjured"... moved to yet another "conjured homeland". What "America" is, in 2019,
with its department of "Homeland Security" is not part of the poem... but I think of what America has become and just what "homeland" means to those living in a country that used to promise to shelter those who leave one. The paradox of destroying the original people living here, to found a country offering refuge is amplified by the "tightened fist of connotation"-- how the lyric description "limpid sashay of corn tassles along the byway", like "Amber waves of grain" is ground into the verb "grits", in "what is owed grits in congress", along with burned council houses.
A must-read in every classroom, every home. Discussion brought up our local Seneca Village Ganondagan; Civil War locations... how in Franklin, TN, the floors are still stained…
Mary Ruefle "gives us an orange" -- a sunkist message... as she contemplates
how something might remain despite our disappearance… that reassurance that poetry provides,
that rescues us from a sense of chaos.
Tony Hoagland, with his perfect blend of sincerity and irony, captures contemporary speech in the observations of the kids he teaches, suffocating in the "satin quilt" of the consumer-run complexity
of fast-food America, 24/7 news America, plastic veneer America. The voices feel real... even
his Dad's which you realize is a tongue-in-cheek, but highly effective use of a rhymed couplets , which of course, Hoagland tells us, l would only happen in a nightmare, and sets us up to believe
the father's totally surreal and unrealistic response to vomiting Ben Franklins...
Tony offers us a deft (hence, enjoyable, but simultaneously unsettling) portrait of modern America where we’re all guilty…
I shared the Billy Collins because a video was made of it in the Finger Lakes Exhibit at the MAG.
I don't recommend the video, but the poem offers a tongue-in-cheek approach to the power of
the poetic imagination to deal with what might start our to be a gloomy physicality of dark rooms, on repeatingly rainy days.
As for the E.E. Cummings... The syntax is delightful and impossible if wearing a grammarian hat.
Since Collins ended with a mouse, why not see what Cummings "up at does"-- how if it's a poisoned mouse... how then he makes it still alive, and like the reader. Now how do you feel about setting traps for innocent people, or genocide for that matter.
We leave cynicism with Whitman who keeps eyes and heart open… not imposing, like Hoagland's bombardment... but mindfully observing how ordinary life has changed so much...
with the fine-grained detail of transcendental flavor in a long list of bucolic surroundings… unlike Ruefle's short list wheat and evil and insects and love),
a little too much to end on... what leads us to follow the road to hate? A good question to ponder...
along with the relationship between love and fear.
As ever, poems are such consoling companions, especially shared with others-- as we enter
their rooms and ponder what we understand.
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