September 11-12

O Pen
Oh Demeter by Ellen Bass

 Garden Notes by W S Merwin

Family Storiesby Dorianne Laux

My Mother's Van  by Faith Shearin

     The Word by Tony Hoagland

     Rewind by Caroline Johnson

  Took out Metronome by Jeffrey Morgan...

In O Pen, we started with Judith reading:  An Ending—Howard Nemerov

After the weeks of unrelenting heat

A rainy day brings August to an end

As if in ceremony. The spirit, dry,

From too much light too steadily endured,

Delights in the heavy silver water globes

That make change from the sun’s imperial gold;  *               *gold, green red of Sarejevo

The mind, relieved from being always brilliant,

Goes forth a penitent in a shroud of grey

To walk the sidewalks that reflect the sky,

The line of lights diminishing down the street,

The splashed lights of the traffic going home.

we also had time to listen to Muldoon's poem, Position Paper

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/09/position-paper

The first two poems were left over from Elaine's selection from a prior week. the first... a beautiful example of a poem that carries an old myth, as Kathy said,  not in a callous or cynical way, but one that is "experientially resonant".  We brought up in discussion Ellen's book, Mules of Love, and her poem to her 21 year old daughter... which ends on the burden of  this flesh must learn to bear, like mules of love.how fierce the love is between mother and daughter: how, as O Demeter tells us, the unspoken part is how we face going/keeping on no matter what...  

She had chosen the Merwin not just  because it is beautiful, but it gives a sense of who Merwin was. 

comments included:      appreciation for how it  begins in silence… soul speaking.  wishing for a death as peaceful as leaf falling… Jan.   Compared to speed reading zen stories-- how the poem reminds us of the  story of flute player who stopped playing b/c listener gone.   Kathy:  grace and gentleness… no edge of "don’t smoke and piss at same time".  life of a leaf.  3 parts… you don’t learn the sounds… form…  unconscious intention a little perfume of Walt Whitman… The Title, garden notes:  nature does not hesitate. Just does.  Just is.  David: buddhism:  being part of… not separate from nature.  accept things as they are.

Laux:  This poem veered into a lot of sharing of stories... the pros and cons of families who share visible anger, vs. those whose emotional detachment can only embrace elephants in the room... what is normal?  what happens until you see other family’s normal? The perennial question:  how is this a poem?  We appreciated the irony, and especially that image of the  gorgeous battered ship of  a 3-layered cake where, in the unforgettable last lines, we can relate to "the smoking candles broken, sunk/  deep in the icing, a few still burning. "-- each in our own way.  The length of the discussion is testimony to the power of a few lines to bring out stories, and how we understand, remember them.

Shearin:  Lovely personnification of the Van for a tribute to a mother and all this particular one sacrifices...   Compared to a one stanza block, this one in aerated tercets gave us breathing 
space to take in the portrait.  

Hoagland:  Who else but Hoagland would put in something as real as a coffee grinder (to describe how real love can feel) next to a sketch of the kingdom of the heart, so at risk for sentimentality,
but weaving it into the image of sunlight, as a gift, ending with it, as that place where one can sit, to listen.  Always the poignant punch.

Rewind: I liked the set-up of the poem, how it addresses a father who once held the speaker of the poem as baby, who ends by holding the father, now reduced to the babyhood-state of dementia.