December 11-12

Wake Up  by Adam Zagajewski

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness. by Mary Oliver

December Morning in the Desert by Alberto Ríos

After Snow by Chase Twitchell

‘Tis the Season by Bruce Bennett

Last Requests by Owen Mcleod

The Voyage Nowhere by Jennifer Soong

Passage by Joseph Stroud

We started on a positive note... or so I read the Zagajewski... even if you do not believe in soul,
the idea of addressing such an entity within yourself, perhaps your "shadow", the companion you,
that reminds you that you are not alone... I believe as humans, we are wired to need this idea... why
else religion?  Last night, a movie called "Transformation" -- how quickly our earth is changing, and how this has an effect on Monarchs... increasingly, as things change, and we realize the damage
we mostly inadvertently have done to our planet... realize the damage of our thinking about our
importance as we pursue the status quo of our "group" which "otherizes" those not like us, to the
point of slavery, wars, desire to extinguish, erase, get rid of...

I am losing memory... I see notes that I read "A Little Book about the Human Shadow" by Robert Bly, "Time and Materials" by Robert Bass... that I used to love Mary Oliver... I really can't tell you
anything about thee books, except that I often find Mary "facile".  Her poem, "Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness" borders the easy reassurance of much of her work...

1st stanza: line break:  every year we have been:
you can stay there... end of the year, cards which summarize the "where we have been, what we have done" then complete the thought on the second line:
witness -- but to what, is withheld...as our eyes follow how the
world descends

 the punch of interest in the second stanza  into a "rich mass" .  This term indeed "wakes up my soul" -- with the idea of climate change, our world is a mess -- but the diversity, the transformative power
remains "rich" and beautiful.  For sure, her poem, from the vantage point of someone in the North,
where we experience "crisping days" of Autumn and days grow dark as we approach Winter Solstice,
emphasizes the passing of the growing, the "vivacity of what was ...
(line break, stanza break after married) to the vitality of what will be. 

This is my favorite line of the poem.  The rhyme of "what else to do" with "love we claim to have for the world is true" followed by the advice to go on, cheerfully enough, is just enough too easy a piece of advice and rather ruins the effect.

How does the sun "swing east"? (not yet risen?) "Doomed" deserves better credit as last word of the poem.  Darkness is deserving of deeper.  interrogation.  To quote Robert Bly, we honor the negative by asking, what do you want? 

The Rios poem, also has the word "crisp"-- not something one usually associates with Arizona desert nor cold "in stark announcement", except in the dark.  The pleasure of the word music, and the imagination in the deeper question "where does the sure noise of their (the star's) hard work go?"
leads us to the delightful image of the great/hot rod skid of the Milky Way across the asphalt night.
If we could hear... if there were a sound of stars in this galaxy in which our tiny Earth is a part...
Rios suggests the noise goes if not into our ears, into the deeper listening of the heart -- able to imagine the sound of a bird's heart beating as fast as its wings and high songs... and provides us the music of words to capture sounds we do not hear in our constructed concrete of cities.  The idea of the "facts of life" as birds and bees, reminds me of  that silly song, "Let me tell you about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, and the thing called love" -- and indeed, Rios brings in
the bees (with their lumbering hum) and wasps, moths, bats, dragonflies -- and personifies them as wondering "if any of this is going to work", and gently slips in, "we humans oblivious"...
He does not point a finger at those of us in cities, hanging on to our non-recyclable styrofoam cups, driving our polluting cars, attached to our i-phones, without much satisfying connection, listening
to "news".  Instead, has us moving/into the slippers of our Monday mornings,

shivering, because we think, (not "is any of this, in this complex universe, going to work")
It's a little cold out there. 

The cold news, simply a question of temperature, reduced in importance by the adverbial "little".
Brilliant and much appreciated poem.

The Twitchell was enigmatic, because of the third stanza where the line break leaves us
hanging.  "The woods look as if they might have" - might have what?  the last line, the absence of tracks? Or, They look as if they might have looked, /1,000 years ago, except for...
The six lines, arranged as couplet, singleton, couplet singleton with each trio of lines containing
the word except for, both pointing to absence, a sense of loss-- like the fact that few people would go into the woods in winter.   I love the title of the book from which this poem was taken:  The Things as It Is where things is a collective, singular noun.  A syntactical move like that invites me to think harder.

My note in the margin on the poems: "dishonesty in poetry".  Perhaps the groups were feeling that truth, as we think we know it, is not the deal, as it is too slippery.  It is more satisfying to discuss enigma, discover different ways of thinking.

The Bruce Bennett poem had  the longest discussion in the Pittsford Group.  Perhaps this is the power of the repeating form -- a fine ballade, that sounds "villanesque".  Soldiers take a vow to "give their life" for their nation.  What is odd about that repeating line, is that it is said by a legless vet in the future.  How do you say the final and fourth please. It feels like a parable... perhaps with the title
"Tis the Season", with no "to be jolly" in the scene of a begging vet ignored by a crowd of shoppers,
one thinks of the Christian celebration of Christ's coming... a celebration perhaps equally ignored and consumed by capitalism.

Last Requests sounds like it was written by an older voice.  Is the crux of the poem about the secret love?  Regret unrequited, begging forgiveness?  We appreciated the vulnerability expressed.

We read "The Voyage Nowhere", admiring the dark feeling tone, dream-like and joining the speaker to wonder about her definition:   "I think and am/ as good as guesswork"... semblance... half-way between silence and mimicry.

We also read, but really didn't have time to discuss, "Passage" which starts with a line from Dante's
Purgatorio.. We admired the clang of the garbage truck and cans which contrasted with the dying
of the poet friend reading Dante.  Can a poem be a guide?  Dante says our life is a passage... how a voice sings beyond the flame building us... Do we as readers subscribe to this?