Jan. 7-8

What Kind of Times are These:   Adrienne Rich
Dreams, Coming to This  by Mark Strand
Green Means Literally a Thousand Things of More  by Matt Donovan
We are of a tribe  by Alberto Rios

In the Wednesday group, we spoke of how what is said, or not matters, especially pertaining to the first poem.

“An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said,” wrote Hannah Arendt in reflecting on how language confers reality upon existence. “And unless it is said it is, so to speak, non-existent.” But if an experience is spoken yet unheard, half of its reality is severed and a certain essential harmony is breached. The great physicist David Bohm knew this: “If we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature,” he wrote in his excellent and timely treatise on the paradox of communication, “we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.”

After 1/2 hr, we were still up to our elbows discussing "What Kind of Times are These" -- the echoes of Bertold Brecht... the difficulty of getting people to listen, and fooling them to hear
what you have to say about politics by talking about trees.  Echos of Frost, of Mary Oliver,
Kipling... 
the repetitions of "dark", "dread", and especially "disappear" three times.  Pleasing rhyme of Russian and Mushroom... which also grows in the dark... the negative intention of telling us
it is not a Russian poem, thereby evoking one...  People enjoyed the sense of history... the mood of being on the edges of something important, not quite specified.  We spoke about the stumbling block of "leafmold paradise..."

Dreams:  the poem illustrates what a dream is like -- skinny column... the orderly capital letter introducing each line -- the disorienting effect of the indented 3rd line...
Dreams, like writing poems, take the ordinary and spin it into something extraordinary...
Why do we so desire to capture these elusive, tantalizing collections of hints of our life... 
Strand won't tell you... but in the next poem, "Coming to This", shows you the danger of stripping a poem down to facts.  Oh there is meat... but it "sits in the white lake of its dish"...
and  cannot be eaten.   
Grim.

Back to Dreams and words.  Bernie sums it up with a quote from Roger Rosenblatt:
"Maybe that's the true power of words--
 to show us how puny they are in the face
of everything they attempt to say.
And maybe that's why poets write,
to show the power of our powerlessness
   in a storm at sea.


Rundel really laid into the Donovan poem... Why the title?  An unsuccessful application of Fern Hill if the note about the poem is what the poem was aiming to address.  

Both groups loved the Rios!