How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This by Hanif Abdurraqib
Disclosure by Camisha L. Jones
Skating in Harlem, Christmas Day by Cynthia Zarin
Locate the site by Alice Major
Naming of the Parts by Henry Reed
Naming of the Parts by Henry Reed
Move by Alicia Ostriker
I Hum to My Shivering by Peter Sears
I love challenging assumptions. First, I note that the first poem is 14 lines. Uneven lines. No rhyme. Nothing sonnet-like about it. No capitalizations. Look up the poet -- he's a thoughtful, regular sort who might be caught eating French Fries. He's talking to me, as a reader about an "us" that is not where I am... and slips in the problematic aspect of humans who judge people and things by what they look like and not by who and what they actually are. His long run-on sentence ends on the 8th line, first word: exercise. But wait... the period doesn't stop the flow of thought, which explains
the exercise that may not have been clear: an attempt at fashioning /something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything /worthwhile of their burial.
Wow. Did you ever ask people who try to eliminate dandelions, how dandelions feel about their
scatter of seed? What is worthwhile to something alive? To perpetrate, and. by so doing, survive?
So, what semantics come to your tongue?
What does the image "hollowed-out grandfather/ clock" replete with a line break separating the human from the object mean to you? A clock's heartbeat, ticking, is precluded here.
What does a million-dollar god look like? What worth if his heaven is worth two cents?
The "like" is both simile and extension into explanation... he look like to... like used to mean for example.
And how about the 3rd image: "He looks like..." all it takes is one kiss & before morning ,/you could scatter his whole mind across a field.
So... our discussion: from dandelion… to the complexity of an individual…
John: gentle poem.
Elaine. Can’t see as gentle. “Just say it…”
Judith: misconstrue…
david: most intrigued…
something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything
unless the seed die..
Title: sarcastic? Who accuses a black person for writing about flowers when the flowers provide an important metaphor for the meaning? What judgement is in THAT question?
They kill us till they kill us…
The next poem: Disclosure had as lengthy a discussion -- .
The treatment of deaf people as needing to "be like those of us who can hear", as if deafness (or blackness) is a disability that prevents someone from participating fully in society. "
"why don’t you get hearing aid. ".
all things are possible for those who don’t have to do them… "With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.
The voice is not angry.
I'm sorry could be polite, or a different way to say, "excuse me". Sorry sometimes has a connotation as pathetic. A "sorry" state... One does get "hard" with repeated apology for being who one is. the "hard for the hearing" could be a rigorous defense of those who can't... I don't believe the poet would wear a hello name tag and believe her name is "Sorry...
I’m hard to hear… (deaf/er people think they are loud…) but it's otherness that interferes with good hearing...
If you’re the victim you become the opposite.
disclosure : making a fact (unbeknownst, secret) known.
assimilation: the way deaf people have to behave.
interpreters are for the hearing people…
America for Americans… where the definition relies on those in power.
I am black because you think you call yourself white.
like first poem: image. dictates how to treat the “other…”
I. AM. -- then line break, HERE.
How do we "interrupt other people's comfort"? Why is it understood that if you are different, you must ask forgiveness for being so? It might be about cultural demands of the hearing world, but it's much more.
The next poem is not a Breughel winter scene in Haarlem, but New York. The "Meer" is shaped two ponds in Central Park, indeed, shaped like a pair of glasses. Dedicated to Mary Jo Salter, who published in 1994 "Sunday Skaters".
Small detail: in the last line of the 3rd tercet: "goats and compasses". became the name of a pub, misunderstanding God Encompasseth.
We'd have to read the Mary Jo Salter... but no one was blown away by Zarin's Christmas Day... Are ice and fire the only integers we've got, reminded us of Robert Frost.
The next poem also had mathematical implications... how we mark with X... how X could be a fall...
but here, not skating, but flying over North Saskatchewan... how to take measure of a thousand miles of river...
How do we measure?
Judith : pleasing language. motif of circling…
how much chance/fate play in our life…
geometry and geography sandwiched by italics. lot of fancy skating… but in a canoe… ?
aerial view. starts w/ human component… no feelings… just surface…
pleasing imagery…
thoughts… giving rise to questions…
The Naming of Parts is so brilliant. Everybody gets it. The repetition. the voice of the drill sergeant, and the voice of Nature. David had proposed it as a favorite from 60 years ago from Freshman English in college, which
introduced him to power of poetry. Listen to Dylan Thomas' masterful reading...
Paul: lived the poem. Sargeant John A. Guthrey… m-1 thumb…
undercurrent of menace..
We were reminded of Blake: The Chimney Sweeper: the instructing voice…
The next poem, "Move" -- interesting title: is it a command… to get out of the way…
or to take action?
I am so wanting to be in the right spot doing the right thing, as the last stanza says.
Sing...
I love the last poem. How to be alive is a privilege, no matter cancer... no matter circumstance.
Peter has that understated conviction. I know every moment, he could embrace shivering.
He was open to feeling like a happy God.
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