learning more about Racism

I joined the 21 day challenge on learning more about racism :

• For 21 days, do one action to further your understanding of power, privilege, supremacy, oppression, and equity.
• Plan includes suggestions for readings, podcasts, videos, observations, and ways to form and deepen community connections. Suggestions are in the following categories

Well... after 6 days... discovered this which seems a little less abstract.
https://www.jewishclimate.org/21day-challenge

Day 1:
The first word that came to mind after reading an article, "How White People Got Made" left me feeling exhausted — a word worthy of examining.

What makes us feel EXHAUSTED?  What saps our energy… makes us feel less vital?  

The etymology goes back to “drained out” — the French “fatigué” as in tossing a salad with dressing — you take  freshness out of the crisp greens, adding flavor of oil and vinegar or lemon.

to reduce, extenuate, This is where I love thinking in French.  A synonym is “éreinter”: Rompre ou fouler les reins, et, par extension, battre, rosser.  To break your kidneys!  beat up violently.

Looking in the mirror is hard work.  

Day 2: James Baldwin The Fire Next Time

Day 3: The Fire This time

(see my goodreads write up.)

Day 4: June 22 issue of the New Yorker:  see the cover.

I am a man:

How can we get a country to understand what it means to be a human being?

NO MAN should be lynched.  No man should be enslaved.

One of the cartoons:  Make sure you can see how insignificant I am.

Well... two white people on the edge of a canyon at night, looking up at the moon, and the man

asking the woman to take his picture.

Day 5:  The Uprising: by Luke Mogelson:

"It's not just about George Floyd.  It's about all the unseen shit, where we don't have the video."--Simon Hunter, 19.

Photo of the vigil site with mural.  Shawn Dunwoody's BLACK LIVES MATTER around the corner from us.

Photo of protesters lying down outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art for 8 min. 46 seconds.

the amount of time Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on George Floyd's neck.

See other issues.

Day 6:  Flannery O'Connor article.  1943, she appears as a bigoted young white woman.

How can anyone refer to a person with black skin as "nigger"?

To know yourself, you must know your region.

KKK: Grand Dragon; Grand Cyclops and "hundreds of men stamping and hollering inside sheets.

It's too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with electric lights."

She doesn't like the "philosophizing prophesying pontificating James Baldwin kind of Negroes.

Very ignorant but never silent.  ML King not the age's great saint but he's at least doing what he can and has to do.  Ossie Davis.. Would this person be endurable if white?  If Baldwin were white, nobody would stand him a minute.  I prefer Cassius Clay.  "If a tiger move into the room with you and you leave, that don't mean you hate the tiger.  Just means you know you and him can't make out.  Too much talk about hate."

to read ? Toni Morrison: (b. in Ohio, 1931): Playing in the Dark:  Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992):  The fabrication of an Africanist persona by a white writer is reflexive... an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly consciousness.

So... is O'Connor working through her racism understanding it as a form of evil, from the inside, practicing it?

"Posterity in literature is a strange god--

how not to address her racist passages...

Measuring Man: Josef Mengele’s malignant “science”.

pretense of empirical rigor armored the Nazi study of racial difference.

“All ideas, ideals, are capable of being twisted into their opposites.  Religious doctrines praching nonviolence and loving thy enemy quickly turn into a search for enemies not to love. 

this practise:  hypocrisy.

1894: Dreyfus

Day 7: from https://www.jewishclimate.org/21day-challenge

https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf

List 50 ways in which your whiteness is a privilege. What can you do to change things so such a list does not depend on skin color?  How will you expand your circles?  Help others realize barriers they put up as do you?  How do we get to the HUMAN we all share?

Day 8:

Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, and social advocate, is the author of When My Body Was A Clinched Fist

“‘When Night Fills with Premature Exits’ was inspired by a meditation on Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and the idea that Black people cannot conceive a world, even a different planet, where they are not feared. The ‘premature exits’ referred to in the title echo a lifelong sentiment that we die at too fast and at too high of a rate, especially as Black men, because we are not deemed worthy of being free or carefree and because those who target us, as Claudia Rankine eloquently puts it, have a hard time policing their imagination. The poem is written in the form of questions because I am on a daily quest for the answers myself, especially as the father of two beautifully radiant sons. I wanted to express the deeply rooted exasperation and exhaustion that comes with always trying to live and build a life in the gurgle of goodbyes.

Day 9: mldunham@gmail.com writes about Suburban racism.  I just subscribed to his blog.  Why these suburbs and redlining?  

AND NOW... over a month later... 

https://bostonreview.net/race/melissa-phruksachart-literature-white-liberalism?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=8d609c011b-MC_Newsletter_8_25_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-8d609c011b-40737165&mc_cid=8d609c011b&mc_eid=e7c55ddda2

Wading through this article was difficult, having read many of the titles.

Day 10:  see my goodreads review of "The N Word" by 

Day 11: see my good reads review of White Fragility

Day 12.  Started, but decided not to finish Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

452 pages.  Perhaps the style is passionate, "razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humor" as the Booker Prize judges say... but I found the lack of capital letters for any sentence disconcerting and only after getting to the third section of the first family felt I was getting snippets and snapshots of one family and not a hodgepodge of unrelated observations.

Day 13-23 .  Black Nature - anthology of 4 centuries of African-American Nature poetry.

The 23 page Introduction will get you thinking about the relationship between eco-poetry, and politics; how a black person and a white person, in different time periods and places will write differently about "nature".  I feel sad that skin color has to enter into appreciation of good poetry.  Any good poem should be loved first because it is a good poem.  What you learn about the poet is secondary.  I saw many familiar names about whom I didn't know anything except that I enjoyed their poems.  I'm not sure knowing they are black changed how I read the poem, but suspect something changed.  I was however glad that in August, many of the poets I hadn't known before appeared on poem a day with biographies,

as well as unfamiliar poems by many of the familiar poets.  

The book is divided into "Cycles" each with an introduction.

1. Just Looking

2. Nature, Be with Us

3. Dirt on our Hands

4. Pests, People Too

5.  Forsaken of the Earth

6.  Disasters, Natural and Other

7.  Talk of the Animals

8. What the Land Remembers

9. Growing Out of this Land

10. Comes Always Spring.

The book will be discussed at the end of Sept. in the Newark library.

And here is another Boston Review article... I'll say more on this later.  LOVE the opening paragraph:

There is a long tradition of white people thinking they can read their way out of trouble. Examples abound, from sentimental novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)—which engaged white antebellum readers through appeals to sympathy and Christian sentiment—to sociological readings of race novels by mid-twentieth-century middlebrow book clubs, the formation of “U.S. ethnic lit” during the canon wars of the 1980s and ’90s, and the explosion of “global literature” in recent decades. As Jodi Melamed noted almost ten years ago in Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (2011), “The idea that literature has something to do with antiracism and being a good person has entered into the self-care of elites, who have learned to see themselves as part of a multinational group of enlightened multicultural global citizens.”

https://bostonreview.net/race/melissa-phruksachart-literature-white-liberalism?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=11d1375ae8-MC_roundup_8_31_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-11d1375ae8-40737165&mc_cid=11d1375ae8&mc_eid=e7c55ddda2

August 26

Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa 

Mending Wall by Robert Frost 

The Bridge  by Rodney Jones 

La Quercia Caduta   by Giovanni Pascoli—(tr. Arturo Vivante) The Oak Cut Down

Characteristics of Life by Camille T. Dungy 

 

The first three poems came from the website of the poetry journal Cobalt whose editor shares Ten Poems that send him “into a Mild Arrhythmia”.  To see the whole list:

https://cobalt.submittable.com/submit/142569/poetry-the-cobalt-weekly-ed-jonathan-travelstead

Kommunyakaa was #2; Frost #7 and Jones #10. I could not find a link to “Bearing Witness” so picked a different poem by Rodney Jones.

 

Facing It:  

Several people attending have been to the amazing Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and shared the experience of entering underground, the sense of being part of the work of art that combines the experience of being present, while reflecting on the past.   The mirror effect of the granite, can be seen in some of the pictures here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Veterans_Memorial

 

The title calls on the same effect of the memorial to make us face the past, the facts of war, where the actual facing towards the monument draws us in.  What else is in the “it” indicated in the title?  Our discussion looked at the layering of language, with double-entendres of “clouded reflection”, “depending on the light”; booby trap; brushstroke/brushing image.  

I can’t imagine how overwhelming it could be to go down 58,022 names…but certainly, in Komunyuakaa deftly allows the reader to feel the truth of his words “half-expecting to find his own name in letters like smoke” as if alluding to something in him died in the war.

The touching of names becomes a way to bring alive both what is and what isn’t — 

“touching” the name Andrew Johnson, could be an army buddy, but echoes the name of the Southern Vice-President selected by Lincoln https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/reconstruction.  The white flash… his black face… the image of a white vet…black mirror… how real that a one-armed vet has lost his right arm inside the stone… and how touch is not erasing… whether it is a name or a real boy, it brushes him… how earlier, names shimmered on her blouse, but stay as she walks away… brushstroke of red wing.

A good poem cannot be “retold” this way.  In our discussion, we entered the poem as in this memorial, each one feeling its touch.  

 

Mending Wall: Marne started us off with labeling the tone as playful… the surface simplicity, the twists of wisdom… the way Frost navigates “both sides of the fence” as David pointed out… 

both wall builder, and wall denier… how mending a wall, in Spring, takes on a hint of gospel,

with no stone unturned, but also the difficulty of building with stones as loaves…or balls (which makes me think of muskets and what one finds in Vermont fields from Revolutionary days!)…

The word “balance” for repairing is perfect. What do we wall in, out? What is mended or not, by the fixing?  The discussion included the wall that protects a father’s saying, behind which a son might hide.  

 

The Bridge:  Although this was nothe actual poem as one of the 10, but by the same poet, I was glad Emily brought up  that she had listened to him read other poems.  You can hear his soft

Alabama accent in this short clip.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0-z9hhzwhE

Called the United States, of course, a totally different subject, although timely. He prefaces the poem by speaking of our two principles as humans: our wildness and our desire to make things well.  

 

As Jan remarked about the first poem, Facing It, this poem, The Bridge allows us to create quite a complex illusion of reality.  Here the adjective real is important, used in the first lines, leading up to the false name of a real man.  Names… “those fulsome nouns” are indeed “not real” —echoed after the superhero rescue in the line “there is no name for that place…” and even the bridge is “not real”, since it was replaced but a wider bridge.  The school is “air”— what it had been, now a parking lot…. Who is the “you” too far from the valley for it to become “all the way true, although it is not true.”?  We wondered about the feel of a digression about Clyde Maples — although there too, the creek “is not/real, and the valley a valley of words.”

So, in all this “not real” all 120 pounds of Arthur Peavahouse is smart to run from huge tackles?

“unthinking to throw himself into that roiling water and test the reality of his arms and lungs.”

 

What really happened?  Is the third jump to save another child trapped in the car, or is Arthur the one in an unbreakable harness?  What is this country of words where you wonder if “everything you have said or thought was a lie… ”  and the lie that stands for truth.

 

Emily thought of Janis Joplin… https://www.iheart.com/artist/janis-joplin-79631/songs/ode-to-billy-joe-2527220/  (lyrics beneath)

Bobbie Gentry singing the Ode to Billie Joe - Tallahatchie Bridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoMF_mSeWJo

 

Haunting poem.

 

The Oak Cut Down:

Such a contrast to read this short, “morality”  poem.  A tiny tragi-comedy/comi-tragedy poking fun at the mindlessness of people, who never noticed how big, how good the tree— or that it served as home to the chickadee… but how good each now has a bundle of wood!  David was reminded of the short story by George Orwell about shooting an elephant

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/shooting-an-elephant/

Thanks to Judith for recommending.

 

Characteristics of Life: 

Camille picked this poem to read at the Democratic National Convention, speaking of the need for environmental and social justice… how economic crisis cannot be separated from climate crisis; calling on us to draw strength from our differences… 

 

A pearl of a poem, with the anaphor : ask me… at first, ask me if I speak and then saying what she would say (although not asked to, but imagining perhaps someone might… which sets us up for the longing at the end).  The set up allows her to paint with beautiful details all the backboneless world we probably have not noticed… and with humor… a little jibe at

the human tendency to be inconsistent, saying one thing today, another tomorrow…

following the dig at our vertebrate human dominance that frowns on “spinelessness”—

(associations legion here…)

 

Is she sarcastic to the you to whom she asks, “What part of your nature drives you?”

So… we house ourselves in cubicles, snails in shells… but I’m in stitches seeing her

 filter, filter, filter.  Now come a few more “punches” — the display version

of ourselves… silent and on the shelf… beautiful, useless — she doesn’t quite say

empty… devoid of any soul, life.  As a woman, I feel her position of “sure, I can play

that part, if that’s the game on the stage”.  You might be interested in this article:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/06/not-finished-yet

 

We ended with the focus on that “candle” that lights the firefly, searching in the dark,

seeking connection, that contrasts so sharply with the you, alone at a table, one chair,

the candle burning.  What is longing?  Where do we feel loss?  

 Wordless does not mean mindless when applied to desire as we search… 

 

This is only a cursory assemblage of remarks.  Please feel free to add!

August 19

Subject to Change:  Marilyn L. Taylor

Transcendentalism: Lucia Perillo

The School Where I studied:  Yehuda Amichai

When the Time is Right: Tammi J. Truax (poet laureate of Portsmouth)

Elegy in Joy [excerpt] : Muriel Ruykeyser

little prayer:  Danez Smith

Rally:  Elizabeth Alexander

Summer Meadow:  Tomas Tranströmer

So… I stumbled on this quote from GK Chesterton and loved how it uplifted my spirits and opened by session by sharing it.

“Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

Nutshell summary:

Taylor:  If, as Wordsworth argues  the first principle of poetry should be pleasure, then Marilyn Taylor provides it for us in this poem published in Poetry in August 2002.  As poet Barbara Crooker notes, “she mutes her exact rhymes 

with slant and half rhymes, increasing the music, and doubling the delight.

Not only the pleasure to the ear, but to the heart, as the reader identifies with the universal theme of how students grow up and move on; the aging process perhaps as well; and pleasure for the mind, watching how the form, which relies on the same words of a line, by changing position, and particularly in the 4^th stanza, changing the verb and punctuation, also does not “remain the same”.  Most of us concurred that the final stanza presented  more than a few puzzles.  vertical direction, as possible

“grow up, grow taller” or perhaps the ups and downs as innocence travels through experience; Does the delusion of beautiful and young include the flowering personhood we prize in old age?  why blackmail?  We enjoyed headlong

remembering perhaps our own youth.  A meditative invitation on the fleeting nature of and transformative power inherent  life, (and here, I think of the proverbial “the more things change, the more they remain the same” with the

paradoxical  constant of “change” itself).  

 

Perillo: I liked John’s idea that perhaps the professor satirized in this poem could have been the one writing “Subject to Change”.  It softens the overblown parody of the student describing the teacher.  David brought up how often Emerson has been parodied- see illustration here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_eyeball

For the poem, the self-absorbed student, transcends from a personal insufferable past the view of Emerson as insufferable to the person who writes the more confessional final stanza… revealing how it takes time to understand how we’ve been influenced. Perhaps there is a flash of awareness in stanza three, just before quoting the opening stanza of Emerson’s poem, Brahma https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45868/brahma-56d225936127b

If the red slayer think he slays, 

Or if the slain think he is slain, 

They know not well the subtle ways 

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Perillo knows her literature.  Her metaphor for postmodernists as wolves, where self is dismantled for the sake of text.

The work is hard… I wished the last line had been the penultimate one — “from his yard into my life— remains a mystery”.  

 

Amichai: Changing countries, a different school experience.  We read the poem in three parts, not that any stanza break demanded it.  The school… what is said in the heart… the loving in vain of all “I didn’t learn”, which could be,

all that wasn’t taught, or all that the student was not ready to learn.  We noted the particular details that make 

learning a living “currency” — not just the names and phylems, but shapes, functions, pests, parasites of plants.

From there to the “botany of good and evil” … and the metaphor of windows. Transcendental twinges… as everyday

we are learning, understanding — these open windows to the future you cannot pin and label, this school will yet

allows us to view the past yet continue to grow.

 

Truax.  This is where I found the poem.

 

https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2020/08/14/poems-can-comfort-and-inspire-during-covid-so-send-yours-us/3365870001/

Other poems quoted in the NYT article:

To nursing school graduates in Nichinan, Portsmouth’s sister city

As you finished your formal studies

the world has demonstrated

what an enormous responsibility

is being pinned upon you

along with a pretty white cap.

 

and Transitions

Today I find the mask useful

along with sunglasses

to hide my tear-streaked face

not wanting to scare the barista

who has enough to deal with

behind his own mask

 

Even though we thought a line or two missing, we discussed “When the time is right” as a concept… the choice of how to look at the world… the waiting involved… not just with a tomato… the vintage linen… the idea of a gift

you want to send, understanding, perhaps hoping, it will be unwrapped “when the time is right”.  We did not mention the sprinkling of salt or grace.  These same details, found in the poem, speak more deeply to all of this.

 

A recurring theme in the poems:  “The best time to climb a tree was 20 years ago.”  Ah… but the realization of that…

takes a long time to catch up. 

 

Rukeyser:  Her poem is words of nourishment… we noted metaphors, images, assymetry… how beginnings are what we must nourish… how flesh, nourish, blest, are echo together.

 

Danez Smith:  A little prayer.. How we respond to a plea for love and peace will depend on how we “hear” it.

Some felt it needed to be more fervent; some felt it lacking in other ways… the ending line 

 & if not      let it be  not strong enough

 

Alexander:  who penned the Inaugural poem for Obama and speaks of a rally for him in 2008 in Miami, when it was not sure he would win.  We all concurred 2^nd stanza first word should be jog.

12 years later, this poem encourages me still — to listen, dream, hope for a human tilt of we.

 

Tranströmer:  We didn’t really discuss, but had a good feeling . Yes, reality does wear us so thin,

And yes, Tomas, thank you for your refreshing fantasy!

 

And thank you everyone present  — please add comments.

August 12 + links to Monet and Hokusai!

The Poets  by Eavan Boland 

August Morning by Alice Ostriker

[To Sheila Lanyon, on the Flyleaf of a Book] by W. S. Graham

Parents Named Us for the Dawn.  by Xiaoli Li

The Agapanthus Triptych by Sigrun Susan Lane

explanation of the Triptych: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5nPXFv517w&feature=youtu.be

Men Waiting for a Train by David Biespiel

(audio by author: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/men-waiting-for-a-train

Today’s poems, for me, underlined the power of poetry to resist intelligence, almost successfully  (https://poets.org/poem/man-carrying-thing. )

and yet seduce us by the how of the sound and multiple layers of sense of words.  

I am so grateful for such a thoughtful group, generous in the sharing of insights! 

For a quick refresher to follow up  Shelley’s “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defence_of_Poetry

Clearly, each of the poets today demonstrated their familiarity with Shelley, and probably Stevens’ words.

Please feel free to add to this quite cursory and insufficient notes:

Nutshell summary:

Boland: Repetition of “They” allows us to feel the layering of the poets, even if referenced to be stars.  Without thumping us over the head with the metaphor of constellations,

those mythic names pointed out by just a few stars, Boland pays homage to poets for finding “a figure in which secret things confide”.  The brightest star (Betelgeuse) the god of war as our neighboring planet, the unnamed Orion, who hunts, (are those three stars in his belt fixed?) the “undoing” as the work.. . — and for us, as reader, the de-ciphering of metaphor circling

upon metaphor.  Remarkable!

Ostriker:  The title celebrates the mundane as it filters into the myriad “windows”, where sacred overtones into stained glass of colorful fruits.  Why malicious?  One thought is the loan word of  the German Shadenfreude — the joy derived from observing the misfortunes of others.  But Ostriker adds the further paradoxical “abundant” to malicious — in a way that echoes the light “from the other world, the pure one”… the play on the word passion, as people pass… and the possibility of that paradise as it might be— a mosaic of  views of all windows— church windows, recreation of of what we see as windows, this welcoming openness of multiple windows always waiting for our eyes.  I was reminded of the body of the beloved of Gregory Orr and his Rumi-esque meditation: https://www.amazon.com/Concerning-Book-that-Body-Beloved/dp/1556592299

Graham: 3 stanzas, 3 modes of speech.  Beautiful intimacy spoken literally and figuratively “on the fly”.  “We two (too) are not afraid” —

what gives us courage to envision — the words penned… the self who penned them once, the self who pens different ones later, recalling the former ones… and that beloved to whom they are addressed… all these selves, still speaking.

Xiaoli Li : Thank you Jan for pronunciation!  The spare simplicity, the calm with which the inconceivable damage done by forcing all the nuanced beauty of a name, honoring family tradition, to be changed to function.  The misnomers because the former words evoke what cannot be admitted.  Orwellian, indeed. 

The saving grace: the pen name… that pen… that allows the preservation through words of what is cherished.

Lane: We read it in 3 parts, like the triptych.  last words of each stanza:  “That moment of seeing” // “painted them out” // the water bearing all.”

The quote from Monet — not participating in WW1, only able to paint… who lives near the train tracks, imagining the “troops carried in, bodies borne out”…

How the process of painting, like poetry, provides solace, sanctuary.  

https://youtu.be/x5nPXFv517w  Thank you Susan for this link to the work of art referenced in the Monet poem. 

Beispiel:  Please share  how you felt the explosion… the vibrant language… images… how you “solved” the puzzle of what happened!    

 It’s as if there is “underground railroad” stuff… war.. 9/11… this is a cool site about David Biespiel : https://davidbiespiel.wixsite.com/david-biespiel/writings

Bernie sent this link about Hokusai:  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/07/arts/design/hokusai-fuji.html

This could help!

August 5

Life is Beautiful  by Dorianne Laux (audio: https://poets.org/poem/life-beautiful-audio-only

                                                            from Smoke, published by BOA Editions, 2000

The remainder of the poems: They come from the Anthology edited by Robert Pinsky

The Mind has Cliffs of Fall 

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Mind_Has_Cliffs_of_Fall_Poems_at_the.html?id=wPaKDwAAQBAJ

Creekthroat  by Atsuro Riley

Failure by Philip Schultz

To “yes” by Kenneth Koch

'No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.'   by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Nutshell notes:

Dorianne Laux: Jan asked why such a long poem.  I remember in my MFA, both she and Ellen Bass would encourage us to keep “turning over another card”.  One starts with observations, that link to implications, and before you know it, the imagination is at work tapping into a stream of consciousness (to steal some of John and David’s words).  We noticed the almost end-rhymes,

the rich language,  the unusual phrases such as “bag of fecund jewels” the challenge to our idea of “beautiful” to include the ooze, scree, pungence, of perhaps not quite “medical grade maggots”  writhingly at work — the reverence for all of life side by side with what we might squeamishly relegate to “disgustingness”.  Hurray for the “clean up crew” of flies!

John shares :  My favorite Larsen one is from a collection of "uncensored" ones. Mr. and Mrs. Housefly are in the usual house, she's in the usual flowered dress, and she's saying "I'm leaving you, Fred, and I'm taking the maggots with me!” 

Atsuro Riley:  For more Atsuro Riley:  Links to poems in Romey’s Order : https://atsuroriley.bandcamp.com/releases

Creekthroat — both the creek.., and the voice of poet as speaker.  Unusual vocabulary — and the desire to translate into familiar expressions/words (ex. by hook or by crook, instead of by hook or by bent…) What is it we are hungry for?  we guttle the rudimentary stories… ask to be slaked by “radicle stories” — with its homophonic overtone of “radical”.  Gollum-like in feel, 

unleashed primeval appetites.

Bravo for everyone sticking with this poem, and arriving at a place of appreciation!

David S. told the story of Robert Frost citing a passage from Finnegan’s Wake when people would tell him one of his poems was obscure. (David, I need your words — how even though at first he didn’t understand it, it grew on him…). Others have said  — Brilliant wordplay, irony, satire, alliteration, rhyme, assonance, consonance, nonce, spoonerisms, and so on…but I have absolutely no idea what it was about" 

The group did well to both appreciate the craft, find a treasure trove of possible associations and meanings.

Thank you Barb. for finding reference to Elizabeth Bishop,  At the Fishhouses  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52192/at-the-fishhouses

Schultz:  What is success? Failure?  How do we project ourselves onto our perceptions of others!  Schultz gently angles into a tribute to his father, allowing the reader to enjoy the 

comical “particularities”, of “failed businesses” and a list of things his father didn’t believe in.  The contrast of the shameful labeling of the Rabbi reminded Susan of a real story: A rabbi  instead of celebrating  the young girl who wanted to be Bat-Mitzvah’d and did a spectacular job,  pointed a disapproving finger at  her parents— that she was successful despite them."  Many commented on the closing lines — he “failed to get away” — from the disapproving family, from the fault of projecting failure onto others, to differentiate,  or to leave his father’s imprint…

It’s a poem that reminds us to “re-embrace” perhaps a father once rejected.

Koch:  Have you heard of the triumvirate that accompanies a question?  Koch with his inimitable humor plays with “yes” as main character, with echoes of the team members, “No” and “maybe”.  Well… we all know the answer to the general question about death… but do want that reassurance that it is “not yet” — later than now.

He rescues “state of peace” from cliché… the “shall I” use of “yes” seeking confirmation.  I feel lighthearted reading the last two words. (no reply)

Manley Hopkins

We discussed at length the power of craft — how by being able to wield it, acts as counterfoil to the terrible leap “Pitched past pitch of grief”.  Whether or not you feel that his embrace of language with dazzling skill “saves” him from despair, the fact is, the poem does exist, some might argue , as if to prove one is , while alive, indeed, alive.