Dawn - Rita Dove
ars Pasifika - by Craig Santos Perez to hear Craig Santos Perez read his poem: are pacifika https://dcs.megaphone.fm/POETS8737071724.mp3?key=72bb030cc5a7add3c823656cfb3977e3
I am the Apsara’s daughter by Sokunthary Svay
From Blossoms -- Li-Young Lee
The Weight of Sweetness by Li-Young Lee
What the Paint Can Do - Kitty Jospé
Palm Sunday by Malcolm Guite
CRIMINAL JUSTICE HAIKU SERIES— Lisa Nichols
sent as extra:
La suavecita by Lupe Mendez
Chrysalis - M.J. Iuppa
Another Shade of Yellow -- M.J. Iuppa
**
Further sharings:
the Apsara dance Marna mentioned is a YouTube called Apsara Dance Royal Ballet of Cambodia Tola Chap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkpXEPfxql0
Poetry is both a genealogical tattoo and a guerrilla archive.
I try to describe and embody this in my work by employing collage, ethnographic, visual, and documentary techniques. This is combined with lyric, multilingual, and polyphonic narrative devices and structures. My goal is to make visible the seams, fragments, paradoxes, complexities, and indeterminacies of being from an unincorporated territory. My hope is that the reader will gather the materials and harvest their deeper meanings.
I interweave my own intimate subjectivity with larger forces. Moreover I tell the stories of my own family not only to value and memorialize their stories, but also to show that their experiences matter. To me, this personalizes the history and politics. In terms of craft, I usually don’t aim for “balance”; instead, I aim for dynamic and profound juxtapositions.
"For me, poetry is a vessel—a canoe—that carries our stories, myths, creation stories, genealogies, histories, memories, kin, foods, traumas, hopes, and dreams. Poetry is navigational chant, song map, constellation of words, and wave patterns that help us journey through our past, present, and future. Poetry is prayer and elegy, protest and critique, truth and manifesto. Poetry is a love letter and mahalo circle. Poetry is an archive, document(ary), and library of voices. Poetry is place-based and planetary, migratory and rooted, archipelagic and oceanic. Poetry is hybrid, polyphonic, and multispecies. Poetry is laughter and trickster. Poetry is like the ocean: it has no end, only unknown depths, contracting waves, and dilating horizons."
Nutshell:
Dawn: Thank you to Joyce for sharing this poem... it allows us to feel a second chance as real...
the welcome relief of starting again afresh. We picked up on the quirkiness of time: "If you don't look back, // (line and stanza break) the future never happens." The link of "prodigal" and smell of biscuits--
and perhaps a return to a more innocent childhood of looking up at the sky to make stories out of clouds
with the sense that anything is possible.
ars pacifica: I went out of order from what was sent. (This was poem #4). Although Bernie read it beautifully slowly, respecting the wide spaces between the worlds... Craig Santos Perez reads it even more
slowly: https://dcs.megaphone.fm/POETS8737071724.mp3?key=72bb030cc5a7add3c823656cfb3977e3
"If you can write the ocean, you can never be silenced". We could feel the level of the water rising...
how the paddle of your tongue appears, like a savior. Lori wrote before hearing Rose-Marie's quote shared above about his "ars poetica" "Steer the ship with word"... Yes! Prayer, elegy... and meditation
enriched by the research (note: kudos for Elaine whose name now is synonymous with "delving deeper").
I am the Apsara's Dance: See Marna's share of the ballet for the spirit of this spirit woman of sky/cloud.
We can hear the bells... I didn't mean to put the men in the group on the spot to ask how they respond to this female "copying the image"... the poem resonates on many levels-- as does "sea of milk". Lori shared the sweetness of the image and scent of orange blossom she is privileged to experience with her son.
A sense of sacred sensuality...
The Weight of Sweetness: we discussed at length this word "weight" -- both a term of measurement as well as an indicator of emotional gravitas. We cannot know sweet without struggle... and what is this sweetness that remains in memory? Li-Young Lee sketches a light philosophical introduction... allows us
to puzzle over choosing three of four "gravities"... proceeds to painting an image of peach... like a video,
from its weight bending the branch to snapping off to rest in your palm... (Ah! David H. explained that
luscious feel... that ultimate experience of tasting a ripe peach... which inspired Bernie to echo with a similar eureka of tasting a perfectly ripe strawberry)... Back to the poem... third stanza sets the scenario...
the tender gesture of the father moving a green leaf, "fallen like a kiss", leading us to the 4th stanza and
an almost unexpected weight... hugging those peaches, trying to keep up with his father. The sounds
support the breathless "f's" -- the sibilance of s, sh, weave in to flavor the memory just as delicately sensuous....
From Blossoms: pick by Jan. She was struck by the emotional impact, the beauty, the sensuous quality
as were we. A companion piece to the other... "O to take what we love inside" now
understood in a deeper way... not just "jubilance of peace" -- but this sense of impossible -- how blossom
is so transformed to fruit... a sense of ashes to ashes, and yet this joy, gathering weight as it is repeated
three times, weightless as wing.
What the Paint Can Do: Van Gogh does in paint, what Li-Young Lee does with words. A portrait is
more than physical ressemblance. As Van G. said, "paintings have a life of their own that derives from
the painter's soul". His yellow in the hat, stands for the sun... the energy and vitality of delivered by...
paint.
Palm Sunday: Thank you June for sharing this... and the context of how it soothed you as you struggled to write a poem about the nameless man burned alive by two teens... How words and crowds and easy feelings are no enough to fix large problems. What surface flourish do we apply... no human being is
spared from some form of "self-interest, fearful guardedness, hardness of hard" -- the barricades that
hide a dreadful emptiness... The last line is a strong call to invite us to participate more fully.
Criminal Justice Haiku Series: This criticism of Rochester, NY is just one such way of participating...
It was powerful to have 10 different voices read the 10 haiku.
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