Judith shared this (continuation of comments from last week) from Dance Anecdotes p. 102 by Mindy Aloff: The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, “the duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.” Meaning this: It is not a question of ability but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation…
Years ago an 80-year old woman won first prize at a dance contest in Jerez de la Frontera. She was competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, but all she did was raise her arms, throw back her head, and stamp her foot on the floor. In that gathering of muses and angels—beautiful forms and beautiful smiles—who could have won but her moribund duende, sweeping the ground with its wings of rusty knives.
Federico Garcia Lorca In Search of Duende
Poems:
Stone by Charles Simic
Inklings by Kitty Jospé
The Lazy Susan by Adrienne Sue
The Crossroads by Joshua Mehigan
Fire Safety by Joshua Mehigan
Monday by Alex Dimitrove
In person: Maura, Marna, Judith, Carmin, Jan, Elaine, Joyce, Ken, Martin
Zoom: Ginny, Barb, Emily, Bernie, David, Susan, Rose Marie
Nutshell:
Simic: do listen to his reading. He prefaces the poem commenting on vileness and stupidity...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XODm-0K9TK4
It is easy to see only a surface... especially for a stone...or a person and both are riddle... Stone as metaphor of self-hood, a model of stoic values... unaffected by circumstances... I was reminded of the artist Isamu Noguchi who said about his sculpture Mono Tari (Japanese folk tale of the boy born out of a peach pit... and his sculpture of stone, indeed, invites one to roll in the space carved for it) "the universe is made of rocks!" https://stormking.org/artist/isamu-noguchi/.
Martin brought up a history of planets... how they too follow an evolution, and the complexity of distributions, spin. This inspired the idea that we, like our planet are more than rock... we too are lava, and fire and evolving. David was reminded of Wallace Stevens' meditation about clouds of different densities, interconnected... material is energy filling a solid...
Several people commented on the poem as advice on stoic behavior, how to face encounters with another. Marna who suggested the poem, called on the Native American belief of every thing imbued with spirit -- that a stone too, is living. The idea of living inside a stone cave, writing on the walls... We enjoyed Simic's mock humility in the first stanza... the sounds of the slow sinking of a stone where fishes will come to knock on it... whether it is the stone or fish -- or those who observe... the idea is not to seek answer, but simply, to listen... Our presumptions are opened to allow possibility in the last stanza...
Inklings: I appreciated everyone's comments on this poem from my book Twilight Venus.
Physical ink... intuition, music, dance and art all combine to weave a satisfying sense they provide--
anything can happen... as they loosen all that holds us from imagining possibilities. There is a 4th dimension of a poem that is released in vibrations of throat and mouth. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/2/11757/files/2015/10/Abrams-The-Fourth-Dimension-of-a-Poem-vy76gc.pdf
The Lazy Susan: a perfect metaphor for the spin of time... now this way... now the other.
The history is interesting: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/lazy-susan-classic-centerpiece-chinese-restaurants-neither-classic-nor-chinese-180949844/
The 1st generation Chinese-American's child's view in the first 11 lines, echoes in the reversal of the lines reflecting the older Chinese immigrant parents. Subtle changes by the placement of phrases without changing the words keeps a sense of familiar... and yet, not quite the same. What fuels the hours to light a center is not the "tea dispenser's orange light" which reminds to fuel the hours, light a center."
Susan shared a delightful anecdote of her elders telling a joke in English, but the punch line was delivered in Yiddish. How does one "laugh in Chinese"? Certainly we were sensitive to the deeper turn on how one works into a culture, and work it out working out of a culture... "the how we live, because of them; they live this way because of us." adds yet another dimension.
The Crossroads: In spite of no details about the "it", repeated 5 times, this little poem is filled with scene and drama for the reader to create. Crossroads... where one can meet the devil, vampires, turn for better or worse... Each reader can create feelings, memories, associations and tone... One senses a car accident, perhaps caused by a leaping white-tailed deer; or the sparkling dust of an enlightenment... (like a baptism perhaps) the stickier grease of the oily smear... (final mark of priest after death); the marker could be sign of a lynching... Whatever "it" is, there is sadness-- perhaps that it is no longer... perhaps a person's life or an entire way of life is at risk of being forgotten.
How do we know what we know?
Fire Safety: we enjoyed the clever transformation of the ordinary, the deft insertion of "screaming machines", "land mines", "warlike", the rather comic details of the fire escape... and the surprising ending after this mysterious wait, with an incontrovertible prediction that we will "cry out". Extinguishers, alarms, hydrants, sprinklers, escape routes -- all supposedly to keep us safe, and which we take for granted... perhaps, will not work when needed... We wonder how the poet came to think of this poem.
Life indeed can turn on a dime. It's a hard life for these objects to wait... unnoticed.
Monday: How do we come to assign such importance to a day of the week... how does the pandemic experience change it? It's good to laugh at our defenses against recognizable frustrations. Dimitrov juxtaposes the trivial (cross the street) with the important (marry),
the what ifs and why nots and like the lazy susan, spins disaster to enjoyment... and then... oh! "the rest of it, we have to get to". Art saves us. We discussed blue -- celestial, sacred, calming, but also melancholy...
and that final unexpected word, pain...
It's the kind of poem that draws in a reader, makes one want to strike up a conversation with the poet,
compare notes on expectations, what we anticipate, discouragements and disappointments. And Art
forgives us... allows us to escape our self-absorption.
To add to the list of A.A. Milne:
King of Peru
https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=3&poet=685&poem=3358
King John’s Christmas
https://www.thereader.org.uk/featured-poem-king-johns-christmas-by-a-a-milne/
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