May 25-26

5/26 was the  last session of Rundel until October.  Note, NO session at Pittsford July 27.  The group will self-moderate from September 7 through October 19.   Both groups will resume October 26/27.

To Be in Love by Gwendolyn Brooks

Sonnets from China by W. H. Auden

Where it Begins by Abby E. Murray

The Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens 

Wrap by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

'Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend'  by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Pi by Wisława Szymborska

Could this be me?  by Charles Simic

Nutshell:  To be... in love... to be, as opposed to "seem", with a multitude of wraps, a caravan of unending decimals, and a 4-liner of who we might be after all...  

thank you Susan for this :  life is just a bowl of cherries lyrics

“There's no two ways about it

You live and you laugh at it all”. 

Brooks:  She always pegs it!  What is it to be in love?  Usually an emotional roller-coaster, which she skillfully paints for us.  We don't touch in the same way... we adopt someone else's way of seeing things,

and "everywhere, you see the other's face"... What is overmuch? Perhaps that is what the pulse must not say when you are with that other... and that if not-- you are left limp  -- and the oxymorons kick in:  ghastly freedom; golden hurt.  In love, the other seems to be gold... but there's a downsize to this -- and reality can kick in to reveal the problem when that magical mesmerization wears off.  Wonderful variety of long and short lines, and all the senses at work.  

Auden: He gives us three perspectives about war: the false simplicity... the monument that says nothing of the horrors, the orders (note, it is a telephone speaking to a man), the passive markers on a map that show "troops were sent".  A child is witness.  The enjambed last word of the first quatrain, "there is a plan...."

which brings us to the actual men... how they are pawns played by time, (nine or noon...and that dry mouth feel of thirst) again that passive voice "can be lost", and curt reality, "and are", the tragedy of real people killed unlike the ideas that sent them.  Auden delivers the truth with bitter overtones.  War is so often justified, defended, to protect what people want to believe.  

Judith brought up this Millay sonnet...   https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46464/time-does-not-bring-relief-you-all-have-lied

Murray: The "she" in question is the poet's 8 year old daughter.  Although the poem was written in January, It is frightening to those of us with grandchildren, some even with great-grandchildren, to think that a parent now has to warn his/her child of the monstrous terror that lies "down the street" -- that the answer a child wants to hear to be reassured, cannot be given.  On this 145th day of 2022, we are witnessing the 213th mass shooting.  As one participant stated, how can action not have been taken after Sandy Hook to prevent this?  Will there be an effective reaction now?

The discussion spoke of the horror of such shootings... and indeed, it felt that the poem had just been penned. I can't imagine as a parent having to give blood to check the DNA of the massacred to see if my child were one of the victims... 

I mentioned the powerful photographs on view currently at the Eastman Museum by McFadden.  https://www.eastman.org/mcfadden (on view until June 19). The Father/Son, hand-written testimonies speak of the powerful love and difficult lessons  of being black in this country, a father tries to convey to a son to protect him.   It is sad to hear the story of a child in a family who immigrated to this country who says, "Mama, please, I want to move to a safe country".  We are the only country in the world with such a record of mass violence.  

Stevens:  In two carnivalesque stanzas we enter a puzzling surrealistic scene filled with marvelous sounds and images.

Is the Emperor of Ice Cream time?  What kind of power, if it is fated to melt?  The key line,

"Let be / be finale of seem"  cries out to call a spade a spade.  The first stanza does not sound like a background for a funeral-- but it would seem that it is with pathetic details of flowers in last month's newspapers and in stanza two, full details of  cheap coffin, the sheet over the dead woman she had  embroidered.   Perhaps like the "Emperor with no clothes" -- what is "real" about an emperor of ice cream,  and what kind of ice-cream which normally is served in Havana and Key West (where Stevens would visit) at festive events?  

Nezhukamatathil: How many different ways can you use the word "wrap" (as noun and verb)?  This delightful poem "wraps" us up indeed with a visceral, highly sensual world of Southern India.  Hurray for poetry which raises questions and inspires wonder.  The opening sentence takes a moment to realize the title is the last word, but unspoken!  Only to move on to food, a present wrapped in curl and furl of ribbon, the wrap of a sari, wrapped... perhaps the speaker of the poem is a small child, wrapped in it, close to her

grandmama's face and that "hush/of paprika and burnt honey".

Manley Hopkins: Perhaps known as innovator, for his sprung rhythm, and in this sonnet, difficult inversions of syntax, and as Paul pointed out, banned by the Jesuit order to write... indeed, this piece might give an example of why!  Poor man imploring God please, please, you grant others a sense of success, please let me do what up to now I have not been able to do!!!

Judith thought this sonnet one of his more workable ones.

https://interestingliterature.com/2017/06/a-short-analysis-of-gerard-manley-hopkinss-thou-art-indeed-just-lord/

Szymborska:  With her inimitable wit, we are given a poetic version of this most important mathematical ratio of circumference of any circle to the diameter of that circle.  Math can be, and should be, a wonderful philosophical tool that allows the human spirit to ponder beginnings and lack of endings... (address real problems as opposed to "drill and kill." to quote Doris, married to a Mathematician.)  

Starting with actual decimal places, Szymborska goes on to explore imagination, "by comparison with the world" -- snakes, fairy-tale snakes, to demonstrate length, caravans of digits... rays of starlight... 

and a "meanwhile" 2,3, 15, 319 -- her phone number, your shirt size, ending with a code a songbird (trostle) sings!   https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-pi-and-how-did-it-originate/

Simic:  The title... at first glance challenges us... who are we indeed, if an alarm clock, no hand, ticking loudly on the two dump?  What parts do we have ? what is our function as alarm?  Hard not to think we are being used as a bomb with all our ticking... and just who threw us in the dump and why?

Mike mentioned the fun of finding useful things others throw out in the Blue Mountain dump... 

May 18-19

The Three Oddest Words by Wisława Szymborska

More like a Lichtenberg Figure  by Zebulon Huset

Do/Do Not  by Nisha Atali                                                                          

Frogs by Louis Simpson

Spring Pools  by Robert Frost

Nothing Gold Can Stay  by Robert Frost

But What Is Gold by Kitty Jospé

Our last zoom session -- with a thank you to Valerie for hosting.  It has been such a boon to be able to continue the weekly conversations during the pandemic (again, with a thank you to Elaine R. for 2+ years of handling the zoom) and especially wonderful to be able to have David join us this way after moving away from Rochester.  

It was especially fitting to have David share the reading of Spring Pools (memorized, so read by heart) with his "Frosting" expertise and a go around of the 18 people each "reflecting" on how much we have appreciated all he brought to the group.  Frost has a way of capturing a sense of mourning as he records.  In Spring Pools, two stanzas of 6 lines, just two sentences, capture the transitory nature of these pools, the repeated mention of flowers bound in their reflection, and ask us in turn to reflect on the nature of the passing of the seasons.  Judith immediately commented on the gorgeous effects of slant vowels, and we all admired the masterful crafting of two sentences, the repetitions, the chiasmus in the penultimate line... the snow in the final line, that, although melting just yesterday, will return. 

I was chided by the Rundel group for not signing my name on the small sequel to Nothing Gold can Stay.  It's humbling to follow a perfect Frost poem in trimeter,  (Nothing Gold can stay) whose short lines laced with long vowels ends with 5 syllable line, as if the "gold" remains in the unspoken.  Emily was reminded of the Japanese term mono no aware -- literally "the pathos of things", and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese idiom for the awareness of impermanence (無常, mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.

 Kathy immediately thought of the word "hence" in the penultimate line -- the treasure of what happens in our weekly discussions as we share our understandings.

Nutshell of the rest...

Szymborska — note how Future, Silence, Nothing all have caps… We discussed why they might be called  “odd” — as a philosophical look at how the actual word "undoes" the meaning.  We did bat about different ways of understanding the "something no non-being can hold" ... What can we, as beings hold?  Judith shared this delightful saying which helps us embrace the refusal of complexity to be unraveled:  "Take the F out of ineffable, and unscrew the inscrutable."

Odd, as in unfamiliar…stops us to think about the nature of language.  Doris, in the Rundel group noted how in this day and age where we hear “words matter; words are powerful” we see words misused, misconstrued.   As grandmother, she suggested this YA (Young Adult) book for her granddaughter— which although, she noted, could be better written, has an interesting premise: Words on Fire https://shop.scholastic.com/parent-ecommerce/books/words-on-fire-9781338606065.html

Huset: For the Pittsford group, Paul underlined the nature of Lichtenberg's lightening patterns.  For Rundel,  Mike immediately saw a bus/car with two wheels… perhaps two suitcases on the top… How do we give value to words here… small broken mosaics of a family tree… The idea of our DNA having some prehistoric elements in it… the mess of our heritage… the anthropomorphic way we have of looking at geography, (cliffs, mountain faces, jagged face of coastline), and this matryoshka metaphor of what nests in our folklore… so apropos to Ukraine/Russia today.  Was it yesterday the topic came up of the welcome of Ukrainians at the Polish border, but not the African students in Ukraine trying to flee to safety?

Atali: Do/Do not..  I love what Elaine said about a poem — once it is out in the world, it doesn’t belong to the poet… as we discussed whether the note "about this poem" helped us understand it.  Without the note,   Mike said kindly,  "the poet has some cool thoughts and ways to express them, but this has the feel of a first draft and unconnected…". Both groups did a lot of guesswork, especially about the last two stanzas… How do animals perceive us?  Do they shudder at us for all the reasons we might shudder at the way we treat the world?  If those mangos arrive unbruised, is it because they are picked too soon…? (The judges say this is evidence of a catastrophe, but might it not also be the way we go about trying to protect such a tricky fruit susceptible to easy damage?)…and what connection is there for wolves to start running?   I'm not sure without the note I would have seen the contradiction Atali mentions of "our impulse to love and nourish, is both insufficient and absolutely necessary".  The Judges' citation felt the poem addresses our human responsibility to the climate crisis... 

In the 11 stanzas,  4 of which are couplets, the rest tercets, all but two contain reference to "I" ( 11 sentences that start with "I", and one "me".). It may be that the damage we do is unintentional, but there is a sense of  cluelessness... and overtone of sadness.  I recommend her audio recording of her voice.

Simpson: Perhaps an overtone of Basho's frogs, but delightful poem infused with the senses, colors, sounds.  We discussed the layers of meaning of the word "monstrous" -- immense sound... but another meaning as Paul pointed out is "absurd".  Frogs are vulnerable creatures, who breathe through their skin... The last line comes as a surprise, but perhaps  also allows us to share the insouciance of being a frog and croaking, with its overtone of death, as well as rhythmic jabbering.

 

May 11

 Loveliest of trees, the cherry now by A. E. Housman

 two more poems Par Lagerkvist —Poems from "Evening Land"

Connecting by Barbara Murphy

No-Hitter, Fifth Inning by Sarah Freligh

Night Game by Thom Ward

Weather Report by Abby Murray

A Friend’s Umbrella by Lawrence Raab

Housman:  Although I played this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5kE1X1okhI  not all appreciated it.  What I liked about the recording for the Housman was the way the dynamics mirrored the shift in tone in the second stanza— and the long drawn out “fifty” one would never say in reading as a poem.

I am a firm component of the sound of sense innate in language — (my thesis for my MFA) — but, there is a certain mysterious “sound of sense” that music might add… note the verb is conditional.   There is no guarantee on anything… and add personal taste, time period, etc, etc….one can get into quite a forest and lose sight of any trees at all!

Jan re-read and mentioned the tenor  Bryn Terfel singing it beautifully.   I found the music embedded in this site:http://preferreading.blogspot.com/2014/09/sunday-poetry-e-housman_21.html The music:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEKLIcui89w

David mentioned how many poems lose when set to music, although he called to mind how he had transcribed the music of the Trout Quintet for guitar and sang the original lied Schubert set to piano.    His take: Good verse finds “music in the sound of sense.” Sometimes music overrides the verse, appropriating it to express its own emotion.

  We quickly reviewed the "biblical" life time of 70, how when only 20 (a score of years) one (hopefully)  can enjoy 50 more years!   A strange tenderness is woven in this poem ending on the final word "snow" looking at the passage of time and that curious falling white of the spring mix of cherry blossom and snow. Quietly brilliant, one person suggested, where the rhyme does not interfere and indeed  "looking at things in bloom"  no matter impermanence or accidental interruption we all know what is implied with the final word, snow...

Perhaps a larger question to be discussed for any favorite poem:  Why or why not does it deserve the fame?  What universal transcends the particular?

Lagerkvist:    Both poems seem to recreate Pascal's "wager" about the existence of God. The point is not to prove God's existence or not, but  the following simplified version of the wager:                               since "evidence" cannot settle God's existence, should you wager on God, you have much to gain and not much to lose should indeed, He exist,  as opposed to losing all should he not.  As Paul put it, "positive or negative, there is, nevertheless, such mental energy... sometimes released, sometimes kept in orbit, locked in the brain. But, it is energy, the particle physics of the mind! "The poem provides a perfect metaphor for melancholy atheism… and longing for a caring God with the terrible ground between… 

Judith was reminded of Carmen de Lavallade and the Creation: https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/carmen-de-lavallade/the-creation/

Marna was reminded of Indigenous native American believe that God is in everything. 

For the first poem, that repeat of "disquiet",  confirms the mystery of the beginnings... the aloneness before loneliness... The  question of how God could remember -- like the sea remembering the seashell it once surged through-- and the plea, please do not forget me... We give to this idea of God our own character tics.  "What is deeper than absences?  unreturned love?"  This cry -- even should no one hear it, exists...

Connecting by Barbara Murphy:  I showed the book Left Behind where she and her nephew Joe collaborated with Poems and Photos. 

This opened quite a conversation about baseball! Here is the picture.

Everyone loved the poem -- how baseball culture blended with ideas.  idioms… the epigram quote from Babe Ruth is perfect…"Never let the fear of striking out prevent you from playing the game."  Even if some do not like baseball..they loved the poem~

The next two poems are on Poets' Walk. The first by Sarah Freligh comes from her book, Sort of Gone. These poems, tough, funny, real,  trace out the life of a baseball player, a pitcher.  The details of playing ball ring true, down to the smell of the grass and the unquiet mind chattering away at you while you just want to concentrate on what that next damn pitch should be.

One of the blurbs has it right: great if you like poetry or baseball. If you like them both, well, this is a must read.

Valerie read it for herself with a pause before the last word so it sounds like this

Too early to hope 

hell, he’s been here before

jinxed himself by thinking too much

hung a curve to some jive rook

who gave it a ride 

high-fived his way around the bases

 

whole thing centers around title… No-Hitter, Fifth Inning-- the pitcher has a big job delivering the ball... playing the edges of the "safe" zone.  David informed us that now there is a mechanical check to help that difficult role of umpire calling strikes.  

Ward: The title sets the scene... Marna suggested the 2-3 line that maybe the moonlight is like foul territory… out of bounds. Or it could be reference to MoonLight Graham in the movie

field of dreams https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/moonlight-graham-anniversary-field-of-dreams-burt-lancaster-shoeless-joe/y7qildo9tsbh1xq09jcagyf4x.  Regardless, it sounds like the nickname of a batter.  The "called" third strike is perhaps the hardest to take -- no swing, some umpire's opinion, and the inner reprimand "I should have swung".  Yet, this fellow doesn't mope, blame the stars.  He plays the game, just like Babe Ruth.

Louis Jenkins. We all roared at this wonderful poem which shows a typical problem of "now what was I about to do... or say..." -- especially with the chaos of zoom and in-person and not getting the mic to people right away... and twice, not remembering what they wanted to share...

It could also be a perfect metaphor for a long-term marriage. We all could hear a Billy Collins tone for reading it.  Joyce (Rundel) calls the basement in her home filled with the previous owner's belongings,

"the magic cellar" -- if you need anything, you'll find it there! 

Murray:  We were running out of time to discuss this poem but all agreed on its power.

The grief of disbelief is quite a subject!  Martin, with his psychologist's eye, understood "umbrella" as protection and saw many sexual innuendos throughout the poem. 

Whether or not, (and I love that each participant can find different things) it is a timely and important poem.

Raab: umbrellas... and memory and Ralph Waldo Emerson... a perfect description of alzheimers and sailing on private seas. 

Rundel only: Mary kindly provided the page with three pictures by Barb's nephew, Joe and my attempt to give a flavor of her words which respond to them on one page.  

This gave rise to many stories of what you can see in the Mt. Hope cemetery -- the tons of daffodils planted, the "He and His Husband" which you might not have seen last century, or "Bill now knows something you don't".  It also allowed Mike to share the many similar instances-- his mother's loss of

her father to suicide, the loss of his 18 year old son to cancer, how his other son loves to take photos.

It is touching to share how poems provide a sense of partnership with our own private lives and that we are never alone. 

fine to get a homerunner.The Creation

 

May 4&5

Cherry Blossom by Abby Murray

Cherry Blossoms by Toi Derricotte

Blue-Butterfly Day by Robert Frost

Prayer Beginning with a Line by Czaykowski by Pablo Piñero Stillmann

A Prayer by Bogdan Czaykowski

Calamity Again by Taras Shevchenko

2 poems from "Evening Land" by Par Lagerkvist

A Short Story of Falling by Alice Oswald

Confessional by Jonathan Everitt

Time... such a familiar trope in poetry, is rare seen as anthropomorphized as a "giver of affection"! How delightful, that with contemplations on Cherry Blossom, and the usual Spring musings on impermanence time is "conspiring to send love notes"!  One perfect cherry blossom as gift... and time begging the speaker to love it day after day... Note, I am paraphrasing the first poem... and the delicious and unusual handling of time.  Usually a "blip of a life" is cause for regret-- but here, time, much as we cannot control it or circumstances, gives its affection, asks to be noticed and used as wanted, with a sense of unhurried happiness!  All of this with a beautiful sound pattern of short vowels (the "i" in gift, brittle, whistle, pick, it, blip, notice) the longer I in time, likes and longer stress words which render vowels into neutral schwa. (begging, wanting, flaunting).  Certainly the sounds reinforce the ideas, and acts as if a paint for the unconscious to be used freely.  

Cherry blossom, as symbol of ephemeral and harkening to the Japanese warrior whose highest honor is to die in battle, in the next poem gives way to the cherry tree as setting for gatherings of people.  An interesting note, from Mike at Rundel, that cherry trees have been developed either to focus on the fruit or the blossom for viewing.   https://libanswers.nybg.org/faq/271056

I love serendipity!  Because I had paired the two poems side by side, the Derricotte looked to be a quatrain of the first four lines, followed by a repeated couplet in italics!  We puzzled about the couplets!  One idea was that the blossoms of the tree are whispering  "be patient" -- and all those viewers and people in the park responded to the trees, "you have an ancient beauty".  Other ideas -- the poet is telling the reader to be patient, that we are all one as beautiful as the gnarled old cherry trees.  Or perhaps it is indeed the blossoms giving a reassuring message to the poet, worried about her poems not being as beautiful.  Regardless, we remarked how when people gather and take pictures of themselves together, the smiles for the camera reflect a genuine happiness.  It is not warm... there is a fur-trimmed coat...but such a beautiful mingling because of these trees-- as if they too are enjoying the love caught in friendship.

I explained the hyphenated blue-butterfly day, as one of those first warm days with a cloudless sky and seeing the first butterflies... Indeed... sky-flakes (perhaps cherry blossoms along with the butterflies) and the lovely mix of songbird implied in "flowers that fly".  We spoke of desire, that fundamental procreative power in Spring, the nuanced alternate rhyme. As David remarked, Frost, no matter how beautiful or joyful the description, adds a lace of melancholy... here, the "April mire". 

This of course gave rise to many references to mud and mud season...  Gilbert and Sullivan Mikado, the ""Mud, mud, I love mud" song, and I believe a even a reference to Kevin Gates, "Out of the Mud"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-QZzVytupY.

The next pairing of "Prayer" perhaps illustrates Billy Collins' advice for a good poem: starts with clarity and ends with mystery.  For sure, the title announced clearly, a prayer. But who is asking to be thrown into a cloud, and is there something we should understand beyond a slant reference to Noah and a God who does not keep promises?  (Does God do better after the flood?)  It would feel that Stillmann's speaker is desperate and suspects, since he asks this God to be honest enough to laugh at him falling again, that making rain fall harder to remind of our unreliability, (is our confined to just humans, life on earth?) that perhaps God is also unreliable.  The "awkward" hand, rhyming with "aught yet are" make me think of a circular continuity of nothing.  There are no "ands", only delicately-coiled ampersands that join the "slip & fall & slip and & once/again fall & laugh again.

O lord!  We felt the speaker, with a fate rivaling that of Job,  was at a church gathering, standing up to deliver an extemporaneous speech, the repeated punctuation of "O lord" a way to pause, gather his thoughts.  The first prayer makes more sense than the second. 

Here the imprecation is to "throw me into a cloud" -- and other various places (flower, lake, forest, into the shape of a stone) but with specific requests of what not to turn the one implorer into (bee, fish) or with specific conditions (not to be found like a pinecone by a squirrel; not to be thrown onto a London street and what is going on with biting walls in that city?  The ending reminds me of the Salamander symbol adopted by François premier of France:  

 

"In medieval iconography it represented the man who never lost the peace of his soul (went through the fires of passion) and who was confident in God despite all troubles. So it corresponded to chastity, virginity, loyalty. It was also identified with Christ who would baptize the world with fire flames. The salamander was a powerful symbol because it was associated with both fire and poison and many people were afraid of it. At the time it was believed that salamanders could use any type of fire without harm. Even brilliant minds like Leonardo da Vinci believed this because he wrote about the salamander: “This has no digestive organs, and gets no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin. The salamander, which renews its scaly skin in the fire,—for virtue"

This brings us to Calamity Again. This seemed a timely poem with the war in Ukraine. 

We commented on the outrage of the exclamation point -- 5th line -- that confirms the announcement on the first line repeating the title-- Calamity again!

When suddenly...! 

Short and to the point.

and two poems by Par Lagerkvist... Although translated by Auden and another, the language felt a bit clumsy.  We had a sense of a choice of gratitude in face of loss, or facing the unknown -- 

Hard to understand the twist at the end of "homeless".  Like the second poem, there is a sense of conviction about peace, although hard to believe when making the best of a bad situation.  Certainly

happiness is a highly subjective element dependent on attitude.  As Richard mentioned, when all is said and done, what will anyone remember?  Is the wishing to look back of the guest referring to death,

leaving earth, and afterlife, or perhaps a dream of death... that reminder to be mindful of what is,

and the nature of looking forward that goes along with it. 

Kathy filled us in on Alice Oswald and her work.  She is definitely a performer and so her poems never "sound" the same way twice.  We all found the poem A Short Story of Falling an incantatory experience.

Her comparison of her poems as "found carvings", balances the evident form you see in this poem-- 

the form more a a guide post, the couplets giving room for pauses.  

Judith was reminded of the myth of Typhonus  

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

Richard kindly offered The Waters of March...by Antonio Carlos Jobim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBEesrdaRog

It is a song about the arrival (promise) of Spring in Brazil, preceded by the floods of March

 

He also mentioned GOLD...lyrics by Nan Knighton saying “Whenever I hear this song on my player (sung by Linda Eder), I freeze and must listen to it all.It might bring out some discussion.” 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE0yiKoR0zk

He also mentioned To a lesser extent there is "If I Had My Way"...lyrics by Jack Murphy

https://genius.com/Linda-eder-if-i-had-my-way-lyrics

Finally, we arrive at Confessional by local poet Jonathan Everitt. 

Skill use, of noun transformed to verb, hinging on the word "return" only to

review in reverse what is already said.  Much more could be said about this love poem which intimates

at the complexity of relationship between two people.