You and I and the World by Werner Aspenström
Coal by Audre Lorde
Such Is the Story Made of Stubbornness and a Little Air by Ilya Kaminsky
Boundaries ~ Lynn Ungar
The Art of Blessing the Day by Marge Piercy
The Last Things I'll Remember by Joyce Sutphen
Two Poems by Deborah Bacharach in Minyan
Plato by E.E. Cummings
Although I don't mean to crunch discussion time to 7-9 minutes a poem, it sometimes might seem that is all that is allowed if we only stayed for hour. I feel a need to share poems which remind us that we all struggle with the human condition, no matter what our DNA, color, circumstances.
Well... the zoom fizzled... but Paul reports:
Well, after the uproar over the substitute moderator settled down, the whiskey and the porter flowed like buttermilk. We finished ALL of the selections by 1:21 PM. Some left, many stayed. There were about 15 lifers present and ALL took active parts in discussions. We all agreed that this bunch was the best group of selections ever. We seemed to all think the whole program could be repeated: there was so much more to "get" from them. It was a grand event ! Judith, as usual, great. Jim, great reading and funny asides.......the big greatness today goes to Marna, whose information and insight on a poem none of us could unravel, elicited a groupwide, " Oh, yeah.....now ,I get it.". It may have been the one on Stubbornness. A really fun day and we all missed you.
And I sure missed everyone!
I did make this comment about the last one (EE Cummings)
The humor starting with famous philosophers, to Gen. Sherman, to a you that could be someone the speaker knows, or the reader, doesn’t prepare us for that key word “Nipponized” which confirms that poem is about the brutal price of war.
Apparently the old 6th av. ‘el’ (torn down in 1939) went by his home on Patchin Place.
That the poem was published in 1944 and some think the scrap metal from the el was sold to the Japanese who used it against the US in WW2 is perhaps part of it.
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