Happy 2023!
I’ve been thinking about how time is calculated, and the history of how we came to organize it in the Western World : BC, now Before Common Era, although no amendment has been made to AD. However it may be, since the popular consensus is that a new year will start on Sunday, rolling to the count of 2023 and tradition would have this be a moment to celebrate, I would say the highlight of any of 52 weeks is meeting in person and sharing poetry! It’s hard to remember that earlier in the year, we were meeting by zoom. I’m so grateful for all who come out each week, and our rich sharing.
Nutshell of discussion:
Wait by Galway Kinnell:
Even if you didn't know that Kinnell wrote this for one of his students contemplating suicide, you might have guessed, it was advice for someone depressed enough to consider it. This wonderfully wise poem is beautifully expressed advice for anyone needing a reminder that "this too will pass." What makes something no longer of interest? It's almost humorous to think of hair being interesting -- and presented simultaneously on par with pain. The transformation in the second stanza to suggest it is also something to which to listen: music of hair, / music of pain, / and the beautiful "music of looms weaving our loves again.
We enjoyed the pacing, repetition, for instance, the short sentences with "tired", each one just a little longer, and then 7 lines later, ending the poem, with the longest line ... "to hear your whole existence,/rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion". What an interesting way to think of sorrow-- just a rehearsal in a much bigger play, preparing us for the final act. Judith brought up wearing her mother's gloves at a funeral she attended-- a perfect example of "second-hand gloves" where their memories "are what give them the need for other hands."
It is a poem where you feel the presence of the poet willing to wait with you. No lecture, just a calming reassurance.
The Day Beauty Divorced Meaning by Leslie Harrison
Like the Kinnell, this poem asked us to pause, look again. Judith was reminded of the radio comedy series of Fibber McGee and Molly (1935-56) which features an overstuffed closet. The title, repeated in the 7th line becomes somewhat more clear, as a celebration for the way no matter how "beautiful" something is or not, no matter what "meaning" associated with it, life goes on. The verb "pick" could be applied to picking a flower, a fight, a flight. One can be snowed in, or snowed on. Where might you lose a suitcase becomes a humorous thought when it is the closet who loses it, not the baggage mis-delivered for instance on a boat. Richard brought up the image of his bird feeder: indeed, the trees do shed silly dandruff ... of birds and seeds. We had a hard time reconciling the title, thought-provoking as it is by itself, with the poem. Perhaps a divorce between title and poem imitates the divorce between one version of beauty with any meaning? Clever and humorous.
Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem by Matthew Olzmann
We didn't discuss the note Ada Limon made about this poem on the Slowdown about the kind of love that normally doesn't make it into a poem because it is a rather private, intimate almost idiosyncratic expression of love. We thoroughly enjoyed the humor: the cleverness of the title, equating a commercial with a love poem, which in disguise could be either one at a stretch; the anaphor introducing a series of unexpected things that normally would not endear a person. It is as if Olzmann is giving us permission to include the unspoken associations, for instance with the verb "drove". Sure, "because you drove me to the train station... Minneapolis... Providence. Hard not to think "you drove me nuts, to drink, crazy, etc." might not have been involved. Sometimes the most irritating things about someone are the very first things we remember and miss when they are gone. Richard came up with a term: sar-lov-casm... not dark, not really sarcasm, because of love. Delightful play with paradox. Much too long to be a commercial for something promoted by "Yahoo!".
N+7 rule applied to Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man:
The Stevens is a worthy poem in and of itself, but we only read it aloud. And then read the N+7 version which turns it into "The Soap Mandible". Judith recalled stories with the idea of an Inuit in an Igloo chewing on soap -- not produced here, https://www.jjon.org/joyce-s-allusions/soap but apparently, not as rare a subject as one might think and perhaps food for a soap commercial.
I quoted Magritte:" to be a surrealist means barring from your mind all the remembrance of what you have seen and being on the look out for what has never been." We agreed, there is something refreshing about the random coming in from a formal constraint. Already the original poem requires the reader to pause and parse carefully to try to understand technique, sound, sense. Certainly, pairing the first lines of both poems is an invitation to more creations. One must have a miniature of wisdom to have a mind of winter, could indeed work beautifully as conceit.
If you want to have a little fun in your life, try this technique to shake away any doldrums. Perhaps this surrealist exercise might remind some of Mad Libs.
The discussion went on at length about Artificial Intelligence and how hard it is to know if a real human has produced some writing, or AI. And that led to how poets steal and break rules all the time, so even if the N+7 version involved cheating, that shouldn't matter!
On Seeing the Deaf, Dumb and Blin Girl, Sitting for her Portrait by Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1827)
8 lovely rhymed stanzas and a sense of the author really understanding the person being painted. We forget about other senses, for instance, in stanza four, the scent of flowers, and feelings comes up, and in stanza five, "paint their language on her smile." The undying soul as teacher, brought up stories of those artists who are "disabled", but perform beautifully -- the blind dancer, or blind pianist, the deaf musician immediately come to mind. Read Oliver Sacks, The Mind's Eye. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7937653-the-mind-s-eye
Lydia Huntley Sigourney was a strong advocate for the deaf, blind, especially girls. Perhaps because diseases produced more cases of deafness, blindness especially in children, there was more concern. Her poem did bring up the callous treatment of those in hospitals and the heart-wrenching closures of pediatric care units.
The Rebuttal by John Lee Clark : (from his book How to Communicate)
This is one of his “erasure” poems. As a DeafBlind poet he addresses this problem of “ableism” and “distantism”… forcing poems to “tell a different story”. The 1827 poem about a dumb, deaf, blind girl in 8 stanzas provided one word from each line, so one line equalled one “erased” stanza in his 8 line poem.
He could have chosen "Heaven" or "artist" or "skill" from the opening line of the 1827 poem, but chose instead ,"guide". It is interesting to spend time looking at the nouns he could have chosen, but erased. It is also interesting that he used in the second line a homonym "tear" that could rhyme with fear, and does indeed rhyme with "here", or could rhyme with "fare/fair".
In other words, there are many levels on which to read, and interpret this poem. We compared both poems, and could have spent hours more talking about how the 21st century is evolving — AI (Artificial Intelligence), how to convey feeling in compressed speech of poetry. How has poetry changed in two centuries, etc.
8 lines, 4 sentences that could apply to much more than responding to disabled people. Disabled systems, governments are also implied. The pacing, choice of words and images created create the feel of the other poem and simultaneously go beyond it, with a 21st century resonance pulling at words like hath and certainly the double meanings of such words as draw, and sway, still. If you didn't know it was an erasure poem, it would absolutely stand on its own, and invite you to imagine the many ways the poem illustrates the title.
In How to Communicate, he provides a description of performing this as a Protactile poem in a later section. For a Youtube to see how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITFHNW_08YE
Is one view, one answer, one word ever enough? Often we try to simplify to prove our own point of view is correct. We are containers of paradox, and why should we not yearn to have language that reflects of simultaneous yet conflicting feelings? The heart understands such swirl... and what a beautiful interchangeability of rife with ripe on which this poem ends. Rife, so often associated with negatives means "abundant" or "prevalent" whereas, ripe is more "fully developed". Just a change of letter to try to blend in these opposites we witness and live.
Over There in That Garden by Meret Oppenheim translated by Kathleen Heil.
I played the New Yorker link which did not give the visual German translation. What I heard
did not correspond exactly to the original German I found of the poem. I could not find when it was written, and only know the dates of the poet: 1913-1985.
The poet is a German-born surrealist painter, famous for her "fur covered tea cup" and "bound high heels on a platter".
What is a shadow? If we do not acknowledge our shadows, we cannot be complete.
Is this world war II shadows... the missing in concentration camps? Shadows of ancestors
felt lying on their grave? Who are we without them?
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