Poems for 2/15-16

 It is Black History Month! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/101640/celebrating-black-history-month  There are so many WONDERFUL poems from which to choose... I was sorry to see Lucille Clifton was not among this  selection... BUT LET US CELEBRATE POWERFUL VOICES THAT HELP UP BECOME A KINDER PEOPLE! https://www.salesforce.org/blog/8-ways-to-honor-black-history-month/

In my email I included an excerpt from her poem My Girls  https://aaregistry.org/poem/last-note-to-my-girls-for-sid-rica-gilly-and-neen-by-lucille-clifton/

i command you to be

good runners to go with grace

go well in the dark and

make for high ground

my dearest girls

my girls my more than me… 

As one commentator put it, "Her poems on race, motherhood, history, and even the self are always, always about more than her."

Line up:

Sunday Dinner by Lucille Clifton

Migrating North by Kitty Jospé

Picture This by Jiordan Castle

Things Shouldn't Be So Hard by Kay Ryan

From the Stone Age, by Alice Corbin Henderson

Not everything is a poem by Maggie Smith

February Augury by Sarah Ghazal Ali

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower by Rainer Maria Rilke

You could almost make a poem out of the titles... and titles in each poem made us pause...  What associations do you have with Sunday Dinner?  ritual?  a gathering together? Migrating North  and what that meant and means now; Picture This and a snapshot of a circumstance embedded in a semi-confessional/commentary on life in contemporary times; Things shouldn't be so hard with perhaps a pun on "abrade" and scraping... not away, but leaving a mark... From the Stone age... and imagining one of those stone statues speaking to us now about what it is that humans have created... 

and thank goodness, Not everything is a poem, and yet we have an eloquent poem that allows a mother to paint the love for a child.  It IS February, so I picked February Augury where, instead of a ground hog predicting 6 more weeks of winter (given global warming) an indirect warning that should indeed give us pause... 

and for comfort...  the Rilke.  I think I've shared it before.   Here is a man, born in 1875 in Prague (but known as Austrian) who died at age 51.  He wrote about subjective experience, disbelief, and here, offers advice for how to live in unsettling times.  I don't know if this was written after WW 1, but for sure, this war ushered in a deep questioning of what history had been about, and the nature of man.  These questions continue, looking at technology providing warfare with increasing efficient methods of mass destruction.

So... here we are ... and how to make sense of it all? I have tried my best to find words to pin down the discussion, but in no way is the nutshell below a "definitive" analysis or scholarly take!   Poems help us.  I treasure each observation everyone makes.  I hope the following allows you to further wonder about this set of poems.  

Nutshell: 

Sunday Dinner:  Well... it's great to see the words "certainty" and "truth" and "heroes"... but also this edged-sword word, "fantastical".  What melts? and how does this melting over all take effect over what pops in grease, steams in the panes. Bless Lucille for her fantastic invitation to look at our times!

Migrating North. I thank Ekphrastic Review for publishing this poem on Friday 2/10 https://www.ekphrastic.net/ You might enjoy seeing some of the other poems this fine journal publishes.

Picture This:  what's the title about, is a good question. The first line doesn't fit. We discussed at length fonts like "comic sans" and the intricate implications of type... And why feel badly for the inventor of Comic Sans?  That is not the question.  But this controversial font, intended to do one thing, used for another is an important subtext.  How do things get so out of hand???? If the stranger had only locked the door of the bathroom... but the adjective "rag-dolled" makes it clear the stranger was in no shape to do so.

Embarrassment is a powerful emotion... but who's at fault?  This provocative poem invites discussion about life and what it's all about.  Indeed, what mistakes (granted they will happen) are ours to make?  And just what do we invent?   Panic by definition is not accidental; doom? something invented???? ah... but repetition, we are good at that with history.  

Wednesday's group heard the recording: poem read way too fast.  These are issue worthy of discussion, but the tone seemed dismissive.  A sort of cascade of stuff that was going on that we don't know about, spoken by a 20 yr old:   fast, disjointed... 

Things Shouldn't Be So Hard: perhaps a bit of New England humor here?  The Em dashes, contribute to a Robert Frost flavor of New England perhaps. That the last line is the title is a clue.. The word "should" resounds and repeats. One idea about abrade: the metaphor that all that physical work, which in life "scratches the surface" goes deeper.  The slant rhymes : erAsed, abrAde, and that damaging parAde and others drive the message home. Really, things shouldn't be so hard -- becomes a whole new idea.. how do you leave your mark???

From the Stone Age : (written in April 20, 1918)  Perhaps one could read a self portrait from stone.. and one thinks of Michelangelo liberating what is inside a stone to become a magnificent sculpture. Does this poem ring universal, although written over 100 years ago?  Southwest flavor? Some felt a flavor of ancient sculptures such as those in  Aku-Aku.  Humans have forever tried to "get at the truth", tried to "do good" , created religions, made statues to venerate what's important.  Like the Kay Ryan poem, there is a sense that there SHOULD be abrasion, like water carving stone, and here a voice from the past, speaking to the space and time which we try to define....The discussion was rich including references to Oxymandias, to Robin Hobbs' story of the king's assassins, and perhaps some Navaho flavor.  The title, gives a sense of pre-historic, and second line probably does not refer to the iconoclasm practised by taking power away from a statue by disfigurement, as the statue is speaking, and "forgets what it was meant to represent".

In some ways, it feels like a description of alzheimers... the body there, life moving through, "space, volume, overtone of volume" with the curious comparison to "taste of happiness in the throat" (associated with chords of music in line before?) which you fear to lose, though it may choke you. 

From the parenthetical comment on,  the stone has let go of any need to remember and just is. 

Polly's comment is that the next poem with its catchy title Not everything is a poem is lighter, makes you want to read it, whereas the enigmas in From the Stone Age weigh you down.

Not everything... but here, everything seems to be poem and the couplets point to a story bigger than any poem of almost losing a son.  Dr. Bernie confessed, he started trying to guess the diagnosis of the illness, and all the mothers in the room could relate to hearing a child call out for them... and how of course, no poem can cure bruising.  The transition of using color for the bruises, corresponding to spring, the invention of "mother-softness" that enters, to describe the poem, elicited by the wilted dandelion in the son's pocket... and going full circle, why she is suspicious of flowers, laundry and not daring to look for poems in Spring... all bound up in controlled couplets to end up with the son's pockets again filled with petals and stones.    

February Augury: Here, the use of couplets doesn't support the poem.  It would be helpful for the reader to have the first sentence put into a stanza for instance.  The powerful image of a dead bird, bent like a comma evoked global warming for many.  Are we as readers also in the mirror of the window, witnessing?

Let this darkness: apparently I've used this poem before, but it is a comforting reminder to return to nature, and as if Rilke is speaking to all of us as friends needing reassurance.

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