Conservation Status by Penny Boxall
Vanished by Rebecca Baggett
I Ask That I Do Not Die by Ilya Kaminsky
For Ilya at Tsarskoye Selo by Carolyn Forché
Alone by Maya Angelou
A thank you to Barb who discovered another poet, Penny Boxall, responding to the woodcuts of Naoko Matsubara, (see the exhibit In Praise of Trees :Woodcuts by Naoko Matsubara. https://mag.rochester.edu/exhibitions/in-praise-of-trees/ )
A thank you to Carolyn, who had been so intrigued by Carolyn Forché's poem Museum of Stone, she shared the book of poems by Forché in which it is found. Both poems this week come from this slim volume entitled In the Lateness of This World.
Serendipity plays a role again, as Carolyn Forché worked with Ilya Kaminsky, and in the NEA Big Read selection this year of his masterpiece Deaf Republic we meet puppeteers Alfonso and Sonya, and the puppeteer theatre owner, Momma Galya Armolinskaya and her puppeteers who teach signs for:
Soldier: (finger like a beak pecks one eye)
Snitch: (fingers peck both eyes)
Army Jeep: (clenched fist moves forward)
The poem by Kaminsky was in the April 2023 Issue of Poet Talk following an interview with him as one of the newly-appointed Chancellors of the American Academy of Poets. Of note, when he pronounces a past tense verb with an “ed” ending, this is a separate syllable. You may have picked it up in his recording of “We were happy during the war”. Opposed would be op/pos/èd in 3 syllables not two.
Nutshell:
Conservation Status: Intriguing cleave form -- a word that has a paradoxical double meaning of both to separate, and to cling to. Read 3 times: 1st column to left: spare: adjectives line up like a tree trunk, but as if hanging in space, 2nd column to right: couplets, ever-so-slightly offset down so they do not exactly line up with the left column. Also large sea of space between the columns. Recognizable idioms, clichés, echoes of a Zen koan (What is the sound of one hand clapping). Implied in the question "what is the sound of a tree/of no trees falling" the recognizable challenge about understanding reality: if not is there
to witness, does an event occur? If no one sees the tree fall, does it fall?
Similarly, this idea that if one kills one human being, all humanity is killed;
If one saves one human being, all humanity is saved.
The third reading is horizontal, connecting the two columns. Ex. Vulnerable I wish you would put that stick down. It is both the "stick" one shakes at something... which moves from descriptive acknowledgement of presence/existence to a double message. Put the stick down (I am vulnerable and feel threatened). and, stop doing lip-service to action and roll up your sleeves and get to work!
Endangered, gathers urgency with Critically endangered; Extinct in the wild moves to the final word, extinct. The final question: What is/a tree: This is not a recognizable cliché. If it is asked by a child who has never seen a real tree, this is a terrifying statement that trees, which we take so for granted, are no longer. If philosophical, it begs the reader to do more than ponder an answer, and state what a tree means to him/her.
Other comments: idiom: "Ignore softly and carry a big stick" (FDR). The set up with so much space emphasizes silence, and one thinks of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Joyce mentioned that she likes poems that make her want to copy the down. This is one of them.
Vanished: As Graeme put it, the poem "is a Billy Collins-like genre of recognition of something ordinary and celebration of the experience". Even if I may be slightly misquoting, you can see it in the poem, starting with lost socks, a familiar occurrence like other misplacements, moving to increasingly more serious losses, back to personal losses as mundane as a favorite jacket, one's teenage metabolism and ending with a most tender description of 3 treasures kept in a cigar box.
The poem honors the universal place of loss in everyone's life, skillfully moving from non-threatening disappearance of a physical tie, to an emotional tie with a best friend, an object associated with grandmother and this list of what's at stake appears: trust, certainty, childhood, loyalties...
This opens the door to qualities of optimism, to even larger loss of faith. As for that blue marble... for some, a metaphor for "pie-in-sky" optimism, others, an association with "heavenly", but the important word here is not the round, roll-away potential of the "marble", but that it is treasured.
Mary pronounced as if from the pulpit that most of us are at an age where we should be sure to appreciate every minute of time we have left.
I ask that I do not die: At first, because, of course, we all know we will, one might think the poem will be about someone captured at gunpoint, or trying to survive a war. The word, "open" appears three times... for coffin, for being a poet "open for business" moving to the final stanza, of an "open box", but here,
not just a box for one's remains... however you understand God, the word God appears seven times,
a warm brick? (I think of the Beatle's song, "Happiness is a warm gun"), a claw, silence that survives empires? Reference to the Alice Ostriker poem of "Blessing of the Old Woman, the tulip and the dog"https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53677/the-blessing-of-the-old-woman-the-tulip-and-the-dog
and soup as one of God's disguises; God's shenanigans (such a beautifully untranslatable word!), to God this and God that. God, who will reach inside "my holes". It's hard not to recite the rest of the poem--
but how else to understand this context, "holes/I can still see/how a taxi makes a city more a city"...
yes, line breaks, and layered meanings... this idea of "not to seem laid out in state/but in transit".
Ah... but that is not all... there is the hooting of the owls, pecking the windows of the 21st century, the boardmembers of Exxon Mobile... and "who is the who" of "beloved nothings? The gentle joking manner
warning us "seriousness will kill you!" and how "doctors /have prescribed happiness."
Curious that there are no periods. Stanzas start with a capital letter however.
There is a delightful, easy-going conversational tone, no overtones of carefully-structured work,
although to create such a poem would require careful thinking... creating images like the dog (another one of God's shenanigans) pushing its nose/into morning's ribcage...
For Ilya: hard not to think this is not Ilya Kaminsky, although Forché makes no direct reference to him aside from the insinuation of Russian influence and that he is one of the silver poets. (For Russia, you'll see among the "silver poet" the likes of Ahkmatova and Mandelstam; each culture has its list of Golden and Silver poets.). To understand the Imperial Residence and village in the title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsarskoye_Selo .
14 long lines. "A lesson writes itself in winter chalk". Snow, so respected in Russia, "falls from the past, vanishes on golden minarets"; recedes from the birches.
The links between the death of Michelangelo, the same day of the birth of Galileo; the continuation of history as Newton born the year Galileo died. Moving to Kabir. And then, the year Newton died, a barn fire during a puppet show. End of an era? End of another tradition?
We did speak about puppets (and of course, their appearance in Kaminsky's book, Deaf Republic)...
It helps to know that Michelangelo felt he was only releasing the statue hidden inside the marble he carved. Such a haunting image of "Man, like the statue whispering about the marble chiseled from his mouth./You are the guardian of this statue, standing in your silent world."
We were not sure about "This life is not the same as your other life" which is loaded with possibilities:
Kaminsky, before he left Ukraine and after? Kaminksy who became deaf at age 4 and how he experienced deafness? American life as it started and what it has become? The way we live many lives before we die?
Intriguing but difficult poem to fully grasp.
Alone: beautiful call and response, this poem seems to call out to be sung to music. I love that Polly played devil's advocate, to say, no, alone is how it is... crossing the miles of the lonesome valley by yourself. One envisages a woman on her death bed... biblical stones are not bread, expensive doctors do not cure hearts of stone... and common moan as the race of man suffers...
I mentioned how a rapper brought new life to old classics, like Emily Dickinson, "I'm nobody, who are you". For some reason, Walter de la Mare's poem, "Someone" came up.
The Last Puppet: apocalyptic. It reminded several people of the Colorado river before it was dammed, and the excitement of "shooting the dirty devil". How this river "cuts through time" and you can see it in the rocks. It brought to mind the devastation of Hiroshima. Current climate disasters...
"As if God said it." Creation myth, and the parallel of the destruction man has created...
The odd bit about the snake, drinking blood, how with or without the heart "no one knows the difference this makes" shook us up.
The poem reminded some of a Chagall painting. The first 3 stanzas... the storm and its wake as something "no one should wish to see" include the ruin of the puppet maker's hut. He returns 5 stanzas later,
holding the last puppet. The enjambment is powerful... and has it speak //
line and stanza break
a language it will never speak again, its shadow finding the shadow
on the wall of no one else.
The poem could have ended there... but no, there is a last song. A political message about taking
this last puppet to America to hold to the light in contrast the line before about souls.
Gogol's dead souls are not mentioned. There are so many echoes and references it is hard to know how to understand the poem outside of its doomed and apocalyptic portrayal. What would you have that last song be?
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