We remarked how wonderful it is to gather in person, hear all the different voices lent to poems. I had asked Scott and Mike to record their poems or come in person so we could hear how they would sound by the original poet!
Rundelania (May 2023) https://rundelania.com/poetry/ (Check out Scott's other two poems)
This issue of Rundelania begins with a quotation : …because of the active principle and spirit or universal soul
nothing is so incomplete defective or imperfect
or according to common opinion
so completely insignificant
that it could not become the source of great events.
– Giordano Bruno
Should you wish to submit to Rundel: send in Microsoft Word compatible format, subject line "Submission" to Andrew Coyle: andrew.coyle@libraryweb.org
No One Knew The Young Black Man by Scott W. Williams
“They were wearing blood" by Michael Yaworsky
May my heart always be open to little E.E. Cummings
After the Goose that Rose like the God of Geese-- -Martin Espada**
Because this morning by Linda Allardt
In Spring by Rosie King
This Morning by Mary Oliver, 1935-2019
In the Museum of Lost Sounds by Celeste Helene Schantz
Rundel will take a break during the summer, resuming October 12.
Nutshell: Perhaps one theme was the surprise poetry allows us to apply the ordinary... and the solace that nature provides.
No one knew: This was the third of three poems Scott wrote for Rundelania. Each one a different style and each powerful.
Unlike a list poem, or a poem that riffs on a list or repeated words, numbering has a different implication of ordering. Does it matter if you read the list from 11 to 1, or 1 to 11? How to "make sense"? Why do some of the people in the list have adjectives, others not?
Just the title alone gives pause. How do we know a person? What happens when we add an adjective to describe a man? Add another adjective to describe a "young man". Add another adjective to describe a black man? Scott explained that the entire poem is a response to the horror and reality that Black Lives Do NOT Matter and that he protested in the 60's, the "oughts" (80's) and last decade
The ending of the poem confirms the tragedy with just one sentence for the Momma, who of course, knows her own child, tried to save him and was murdered doing so. The empty bench, the weeping willow cannot be ignored. The poem was so real, and powerfully moving. We too weep our insides out like the willow but must continue to protest.
They were wearing blood: inspired by a newscaster describing the Brussels' airport and metro bombings in 2016. Mike explained he didn't want to use capitals or punctuation... the conventional usage seemed to interfere with the flow of the emotion. Indeed, his use of sounds, play with the vowels of all that rhymes with "words", amplifies to "ow" in sounds (a foil to the eye-rhyme of wounds). Barbarous is a perfect adjective... not just for usage of words, but for our actions... a pivot point where all those p's spit out
who we are: posers and all we do with promises...
He imagines himself there in the scene, although as he put it, seeing the news, he did not slither down to the floor in front of the television. Like Scott's poem above, his poem is so real, we cannot help but feel we too are there.
May my heart: Joyce's favorite: Mike asked when the poem was written -- I was thinking pre-WW 2, possibly pre-WW1 with Cummings a very young man... but wiki says it was penned in 1952. The cleverness of his pauses, the slant rhymes and delightful use of the adverbs "usefully" and "truly" indeed, open us up to "little",
more aware of each small possibility-- and supple enough to enjoy it -- why not indeed, pull the sky
over yourself? Although not realistic, the beauty is in the metaphorical "use" of imagining doing so!
After the Goose: Thank you to June who says this: Gets to the rythmic breathing heart of what it is to be alive, after a death or anytime, not replacing grief but describing the break/growth we can feel through awareness outside of ourselves from nature/other species. After, after, after... and one feels in the anaphorical repeats, first describing the death of his father, then, defying the "do not feed the geese" sign, the sense of ressurection... life after death. Perhaps the poet fed geese with his father... Bread, as sustanence, as symbolic communion offering a "truce with the world" that takes a loved one away. There was quite a discussion about geese, associations such as Gabriel's Hounds, and mention of the 2014 "All Rochester Reads" story of The Snow Child.
Because This Morning: Kindly note, the title is capitalized, although it leads into the first line.
This is no Frostian fork in the road sort of poem about choices, but rather the serendipity of
"roadlessness".
In Spring: Delightful snapshot of a poem with marvelous surprise ending!!! We all are invited to continue "fleshing out" the possibilities!
This Morning: More mindfulness... how careful consideration comes with careful observation. I love that the hatching of redbirds is both ordinary as "neighborhood event" and simply, a miracle. And we too, don't know so much, or even consider our version of wings...
In the Museum of Lost Sounds: The poet explains:
"I got the idea from an article on a curator who was collecting audio for a museum of endangered sounds. The Atlantic did an article on it called “The Museum of Lost Sounds” and I used it as a prompt. I also created a cover for a collection entitled The Museum of Lost Sounds. The endangered sounds curation is mostly old tech sounds (a rotary phone ringing, a telegraph, etc) and Cornell University also collects endangered and extinct animal sounds. It’s a project I’ve been conceptualizing for a while. I tried to write the poem in a style similar to Elizabeth Bishop because I was reading her “Arrival at Santos” then and liked the observational, detached voice."The wind was delicate,
The wit well timed,
The limbs well formed,
The pictures straight on the wall:
It was all very tidy.
He was cancelling out
The last row of figures,
He had his beard tied up in ribbons,
There was no dust on his shoe,
Everyone nodded:
It was all very tidy.
Music was not playing,
There were no sudden noises,
The sun shone blandly,
The clock ticked:
It was all very tidy.
‘Apart from and above all this,’
I reassured myself,
‘There is now myself.’
It was all very tidy.
Death did not address me,
He had nearly done:
It was all very tidy.
They asked, did I not think
It was all very tidy?
I could not bring myself
To laugh or untie
His beard’s neat ribbons,
Or jog his elbow,
Or whistle, or sing,
Or make disturbance,
I consented, frozenly,
He was unexceptionable:
It was all very tidy.
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