The New Year Makes a Request, by Abby Murray; To the New Year, W.S. Merwin; Singularity by Marie Howe (https://vimeo.com/411239105 : This explains some of the background of the poem. Sun-messenger by Lynn Xu. The Buck in the Snow by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Thus Spake the Mockingbird by Barbara Hamby; a few of the 10 Sloppy Haiku of Ordinary Life by Bruce Cohen. (all 10 here : https://www.rattle.com/ten-sloppy-haiku-of-ordinary-life-by-bruce-cohen/ See other post about the "Only" response and two Norwegian poems.
Nutshell of discussion
What do you think of with "New Year"? The first two poems allow us to review possibilities. In Abby Murray's poem, she imagines the New Year as a person speaking back to us about all our greetings and wishes for peace which indeed, sound glib especially if attached to welcoming yet another stroke of time as our planet orbits around the sun. Comments: Brave and surprising stance. Her stanza breaks give us pause... ex: like the act// of not killing each other really is//
something we could have had// years ago if we needed it enough
Or, the new year's face withered as the leather of believing//
Perhaps we live in an era where there are so many festivals, celebrating "New Year" doesn't feel so special. New starts are great, but resolutions? And yet, the idea is that we are in charge of finding the peace within reach, inside of each of us... and it's up to us to put it into action.
This is quite different than Merwin's epistolary address. The beautiful opening line with the inverted syntax stresses stillness, a lovely "light stealing across the sky" feel. Merwin's break before the second stanza, is not a new thought introduced, but rather stresses the "this is" as sound, and time/place. Hope is given tribute as the invisible framework, both untouched and still (which resonates with stillness) possible.
Singularity: Please do listen to Marie Howe deliver her poem. Rose-Marie spoke about hearing her in person in Maria Popova's Universe in Verse and how you could not hear a pin drop. There are two versions to hear: https://vimeo.com/411239105 AND https://www.themarginalian.org/the-universe-in-verse/
In the discussion, we wondered if she was not adopting a manner of Stephen Hawking, and yet, she clearly expresses the limits of science-- it's not tests that tell us about grief. She quotes Whitman (Song of Myself) For every atom belonging to me as good/belongs to you. No... "them", no "I", "we", no was, no verb, no noun "before anything happened". Only a tiny (tiny, tiny, tiny) dot brimming with is, is, is, is... As Mike put it, a really well done way of showing what is. Poetry celebrates the realm of subliminal, pre-verbal, intuitive, ambiguous and paradoxical through language. Her spacing and pauses allow us time to take in the message.
Sun Messenger: We were not sure what to make of this poem. Who is the Sun-messenger? Who is the speaker? Is he/she depressed? Is this a glimpse of a bad day? If the only thing she could say about this poem, "I wrote it because someone told me to write a poem", what does that guide us towards understanding. If you have ever heard a snail eating... it is quite loud! This book came up: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Wild-Snail-Eating/dp/161620642X And yet, there was something about the snail: its moving shroud, the thousand roadways as silver trees... life as criss-crossed golden light... just like a dream... but why does she want it to hurry past?
The Buck in the Snow: Beautiful form to embrace beauty, the low O's of snow, doe, go, slow. The stark and dramatic solo line introducing the death of the buck with inverted syntax, its blood scalding the snow. Death, of a buck in the snow... the hemlocks heavy with snow, shift, letting fall a feather of snow... life. A sad poem, but so beautifully crafted.
Thus Spake.. Almost like a rap song, where one sound invites another, alliterations accumulate, and images galore. As one person said, "that's an awful lot of pressure on one little bird!" Is it a political portrait of a former president? Duodecimo sounds like Generalissimo. She embraces positive, negative, floods us with visual information and then the multiple "I am" repeated, biblical references, perhaps a slant reference "Thus Spake Zarathustra"... (from wiki: it addresses the nature of values and how traditional religions lead to nihilsm. Nietzsche proposes a morality that is creative and life-affirming.
Sloppy Haiku: Calls English 3-liners imitating in our non-syllabic language the Japanese form properly! Fun glimpses of the everyday.
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