This week, a little bit of pairing of poems by Virginia Elson**, kindly lent by Polly.** A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096) by Emily Dickinson and 0° by Virginia Elson; Crows and Crocuses by Virginia Elson; Leap Frog/Astronaught by Virginia Elson; At This Party By Hafiz and Catalyst by Virginia Elson (Invitation to the Dance); May Flowers Twice; A Gift for Emily Dickinson + Dickinson's poem about daffodils; Discovery; Reflections in a Florists' Window. We end with a jewel of a poem by William Heyen, The Return.
I started with mention of the marvelous hour of sharing by Bill Heyen on Sunday April 21. For a souvenir of Bill's manner and delivery, many of the things above can be heard from this 2021 video of Bill talking about his book "Yawp" about Whitman. https://www.beforeyourquieteyesbooksandart.com/projects-2
I post separately my write-up with references to these poems: Merwin's line from the Anniversary of my Death; Heyen's dedication poem, Fana al-Fana to Nature, his compendium of poems from 10 of his books, several Wallace Stevens poems: Of Modern Poetry; Woman in Sunshine; The Poems of Our Climate; Imperfect is paradise Robert Penn Warren, Tell me a Story https://poets.org/poem/tell-me-story what Heyen calls his "darkest poem", The Killers, and Stafford's Meditation.
**Virginia Elson, (1919-2000) was the teacher and good friend of Polly Nelson. I typed up 31 of her poems for publication by FootHills sometime this summer -- the title of the book is yet to be determined, as they were all hand-written in a journal called "Record". [FootHills published a chapbook in 2004, Harrier of 42 of her poems . It was edited by Linda Allardt with the generous assistance of Sarah Curtis and Judith Kitchen.]
Virginia has another book "And Echoes for Direction" published in 1987 by the State Street Press, edited by Judith Kitchen. (on the back is a blurb by Robert Bly who says this: "I read Virginia Elson's poem And Echoes for Direction in the Atlantic and liked it so much that I wrote to her though we had never met. Her poem "Suddenly During the Night" is a small masterpiece. In her best poems she descends to a place where death is hardly distinguishable from new life".
The blurb by Judith Kitchen: "Seasons make a sine curve through these poems giving us the timeless quality of nature. Signs are everywhere, if only we will notice, and Virginia Elson notices— with wit, with sympathy, with a tenacious hold on what is most human."Nutshell:
A narrow fellow: Emily's observation of a snake, without once pronouncing the word, captures the movement as it "rides" in the grass, "dividing it as with a comb". Immediately, the reader is drawn in, as she asks "you may have met him? did you not..." and inverts the syntax "His notice instant is". The sense of displacement reminded Neil of Stranger in a Strange Land. Interesting that Emily takes the viewpoint of a barefoot boy (both b's are capitalized, as is Boggy, a several other nouns). We remarked on how few people feel "cordiality" towards snakes as opposed to other of "Nature's People" (the statistics say only 3% of people are not afraid of them). Elaine mentioned her pet snake, and how it enjoyed wrapped around her waist for warmth... Like any animal, if we startle them, they'll defend themselves, and Emily captures that with the "Whip Lash" and how it wrinkled... then gone. The "zero at the bone" perfectly describes the tight, shivery feel of fear.
Zero Degrees: Virginia's poem explores temperature using much of the same vocabulary. Darkest night, not of the soul, but coupled with "knobbled vertebrae", one thinks of an older person writing and something human at stake. She also takes liberty with syntax (Outside from the eaves depends) and delightful contrast with the unusual image of icicles as "spine of ice", and within "bone up-ends/its own precarious stress. The similar wit of rhyming "dumb" (silent) and "numb" mimics the verb choice, "cushion" the sound of frost at work. I for one will never think of frost patterns on windows other than as a calligraphy of "ciphers". The "double blow" of the rhyme, the ice (possible because of the zero degrees) and numbed marrow, gives us the sense of how unable we are to feel when frozen. People were reminded by that final word, "nothing" of King Lear. Above all, we were taken by Virginia's elegant eloquence.
Crows and Crocuses: Good occlusives in the title, the first, something we see all year, the later, the first sign of spring. We enjoyed the spacing after "air"... the vertical line up of "That still" and "Holds chill", the one syllable on a line of "Thin" and "Green", rather like the slow drop of sap into a bucket -- indeed a "promise of sweetness/only half convincing". These hand-written poems as mentioned above were given to Polly and dedicated to her. The "your birthday" refers to Polly's.
Leap Frog: https://afroghouse.org/ We'll look forward to seeing this poem on "The Frog Blog"! There's a touch of "naughty" in the wit of the "Astronaught" and the description of the launch of this shining self of a frog rising about "bubble dust" in the lively rhythms, the tip-tilted antics in parentheses, cheery rhymes and playful double meaning in the title. Too "lunar to adopt a satellite?" Green upon green, white upon green, we end up with Green upon white... "leaving us to consider roots and stresses/among the Pascal reeds and water cresses." Whether Pascal applied to the reeds implies the philosopher, the unit of Pressure named after him, or Easter, perhaps this quote will twist you to thinking the former: from Blaise Pascal, Pensées " “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. but even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.”
At this party: translated by Daniel Ladinsky, makes you feel indeed at a festive party. 14th century Sufi philosopher/poet, Hafiz, captures the spirit of Ramadan we saw last week in the poem, Eid Mubarak. People asked about this most important Persian poet -- see the poem paired with a painting of "preparing a feast" https://flashmoment3.home.blog/2020/03/30/persian．preparing-a-meal-illustration-from-an-epic-poem-by-hafiz-shirazi/ For more poems: see https://bestlife3822.medium.com/the-best-hafez-poems-185762cf18f7 ; see the translator's notes in this link to the Hafiz poem where the heart questions reality.https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/50967/for-years-my-heart-inquired-of-me-- There is also a bit of moral to the story-- at the party, make room for others. Indirectly, it reminds me of what Teilhard de Chardin said about the world being round -- "so that friendship may circle it."
Catalyst: I paired Virginia's poem with the Hafiz, as the phrase in brackets has his kind of spirit. [Let's create our own living]. What triggers the urge to dance? The poem goes from stillness by a pond, and solo touch of the willows on their own reflections to an invitation to step in! We discussed the flurry of F's describing the "feathered brown explosion above" fusing with "finned flurry" below-- human legs making the trees dance -- as for the "touching each other" -- it's every possibility of tree, two people, connecting. Some noted the semi-colons at the end of the first two lines: complete thoughts with a pause, I call them. Marna was reminded of the refrain of "Lord of the Dance". Dance, then, wherever you may be; I am the Lord of the Dance, said he./And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be,/And I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he. We felt a cinematic precision producing a magnificent moving picture!
May Flowers Twice: "May" could be the month, adjective for flowers, or verb flowering as possibility. The witty title also doubles the meaning of "flowers" as noun and verb. Trilium, twice-mentioned as seen by a child, and again as an older woman. Jack in the Pulpit appears twice as well, first broken... and then serves "double duty" in the more enigmatic indentation where it seems to be part of the question "where, anywhere in the world is..." and also subject of "dares". One can also read "Dares moralize mortality with flowers" as scrambled syntax: Mortality dares moralize (with flowers). Her stone at the end, we agreed refers to the mother's grave.
A Gift for Emily: I paired this with Emily's 4 lines, "I dared not meet the daffodils", and we remarked on her choice of dressing modestly in white. Virginia's poem pays her homage, refers to the sound of Emily's "quizzical bright scissors" and provides a perfect description of the effect of her poetry: "like crickets in the evening, like the stir/of little things surprised by sudden space." Although Virginia wrote a similar poem referring to Emily as "poet of paradox, and reference to Uranium atoms "mushrooming sand", here, the title is changed from "sonnet" to "Gift". It is more than just "understanding", but actually holding a pen, "holder of celestial contraband—", and using the famous em-dash, finishing on the final line: "An atom split, and placed within your hand."
Discovery: We were delighted with the originality: the childhood where "sun sang in my blood", the blossoming of womanhood, "moons womanned all my heart" and the third stage of a mature woman more fully understanding after reflection of the lines concluding the first two stanzas (I do not think I loved... the rain; the clouds), the more universal complete idea of love. The cadences are beautiful, and Polly was reminded of the 18th century Richard Lovelace, "I could not love thee Dear half as much/Lov'd I not Honour more" (the ending lines of To Lucasta: Going to the Wars: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44658/to-lucasta-going-to-the-wars
Many had many associations with this poem! Marna was reminded of Cummings, In Just Spring "when the world is Mud-luscious https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47247/in-just; Neil was reminded of The Spice Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spice_Girls Emily was reminded of Dylan Thomas (see last stanza of Fern Hill): https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/literary/dylan-thomas-welsh-poems and also Things I Didn’t Know I Loved by Nâzim Hikmet 1902 – 1963 https://poets.org/poem/things-i-didnt-know-i-loved
Reflections: In the hand-written version, the poem's many layered reflections, starting with the city traffic in the Florist window, seems to continue in the double brackets where "February" is under "disembodied" -- and outside the bracket is the word "face". I think it allows the reader to see "face" as both noun and implied verb where "time and space" face flowers, the spring season of resurrection (Easter Lilies) perhaps facing back to the first flowers in February (crocus), both of those flowers also in brackets. The powerful reflection of taxis that roar, buses that fling in the window -- both with "abstracted" wheels, in this tangle appearing in the window, captures a most unusual setting! Is the "face" as noun, the Christ at Easter, risen, the face of the poet looking in this window? How many different subjects "face" us as we read? (Taxis, daffodil, buses, the parenthetical lilies, crocus, time and space). Intriguing poem with a surrealistic effect.
On double-checking, I found the version which appeared in And Echoes for Direction p. 58. Perhaps some readers might feel an element of intrigue has been traded in favor of clarity. The first two stanzas are the same. The third stanza introduced by the last line of stanza two:
undiminished daffodils,
crocus, hyacinth and lilies
into outer space,
resurrecting April
in a February face.
The Return: the epigraph is from The Return by Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/return/
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