Poems for June 12

  

Something here about memory by Robin Walter ; Self-Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso by Eduardo C. Corral; Radishes by Ange Mlinko; (May 13, 2024 New Yorker); Mazel Tov by Jessica Jacobs; The Listeners  by Walter de la Mare (Also called "The Traveller" https://academic.oup.com/liverpool-scholarship-online/book/46324/chapter-abstract/405788807?redirectedFrom=fulltext); Watch by Robin Walter

Nutshell: 

We had ended the last session marveling at metrics which had Graeme offering the Walter de la Mare, and Judith wishing we had time to enjoy the Albert Noyes, The Highwayman. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43187/the-highwayman

 Since that poem is a good 3 pages long, I asked Judith to recite the first three stanzas to enjoy the beauty of the rhythms.

The poems seemed to have common threads to add to the weave of the theme of aging

Robin Walter:  The session opened and closed with this young poet from Colorado Springs.  She is interested in "inner knowing", well-connected to nature.  It was surprising to me that she is young, addressing "memory" which usually is a theme one finds in an older person.  

I admire her use of the em-dash, as if trying to start, to gather a thought, or later, interrupting it.

Her enjambments also have a similar "pause" before falling on the next stanza, but layering double meaning.  We enjoyed pondering "letter" as both letter of the alphabet, but also the epistle or message written... "body" both a physical body, but also the "body of a letter", and perhaps the collective body of all that goes into memory.  Some saw the poem as a way to address the difficulty of starting.  The clever

"letter that begins" opens up association with the sound of "b" repeated in begins, body, bearing, birth, and as Marna shared, a sense of  "to be" and "being" as a place of beginning.  We appreciated the reversal of the l and f in leaf, furl how they come together in itself.  

Mysterious, intriguing, and a poem where the overall feeling tone overrides any concrete "meaning".

The final poem, Watch, also uses the em-dash, and calls on a vowel, which could be the a in watch.

Beautiful music of the opening couplet "the faithful shadows/swivel around forest floor" and we discussed at length the adjective "threshing" for the sun.  Watch, as noun, as verb, perhaps as time-keeper, and a sense of dropping leaves and these "edges" -- tilting the "vowel skyward" to mirror the energy of the sun. 

Self-portrait:  Brilliant poem filled with movement, surprises !  It made many in the group want to write such a self-portrait!  How might you be as drumroll, watermark and fable... and weaving the snarls of a wolf through your hair like a ribbon! What an opening... leading to jigsaws and performing an autopsy on his shadow.  I might as well write out the whole poem!  Complex... as human beings are... twice a mention of black, once as fish, another as a piano melting like  slab of black ice as his touch.

We discussed Opalescent and how it conveys the shimmer of varying colors, rather like Seurat's "Le Cirque", and orphic with overtones of the musician/poet... the scraping sound of sk in skinned and scarlet--followed by threshold... then a ghost undressing.  It all works.  A sense of exhuberance, triumph, celebration, unconventional -- as Emily put it, a bit like the manic phase of bi-polar... but ever so appealing!

Radishes: more words... like camber (tilt of the road...) and what really worked in the read-aloud, 

were insertions by people reading:  "looks like my battery's low" in the 4th stanza that mentions "sensation wanes with age" ... and we all repeated clog my drain-stopper out of context to apply to losing a place,

to cheer "up with cucumbers" and celebrate the use of all the senses, the playful raw/war spell, repeat of rosy cheeks, snow... and the alliterative filial and feral. Definitely about aging... losing the taste of spice, the knife, whether intellect or physical prowess, duller.

We listened to the poet reciting the poem-- which sounded quite insipid.  If recited dramatically, it would be quite a different piece!

Mazel Tov:  We enjoyed the circular first word, and sense of beginnings and ends repeating.  What are constellations but imaginary lines to illustrate stories that give meaning to the stars?  We discussed "sentimental" and whether the lines about darkness were convincing.   The clincher lines, -- the space between stars... lines we draw to shape the absence... and  dying... and not knowing we are. I love the blessing.  May we find reason indeed, to open our door to the dark... notice the stars...

The Listeners:  Graeme had proposed this poem and read it beautifully.  Someone brought up that Robert E. Lee's horse was called "Traveller".  

We ended with a discussion about how a group of poems carries along poems we might not have noticed, adds energy to create a much bigger sense of a poem than if it stood alone.  

Like the collective power of memory.

We discussed as well the word "redemptive"... what makes a poem feel so?