On the poster for Poetry Month 2025 is a quotation from Naomi Shihab Nye, from her poem Gate-4: This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. This was a theme of last week's poems. When we share, we feel interconnection.
Poems April 9-10: We had a special guest of David Michael Nixon who read his poem, "My Fears" aloud. I included two poems that came up from last week: the Clifton came up in the James Dickey poem, The Strength of Fields with the line about "The dead lie under/ the pastures." which imparts a sense of ancestors... The two parts of a longer poem by Langston Hughes came up when discussing his early work curated by Danez Smith in Stereo in Blues If there had been more time, I' would have included this one: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43386/the-god-who-loves-you ;
Line-up of Poems
The Landscape of My Fears by David Michael Nixon; Postscript by Anna N. Jennings; mulberry fields by Lucille Clifton 1936 –2010; [poets in their bassinets] by Lucille Clifton; How Do I Know When a Poem Is Finished? by Naomi Shihab Nye; A Seat at the Table by James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901– May 22, 1967) (just two sections); The Things I Love by Scottie McKenzie Frasier; More Music by Carl Dennis; My Ordinary Love Paula Bonnell
I shared lines from poems in David Michael's book
Stephen Forgives the Stones.https://www.foothillspublishing.com/2019/nixon.htmlGretchen Schultz, another Just Poet member provided the cover in her shot of Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina in 2018 : The poem" I thought I heard you callin' My name" gives us a hint of biography: "editors who did not choose the poems that chose me as their champion; captains who left me shooting set shots in my head, until I formed my own team... In the poem p. 35 Tomorrow Morning with Tennessee Williams, he notes: "will -- used to express simple futurity -- tomorrow morning I will wake up in this first-class hotel suite. -- It is the opening line and concludes-- only he and I...will wake up in this first-class hotel... On p. 31 he mentions where the future will be shining in his first class eyes for years to come. p. 66+ 67 One of my favorites: Friends meeting wherever we are - p. 71 Let the River rise p. 77; p. 83 "Despite the fear that everything is decaying; with no way out but death, there seem to be new poems, ghostly as the future,, calling to me from some clear day.
I read his poem from the 2024 Le Mot Juste, (anthology of members of Just Poets, a local poetry group in Rochester.) Leaning Toward the Inner Life (p. 45)
Why open my eyes
when I can see white tigers
in rhapsodic dark?
Sunlight only shows me pain:
lovely women I can't touch.
Nutshell:
Landscape of my Fears: David Michael read aloud his poem, Landscape of My Fears to our appreciative audience who saw a metaphorical parallel of imaginary/real with the above poem. The "indoor woods" (perhaps an echo to Dante's dark woods?) are self created, as anxieties are not necessarily real. The regular rhythm gives a sense of classic iambic pentameter in a rhymed poem, yet there is no rhyme. Looking for alliterations one can see d's in indoor, dangers, and the double d in hidden-- indeed, the "inner d's" imitate the meaning of "indoor/hidden". The group enjoyed the surprise of the last line where humble describes the path illuminated by implied inner light cast by a concrete lamp. The second stanza seems to take emotional charge.
Postscript: This poem allows us to imagine all that went before in this poet's life, whether 16 years ago, or just the past 16 years of going it alone as a widow with two children. The poem is set up with 3 lines offset between stanzas that could be read together as an offset inner dialogue: They're doing all right. / But sometimes I do wonder./ They're doing all right. The second time "They doing all right" is said, it is after mentioning how the children laugh the deceased father's laugh. This poignant poem imparts to the reader the weight of the poet's grief. The dialogue with the dead shows how alive the presence of the person who has passed. This is a perfect example of the truth in the saying that "a person who lives on in our hearts will never be dead".
mulberry fields: Clifton uses no capital letters, no punctuation, only a few extra spaces and judicious use of line breaks, to set up the "they" of the privileged white, and the "i" spoken by the black poet. Eddy commented it was a "star" poem, one to be given several stars, as it makes you think a lot. One senses in the rocks, multiple stories, perhaps of Indians, as well as white settlers removing them to create fields for a plantation, and again using them to set up walls to keep out those they enslaved. There are overtones of an ancient perhaps biblical curse. Clifton gives crops and pillows the ability to act for themselves to drive home a metaphor for resistance: the one refusing to grow anything, the other refusing any dream. The same stones for the black slave "marked an old tongue", a slant reference perhaps to markers for safe passage north; the slant rhyme echoed of mulberry in the title and moulders makes a strong contrast of the resistant strength of the living (nature with the alliterative "berries" and "bloom" ) and the bones of the buried mistress whose great grandson [now old] refuses to speak of slavery. The final "i say" underlines the power of the speaker to have the last word.
We admired the plain speech and how powerfully Clifton worked it.
Poets in their bassinets: delightful title, which in reminded Judith of Robert Graves. ( "The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse.") The muse uses you... Here, Clifton's muse is more accessible, a "splendid woman" dreamed, a "globe shining with//possibility" (note the very effective break). One person elaborated on the image of a baby in a bassinet, batting shiny objects strung up for instructive amusement. We batted about meanings of terrifying one of those words with "God voltage" -- terrifying and wonderful all at once with the weight of unpredictability. At Rundel, Bart felt compelled to read her poem Blessing of Boats as echo. Marna thought of Billy Collins, The Trouble with Poetry. (We'll discuss these next week.)
How Do I know When a Poem is Finished: Naomi Shihab Nye wears a Billy Collins hat with this poem. A stanza in Italian means a room, and takes on its own personality, at first light-heartedly described as happy to have some space from the poet. What a character "this room" who rises from gathering dust balls unruffled and proud! The wry humor continues with a fabulous twist, which doesn't quite answer the title's question, but clearly insinuates that overworking revisions is not worth the effort. That first draft was enough. Paul provided more humor about "over and done with". 1) when you hear the snoring; 2) When the congregation says amen.
A Seat at the Table: This long poem written by "The Bard of Harlem" reflects a time when African Americans were struggling for civil rights, and the poem speaks to their plight. A Seat at the Table has come to be seen as a major milestone in the history of American literature, as it addresses African American identity and their unique experience. The poem is divided into seven sections – “The Question,” “The Table,” “The Chair,” “The Voice,” “The Proposal,” “The Decision,” and “The Seat.” I could not find all 7 parts. My guess is that there are different titles. I offer two here.
Most know his poem I, Too. (echoes of Whitman, "I hear America Singing). Hughes wrote "I too" in 1924, trying to board ship in Italy to return home, only to have his place by-passed, replaced by white sailors.
The metaphor of table, both as noun, implying one's shared place, and as verb, implying to be tabled, or set aside for a future date is quite poem. One person brought up Poems of America where the Hughes and Whitman poems are set side by side... celebratory and challenging.
The movie about a talented Black piano player and the necessity of protection from a white bouncer came up: The Green Book.https://www.biography.com/musicians/don-shirley-tony-lip-friendship
The Things I love: This kind of list poem could be dismissed as sentimental, and the few rhymes towards the end "tacky attempts"and yet, the clichés are touching in their sincerity and make the reader want to make up his/her/their own list. If you are so lucky as to have a home "where love, kindness, peace, rest" abide, indeed, how could one not celebrate this as being "the best."
More Music : We teased about Uncle Victor, as being symbolic of RCA, but for sure, everyone agrees, "Poetry is a first cousin to song.". There was a stanza missing at the end which Eddy provided from the book The Poem is You by Stephen Burt. (in our library system! I just reserved it and will be happy to pass on after I read it.) Some figured out the the poem tells the whole story of Victor... the "one" in the first stanza is Uncle Victor en route to a concert, perhaps "she" is the nephew's wife. The missing part and last line I gave you, which on internet ends with "list..."
Should we try to deny it? Why make a list ...
Of all we think he's deserved and missed
As if we knew someone to present it to
Or what to say when told we're dreaming
Of an end unpromised and impossible,
Unmindful of the middle, where we live now?
Dennis emphasizes the ambiguities of life we tend to shirk by passing judgement about what is good, bad, lucky or not, pronouncing who deserves what as if we have any control about it. The middle is the now of our story, wherever we are "now".
Ordinary Love: Everyone seemed to note the comment by the poet: “Poetry and I met when I was fifteen and Poetry a couple of thousand or so. We’ve had our ups and downs, but I still hanker for Poetry, and new poems arrive when they feel like it. I try to help them land where other people can hear them too.”
What is the "it", this simple thing, this grey, golden, solid, red, quiet, dense thing? The title tells us, but the poem elaborates the accidental possibilities of "ordinary": humdrum, gritty, numb, loud steady, ruddy
The 8th line a loud (as if trumpeting the news aloud), ordinary love is "a fabulous flower—
This simple poem delights by its refusal to "spell things out" and yet, breathes and weaves with adjectives what the poet "wants us to know" (said in the opening line, and repeated in the 4th.
We discussed at length the adjective "ruddy", often used in British slang as substitute for "bloody" as in "bloody good". The common association is with red cheeks or a healthy complexion. Oh yes, a great rudder of a word on which to end the poem followed by a period, but which doesn't feel it will ever end.
As Naomi Shihab Nye says, "you might as well/leave it that way"!
https://www.poetrypoets.com/a-seat-at-the-table-langston-hughes/This long poem was written during a time when African Americans were struggling for civil rights, and the poem speaks to their plight. A Seat at the Table has come to be seen as a major milestone in the history of American literature, as it addresses African American identity and their unique experience. The poem is divided into seven sections – “The Question,” “The Table,” “The Chair,” “The Voice,” “The Proposal,” “The Decision,” and “The Seat.” I could not find all 7 parts. My guess is that there are different titles. I offer two here.
