You know all secrets of this earthly sphere,/ Why then remain a prey to empty fear?/You cannot bend things to your will, but yet/ Cheer up for the few moments you are here! -- Omar Khayyam
Announcement: Nowruz celebration at UR on 3/23 with Rumi Specialist,
A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water by Kay Ryan; The Cameo by Edna St. Vincent Millay; Lichen Song by Arthur Sze; Sestina: Like by A.E. Stallings; In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa[1] by Ada Limón; Cloud Anthem by Richard Blanco (Set to music by Oliver Caplan : https://soundcloud.com/music-68-2/cloud-anthem-excerpt-chorus-orchestra
This is another musical reference by Michael Gilberton.https://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/cloud-anthem-single
Supplement: I shared Old Hundred by Lucille Clifton:skillful mix of Psalm 100 and Negro Spiritual posted by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (thank you Eddy). Underneath, Tracy's poem, Wade in the Water.
Reminded people of the special Nowruz (Persian New Year) event and invited all to send to me any favorite Rumi quotation or poem. You will see I add an epigram for the poems from the 11th century Persian polymath Omar Khayyam -- you are welcome to send any favorite quotations from him and other such wise scholars!
CORRECTIONS:
Nutshell:
Kay Ryan: In 15 short ingeniously rhymed lines, 3 sentences laced with adjectives plain, serene, peaceful, tenderest, simple yes... and seeming non-sequiturs of rubbery for water, compared to Jell-O, Ryan enjoys painting observations from the standpoint of an observation announced in the title. Brilliant is an understatement for her way of addressing unseen tension, with a clear sense of enjoyment and charm. A needle on rubbery water, with a point encased /in the tenderest dimple, -- as if lying on a pillow? How is it that things or people modify each other's qualities? It takes the oddity of her set-up to remind us of the oddity of that!
Edna St. Vincent Millay: (1892-50) With her skill of sonneteer, this exquisite 16 line poem creates a vision of "love not meant to be", carved like a cameo, preserved as a gem stone. The repetitions and choices of sounds such as the collection of hard c's
from the title, (Cameo repeated twice more), clear, [and diminished -- this combo also twice] carven... cove, cut (twice), cold, cliff, alliterations, and metaphor of the action of waves akin to the action of sorrow, crystalize and honor what had been and is no more. A colorful addition to the much that has been written about her, here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/16/how-fame-fed-on-edna-st-vincent-millay-diaries-rapture-melancholy
Arthur Sze : Apologies for the format-- Eddy brought in the book, Sight Lines from which "Lichen Song" comes. The block of text was not lineated as it should be in the book. To start a poem with "—Snow in the air" , and an unknown speaker who turns out to be the voice of one of the most ancient forms of life, and employ unusual spaces and line breaks feels quite daring. Was thousand broken into thou - sand? Clearly, the lichen is chiding us humans, as one person says, "brings us down a peg". We are but a "blink" -- and have not learned that we "are not alone in pain and grief"... although we have installed pain and grief...
The poem dares us to "urge the dare and thrill of bliss"... We all agreed on the mastery of this poem and punned how we were "likin' it.
Judith was reminded of a tree story by Ursula LeGuin. It is in the collection Buffalo Gals and other Animal Presences, and is titled “Direction of the Road.” As Judith says, it is really really unusual, and as often with Ursula, dead-pan funny. O what a magnificent writer and thinker she was. It cannot be read even as a prose poem—that is not remotely its intention, but a gem.
A.E. Stallings: Like as final word in each line of a sestina, which invites a possible tedious chore of working with repeated end words could be a challenge for most writers. Alicia Elspeth however, clearly not only revels in form and tosses off pantoums like confetti, but uses it with skill to explore meanings. What does it mean to "like" someeone or something? What did it mean before facebook? Has conversational speech changed, replacing pauses with "you know" with pauses of "like"? Simile has a reputation as inferior image to metaphor; "like" as simile still remains a valuable and popular tool. Where is truth in our subjective use of "liking" or "disliking" something? Perhaps the falseness of a virtual world doesn't allow "dislike" in its set of proscribed responses in the case of facebook, and desire "money-like" and act cuckoo-like (pushing others out of nests) . We admired her use of the archaic "belike" . The poem is satire, comedy, meditation all at once. The question might be, is it memorable?
Ada Limon: The How and What that goes into our memory is an important item to consider in our human history. Is this finely crafted poem any more memorable than the sestina by Stallings? Lovely crafting with aba rhyme in the first tercet, eye-rhyme of "inky" and "sky", how "rain" as final word in the 5th tercet carries into the rhyme of the "vein" as final word on the first line of the 6th. Indeed, we, as "blink" pin "quick wishes on stars" and this poem traveled on NASA's Europa Clipper. As an occasional poem, the wishful thinking of how we, as human inhabitants on this planet, would like to be considered by other forms of consciousness in the universe seems to be the politically correct choice. Indeed we are made "of wonders, loves, invisibles" whether these are great or small, whether indeed we can say all humans are in constant awe, this much Ada credits us with: we have a need to call out through the dark.
Richard Blanco: This poem,is hands down is memorable. It uses cloud as a metaphor to explore the nature of being human. The anaphor of until opens a series of fragments and repeats 14 times until interrupted twice by "though" and twice by "we" of what we can do: The first instance, we can collude into storms that ravage, is one possibility and also "sprinkle ourselves like memories" -- which makes me think of history sprinkling its repeats, both good and bad. That last two "Untils" show us the direction. Just like clouds, so much depends on wind, on conditions. Originally from the 2020 project "The Crossing Votes" Here, he reads it (Jan. 2021) https://www.facebook.com/RichardBlancoPoetry/videos/1711208562384848/
there are several musical settings of it. For the one I gave with music by Oliver Caplan, this article explains more: https://www.nhmasterchorale.org/post/imagining-a-better-world-the-music-of-oliver-caplan
[1] “In Praise of Mystery” by Ada Limón was released at the Library of Congress on June 1, 2023, in celebration of the poem’s engraving on NASA’s Europa Clipper, scheduled to launch in October of 2024. Limón, in addition to being national poet laureate, she was appointed in January 2025 as one of the chancellors in the American Academy of Poets.
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