First, some humor:  in my "prélude" sent early Friday 4/4, one person wrote me this: "You know how software applications sometimes truncate words when they're too long to fit in the computer-allowed space? Your attachment called "Prelude to Nutshell Discussion..." got cut off in my e-mail so it said "Prelude to Nuts." I had to laugh even before opening it.

Then, insight from Maya Angelou: There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you. -Maya Angelou  (1928-2014)

In a similar way, every poem I chose for April 2-3 seemed to have links within links of stories that cry out to be told!  How to summarize two discussion sessions on such rich material

 

The briefest summary: This week's selection contained  another poem for an "inaugural occasion", another response to the photo of an abandoned library... for humor, a Billy Collins... a different take on cake, an invisible stenographer, and Langston Hughes' mockery of what the old privileged guard in the 19th century might call Poetry.  

 

NUTSHELL OF DISCUSSION 4/2-3

 

1. The Strength of Fields by James L. Dickey[1]

I was so pleased that everyone enjoyed the sounds, took time to reflect on the complexity of the intertwining in this poem. The link in the footnote connects this poem to the inauguration of Jimmy Carter in 1977 and  his choice of the Dickey, the 18th United States Poet Laureate (appointed in 1966) to pen a poem for the gala held the day before.  As a  "occasional poem" for this occasion,  it would be fitting to choose an exploration of the theme of interconnection. Van Gennep, mentioned in the epigraph further emphasizes the common human rites of passage.

 

 The poem itself unrolls slowly, replete with hyphenated nouns or noun-adjective combinations, and repetitions.

moth-force                              "the sun can be conquered by moths"

field-forms                  (strength /of fields; Lord of all the fields... tended strength

light-decisions

town-moths

train-sound      // freight-train

home-deep      -- (street-lights, blue-force and frail /as the homes of men; blue home-town air)

 

You could make a map of overlays of words such as moon, sea, light, (solar system, sun, stars) Lord, interconnecting along with the sound of a train asked to speak in the voice the sea/would have if it had not a better one. We brought up the idea of "Moth-Force" as both fragility but also persistence.  Moths are capable of navigating in the dark.  

Some felt a quality of a prayer.  The ambiguous nature of pronouns, when they can refer to several different things accentuates a sense of a misty, mysterious moment at night.   For example:  "They look on and help".  They could be the stars.  The dead buried in the pastures.  The pastures themselves.  The moths. 

If you look at the choices of spacing, James Dickey has made waves of indentations but also towards the end, a larger stanza breaks.  Hunger, time and the moon:

[space]

[space]

The moon lying on the brain

 

                                                            as on the excited sea        as on

The strength of fields.

Perhaps this is to give the reader time to think about hunger, time, the moon.  

Then he gives three separate examples, all combined, united by the light of the moon.  I shared with Rundel one of my favorite haikus:  moon in the water / broken and broken again / still it is there.

What is there is the tended strength, announced in the title, The strength of fields, and repeated again.  Everything is in that. The lines tighten, unified in space in a strong block.

 

Mid-poem, Dickey asks, You?    [space]                        I?   What difference is there?  We can all be saved. 

This single line hangs with double-space above and below it.

 

At the end,  he uses the space again filled with an emotional kindness.

More kindness (repeated for the 3rd time) will do nothing less

  Than save every sleeping one

   And night-walking one

 

Of us.  

Every one... meaning all creatures.

The final sentence is one to continue to repeat for us all.  My life belongs to the world.  I will do what I can.

**

Not Even by Michelle Visser

This title launches us into the poem.  How many ways could you continue ?

 

What an odd beginning to introduce Hildegard as if in passing, as if everyone knows there is only one Hildegard worth mentioning, to make the point that in the 12th century, the preparation of parchment was from sheep (white sheep provided the finest, but also calves provided yellow parchment and goats were used as well.)  Carolyn filled us in on the laborious process involved!  She was also generous in bringing in books about Hildegard von Bingen, German Benedictine Abbess and  brilliant polymath born 2 years before the start of the 12th century.  Apparently, she would write words in wax tablets, as only male Abbotts were entrusted with ink on parchment for Biblical exegesis.  She went along with belittling her ability, to give her own ideas more credence as visions coming directly from God. Her friend, the monk and scribe Volmar, would then translate her writings into proper Latin (and scribe them in calligraphy on parchment.)  Not only was her noteworthy writing prolific, but her compositions of music and beautiful illuminations testify to a beautiful and exceptional soul.

 

Back to the poem: We puzzled about the opening sentence.  Perhaps a tribute to her genius, or a way to underscore the countless skins involved to transcribe a Bible in the days before the printing press?  It is not a long poem, but as a response to a photo of an abandoned library, the metaphor of books wrapped in animal skins (the cerebral anchored by the physical) is given the setting of a cold monastery, the grueling work, the thin, gruel to feed the monks, clothed in thin robes, thin hope.  The conclusion is that our animal/human nature also covers us, perhaps more thinly for non-monks, but our faith in the divine can never fully overcome it.  Thin seems to merit attention and accentuates a sense of shivering misery.

 

We laughed heartily at the personification of the books, which writhed, forced themselves/apart or together depending on conditions.

**

Osprey by Billy Collins :  delightful capture with his wry tone of a "birder" and our human fallacies promising to do X as soon as Y, before we get around to Z.  One sentence in 4 quatrains,

opening with an address to an un-named large brown, thickly feathered creature (which the title says is an Osprey -- which detail only augments the irony!).  We have a complete sense of what the bird watcher carries, wears, his boat, the location, and even preference for a restorative tonic once he arrives home, to look up the name of the bird.  On a larger note, the poem perhaps is calling attention to the importance of calling people by their names, knowing more about them. 

It brought up the recommendation of this 8 episode series that looks as the bonding effect of love: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Resident_(TV_series)

 

Banana Bread  by Abby Murray: Anyone who has made banana bread will immediately relate to this masterful description of the bananas who take on quite the role as they freckle, bruise, wrinkle, shrink, are "ugly as salted slugs and sad as you'd expect the fruit of guilt to look."  One

feels a touch of compassion for them, but also for the poet who reflects on how easy it is to squander what lives to be savored.  Lovely moral twist of a lesson at the end -- far more satisfying than the cliché about life giving you lemons  and squeezing it into lemonade.   Wouldn't it be fabulous to be able to assemble our mistakes, "sort our shame and turn it into something as sweet, as useful as cake".

 

The Invisible Stenographer...  by Kathleen Wakefield

Her note about this "persona" clues us in about the power of choosing a persona who will take on the world to write about.  It reminded Marna about children who invent an invisible friend who shoulders difficulties and makes them bearable.  One person noted the crucial importance of "Invisible" in the title, and how important a translator is for instance in sessions of the UN.  Many remembered stenography as a course offered in high school, and most consider short hand an art akin to translation. What a great metaphor for noting a running inventory of all that goes through our head!  

The first stanza summons 4 voices in a cast of  characters, which leads to the question in the second stanza about the role we have in our lives, who's important, and again, this theme of interconnection, the idea that giving/receiving allows the best of us to flourish.  

 

Formula by Langston Hughes.  

In the handout I had a long note about Stereo in Blues  early poems by Langston Hughes curated by Danez Smith. (posted on blog with "Prelude to a Nutshell").

I mentioned the book James by Everitt where in chapter 2, the older slave teaches the young slaves how to survive by disguising what they really think when they speak.  Hughes seems to do this here with irony.  "Formula" as title, the "proscribed" or "prescriptive" way to write poetry seems to mock 19th century privileged white male poets and their idea of "the muse".  Perhaps he is also mocking the  way they draw on the Western canon as well.  You can see he wants poetry to have that exclamation point!  His repeat of the same words in the first stanza has only that distinction and the removal of "should".  This shifts the meaning of "lofty things".

In consequence, soaring thoughts also goes beyond mere abstractions of beauty and truth, and those birds, those wings are free to express the inner truth and outer life of all people.  You can see how Hughes was a founder of a whole new poetics -- not just for black poets, but for us all.

 

I end this long blog filled with gratitude for the nourishment poems provide us all -- each one of us receiving just what we are ready and eager to receive.   

 

 

---

[1] Poem shared in the week-long ceremonies preparing President Carter's inauguration in  1977.  Article about it contains reference to Robert Hayden and many others: https://blogs.loc.gov/bookmarked/2025/01/02/jimmy-carters-lifelong-love-of-poetry/

additional poems related to those of April 2-3

When Carter returned home to Plains, Georgia, in 1981 after his term in the White House, Miller Williams and James Whitehead both wrote poems honoring Carter. Williams’s poem “Sir” (p. 470) and Whitehead’s poem “For President Jimmy Carter on His Homecoming” (p. 471) were later published in the Summer 1981 issue (v. 3, no. 4) of New England Review. You can listen to Whitehead read his poem, which champions Carter as “a steward for the earth” who “cared for human dignity,” starting at 17:02 of the aforementioned A Word on Words episode. I close this post with the last stanza of the poem, which seems an appropriate epitaph for a man whose life was so full of love for all of Earth’s inhabitants:

People and history
Begin to say it’s clear you love the earth,
Day in, day out, so much you catch your breath
To imagine how The Death
Might take the possibility of love away.
Thank you, sir, I’ve nothing more to say. 

FROM RICHARD BLANCO : We're the cure for hatred caused by despair. We're the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name,

the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We're every door held open with a smile when we look into each other's eyes the way we behold the moon. We're the moon. We're the promise of one people, one breath

declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.

 

"Declaration of Inter-Dependence" HOW TO LOVE A COUNTRY, Beacon

 I am sensitive to the over-abundance of information available.  The first poem, by James Dickey, performed at the Gala before  Jimmy Carter's inauguration led me to explore how his love of poetry and belief in the power of words well used, would result in sharing with congress this poem by Dylan Thomas:"The Hand that Signed" by Dylan Thomas  https://poetryarchive.org/poem/the-hand-that-signed-the-paper/--

Dylan Thomas looks at what kings order w/ their signature... and yet a goose's quill can also put an end to murder... that put an end to talk... ) the finger joints cramped with chalk,  A Hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven... // hands have no tears to flow. 

Sunday, Rattle Magazine had a version of this signing, mocking the teetering tower of executive orders on the  president's  oak desk, called  Resolute made of timbers taken from the British ship that shares the desk’s name.  https://rattle.com/executive-orders-by-tonya-lailey/

Tonya LaileyExecutive Orders

Who, in a back room, prepares the folders? The ones

that look like menus from ’80s family restaurants.

In the office, there’s always a person, let’s be honest,

a woman, who procures the staff birthday cards 

then devises a way to circulate them—in a binder, a folder,

within a pad of paper—for discreet signing by fellow

workers. Does the executive-order-folder-preparing-

woman take care of the White House birthday cards

too? I wonder. May I take your order? Does she

say that before whisking the folders off 

to the Office of the Federal Register to be given 

a sequential number?

  

In today’s New York Times photo, just one folder lies

open on the high gloss of the Resolute Desk. Oak 

rests below the thick polish. Timbers taken from the British 

ship that shares the desk’s name. Earlier NYT photos 

showed folders in stacks, like at a hostess station

where families wait to be taken to a table. I remember 

those months too, when there were so many birthday

cards to sign at work that eventually I just signed

my name without much thought for whom it was for

or what anyone else wrote. I’d grab a juicy, inky

marker, like a Sharpie, and use my time to form every

letter in my name, as if that were the gesture, as if 

that were the work. I learned recently of an English 

ancestor on my dad’s side, who mastered his art of making 

wooden bowls. That’s what he learned to do in life, 

so that’s what he did. He turned wooden bowls 

with a pole lathe. Elm mostly. I read he didn’t concern 

himself much with what happened to them

after he’d made them. I once found a photo of him 

in his work shed in an archive online. He and his lathe

in a murky light. Behind him, tower after teetering tower 

            of empty wooden bowls. 

Tonya Lailey

“The photos of President Trump at the Resolute Desk signing executive orders are piling up. For whatever reason, the March 26th one hit me in a new way. Maybe it’s the Sharpie and seeing the name Donald being fully written out in big thick ink. I had been noticing how repetition renders ordinary the story of relentless executive orders. I wanted to explore the ordinary, the simplicity in the act of signing in an office, be it the oval one or otherwise, the familiarity in the office work involved, the movements of people and papers. It is curious to me how such reckless and deadly expressions of power nonetheless adhere to certain codes of conduct, certain rituals. My ancestor’s empty bowls flew in while I was writing. I feel they belong here.”

Poems for April 2-3- prelude

 The Strength of Fields by James L. Dickey[1]  Not Even by Michelle Visser*** see footnote; Osprey by Billy Collins; Banana Bread  by Abby Murray; The Invisible Stenographer Listens to the Dead  by Kathleen A. Wakefield; Formula by Langston Hughes

A lovely thought from Kahil Gilbran (thank you Carolyn):  "All things shall melt

and turn into songs

when spring comes. 

Spring is full of tricksy weather, and the history of April Fools a perfect foil.  To follow up on last week, another poem for an "inaugural occasion", another response to the photo of an abandoned library...

for humor, a Blly Collins... a different take on cake, an invisible stenographer, and Langston Hughe's mockery of what the old privileged guard in the 19th century might call Poetry.  

The nutshell  for last week: has links to the 3.5%; to This American Life; to Verdi -- kindly understand, this is trying to collate a wealth of treasures offered in discussion, not a scholarly report!

I am posting several "nutshells" for this week.  Sent out with "Nutshell #1" these words:

 

This morning I googled the antonyms of subtle thinking about how  tyranny starts in subtle ways. One of these is abusing language. (beware of dangerous words with fatal notions like "emergency" and "exception".)  I was taken to a list of 1,146 words : https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the-opposite-of/subtle.html

What is frightening to me, is that some of the antonyms reflect the slippery nature of understanding what subtlety is-- on the surface, many of the words look like positive attributes.  I skimmed through 12 of the categories and stopped after antonyms of beautiful, elegant, astute, wise.

 

Subtle has the reputation for being difficult, ambiguous, unclear-- and the opposite thus gains power by promising to be moral, conscionable, trustworthy, sincere -- 

in the same group of words for "understated" (the "bad" connotation of subtle as delicately complex) immoderate, shocking, misguided, ill-advised  hold hands with  explicit, apparent, 

the opposite of "capable of making fine distinctions" is a best buddy of "innocent, naive, trustful, honest, genuine" !

 

Tyranny is not afraid to be unsubtle, as it puts on its sheep's clothing.

***

**Footnote for Not Even: Last week we enjoyed the poem by Dick Westheimer responding to the photo "Abandoned Library" by Walter Arnold[1], part of Rattle Review's ekphrastic challenge.   Michelle Visser[1]

 Formula:  from the book Blues in Stereo: the early works of Langston Hughes, curated by Danez Smith. It is the final poem of the book, and Smith calls it "ant-Hughes" in the poetics of its claims.  He's poking fun in the voice of the "Muse of Poetry" which Smith thinks is the kind of poet Hughes would least like to see in the world.  Who will be the poets that speak -- who will provide the poems that help us change the world, invite us to have an active hand?  Poetry should treat/of lofty things  in the opening line, moves from statement to command in the final stanza:  Poetry!/Treat of lofty things...Can the shift be believable -- that this include the manure-rich dirt, pain -- lofty things spring from such things , and the call is for all of us to speak to the pain, conjure up compassion for the entire realm of living. 

---

[1] Abandoned stacks of books at the historic Cossitt Library in downtown Memphis, TN 

---

[1] Megan O’Reilly: “The first line of ‘Not Even’ intrigued me with its unexpected phrase, ‘the hard number of sheep it took to copy a bible.’ I was drawn to the contrast between nature and the metaphysical, which continues in the juxtaposition between the physicality of the monks (the stones making their ‘bones ache with cold,’ their ‘thin gruel and thin cloth’) and their belief in the spiritual. This contrast is also a connection: It’s the harshness of physical reality that seems to push the monks toward something beyond the material realm. I love the way this is reflected in Walter Arnold’s image of the bookshelves, a visual which is so tactile and textured, and yet we know that each book we see represents a transcendent experience. The metaphor that runs throughout the poem–books wrapped in animal skins, the cerebral anchored by the physical–reaches its peak at the end with a flawlessly-crafted insight into how our faith in the divine can never fully overcome our human nature.”

---

[1] Poem shared in the week-long ceremonies preparing President Carter's inauguration in  1977.  Article about it contains reference to Robert Hayden and many others: https://blogs.loc.gov/bookmarked/2025/01/02/jimmy-carters-lifelong-love-of-poetry/

Footnotes for Langston Hughes -- from Blues in Stereo: early poems of Langston Hughes curated by Danez Smith. the famous question Hughes is known for is "what happens to a dream deferred."  As a young black poet, Smith and his friends learned that a dream could dry, fester, run, stink, crust and sugar over and even explode.  They stretched their minds to meet Hughe's imagination. This collection contains the early poems of Hughes.  It is hard not to be moved by Hughes, age 18, writing a poem where his "I" is big enough to hold all of us, and "the Negro" is both individual and all Black folks.  

The Negro Speaks of Rivers [1]became his first published poem in June 1921, in The Crisis,  the NAACP's monthly magazine edited at the time by W.E.B. DuBois. Danez Smith claims this poem changed the canon of poetry, the history and sound of American poetics.

Hughes wants us to take his poem Formula with irony.

---

[1] In Hughes autobiography he recounts about looking out at the Mississippi through a train window, near St. Louis

and started thinking about what this river meant to Negroes in the past.  "...then I began to think about other rivers in our past— the Congo, the Niger and the Nile in Africa —and the thought came, "I've known rivers" and I put it down on the back of an envelope I had in my pocket.  Within the space of 10 or 15 minutes, as the train gathered speed in the dusk, I had written this poem.