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.
Kathleen's reponse to my email thank you note.
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/
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