‘Poetry cannot, under pain of death or of failure, become assimilated to science or to morality; it does not have Truth as its goal. It only has itself. The methods of demonstrating temperament thrusts aside the diamonds and the flowers of the muse; it is therefore absolutely the inverse of the poetical temperament. The artifices involved in rhythm are an insurmountable obstacle to that meticulous development of thoughts and expressions whose goal is the truth.’-- Charles Baudelaire
Nutshell: Aug. 6 and the 80th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bomb : And poets carry on singing, as in Virgil's opening lines, I sing of Arms and Men.
What keeps us going is art, poetry, music. And knowing this keeps others alive gives us the courage to keep on engaging in it.
Whether this is a poem or rather a polemic, we agreed that it carries a strong message that hopefully those who don't read poetry, might pick up and ponder.
Accessory to War: written by the son of William Stafford, who was not only a fine poet from the Northwest, but also an anti-war activist. You can see the "apple does not fall far from the tree". What is cool about this poem, is the shape -- it looks like each stanza is a bomb. The first stanza has the brother singing his brother to sleep, and the comfort of lullabies and stories which seem to come from the Bible. The second stanza has a brother who will become filled with hatred and desire for revenge (I think of those who joined Hamas) because of the horror inflicted by an enemy. The title is multi-layered. What is accessory to war? 1) the weapons, but also the society who convinces its citizens that we need to use them, demands we pay taxes to create and deploy them. 2) people are accessories also to wars. Decision and policy makers and here, tax payers. Polly suggested we add a note when we pay taxes: "I am paying taxes under protest that they be used for war, detention centers, harassment of lawful immigrants, etc." I have calculated that x% is used for (and make a list) and therefore have deducted x%."
The juxtaposition of earning money teaching, writing, modeling peace, and having that turn into dirty money of taxes that deliver bombs, enforces the irony. The ending is brilliant... those taxes bought the rivet on the shoulder of the bomb this poem sent.
Stafford joins Bunkong Tuon, "we are telling you this"-- his poem delivers a different kind of bomb.
As one Jewish friend of ours shared what his father said about Israel, did it take a holocaust and destruction of 6 million souls in order to establish a homeland? The irony is to see that "homeland" wreak the same destruction on the homeland that was there before them. This only promotes an on-going sense of injustice and "need" for war to "solve" it. Of course, we know war has never been the answer. The shifting of "national lines", empires, then declaring wars to maintain them, perpetrating lies about who needs to be "eliminated" as enemy is nothing new. But that cannot stop us from writing.
"What Holds the Sky" was written by a Nigerian multi-talented artist. I loved that in the discussion, Judith brought her dance background and shared the concept of "contact improvisation".
When dancing with another, if one falls, there is a trust that the other will be there, and will not only protect the falling one, but use the momentum to continue the dance, necessarily, improvised in a different direction.
How can you make times more bearable? First, face what is with all your attention and trust. We are living in times that "assault our psyche". Perhaps it is a "shared fall" -- one we can only survive by interacting, interconnecting. The 3rd poem uses faith, prayer, grace, hymn in unusual ways -- with this metaphor of a kite and the tension of pulling at the string -- each tug, a prayer/to the wind, etc. The boy in the field with the kite is near the edge of a city -- which echoes "a hymn of glass/&steel" with echoes of the sky's light like an unspoken promise. What an infusion of faith, that nature, our sun, is there as if to balance our manmade efforts.
How do we "weigh in" a situation, balance, share the fall?
The 5th poem calls on Apollinaire, and this quote: "What isn't given to love is so much wasted.". Writing in WW1 and the horrors of that war, loss of love both sweethearts killed, but also humankind's loss of compassion which has no place in war. Without this vital element of love, one would feel a sense of loss or incompleteness.
I love, love, love, love Apollinaire's poem "Le Pont Mirabeau" and give a link to it in the footnote.
Barbara Crooker, in her title, suggests the flow of the river... everything reflected in it... like the poem before, where everything "tethered to a gravity" one can't name. Gravity as physical force and metaphorical quality. I love that the poet wonders what she hasn't yet given to love. It's a great question!
She looks up at a "comma moon" -- a sweet slice of melon... a pause in the flow of things that invites us to "give to love". What a great metaphor for pausing, for realizing the dark contains dusky wings, and stealing again from the poem before, the dark allows us to see stars, and imagine them "leaning in to each other."
Well... the 6th poem then sums it up! I don't know why the poet wrote an elegy for Etta. The poem holds the unsayable, the dark. As Judith remarked, it is in the style of a nursery rhyme: "This is the house that Jack built".
This is where... this is... this is... 6 times! The repeat of the "usable truth" (we didn't discuss what that means) is followed by the repeat of the first line introduced by AND (this is where the poem holds its breath).
There is one fragment: This is where tumult, this is where prophecy. A different way for the poem to hold its breath. The sky "wild with sound", is now "it" -- perhaps the poem, or perhaps the dark, "wild about the child." The final two lines are powerful because they will means exactly the truth each reader will find in the poem. It is not a new idea this "crack that lets the light in" -- and we know gratitude for life lived helps us in the time of loss.
Let this Darkness Be a Bell Tower: Joanne Macy and Anita Barrows And the translation of the Rilke, picks up this darkness, asks us to be the bell. This is in keeping with the philosophy of Joanna Macy, a Buddhist, activist and well known poet who recently passed away who looks at our world and calls on us to "Stand Afresh" even in the midst of great crisis. I skip ahead, as Joanna's work came up discussing her translation of the Rilke poem.
Judith brought up the happy coincidence of the word "change" in the second stanza which could mean also the "ringing of the changes" in terms of campagnology or bell ringing -- apparently Dorothy Sayers wrote a splendid account of it in Nine Sailors. It brought back the old nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of St. Clements" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oranges_and_Lemons
