June 24+ 26

 Happiness  by Raymond Carver Jr.;  Rock Paper Scissors by Arthur Sze;  Artemis II  by Nellen Dryden; 

Poems from Verse Virtual: https://www.verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.asp

 It Really Is Wonderful  by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders; Lunar Blues  by Michael Minassian;

Nutshell:

 

notes from the poems for June 24-6

Happiness:  Carver pins the ephemeral nature of happiness, but also creates the sense that "anything could happen".  One thought shared was that the happiness was in the poet, observing the two boys.  He says they are so happy, but there's no way of telling.

 

Rock Paper Scissors: We enjoyed the interconnections this game demonstrates, and how Sze moves on to the sense of competition in the loop of evoluation.  The rhyme smudging/trudging linking finger and foot prints, accentuates interweaving, and then the chrysoprase, known as the stone healer of the heart is the heart

to complete the sense of all woven together.

 

Artemis II:  this poem by singer/songwriter Nellen Dryden based in Nashville, was published in Rattle.  She is referring to the New Yorker interview  of astronaut Reid Wiseman and says her poem "reflects on the meaning of the mission."  The group was divided as to whether the length of the poem worked, or was overworked; if the thoughts flowed or felt composed of jarring parts.  The book Orbital by  Samantha Harvey came up.  An interesting observation: The mission is a non-verbal thing... but the poem starts w/ microphone.  coming back to communication and pull back to human.  I believe there was consensus that  however one arrived, the last line is a keeper.

Who doesn’t feel a weight lifted

at the prospect of a world?

 

It Really Is Wonderful: from Verse Virtual:  We enjoyed discussing pros and cons of vocabulary such as "jettisoned" in the first stanza and "fracture of his grief", "a tear floating up", where some felt it echoed the situation of a space capsule, while exposing the personal grief of the Commander of Artemis, which indeed, can  break us, "throw us violently" outside of ourselves.

Is the poet "trying too hard"?  We enjoyed comparing the angles of the space mission in these two poems, concluding (as Maya Angelou puts it) we may not remember the facts, but we remember how something made us feel. 

As ever, we appreciate that in poetry it is not about right or wrong interpretations.  

 

Lunar Blues  : from Verse Virtual   A reflective poem where we all liked best the second couplet, Moonlight covers us 

like a fleeting thought.

 

The accent isn't on a general feeling of regret, but how fleeting our thoughts and emotions are.