Inside by Dan Albergotti; For the Anniversary of my Death by W.S. Merwin; From the Sky by Sara Abou Rashed; Around Us by Marvin Bell; Any Common Desolation by Ellen Bass; How to Take a Life by Janel Pineda; Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden; Back Yard by Carl Sandburg; Driving West by Linda Pastan; My Daughter Describes the Tarantula by Faith Shearin
For last week's poem, Elegy by Merwin, I provided a link to a post by Devin Kelly, poet/professor who said:"A poem doesn’t save us from this world, and it doesn’t save the world from whatever the world might need saving from. But a poem is, in and of itself, a kind of value that someone cultivated within this world from those very needs and desires and questions."
I agree... and further agree that the kind of attention we pay to a poem awakens our hearts and minds to appreciate what sustains us.
Inside by Dan Albergotti is such a poem. In an interview with Ploughshares, about it, the poet explained the rhythm of a 3 beat anapest (short-short-long) followed by an iamb (short long) drove the poem. The pattern captures what lies inside a lake, a sea, soil, but also abstractions: the dark, light, and metaphors: steel, dust, air, vessel. With the hole in the earth, one senses burial, and grief inside one's own living blood where the image of the one gone becomes a vessel, leaving in the trace of these four couplets, a wake. We noted the interweaving and repetition of internal rhyme: the rhyming of the final words of a couplet carrying on to the 3rd syllable of the next first line-- I type up the sequence of rhymes below.
shark/lark: dark
trust/rust: dust (memory in the dust)
soul/coal: hole (the coal in the diamond)
quake/wake
The richness of internal rhyme such as seed, tree, steel; head-unsaid provides further associations and interconnections of a complex tapestry of life.
We puzzled about how to understand In the child, the weight of years. Perhaps the beginning of a life story and what a child will bear growing up. We also made conjectures about how to understand In my blood, your vessel ran, which seems less awkward if you do not connect "blood vessel" although one can see the connection.
We agreed it was a hauntingly beautiful poem with multiple threads to admire, hold up in multiple lights and weavings.
For the Anniversary of my Death: Bernie provided Dan Chiasson's short article about this in the New Yorker entitled, "The Final Prophecy of W.S. Merwin". Chiasson summaries that the anniversary, perhaps a small Zen joke, contrasts being outlived with last week's "Elegy" -- which addresses "outliving". For both poems, I feel a little background on the poet will help the rather enigmatic choices of Caps on first words and lack of punctuation.
Theorists propose that unusual punctuation of Merwin, like e.e. cummings, or William Carlos Williams, allows an unfettering effect. Dan Chiasson compares Merwin's lack of punctuation to how "a jet stream must speak, or "how a crack in bedrock might introduce itself" -- but for sure, to avoid "stapling the poem to the page". As for a theory of capitalizing, it is curious to guard that traditional practice but forego rules of punctuation. One thought is that it places an accent on the first words. If you read first word each in a row, "Every When— Tireless Like Then" is an intriguing combination. The four "And" stand out, as does the rhyme between "When" and "Then" and wren in the penultimate line. Our brains are sensitive to such innuendoes, which also occurs with eye-rhyme of "bowing" and "not knowing".
Regardless, the fact that Merwin wrote this poem when he was 33, published it seven years later in his book Lice in 1967, and again in his book The Second of Four Books of Poems in 1993, and since 2019, we can read it on the actual March 15 anniversary, perhaps provides several different angles with which to read it.
I highly recommend that you spend a few minutes with these two links found on the Merwin Conservancy web page. The first is commentary of the man who made a film about him. The second will show you the scope of work that Merwin undertook and his Buddhist practice -- poetry, translation, essays on words and ecology.
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/merwinfilm/129836313
https://merwinconservancy.org/w-s-merwin/
Discussion of the poem: Each of the 13 lines can be savored independently, or read as two sentences in two stanzas. Polly brought up that this is the first summer she has not heard a wren at her cottage. Elmer reassured us that he is hearing plenty of wrens. Merwin captures a sense that the world is indeed a magical place. Indeed, sensitive as he was to the man-provoked disasters and destruction of nature, writing poems such as "Even though the world is burning", or "For a coming extinction", he is able to go beyond this. His work on Maui, creating a palm forest creates such magic.
To find ourselves, "in life as in a strange garment" resonated with many of us -- embodied, not quite as ourselves, and yet, we are that self. The humble side of Merwin is revealed in the final line.
From the Sky: The poet is Palestinian-American. Judith reminded us of the murder of Lorca and the Spanish Revolution. Although the poem could be solely political, the opening stanza is clearly not speaking of the reality of the sky, filled with planes, space stations, warring parties and drones. We discussed the link between the metaphorical sky burial, a heaven unsullied by war, a place of peace after life. Using all the senses, and the perspective of looking down, the poet provides a sampling of life, rife with death.
Around Us: This poem evoked many memories of camping and our need for connection to nature.
Although "zipper" and "snap" are good onomatopoeia, many felt coupling that "a little sound of thanks" took away from any otherwise expression of gratitude, and trust in the possibility of good.
Any Common Desolation: Threading the title to the first line "unstitches" the negativity of "desolation" until the wordsshot, rip, break, echo a certain violence in describing what should be beautiful. Add the ruby neon of the liquor store, and the discombobulating effect of "all you dread, can't bear, dissolves/like a needle slipped into your vein..." We loved the description of the socks-- that was the heat of the poem, and most of us wanted it to stop on "dissolves". Judith brought up the parallel with the ballet Swan Lake-- where the lyric grace of dancers suddenly changes gear. For a visual taste of this, compare the first two minutes, with the following minute in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btiBzU9mCgY
How to Take a Life : real life told -- and how we ached, feeling this story in these 13 lines.
Frederick Douglass: a perfect sonnet... this dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
Hold fast to dreams, says Langston Hughes. This poem reminds us to continue to make the vision of a just world, where "man, superb in love and logic" will be remembered, "fleshing his dream of the beautiful needful thing."
Back Yard: And back to nature. I felt I was eavesdropping on Sandburg's private song sung to the moon. Hold on to such moments...
Driving West: Although Linda was born in the Bronx, was Maryland Poet Laureate from 1991-5, one feels she has experienced this travel first hand. These words would have been enough perhaps: "We are pioneers /// of our own histories, drawn/to the horizon as if it waited just for us" -- but she goes on with one more couplet : the way the young are drawn/to the future, the old to the past. It's no longer about driving West, but the larger sense of life's journey.
So many in the room who have traveled West could relate to this... but even better are the universal lines about what it is about traveling -- drawn to the horizon.
My Daughter Describes the Tarantula : We did discuss real tarantula -- and yes, they are quite soft will not bite unless you threaten them. This is a wonderful snapshot of a small thing most people would shy away from knowing connected to the complexity of mother-daughter relationship. Don't we all want to be appreciated properly, feel we have a place where we belong?
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