What is it that we want our voice to call out -- and how in tune are we to our own inner voice?
Thanks to Lorrie, who discovered an anthology of Black Writers on Nature, we enjoyed discussing a poem by June Jordan : b. 1936 --
It takes a room full of people, carefully in tune, looking, searching deep into the spaces around the words, their sounds, to find all sorts of different meanings.
I love her voice in poems like "Apologies to All the People in Lebanon", and "A Poem about Intelligence for my Brothers and Sisters." The Secret of Intelligence...
-- more later.
I shared
Lucille Clifton:
hag riding
why
is what i ask myself
maybe it is the afrikan in me
still trying to get home
after all these years
but when i wake to the heat of morning
galloping down the highway of my life
something hopeful rises in me
rises and runs me out into the road
and i lob my fierce thigh high
over the rump of the day and honey
i ride i ride
The voice of Jack Gilbert, illustrated by a Utube where someone draws as the poem is spoken --
Jack Gilbert:
" How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite."
How we say Love, and get it all wrong. The details are sensuous, archaic, biblic. Etruscan tombs,where indeed, couples smile, as Emily pointed out, may give us a clue... or not. Like our words.
Linda Pastan : Traveling Light: the favorite of the group: Tone management (word choice, use of vernacular, the switchblade weather) to create a sense of lurking danger and that all is not so well with "I'm only leaving for a few days" -- and what we guess about such specific instructions... in spite of which "our lives have minds of their own". It brought out memories of preparing for traveling; the larger metaphor of traveling through life, and what it is we really need.
Alberti, translated by Mark Strand: Song : reminded me of a song sung as ashes are sprinkled out to sea.
Stephen Dunn: One Source A Love Poem
Terrific fun -- the tropical storm (Barbara) and how changeable she is -- which is as suspect as the reporting of the behavior.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
O Pen discussion May 3
Opened with one of the love poems by Shikubu --
Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
This is
the first morning.
Indeed, this Spring, nothing seems usual. And how one yearns for the first morning of anything.
As if chanting, "today is the first day of the rest of my life" -- and for a moment, all feels so possible.
Today brought so many poems before "O Pen" ... and I wonder how Shakespeare might have dealt with it all. Sonnet 87: "Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,/In sleep a king, but waking no such matter."
Frost's 14 line poem, "Mowing" seems to join the master-mistress play on a - king --
mist-a-king; ma-king; wa-king -- nutshells hiding the nut in #87.
the whisps of hay, the scythe at work --
the word "swale" which contains the whisper and "wail" but means
"low, hollow place, often boggy," 1584, special use of Scottish swaill "low, hollow place," or dialectal East Anglian swale "shady place" (c.1440); both probably from O.N. svalr "cool," from P.Gmc. *swalaz.
The negatives: no dream; no easy gold.
the associations: fay/elf; idle hours
Dream returns bolstered with fact of work. And yet that magic of the hay, cut, left to rest in the sun -- and that too is work, the making.
**
The Digging: Seamus Heaney
How the pen is squat; snug as a gun in first and last stanza.
How the stanzas gather strength from 2 lines to 3, to 4, to 5, back to two.
to 8; to 4 to 3.
The repetition of dig and digging. How time inserts "his straining rump among the flowerbeds/bends low, comes up twenty years away;
Digging into a legacy.
**
Wonderful find of two poems by Rachel Contreni Flynn
Rachel Contreni Flynn was born in Paris in 1969 and raised in a small farming town in Indiana. She got her BA from Indiana University in Bloomington where she majored in journalism and history. She received her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2001. Her first book, Ice, Mouth, Song, was selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2003 winner of the Dorset Prize. She has recorded her work for the Bloomington/Normal Public Radio station, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was featured as The Spoon River Review's Illinois Poet in 2005. She also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship. Flynn works at Fortune Brands, Inc., a Fortune 500 consumer products company. She teaches poetry courses and workshops occasionally, and lives in Mundelein, Illinois with her husband, Patrick, and their children, Grace and Noah
The Yellow Bowl
Dead Center
Beautifully crafted -- the yellow bowl like a still life; the "if" suspended and accelerated
loneliness has lost its shape, and this quiet is only quiet.
Dead Center: Ominous detials and what it is to lose a mother; what it is to test a father;
stages of grief.
**
Louis Jenkins:
Earl and Telephone:
Poignant. Delightful. Earl -- all seals (substract the R) (and the seal voice)
and how we live by denying what is painful...
The problem of hearing. The problem -- what to listen to -- and just what is said.
Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
This is
the first morning.
Indeed, this Spring, nothing seems usual. And how one yearns for the first morning of anything.
As if chanting, "today is the first day of the rest of my life" -- and for a moment, all feels so possible.
Today brought so many poems before "O Pen" ... and I wonder how Shakespeare might have dealt with it all. Sonnet 87: "Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,/In sleep a king, but waking no such matter."
Frost's 14 line poem, "Mowing" seems to join the master-mistress play on a - king --
mist-a-king; ma-king; wa-king -- nutshells hiding the nut in #87.
the whisps of hay, the scythe at work --
the word "swale" which contains the whisper and "wail" but means
"low, hollow place, often boggy," 1584, special use of Scottish swaill "low, hollow place," or dialectal East Anglian swale "shady place" (c.1440); both probably from O.N. svalr "cool," from P.Gmc. *swalaz.
The negatives: no dream; no easy gold.
the associations: fay/elf; idle hours
Dream returns bolstered with fact of work. And yet that magic of the hay, cut, left to rest in the sun -- and that too is work, the making.
**
The Digging: Seamus Heaney
How the pen is squat; snug as a gun in first and last stanza.
How the stanzas gather strength from 2 lines to 3, to 4, to 5, back to two.
to 8; to 4 to 3.
The repetition of dig and digging. How time inserts "his straining rump among the flowerbeds/bends low, comes up twenty years away;
Digging into a legacy.
**
Wonderful find of two poems by Rachel Contreni Flynn
Rachel Contreni Flynn was born in Paris in 1969 and raised in a small farming town in Indiana. She got her BA from Indiana University in Bloomington where she majored in journalism and history. She received her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2001. Her first book, Ice, Mouth, Song, was selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2003 winner of the Dorset Prize. She has recorded her work for the Bloomington/Normal Public Radio station, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was featured as The Spoon River Review's Illinois Poet in 2005. She also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship. Flynn works at Fortune Brands, Inc., a Fortune 500 consumer products company. She teaches poetry courses and workshops occasionally, and lives in Mundelein, Illinois with her husband, Patrick, and their children, Grace and Noah
The Yellow Bowl
Dead Center
Beautifully crafted -- the yellow bowl like a still life; the "if" suspended and accelerated
loneliness has lost its shape, and this quiet is only quiet.
Dead Center: Ominous detials and what it is to lose a mother; what it is to test a father;
stages of grief.
**
Louis Jenkins:
Earl and Telephone:
Poignant. Delightful. Earl -- all seals (substract the R) (and the seal voice)
and how we live by denying what is painful...
The problem of hearing. The problem -- what to listen to -- and just what is said.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
poems for April 27, 28, 29, 30
April 27
First, butterfly
in the waking spring
plays the flowers
Seconds yesterday's butterflies
in my stomach
at the piano
Butterflies
never staying long enough
to be cared for
Not needing to know
anything beyond fingering
the air in silent music.
**
April 28
Tones
affirming stone
like the one in the furrow here
as soft as a polished egg
waiting for the wind
to sway a golden stalk
with one red-winged blackbird
closer to listen.
Listen closer,
blackbird
stalks the wind
polished soft
egg in the furrow,
stone affirming
tones.
**
April 29:
In this poem, Tolerance and Vitality are vertical,
love (third letter of Tol...erance)
finds its V in vitality, and starts again with
the "l" . The format does not cooperate to see this.
A Deadman Tells about A Boy
who built cities
of words like this:
T
o
l o v e
e i
r t
a a
n l o v e
c i
e t
y
always holding hands
each syllable in love
with the sound of it all,
the sound of the sea
lit by day by that near star,
sun.
And the deadman explains
how fear started.
no one touched
how love crumbled
darkness sieved.
The dead man says
to keep building.
**
April 30
The 'Scuse Me Bird
In the garden this year,
a new bird has arrived saying
"scuse me... scuse me"
too shy to present himself
by the row of rhyming red tulips
under the weeping Siberian pea,
too blithe
to be begging forgiveness
or interrupting,
just a simple two note phrase
loud, soft, down, up,
"Scuse me, scuse me"
his own little phrase,
that turns two syllables
into something beyond song.
First, butterfly
in the waking spring
plays the flowers
Seconds yesterday's butterflies
in my stomach
at the piano
Butterflies
never staying long enough
to be cared for
Not needing to know
anything beyond fingering
the air in silent music.
**
April 28
Tones
affirming stone
like the one in the furrow here
as soft as a polished egg
waiting for the wind
to sway a golden stalk
with one red-winged blackbird
closer to listen.
Listen closer,
blackbird
stalks the wind
polished soft
egg in the furrow,
stone affirming
tones.
**
April 29:
In this poem, Tolerance and Vitality are vertical,
love (third letter of Tol...erance)
finds its V in vitality, and starts again with
the "l" . The format does not cooperate to see this.
A Deadman Tells about A Boy
who built cities
of words like this:
T
o
l o v e
e i
r t
a a
n l o v e
c i
e t
y
always holding hands
each syllable in love
with the sound of it all,
the sound of the sea
lit by day by that near star,
sun.
And the deadman explains
how fear started.
no one touched
how love crumbled
darkness sieved.
The dead man says
to keep building.
**
April 30
The 'Scuse Me Bird
In the garden this year,
a new bird has arrived saying
"scuse me... scuse me"
too shy to present himself
by the row of rhyming red tulips
under the weeping Siberian pea,
too blithe
to be begging forgiveness
or interrupting,
just a simple two note phrase
loud, soft, down, up,
"Scuse me, scuse me"
his own little phrase,
that turns two syllables
into something beyond song.
The anthologist
The Anthologist by Nicholson BakerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I'm never sure what to call the phenomenon of starting a book and giving it 5 stars right away, noting pages,
finding inspiration for new writing, and then mid-way, lose interest, and can't wait to finish it, not because I am being pulled by it, but just want the experience to end. However to call this, attention-span challenge due to overdose of desire to read more than eyes and mind can absorb, and then extricate my reader's responsibility and be objective about the book itself... is perhaps not as easy as it could be.
The tone of the book is chatty, slightly ADD, which can be both intriguing and annoying. Certainly Baker has a lot of knowledge, and you will end up with a mosaic of information about poetry and be able to construct a fine reading list. However, the final chapters seemed to fizzle and I would have been happy to end on the last sentence of Chpt. 10 -- "I think I'll do a quadruplet rhythm, a love-has-gone-and-left- me- rhythm: one gray-green bead and then three other beads of near-random colors, and then agray-green bead again."
I found the few examples in musical notation to be more an interruption and distraction. It's part of his delight in showing off, and his rambling manner. In spite of perhaps a negative comment here and there, I do recommend this book.
View all my reviews >>
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
posting poems for 4/22, 4/23, 4/24, 4/25, 4/26,
Poem for April 22
Iron Motion vs. Robin, Train, Song
Say train this way: loco,
loco, locomo, locomo –
with a French tee-vah
lo-co-mo-TEE-vah, locomoTIve
Can you hear it now, this
crazy train propelling itself
on the tracks
and the little boy in the film
saying it in Japanese,
Do-des’-kaden driving his faux tram
through the slum?
Do-des KADEN, do DES ka DEN
and it is spring and a robin sits still,
high on a fence,
thrusting out his orange waistcoat
tight around his fat spring belly
bright ringed eyes watching,
and the train is charging ahead,
locomo, locomo, locomo
and suddenly the whistle escapes
like an ungodly iron horse screaming.
It covers the robin call
chee-ear-eo, chee-ear-up
And what if the robin
were made of iron
and pistons made him fly?
Just what if we really listened to what is created?
What do you pick?
the little boy in his world
do-des’ ka DEN
where in the dump where he lives,
he has made a tram line
which carries him
where he wants to go.
**
Poem for April 23
Unspoken In the 17th Century Gallery
In the small scene, a man peers
in from a high window
looking down at a man standing
by a poster of an owl, with candlestick, eyeglasses.
The upright man tamps his pipe,
looks at the man extolling his beer
who looks towards the man in a red hat
who looks at his pipe as if a look
were a light passed from man
to man, to man, to bowl of tobacco.
But each eye rolls overboard,
missing the person he should see.
Across the room, hangs a painting
of a man in an armchair,
as if surveying the tavern scene.
Light pulses from his hands,
and the moon of his face
where dutch-windowed lips
look at if they will speak
perhaps to point out
the still life beside him,
with curl of orange, pearlescent oyster
and a smoldering rope hanging
off the table.
If you look long enough
the human surfaces
beyond the paint:
a Willem contemplating
his subjects, Jan, Pieter, Loek.
Perhaps their carousing amuses him,
perhaps he is as unable to see.
poem for 4/24
Penned Sheep
E Each line shall start
W With a capital because
E Everyone knows that rule.
Y Yellow you
O Ochre you
U Umber: the color of you in Fall.
in a nation of
S So little
H Heart
E Errant
E Erring until lost
P People
4/25
C BCD
Children
Before the
Camera
Died
Children
before
changing rooms
dance them into new clothes
Camera obscura
broken
chest for treasures
demands
children
blessed
children
dancing. And so when the
children came home, we
brought the camera on our walk, swinging, skipping, we
caught a few images
downloaded them but now the
Camera is dead.
But it gave us memories of our
children
dancing.
4/26
This spring morning, white drifting,
as if apple blossom straying
but it is snow
the wind twirls white into skirts
without the chatter of bird music
crack of cold shuts down even the tulips
the lilac tightens its purple nubs
snow paints the earth in broad bands.
This spring afternoon,
cumulus puffed into castles
every dandelion has opened shop
basking as if to make daydreamed sun.
what snow? It has spun
into the wild and all is breath
to warm frozen fingers of spring
cool the steaming soup until able to eat.
4/27
60 Seconds
(with thanks to Giuseppe Ungaretti and Gian Lombardo)
Could write
"m'illumino
d'immenso"
four words in Italian which would take
four volumes in English to explain.
Can you hear how the M's magnify the darkness
how the L's push the light inside one self
spread it to the immensity of O
push into it
then out.
Iron Motion vs. Robin, Train, Song
Say train this way: loco,
loco, locomo, locomo –
with a French tee-vah
lo-co-mo-TEE-vah, locomoTIve
Can you hear it now, this
crazy train propelling itself
on the tracks
and the little boy in the film
saying it in Japanese,
Do-des’-kaden driving his faux tram
through the slum?
Do-des KADEN, do DES ka DEN
and it is spring and a robin sits still,
high on a fence,
thrusting out his orange waistcoat
tight around his fat spring belly
bright ringed eyes watching,
and the train is charging ahead,
locomo, locomo, locomo
and suddenly the whistle escapes
like an ungodly iron horse screaming.
It covers the robin call
chee-ear-eo, chee-ear-up
And what if the robin
were made of iron
and pistons made him fly?
Just what if we really listened to what is created?
What do you pick?
the little boy in his world
do-des’ ka DEN
where in the dump where he lives,
he has made a tram line
which carries him
where he wants to go.
**
Poem for April 23
Unspoken In the 17th Century Gallery
In the small scene, a man peers
in from a high window
looking down at a man standing
by a poster of an owl, with candlestick, eyeglasses.
The upright man tamps his pipe,
looks at the man extolling his beer
who looks towards the man in a red hat
who looks at his pipe as if a look
were a light passed from man
to man, to man, to bowl of tobacco.
But each eye rolls overboard,
missing the person he should see.
Across the room, hangs a painting
of a man in an armchair,
as if surveying the tavern scene.
Light pulses from his hands,
and the moon of his face
where dutch-windowed lips
look at if they will speak
perhaps to point out
the still life beside him,
with curl of orange, pearlescent oyster
and a smoldering rope hanging
off the table.
If you look long enough
the human surfaces
beyond the paint:
a Willem contemplating
his subjects, Jan, Pieter, Loek.
Perhaps their carousing amuses him,
perhaps he is as unable to see.
poem for 4/24
Penned Sheep
E Each line shall start
W With a capital because
E Everyone knows that rule.
Y Yellow you
O Ochre you
U Umber: the color of you in Fall.
in a nation of
S So little
H Heart
E Errant
E Erring until lost
P People
4/25
C BCD
Children
Before the
Camera
Died
Children
before
changing rooms
dance them into new clothes
Camera obscura
broken
chest for treasures
demands
children
blessed
children
dancing. And so when the
children came home, we
brought the camera on our walk, swinging, skipping, we
caught a few images
downloaded them but now the
Camera is dead.
But it gave us memories of our
children
dancing.
4/26
This spring morning, white drifting,
as if apple blossom straying
but it is snow
the wind twirls white into skirts
without the chatter of bird music
crack of cold shuts down even the tulips
the lilac tightens its purple nubs
snow paints the earth in broad bands.
This spring afternoon,
cumulus puffed into castles
every dandelion has opened shop
basking as if to make daydreamed sun.
what snow? It has spun
into the wild and all is breath
to warm frozen fingers of spring
cool the steaming soup until able to eat.
4/27
60 Seconds
(with thanks to Giuseppe Ungaretti and Gian Lombardo)
Could write
"m'illumino
d'immenso"
four words in Italian which would take
four volumes in English to explain.
Can you hear how the M's magnify the darkness
how the L's push the light inside one self
spread it to the immensity of O
push into it
then out.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Notes on discussion: 4/26
Details:
Barnacle's Son:
I love knowing that Taranto as the most polluted city in the Western Europe, that cirri are not just plural for cirrus clouds, but tendrils.
According to Greek poet Hesiod, she was born when Cronus cut off Uranus' genitals and threw them into the sea, and from the aphros (sea foam) arose Aphrodite.
1954: perhaps: During this year [1954], the seeds of an even worse war than Korea began in Vietnam, were sown as France's Asian colonies collasped into disorder.
** Trombones...
Wynton Marsalis -- making the trumpet "talk"...
"I believe jazz revolutionized the art of music by vesting the individual musician with the authority to 'tell their story' and by positing that an even larger 'story' could be told, by choice, by a group of equally empowered musicians."
Barnacle's Son:
I love knowing that Taranto as the most polluted city in the Western Europe, that cirri are not just plural for cirrus clouds, but tendrils.
According to Greek poet Hesiod, she was born when Cronus cut off Uranus' genitals and threw them into the sea, and from the aphros (sea foam) arose Aphrodite.
1954: perhaps: During this year [1954], the seeds of an even worse war than Korea began in Vietnam, were sown as France's Asian colonies collasped into disorder.
** Trombones...
Wynton Marsalis -- making the trumpet "talk"...
"I believe jazz revolutionized the art of music by vesting the individual musician with the authority to 'tell their story' and by positing that an even larger 'story' could be told, by choice, by a group of equally empowered musicians."
Discussion: Lost Horse Press New Poets Series 4/26/2010
What a treasure to discover Abby Murray! Not only do we "experience what life feels like inside us" but she adds layers and layers -- innuendos, mythologies, paves the way for possibilities that come as surprises.
Barnacle: it makes you think about what it is like to born in this age,
And then other ages, and why it is we don't wish to bring children into a troubled world; The sense of mythology (3,000) juxtaposed with contemporary; layers of myth...
Trombone: one thing has many faces... How thoughts change; Sid's interpretation that the poem starts the day after the scene, "Since you asked..." and as the telling proceeds, the "fat" part of the trombone, the woozy, hungover feel gives way to the recollection of dancing,
"shaking our hips like they were rolling in oil". The group responded with memories of the cards in bike wheels, roaring twenties dancing, and the fun of watching minnows.
Taking Justice Home: How Esther is Justice -- "I dreamt I would meet Justice in vagrant form" --
and we thought of Esther's heroism, saving her people, and all the faces of a contemporary Esther, and looking at honey and fish from Roshashanna honey to Christ and the fishes --
but realizing the poem has it all in front of the reader, with language that pulls you through the scene and gives you a sense of knowing this woman who lives inside the curve of an old concrete sewer pipe. And dream and reality meld until the rescue mission... and like a dream of Justice creating a new society, Esther will be asked to draw a map of the world but the mystical, is preserved, like Esther's secrets which will be held in a jam jar...
Jesse brought us to Hawaii and Angela gave a long description of the zoo, and how Hawaii has changed. And Karen's poem gave us a chance to discuss "I'm in No Mood to put up with your..."
briefly.
Like all good travels, there's the obligatory end...
Barnacle: it makes you think about what it is like to born in this age,
And then other ages, and why it is we don't wish to bring children into a troubled world; The sense of mythology (3,000) juxtaposed with contemporary; layers of myth...
Trombone: one thing has many faces... How thoughts change; Sid's interpretation that the poem starts the day after the scene, "Since you asked..." and as the telling proceeds, the "fat" part of the trombone, the woozy, hungover feel gives way to the recollection of dancing,
"shaking our hips like they were rolling in oil". The group responded with memories of the cards in bike wheels, roaring twenties dancing, and the fun of watching minnows.
Taking Justice Home: How Esther is Justice -- "I dreamt I would meet Justice in vagrant form" --
and we thought of Esther's heroism, saving her people, and all the faces of a contemporary Esther, and looking at honey and fish from Roshashanna honey to Christ and the fishes --
but realizing the poem has it all in front of the reader, with language that pulls you through the scene and gives you a sense of knowing this woman who lives inside the curve of an old concrete sewer pipe. And dream and reality meld until the rescue mission... and like a dream of Justice creating a new society, Esther will be asked to draw a map of the world but the mystical, is preserved, like Esther's secrets which will be held in a jam jar...
Jesse brought us to Hawaii and Angela gave a long description of the zoo, and how Hawaii has changed. And Karen's poem gave us a chance to discuss "I'm in No Mood to put up with your..."
briefly.
Like all good travels, there's the obligatory end...
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