Prose vs. Poetry:
What is the difference between a prose poem, a narrative poem, and a story which uses good language? What if writing were only collections of words that sting?
What hooks us in?
Here is the link (apologies -- fuzzy here) of Alan Ginsberg at RIT reading from “Howl”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm3QodfkUKw&feature=related
Are there works like “hydrogen jukebox” in the poems and sentences below?
Merlin Enthralled by Richard Wilbur
OCTOBER 4, 2010
Hell, by Zbigniew Herbert
(discussed with Christopher Kennedy 10/9 at his workshop. Two paragraphs; an ordering of Hell. One wonders about the nature of life as joke.)
Antonina’s Education (runner-up for Cranston prize awarded by Calyx.
http://www.calyxpress.org/Cranstonprize.htmlprize -- for winning poems and other runners’ up.
(stanzas: part 1 of 6 lines; part 2: 3 lines; (initiation -- as girl, changing language/country) part 3: couplets. The juxtaposition of the German guard who shares his sandwich. Her surprise when she expresses sympathy to him on the loss of his son.)
Lines from Prose : (from Gary Lutz' talk 10/9)
Sam Lipsyte: Novelist – sentences that read like a string of epiphanies, glued with assonance, patterned repetitions, blends.
“Viola tones rose from a carved alcove.”
“So maybe I wanted all these memories, the sorrows and the hollows.”
“the blade bordered on sword.)
Christine Schutt:
“Mother had used overcooked bacon for a bookmark,
or a hair pin, stick of gum, sucker stick, twig –
whatever was at hand.
**
Two poems by Christopher Kennedy from "Encouragement for a Man Falling to his Death"
poems with a touch a strange, beautifully structured prose poems.
Speech Identification Procedure : beautiful crafting in 3 stanzas -- relationship -- of father to child, light, dark, absence, disappearance. How italicized "father" migrates to italicized last word, "bird".
The 3rd stanza:
A person can stand still for a long time moving about in the world.
My days are like this, a scarecrow in a field, trying to imagine "birds"
King Cobra Does the Mambo
Like Ashbery -- a view of chaos, with serpent power and clin d'oeil to Villon, Stevens' monocle.
Juxtaposition. Italics: "I love you,/but you never phone." non-italics: For this, our species waited centuries./ That's as far as I go today;
and the poem continues. Ends with a dream -- "I intuit the laughter/of trees. That, or a runaway train headed your way."
**
There's an irresistable humor, more pleasing than Herbert's "Hell";
Prose cannot be a simple kyrielle (string of Kyrie) of epiphanies. Nor poetry for that matter.
Well-constructed snapshots that capture more than the black and white.
Friday, October 22, 2010
O Pen -- October 11 -- on the heels of Black Mountain Symposium
October 11 :
I love October. Perhaps a bit like Molly Peacock's opening statement in "Why I am not a Buddhist". I love the "state of want and thought // of how to get.
There is something "tattered" about the leaves falling, in all their crimson, golden, royal glory.
A reminder that nothing is permanent.
& is such a sign. Ampersand. Put a line between two backward "C's" )( -- and a Greek letter schoots (scoots and shhhhh's?) across the page. et per se. etc.
Man and his symbols and constantly changing language -- and how love moves through it -- whether in ee cummings, "love is a place..." or Molly's poem.
Yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds.
Ashbery : p 11 "A Worldly Country" --
Like a Photograph.
"It will be all over in a minute you said. We both
believe that, and the clock's ticking: Flame on, flame on.
McLuhan on photography: you lose the experience. What we are left with depends not on the clicked instant, but the attention we bring to each moment. And then Emily started to sing
"Our little house is a very fine house,
all made out of ticky-tacky..."
I shared the Patrick Graybill's "mime" of Richard Cory
and a poem by Robert Creeley (from Bly's little book "Leaping Poetry".
Kore: one of those Greek sculptures of a clothed woman, feet together...
and a double flute makes her move
"O love / where are you // leading // me now ?
This intriguing click in a poem which stays in one part of the psyche -- a poetry of "steady light" vs. leaping flashes. As if the poem is tethering down the mind to stop any chaos.
Ashbery's "A Worldly Country" is the opposite --
from insane clocks; scent, and end-rhymed lines which contain everything in real time, novel time -- "In short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon".
But at night? Peace. How sleep offsets the great ungluing.
And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea
we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.
I love October. Perhaps a bit like Molly Peacock's opening statement in "Why I am not a Buddhist". I love the "state of want and thought // of how to get.
There is something "tattered" about the leaves falling, in all their crimson, golden, royal glory.
A reminder that nothing is permanent.
& is such a sign. Ampersand. Put a line between two backward "C's" )( -- and a Greek letter schoots (scoots and shhhhh's?) across the page. et per se. etc.
Man and his symbols and constantly changing language -- and how love moves through it -- whether in ee cummings, "love is a place..." or Molly's poem.
Yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds.
Ashbery : p 11 "A Worldly Country" --
Like a Photograph.
"It will be all over in a minute you said. We both
believe that, and the clock's ticking: Flame on, flame on.
McLuhan on photography: you lose the experience. What we are left with depends not on the clicked instant, but the attention we bring to each moment. And then Emily started to sing
"Our little house is a very fine house,
all made out of ticky-tacky..."
I shared the Patrick Graybill's "mime" of Richard Cory
and a poem by Robert Creeley (from Bly's little book "Leaping Poetry".
Kore: one of those Greek sculptures of a clothed woman, feet together...
and a double flute makes her move
"O love / where are you // leading // me now ?
This intriguing click in a poem which stays in one part of the psyche -- a poetry of "steady light" vs. leaping flashes. As if the poem is tethering down the mind to stop any chaos.
Ashbery's "A Worldly Country" is the opposite --
from insane clocks; scent, and end-rhymed lines which contain everything in real time, novel time -- "In short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon".
But at night? Peace. How sleep offsets the great ungluing.
And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea
we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.
Poetry and Spirituality -- October
Poetry and Spirituality -- Month of October – YES !
(Optimism, acceptance, tolerance, permeability, commitment, saying “yes to life” when the path is uncertain. )
I love serendipity.
For instance, that I am choosing poems to discuss that have to do with the feeling of YES, and stumbling on a series of ee cummings poems – where if you type eYes, the “vision” of “yes” appears… Oh indeed -- “love is a place” (yes is a world):
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/love-is-a-place/
or for instance, that I send an ee cummings poem, i thank you God to my friend, and she tells me – oh that is the one I copied by hand on all my wedding invitations 35 years ago!
YES! carried in the coincidence that Writer’s Almanac posted 2 ee cummings’ poems in celebration of his birthday 10/14:
i carry your heart with me // and since feeling is first
since feeling is first
or for instance that the new poet laureate, W.S. Merwin will be giving a reading, and a Seattle contact sends a link to his translation of Lorca’s poem, “Cancion del naranjo seco” – Song of the Barren Orange Tree, which talks about the need to live without having the mirror of oneself interfere – which coincides perfectly with our discussion of poems which beckon to “Atman”, beckon to the larger spiritual connection we seek.
today (10/21):
Ode to The God of Atheists by Ellen Bass -- (not a question of earning a reward, being punished, outward manifestation of faith, etc. Oh give me a god a holy dirt.)
The Thing Is – by Ellen Bass – posted on WA, 10/16 and sent by the minister after I’d already chosen it! And it IS a ‘YES” – a look at the “obesity of grief” and the thing is, you take life, and you love it – even if you have no stomach for it.
Fifth Avenue in Early Spring – by Philip Schultz -- the sense of Spring, young lovers, the raw edge of coming into a new season, the joy simply to “bear witness”. How is it that “satisfactions are disturbing” is such a meaningful paradox – knowing our hunger can only be temporarily satiated.
Dreams – by Szymborska,(translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak) where in spite of accidents, the unplanned and certainly not because of orderly fact, “at times even a clear-cut meaning may slip through”
YES! carried in the coincidence that Writer’s Almanac posted 2 ee cummings’ poems in celebration of his birthday 10/14:
i carry your heart with me // and since feeling is first
since feeling is first
Other poems discussed 10/14:
Dawn – by Robert Bly (Ghazal; like a beautiful rosary of precious beads, linked by the final word)
Derry Derry Down -- by Seamus Heaney for the joyful sound of it, the bright innocence
Ted Kooser’s Selection : Nocturne by Michelle Y. Burke, who lives in N.Y., in which a man who does everything right doesn’t quite do everything right.
Call to Prayer, Abby Murray (the need for prayer for a man, his daughters, and even a Sheik who will abuse them)
My country, I will build you again by Simin Behbahani. She is the
most prolific female poet in Iran, a country in which poetry is the national
scripture.
Shoulders, Naomi Shihab Nye. What we carry, how we carry it; “We’re not going to be able/ to live in this world/if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing/with one another.
October 7 :
Amy Lowell : Patterns
and two more ee cummings:
most(people
simply
can’t)
won’t (most
parent pople mustn’t
shouldn’t)most daren’t
(sortofpeople well
youknow kindof)
aint
&
even
(not having
most ever lived
people always)don’t
die(becoming most buried unbecomingly
very
by
most)people.
**
Here’s another “YES”
yes,is a pleasant country
if’s wintry
(my lovely)
let’s open the year
both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear
love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april’s where we’re)
September 30: Theme of Growth :
Identification : Szymborska
Roots: Lucille Clifton
Poems from Rochester Art Drop: (see : http://artdrop.democratandchronicle.com )
Wandering Eye: Jan Cedras
English Flavors: Laure-Anne Bosselaar
The Giving in : Marvin Bell
(Optimism, acceptance, tolerance, permeability, commitment, saying “yes to life” when the path is uncertain. )
I love serendipity.
For instance, that I am choosing poems to discuss that have to do with the feeling of YES, and stumbling on a series of ee cummings poems – where if you type eYes, the “vision” of “yes” appears… Oh indeed -- “love is a place” (yes is a world):
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/love-is-a-place/
or for instance, that I send an ee cummings poem, i thank you God to my friend, and she tells me – oh that is the one I copied by hand on all my wedding invitations 35 years ago!
YES! carried in the coincidence that Writer’s Almanac posted 2 ee cummings’ poems in celebration of his birthday 10/14:
i carry your heart with me // and since feeling is first
since feeling is first
or for instance that the new poet laureate, W.S. Merwin will be giving a reading, and a Seattle contact sends a link to his translation of Lorca’s poem, “Cancion del naranjo seco” – Song of the Barren Orange Tree, which talks about the need to live without having the mirror of oneself interfere – which coincides perfectly with our discussion of poems which beckon to “Atman”, beckon to the larger spiritual connection we seek.
today (10/21):
Ode to The God of Atheists by Ellen Bass -- (not a question of earning a reward, being punished, outward manifestation of faith, etc. Oh give me a god a holy dirt.)
The Thing Is – by Ellen Bass – posted on WA, 10/16 and sent by the minister after I’d already chosen it! And it IS a ‘YES” – a look at the “obesity of grief” and the thing is, you take life, and you love it – even if you have no stomach for it.
Fifth Avenue in Early Spring – by Philip Schultz -- the sense of Spring, young lovers, the raw edge of coming into a new season, the joy simply to “bear witness”. How is it that “satisfactions are disturbing” is such a meaningful paradox – knowing our hunger can only be temporarily satiated.
Dreams – by Szymborska,(translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak) where in spite of accidents, the unplanned and certainly not because of orderly fact, “at times even a clear-cut meaning may slip through”
YES! carried in the coincidence that Writer’s Almanac posted 2 ee cummings’ poems in celebration of his birthday 10/14:
i carry your heart with me // and since feeling is first
since feeling is first
Other poems discussed 10/14:
Dawn – by Robert Bly (Ghazal; like a beautiful rosary of precious beads, linked by the final word)
Derry Derry Down -- by Seamus Heaney for the joyful sound of it, the bright innocence
Ted Kooser’s Selection : Nocturne by Michelle Y. Burke, who lives in N.Y., in which a man who does everything right doesn’t quite do everything right.
Call to Prayer, Abby Murray (the need for prayer for a man, his daughters, and even a Sheik who will abuse them)
My country, I will build you again by Simin Behbahani. She is the
most prolific female poet in Iran, a country in which poetry is the national
scripture.
Shoulders, Naomi Shihab Nye. What we carry, how we carry it; “We’re not going to be able/ to live in this world/if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing/with one another.
October 7 :
Amy Lowell : Patterns
and two more ee cummings:
most(people
simply
can’t)
won’t (most
parent pople mustn’t
shouldn’t)most daren’t
(sortofpeople well
youknow kindof)
aint
&
even
(not having
most ever lived
people always)don’t
die(becoming most buried unbecomingly
very
by
most)people.
**
Here’s another “YES”
yes,is a pleasant country
if’s wintry
(my lovely)
let’s open the year
both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear
love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april’s where we’re)
September 30: Theme of Growth :
Identification : Szymborska
Roots: Lucille Clifton
Poems from Rochester Art Drop: (see : http://artdrop.democratandchronicle.com )
Wandering Eye: Jan Cedras
English Flavors: Laure-Anne Bosselaar
The Giving in : Marvin Bell
Thursday, September 2, 2010
borderlines' poem -- 9/2 with comment 10/21
Today I sent this for workshopping: (9/2) AFTERWARDS: (10/21) pared off the parentheses and unnecessary trimmings. Re-thought what direction the poem was headed. It makes me realize posting a poem on a blog is just that. A temporary casing for a thought. I mean, how many versions of a draft does anyone REALLY want to see?
Questioning Evidence
What happened to the snail?
(disappearance)
A slip of
a shell
in slim-skinned silence
in a stare of August heat;
(non-interference)
Crabgrass elbows its joints, sleekly
combs its purple-seeded valence,
does not comment on the abandoned ship.
(surveillance?)
Did anyone see the snail disembark?
(perseverance)
Not the milkweed,
closed within seed-podded vigilance,
nor the cow parsley fleetly
seeking a full-hipped, laced-bell chance
to chorus line circumstance
(incoherence)
A snail does not leave its shell –
and yet here is this litter of shells in the garden.
(disappearance)
It reminds me of the fading images of Cambodian faces
printed on leaves, hanging in the museum.
(non-interference)
nameless victims in mass graves
(surveillance)
we are reminded not to forget
(incoherence)
each year, new snails, new shells.
(perseverance)
new snails, shells.
9/2/2010
Questioning Evidence
What happened to the snail?
(disappearance)
A slip of
a shell
in slim-skinned silence
in a stare of August heat;
(non-interference)
Crabgrass elbows its joints, sleekly
combs its purple-seeded valence,
does not comment on the abandoned ship.
(surveillance?)
Did anyone see the snail disembark?
(perseverance)
Not the milkweed,
closed within seed-podded vigilance,
nor the cow parsley fleetly
seeking a full-hipped, laced-bell chance
to chorus line circumstance
(incoherence)
A snail does not leave its shell –
and yet here is this litter of shells in the garden.
(disappearance)
It reminds me of the fading images of Cambodian faces
printed on leaves, hanging in the museum.
(non-interference)
nameless victims in mass graves
(surveillance)
we are reminded not to forget
(incoherence)
each year, new snails, new shells.
(perseverance)
new snails, shells.
9/2/2010
Member Night at W&B -- August 11
Leah Ruekberg,(terrific story teller) and I decided we'd have fun performing poetry -- which I envisioned as a way of connecting audience participation and poetry performance.
Leah's selection:
Methodist Church, from New and Selected Works by Stephen Dunn
Two Trains , from What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland
Square Dancing With Sister Robert Claire from Halfway Decent Sinners by Michael Cleary
Healing the Mare, and Hotel Nights with My Mother, from Eva Mary by Linda McCarriston
We Are Transmitters, from Collected Works by D.H. Lawrence
You do Not Have to Be Good, and Trilliums, from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
I Thank You God, My sweet old etcetera, and Somewhere i have never traveled, by e.e. cummings
The Lanyard, from The Trouble With Poetry, by Billy Collins
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes, from Picnic, Lightning by Billy Collins
Some Kiss We Want by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
My selection:
Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donne, Auden, WCW, (ekphrastic), Housman, Ferlinghetti, Dylan Thomas,
I liked this quote :
"I think one of my early motivations for writing was that other people's versions of experience didn't gel with my own. It was a gesture toward sanity to try to get the world right for myself. I've since learned that if you get it right for yourself, it often has resonance for others."
Stephen Dunn
I think that is one of my early motivations for performing.
So, we giggled through Romeo and Juliette "kissing scene" (I'll never forget how Dorianne Laux performed it)
cavorted through Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins
-- skies of couple colour... whatever is fickle, stippled, freckled, plotted, pieced,
all those things alliteratively fresh as firecoal and finches wings
On Fools: more Shakespeare, and Donne's Triple Fool (remembering how Heather McHugh performed it) at which point I felt more fool than three, and not wise enough...
For both Auden and William Carlos Williams -- Bruughel paintings: WCW's fun of "La Kermesse" with "The Round... and Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts (Brussels) ah... those old masters, never wrong about suffering... and that ship, hurrying on to get to where it had to get, while a boy is falling up there in the corner, out of the sky...
Housman: 8 O'clock -- how to tell a story in 8 lines, like a riddle. I love how those quarters the steeple sprinkles down seem as fresh as first snow flakes. How quick the luck of the draw -- how the clock does the work. Makes you re-tell the story differently if you isolate
the second stanza:
Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.
Ferlinghetti : Constantly Risking Absurdity : I did as an acrobat on a tightrope.
Ended with Dylan Thomas, remembering my Welsh grandfather who would cite Fern Hill.
The music always wins.
Leah's selection:
Methodist Church, from New and Selected Works by Stephen Dunn
Two Trains , from What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland
Square Dancing With Sister Robert Claire from Halfway Decent Sinners by Michael Cleary
Healing the Mare, and Hotel Nights with My Mother, from Eva Mary by Linda McCarriston
We Are Transmitters, from Collected Works by D.H. Lawrence
You do Not Have to Be Good, and Trilliums, from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
I Thank You God, My sweet old etcetera, and Somewhere i have never traveled, by e.e. cummings
The Lanyard, from The Trouble With Poetry, by Billy Collins
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes, from Picnic, Lightning by Billy Collins
Some Kiss We Want by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
My selection:
Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donne, Auden, WCW, (ekphrastic), Housman, Ferlinghetti, Dylan Thomas,
I liked this quote :
"I think one of my early motivations for writing was that other people's versions of experience didn't gel with my own. It was a gesture toward sanity to try to get the world right for myself. I've since learned that if you get it right for yourself, it often has resonance for others."
Stephen Dunn
I think that is one of my early motivations for performing.
So, we giggled through Romeo and Juliette "kissing scene" (I'll never forget how Dorianne Laux performed it)
cavorted through Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins
-- skies of couple colour... whatever is fickle, stippled, freckled, plotted, pieced,
all those things alliteratively fresh as firecoal and finches wings
On Fools: more Shakespeare, and Donne's Triple Fool (remembering how Heather McHugh performed it) at which point I felt more fool than three, and not wise enough...
For both Auden and William Carlos Williams -- Bruughel paintings: WCW's fun of "La Kermesse" with "The Round... and Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts (Brussels) ah... those old masters, never wrong about suffering... and that ship, hurrying on to get to where it had to get, while a boy is falling up there in the corner, out of the sky...
Housman: 8 O'clock -- how to tell a story in 8 lines, like a riddle. I love how those quarters the steeple sprinkles down seem as fresh as first snow flakes. How quick the luck of the draw -- how the clock does the work. Makes you re-tell the story differently if you isolate
the second stanza:
Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.
Ferlinghetti : Constantly Risking Absurdity : I did as an acrobat on a tightrope.
Ended with Dylan Thomas, remembering my Welsh grandfather who would cite Fern Hill.
The music always wins.
Aug. 16 -- Toy Bone, Town of Hill
A few sentences can capture a whole world within interactions of two people...
Ted Kooser selection
Toy Bone : triggered by the find of a toy bone in the attic, a stanza (room) filled with memory, a snapshot of a lonely boy, the simplicity of loving a dog, ending on the pause for breath
Town of Hill -- music always wins... Hall's comments on this poem in his book Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird give insight to this thin-column of "dream water" anchored by a real story.
Ronnyy Someck: Algeria -- translated from his book of the same, in 2009. I found this on "phatitude" is a copyrighted by Phatitude. You will see 4 of his poems here:
http://phatitude.org/online/phatitude-online/poets-corner/
ALGERIA
If I had another daughter
I’d call her Algeria,
and you would doff your colonial hats to me
and call me “Abu Algeria.”
In the morning, when she opened her chocolate eyes
I would say: “Now Africa is waking up,”
and she would caress the blonde on her sister’s head
certain that she had rediscovered gold.
The grains on the seashore would be her sandbox
and in the footprints of the French who fled from there
she would hide the dates that dropped from the trees.
“Algeria,” I would clasp the railing of the balcony and call to her:
“Algeria, come home, and see how I’m painting the eastern wall
with the brush of the Sun.”
Ted Kooser picked this poem introducing it this way:
Anton Chekhov, the master of the short story, was able to see whole worlds within the interactions of simple Russian peasants, and in this little poem by Leo Dangel, who grew up in rural South Dakota, something similar happens.
One September Afternoon
Home from town
the two of them sit
looking over what they have bought
spread out on the kitchen table
like gifts to themselves.
She holds a card of buttons
against the new dress material
and asks if they match.
The hay is dry enough to rake,
but he watches her
empty the grocery bag.
He reads the label
on a grape jelly glass
and tries on
the new straw hat again
Ted Kooser selection
Toy Bone : triggered by the find of a toy bone in the attic, a stanza (room) filled with memory, a snapshot of a lonely boy, the simplicity of loving a dog, ending on the pause for breath
Town of Hill -- music always wins... Hall's comments on this poem in his book Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird give insight to this thin-column of "dream water" anchored by a real story.
Ronnyy Someck: Algeria -- translated from his book of the same, in 2009. I found this on "phatitude" is a copyrighted by Phatitude. You will see 4 of his poems here:
http://phatitude.org/online/phatitude-online/poets-corner/
ALGERIA
If I had another daughter
I’d call her Algeria,
and you would doff your colonial hats to me
and call me “Abu Algeria.”
In the morning, when she opened her chocolate eyes
I would say: “Now Africa is waking up,”
and she would caress the blonde on her sister’s head
certain that she had rediscovered gold.
The grains on the seashore would be her sandbox
and in the footprints of the French who fled from there
she would hide the dates that dropped from the trees.
“Algeria,” I would clasp the railing of the balcony and call to her:
“Algeria, come home, and see how I’m painting the eastern wall
with the brush of the Sun.”
Ted Kooser picked this poem introducing it this way:
Anton Chekhov, the master of the short story, was able to see whole worlds within the interactions of simple Russian peasants, and in this little poem by Leo Dangel, who grew up in rural South Dakota, something similar happens.
One September Afternoon
Home from town
the two of them sit
looking over what they have bought
spread out on the kitchen table
like gifts to themselves.
She holds a card of buttons
against the new dress material
and asks if they match.
The hay is dry enough to rake,
but he watches her
empty the grocery bag.
He reads the label
on a grape jelly glass
and tries on
the new straw hat again
August Clean-up --
Goatfoot, Milktongue and Twinbird
Who can resist reading this title outloud, and start hunting for the "dark mouth of the vowel by which the image tells its sensual rhyme" ! We applied Donald Hall's concepts to the August picks for "O Pen". I particularly love his definition of a poem as "one man's insides speaking to another man's insides".
August 2: poems that resonate:
Naomi Shihab Nye: Shoulders
Are we willing to do what this man is doing? Are we willing to see him in the way Naomi does?
Have you listened for the hum of dreams deep inside someone else?
Mary Oliver : When Death Comes
how the name of each flower is a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.
Have you felt married to amazement?
Can you imagine measuring amazement???????
"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
Li-Young Lee : One Heart
"the work of wings/was always freedom, fastening one heart to every falling thing."
What will be the walker's lasting memory about the Art of the world?
**
Robert Hass: "Mexico" from Counting Thunder.
magical realism?
here and now in tongue-in-cheekish.
What do we know really of the speakers insides?
his posturing in a poem about Mexico, that really, he's being pursued by... hmmm. is it the lovely senorita in his dream, the posse, the wife...or the mirage... or that he is starving and running, and lives by his wits, gets side-tracked by mirages, white adobe with a red-tiled roof, where one will rest, drink some tequila,and dream of that lovely senorita.. but, enough of that.
Somehow, we're right on that faithful, unfaltering horse right with him, riding the poem.
**
See APR and all of Dorianne's poems. Timing is amazing!
cf. with Composed upon Westminster Bridge -- Wordsworth... poetry is not argument (as it was for Pope and George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet -- but mood, a way of feeling that distills experience.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: 1911...
Departure. and electronic poem from Linebreak 6/22/2010, "Naming Goodbye." by Stephanie Rogers.
form... craft. and fragments, negations. Trying to get the words to work. But do they?
Rae Armantrout: Scumble...
HAITE: Here's An Idea. The End.
vs. The Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab, Naomi Shihab Nye.
I go back to Kunitz, as if rolling on leaves.
"Live in the layers, not on the litter.
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
**
Keeping on, keeping on.
Who can resist reading this title outloud, and start hunting for the "dark mouth of the vowel by which the image tells its sensual rhyme" ! We applied Donald Hall's concepts to the August picks for "O Pen". I particularly love his definition of a poem as "one man's insides speaking to another man's insides".
August 2: poems that resonate:
Naomi Shihab Nye: Shoulders
Are we willing to do what this man is doing? Are we willing to see him in the way Naomi does?
Have you listened for the hum of dreams deep inside someone else?
Mary Oliver : When Death Comes
how the name of each flower is a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.
Have you felt married to amazement?
Can you imagine measuring amazement???????
"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
Li-Young Lee : One Heart
"the work of wings/was always freedom, fastening one heart to every falling thing."
What will be the walker's lasting memory about the Art of the world?
**
Robert Hass: "Mexico" from Counting Thunder.
magical realism?
here and now in tongue-in-cheekish.
What do we know really of the speakers insides?
his posturing in a poem about Mexico, that really, he's being pursued by... hmmm. is it the lovely senorita in his dream, the posse, the wife...or the mirage... or that he is starving and running, and lives by his wits, gets side-tracked by mirages, white adobe with a red-tiled roof, where one will rest, drink some tequila,and dream of that lovely senorita.. but, enough of that.
Somehow, we're right on that faithful, unfaltering horse right with him, riding the poem.
**
See APR and all of Dorianne's poems. Timing is amazing!
cf. with Composed upon Westminster Bridge -- Wordsworth... poetry is not argument (as it was for Pope and George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet -- but mood, a way of feeling that distills experience.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: 1911...
Departure. and electronic poem from Linebreak 6/22/2010, "Naming Goodbye." by Stephanie Rogers.
form... craft. and fragments, negations. Trying to get the words to work. But do they?
Rae Armantrout: Scumble...
HAITE: Here's An Idea. The End.
vs. The Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab, Naomi Shihab Nye.
I go back to Kunitz, as if rolling on leaves.
"Live in the layers, not on the litter.
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
**
Keeping on, keeping on.
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