O pen discussion: March 4, 2013
Poems for March 4
Streetlamps by Brenda Shaughnessy
Hearth by Brenda Shaughnessy
Honda Pavarotti by Tony Hoagland
The Cellist by Galway Kinnel
The Same Inside by Anna Swir
You never know how our discussions will start... and I already am suffering from CRS which Michael kindly explained means (Can’t Remember Stuff (or shit) with a case in point being the “word.a.day” which David brought up. It was: gelasin: noun: A dimple in the cheek that appears when someone smiles.
And you never know how such a detail will serendipitously fit as if perfectly planned. Today’s word of the day: Sprezzatura. What I aim for when playing piano... Doing (or giving the appearance of doing) something effortlessly; effortless grace; nonchalance.)
My new goal is to mention the birthdates and important places to the poets picked each week. It makes a difference to know Anna Swir is born in 1909 and lived in Poland.
Sometimes knowing a biographical fact is important – for instance, if the poet is writing about grief and references to doctors arriving too late, but does not talk about a difficult birth, cerebral palsy, this information adds a lens which changes out perception.
I picked two very different poems by Brenda Shaughnessy b. 1970, both of which appeared in Gwarlingo last week. They both used couplets, but to quite different effect: the first, with clever enjambments, which stand out in short stanzas, eye rhyme, rhyme and slant rhyme, made us laugh. The second, strongly emotional had a sober and mysterious narrative .
Martin mentioned how he thought “Streetlamps” was a very serious poem, and looked up the author, only to find out she often used humor, which changed the poem completely. Her couplets accentuate the possibilities of paradox and the humor of double negatives, a road being “unplowed” as opposed to a field, the repetition of a quartet of “so” with parallel negative foils, the blending of cliché, “primacy of eggs”, only to arrive at a vocative address: “O streetlamp,/
wallflower clairvoyant,’ you are so futuristically/ old-fashioned, do not allow us to pause, reflect, but rather click along rapidly, yet, demand we slow down, playing serious against funny. Is wallflower or clairvoyant adjective or noun, and after leaping on from light to address “now and later” and the ping-pong of opposites, where “half” turns into a verb to erase the other half, and light, only able to be light in the dark... indeed, makes this reader feel breathlessly insane. The final line, “The only snows are dark snows.” brings us back to the plowed road – what it is we try to “clear”, but also, what snow, white as it is, also wraps things, covers up.
In “Hearth” there is no mistaking the opening as dramatic.
“Love comes from ferocious love
or a ferocious lack of love, child”
one does not joke with mothers, love or lack. The contradictions in the couplets this time drive the poem with urgency: The final sentence brings us home – but this is not to be still – there is an urgency -- and ferocious and lack return in the final sentence: You’ll lack nothing,/ child, and I will never let you go.
Reading Tony Hoagland’s Honda Pavarotti , we discussed opera... how sometimes knowing what is being sung, like understanding some background to a poem, increases enjoyment. Although some opera can be understood no matter what, Jim mentioned hearing a Czech opera in Budapest, translated into Hungarian, and yet could understand 85%. We also discussed the use of “Honda” in the title as well in Hoagland’s latest book, “Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty”. From the experience of driving, listening to Pavarotti, who is a singer who moves even the most misanthropic of opera shunners, a visceral identification with the production of the singing, comes the idea of squandering a life. No place ... “is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience/but to which experience will never measure up.” Note that this is both a dark AND soaring fact – that it pushes us to renounce OR fall in love with the world.
Contradiction remains the theme in “The Cellist” by Galway Kinnell, although many of the class had great suggestions about how he could tighten the effect – perhaps tell us why the speaker of the poem went backstage and what the relationship was, and take out the entire physical description of the girl’s private parts. Martin brought up a painting by Balthus called “The Guitar Lesson” (google Balthus on wiki to see it) which echoes a sense of instrument=woman – but we wondered if the poem is really about that.
What touched most of us was “the dreary in us” – what we have given, received, and cannot balance in a 12 lines sentence including “and for fear I wasn't worthy,
and all I poured out for reasons I don't understand yet.”
The ancient screaming, the cat, the birthing, etc. perhaps are to enhance fear, but most everyone found the pushing of the metaphor was “over the top”.
Anna Swir’s “The Same Inside” is a brilliant poem, contrasting the spiritual and physical beggar, the need for trust, relationship, hearth. Such simple strokes: Beggar, woman going to a love fest; reptilian brain like a dog; money; and an epiphany: “I could not part from her./After all, one needs/someone who is close. This is not the cerebral “love they neighbor as thyself” but a moment of transcendence, where conversing, touching another, feeling their needs, translating them to you own, exposes the artificial trysts for what they are – which are no longer needed.
I ended by reading Tony Hoagland’s “The Loneliest Job in the World.”
We left, feeling we all were better accountants of the heart – having shared hearty laughs, seen in the ordinary things of our lives new insights.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Poems for February 25th: starting w/ Wakefield
Poems for February 25
The Meadow by Marie Howe
Miss Consolation for Emotional Damages – by Laura Kasischke (Lilies Without)
While They Speak – Titos Patrikios
The Flying Cat by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Promise by Jane Hirshfield
Marie Howe uses an epigraph from Friedrich Hölderlin for her book, Come, Thief (from which "The Meadow" is taken.) I'm not sure of the original German, which has been translated as variously as this:
“But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” or “where danger is, also lies deliverance”
or “what rescues us”.
In the poem, The Meadow, she starts with a search for words and the meadow, muddy with dreams, which allows a weaving between certain, uncertain, a telephone and a woodpecker; there is no question that a dozen wasps become puttering prop planes, or that the grass be bewildered, that the two older, self-important horses be unable to "design"how the small white pony will escape the fence. Forgiveness hinges on "this small time when you can forget what you are". Perhaps a metaphor for a poem as a walk into words, as mysterious as the meadow remembering how to make wildflowers... The point is not to "figure out" and have answer on how to speak for sound alone, listen for and to the cry, identify, understand. The journey is search, choice, and faith:
Bedeviled,/
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words//
that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
**
In contrast, The Kasischke poem is a rollercoaster for sound and rhythm -- no regular couplets or line length here. What is "the" embarrassment? As fundamental as Adam and Eve becoming aware of their nakedness? Kasischke repeats "it" over and over, providing more and more possibilities -- meanwhile the title echoes in question -- why "Miss Consolation" like a pageant queen -- and what emotional damages? Perhaps, with the Einstein reference, it is about identifying brilliance beyond race, religion. The bluntly stated inability to deal with a "curvature of a 3rd dimension" holds up a mirror of the danger of falling into a sameness out of shame for coming from a place that seems to be different from the one in which you find yourself.
David was reminded of Marge Piercy's "Barbie Doll" -- the cutting off of the nose -- the final ending in the casket where all you can say is "isn't she pretty" and pay lip service to what is sold as a dream life.
The Patrikios sparked great discussion -- and the question of what it is that we bring to poems from our own experience and beliefs. Is the poem just a snapshot in a cafe -- about a writer, writing about freedom and love? Kathy reminded us of Adrienne Rich saying "as long as we can't agree, at least we will have something to talk about." This is such a poem. How can we truly talk about freedom and love without knowing its opposite? The "how could you say" can be interpreted in different tones -- perhaps accusatory, perhaps
responding to something we have not heard, as if to ask the person who said it, to explain further, with the conviction that the fact that these things have been spoken of, means there is possibility for freedom and love... Patrikios believes that poetry should do this: bring people together, help readers discover something new about themselves and to address and provide answers to problems that have gone unnoticed.
Perhaps the third item is not so much "provide answers" -- but to reflect about aspects of problems that have gone unnoticed. The fact that there was so much discussion about these nine lines indeed brought us together, helped us discover something new as we listened to each other.
The Flying Cat came to the rescue at this point and reminded us about our versions of our careers of worrying... What is our private language of pain? And what do we transpose onto our animals who cannot tell us in words how they respond to life? Regardless, we are the ones who must look at our own "black holes in space or the weightless rise of fear".
Binding the poems together, was Jane Hirshfield.
I quoted from Philip Levine who seems to echo some of the thoughts in the interview link.
“Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.”
What is it that we mean when we say "Stay"?
The pause of stillness allows us to recognize our relationship to everything around us.
Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.
How does "always" work as the final word? So, we go back to the title, "The Promise" read again,
and note how each thing has such trouble being still. How constant our shifting, our love.
The Meadow by Marie Howe
Miss Consolation for Emotional Damages – by Laura Kasischke (Lilies Without)
While They Speak – Titos Patrikios
The Flying Cat by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Promise by Jane Hirshfield
Marie Howe uses an epigraph from Friedrich Hölderlin for her book, Come, Thief (from which "The Meadow" is taken.) I'm not sure of the original German, which has been translated as variously as this:
“But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” or “where danger is, also lies deliverance”
or “what rescues us”.
In the poem, The Meadow, she starts with a search for words and the meadow, muddy with dreams, which allows a weaving between certain, uncertain, a telephone and a woodpecker; there is no question that a dozen wasps become puttering prop planes, or that the grass be bewildered, that the two older, self-important horses be unable to "design"how the small white pony will escape the fence. Forgiveness hinges on "this small time when you can forget what you are". Perhaps a metaphor for a poem as a walk into words, as mysterious as the meadow remembering how to make wildflowers... The point is not to "figure out" and have answer on how to speak for sound alone, listen for and to the cry, identify, understand. The journey is search, choice, and faith:
Bedeviled,/
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words//
that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
**
In contrast, The Kasischke poem is a rollercoaster for sound and rhythm -- no regular couplets or line length here. What is "the" embarrassment? As fundamental as Adam and Eve becoming aware of their nakedness? Kasischke repeats "it" over and over, providing more and more possibilities -- meanwhile the title echoes in question -- why "Miss Consolation" like a pageant queen -- and what emotional damages? Perhaps, with the Einstein reference, it is about identifying brilliance beyond race, religion. The bluntly stated inability to deal with a "curvature of a 3rd dimension" holds up a mirror of the danger of falling into a sameness out of shame for coming from a place that seems to be different from the one in which you find yourself.
David was reminded of Marge Piercy's "Barbie Doll" -- the cutting off of the nose -- the final ending in the casket where all you can say is "isn't she pretty" and pay lip service to what is sold as a dream life.
The Patrikios sparked great discussion -- and the question of what it is that we bring to poems from our own experience and beliefs. Is the poem just a snapshot in a cafe -- about a writer, writing about freedom and love? Kathy reminded us of Adrienne Rich saying "as long as we can't agree, at least we will have something to talk about." This is such a poem. How can we truly talk about freedom and love without knowing its opposite? The "how could you say" can be interpreted in different tones -- perhaps accusatory, perhaps
responding to something we have not heard, as if to ask the person who said it, to explain further, with the conviction that the fact that these things have been spoken of, means there is possibility for freedom and love... Patrikios believes that poetry should do this: bring people together, help readers discover something new about themselves and to address and provide answers to problems that have gone unnoticed.
Perhaps the third item is not so much "provide answers" -- but to reflect about aspects of problems that have gone unnoticed. The fact that there was so much discussion about these nine lines indeed brought us together, helped us discover something new as we listened to each other.
The Flying Cat came to the rescue at this point and reminded us about our versions of our careers of worrying... What is our private language of pain? And what do we transpose onto our animals who cannot tell us in words how they respond to life? Regardless, we are the ones who must look at our own "black holes in space or the weightless rise of fear".
Binding the poems together, was Jane Hirshfield.
I quoted from Philip Levine who seems to echo some of the thoughts in the interview link.
“Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.”
What is it that we mean when we say "Stay"?
The pause of stillness allows us to recognize our relationship to everything around us.
Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.
How does "always" work as the final word? So, we go back to the title, "The Promise" read again,
and note how each thing has such trouble being still. How constant our shifting, our love.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Poems for February 18
The Fist by Derek Walcott
Soldierization -- by Jane Satterfield (Verse Daily 1/13/13)
The Argument -- Robert Peake
The Cricket and the Grasshopper by Dan Beachy-Quick
Valentine for Ernst Mann
You might receive a chuckle about "The Passionate Freudian" to His Love – by Dorothy Parker
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21356
and
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love -- by Christopher Marlowe
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16408
but what is each trying to say, establish and how? Is it any different from Richard Wakefield's brilliant
"Writing about Love" where "love" holds the spine, with the writing shifting from one side to another?
Wit and message work hand in hand. I look forward to our discussion!
**
Poems for February 18: Discussion
Love? I love poems which challenge Hallmark! Love has as many guises as circumstances. I find great comfort from reminders that we are all on this journey together. “There are more like us. All over the world/ There are confused people, who can’t remember / The name of their dog when they wake up, and people /Who love God but can’t remember where // He was when they went to sleep. It’s/ All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
“Writing about Love” is one of those poems worth memorizing. It has that sort of cleansing power. What is “love” in quotation marks, love without quotation marks, and what is love if one is not writing about it? This playful yet deep poem arranges words around the “spine” of love. The lines demonstrate the paradoxical difficulty of writing about love as an experience, which shifts into love as a general subject. Removed from us into memory, we wonder just what love it was we were experiencing, and what it means now.
Both the image of the cave echo where the word “delayed” is delayed to the next line and the image that stays, enjambed to “a moment” further enjambed by “love has gone” to fall onto the next line, “into another room” reminds me of Tosca and Recondita armonia — hidden harmony. Why not write love /on a stick ... and toss it in the river, watch where the word and “real love” join.
Writing about Love – by Richard Wakefield
Love is hard to write about because
love moves. We’re always looking where it was,
saying “love” and pointing to a spot
now void of love, now empty or, if not
empty, then echoing “love” as a cave will say
a name delayed. Or love is an image that will stay
a moment in the eye after our love has gone
into another room. Write “love” upon
a stick and throw it into a river, and “love”
moves no less fluidly than real love.
Perhaps like Derek Walcott’s “Love after Love”, this poem without any stanza pattern
allows us to peel away all the words on either side of love, the way Walcott asks us to ‘Peel your image from the mirror.’ Then we can “give back the heart/to itself...” Walcott also writes in his poem “Oddjob, a Bull Terrier” about our “unreadiness” for sorrow, and what lies deeper than silence, at “love-deep” level “must be said/in a whimper,/in tears,/in the drizzle that comes to our eyes/ not uttering the loved thing’s name,/ the silence of the dead,/ the silence of the deepest buried love is/ the one silence.”
We know we cannot truly live without feeling – and it is only by our emotions as we live, love, lose,
fail, forget, that the “one love” includes ourselves, as we “unpeel” an understanding of ourselves.
Walcott ends by repeating “and it is blest/deepest by loss/it is blest, it is blest.” In French, “blesser”, means to wound. This calls to mind the poem, also by Walcott, “The Fist” where he asks in the first stanza, “When have I ever not loved/ the pain of love? But this has moved // past love to mania.” It feels paradoxical to love “gripping the ledge of unreason, before/plunging into the abyss.” The last line contains two unbroken sentences. “Hold hard then, heart. This is the way at least you live.”
The poems for Feb. 18 were anything but popular Valentines.
“Soldierization”, brings a neologism in the title of the toughness of the process of being a soldier, following orders, keeping cool. It is a dramatic script in two voices that mirror and repeat a woman’s experience with tanks, guns, “chronicle and elegy”. “There’s duty in memory’s mirror, brains and brawn start here.” Satterfield announced, second sentence she would bring her brains to “this”. The repetitions, the choral response are like a prayer. Words may not suffice, but they are the only way thing left. “Poor words, quiet grave.”
“The Argument” seems to call on the old French etymology of the word, "reasoning, opinion; accusation, charge" with the mention of it in the third sentence: “The argument to remain placid is as soft/as the fur-covered thoraxes, as clear/and as light as the transparent wings.” The mention of bees whirring on a face “as close to kissing as they will come,/bound together but without intimacy,/” pulls me as reader to thinking about the arrival of metaphorical bees, some “terror unable to win its case” while the tiny legs “tap their reasons across his pores”. Perhaps we all are in position of beekeeper, able to withstand terror by doing nothing (not reacting to it.) The tone of the poem is concise, scientific yet the description of bees on a beekeeper’s face is poetic, the movement of the bees “rippling like sauce” and the tapping becomes the “music of stillness”.
The next 14 line poem by Dan Beachy-Quick has an appealing flow, enticing diction, and initially I thought some fable might be in store such as the ant and the cricket. Repetition of the word “green” like “grow” moves from first word to last word, “ceases” to “ceasing”, last word to first. “Tangle”, tangles and twins.
repeated three times before ending as owner of “green” as the final word. Poetry of the earth never ceases, the song of the cricket, hidden, yet heard in this chaotic lushness.
Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “Valentine for Ernest Mann” remains one of my all-time favorite valentines
opening with a personable observation about poems and a generous sharing of the secret of how to find not just poems, but love in our lives.
**
The discussion of poems for Feb. 25 seemed to reflect the magic of poetry to “reinvent whatever our lives gives us”—how we curve “poetry as memorable speech” (to quote W.H. Auden) and reach out for what is absent as does Richard Blanco in “Love Poem According to Quantum Theory”. “According to theory”.... repeated in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 6th stanza. “There’s another” changes like Wakefield’s words on either side of love. Enjoy it below. From Looking for the Gulf Motel.
Love Poem According to Quantum Theory
According to theory, there’s another
in an equal and opposite world who
dreams into words all I’ve never
captured in a handful of rain, a feather,
or palms swaying under a tarnished moon.
According to theory, there’s another
who’s growing younger as I grow older,
who’ll remember what I’ll forget soon:
every word, every poem, every letter
I’ve written—memories will wither
and disappear into that dark vacuum
where according to theory another
keeps embracing, kissing all the lovers
I’ve unembraced, unkissed, except you
with me in this world of words I’ll never
find for us, yet always reaching further
than Orion to where the stars all bloom,
and according to theory there’s nother
for you whose words are far more clever.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
February 11
Martin Espada : Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass
http://martinespada.net/Litany_at_the_Tomb_of_FD.html
Mary Oliver: The Poet with his Face in His Hands (The New Yorker, 4/4/2005)
: Spring Azures
We Wear the Mask -- Paul Laurence Dunbar 1872–1906
There Is No Word by Tony Hoagland
Where by Taha Muhamad Ali
Imagination threads all the poems discussed today. To see, envision, understand with insight...
paradox, the obscure, becomes possible.
I didn't plan the Espada poem, written on the occasion of visiting Rochester, Frederick Douglass' tomb, interview with Bill Moyers on Obama's 2nd inauguration, to prepare us for Obama's State of the Union speech Tuesday 2/12, Lincoln's Birthday.
The world is as we see it, and always will be. (from interview w/ Martin Espada w/ Bill Moyers on Obama’s 2nd inauguration. http://billmoyers.com/wp-content/themes/billmoyers/transcript-print.php?post=22548
But there is something about the foresight of strong leaders, courageous men that allow us to enter the language of "the impossible".
In our discussion, Martin reminded us to pay attention to the difference between "illusion" and "hope".
Hope is OK. Susan B. Anthony saying, "Failure is impossible" had the grit of hard work in it.
That Espada used the "omphalos" or epicenter, the O in Douglass' name, the shape of a button, in a litany -- not an elegy, gives a sacred feel to a prayer, filled with hope.
This is... repeated 8 times; semi-colons and colons marking relationships, clear images of past to present tense cuts out the social importance.
The two Oliver poems struck me as containing a new tone. More realistic. Worthy of the "stone-hard beauty" as well as the playful. By using the second person, she could be talking to herself, to the reader, or universal "us". Does she say to go it alone with complaint, or rather -- take some time with it until you do what you have to do to transform it?
The same with Spring Azures -- whatever the circumstance of Blake, butterfly, or reader, what turns the poem from tra-la-la lyric is the story of Blake, how his imagination freed him, just like the butterfly wings,
the spring return of azures, sharing that hope with us, the reader.
The Dunbar poem gives a clear portrait of the black man. David pointed out the break in the regular rhyme,
Rich pointed out specifically the hemiola (O Great Christ) in between the two iambs of the final stanza.
Subtle ties indeed.
Hoagland's layered sensibility from white milk in wrapped plastic to the stretching of language, relationship is a tour de force which resonates beyond the "how witty, I'm so glad I read that".
Taha Muhamad Ali brings our imagination home, to the reminder of looking for the pencil.
http://martinespada.net/Litany_at_the_Tomb_of_FD.html
Mary Oliver: The Poet with his Face in His Hands (The New Yorker, 4/4/2005)
: Spring Azures
We Wear the Mask -- Paul Laurence Dunbar 1872–1906
There Is No Word by Tony Hoagland
Where by Taha Muhamad Ali
Imagination threads all the poems discussed today. To see, envision, understand with insight...
paradox, the obscure, becomes possible.
I didn't plan the Espada poem, written on the occasion of visiting Rochester, Frederick Douglass' tomb, interview with Bill Moyers on Obama's 2nd inauguration, to prepare us for Obama's State of the Union speech Tuesday 2/12, Lincoln's Birthday.
The world is as we see it, and always will be. (from interview w/ Martin Espada w/ Bill Moyers on Obama’s 2nd inauguration. http://billmoyers.com/wp-content/themes/billmoyers/transcript-print.php?post=22548
But there is something about the foresight of strong leaders, courageous men that allow us to enter the language of "the impossible".
In our discussion, Martin reminded us to pay attention to the difference between "illusion" and "hope".
Hope is OK. Susan B. Anthony saying, "Failure is impossible" had the grit of hard work in it.
That Espada used the "omphalos" or epicenter, the O in Douglass' name, the shape of a button, in a litany -- not an elegy, gives a sacred feel to a prayer, filled with hope.
This is... repeated 8 times; semi-colons and colons marking relationships, clear images of past to present tense cuts out the social importance.
The two Oliver poems struck me as containing a new tone. More realistic. Worthy of the "stone-hard beauty" as well as the playful. By using the second person, she could be talking to herself, to the reader, or universal "us". Does she say to go it alone with complaint, or rather -- take some time with it until you do what you have to do to transform it?
The same with Spring Azures -- whatever the circumstance of Blake, butterfly, or reader, what turns the poem from tra-la-la lyric is the story of Blake, how his imagination freed him, just like the butterfly wings,
the spring return of azures, sharing that hope with us, the reader.
The Dunbar poem gives a clear portrait of the black man. David pointed out the break in the regular rhyme,
Rich pointed out specifically the hemiola (O Great Christ) in between the two iambs of the final stanza.
Subtle ties indeed.
Hoagland's layered sensibility from white milk in wrapped plastic to the stretching of language, relationship is a tour de force which resonates beyond the "how witty, I'm so glad I read that".
Taha Muhamad Ali brings our imagination home, to the reminder of looking for the pencil.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
poems for February 4
Poems for February 4
Somewhere to Paris – by Richard Blanco
Dark Charms by Dorianne Laux
Live Light by James Grinwis
from Timbered Choir -- Wendell Berry
Letter to a Lost Friend by Barbara Hamby
quotes of poetry by an art exhibit, Williams Gallery, UU Church, S. Winton Rd.
The first three poems used a single block approach, the Berry gathered into five lines stanzas, and the Hamby had a long line, followed by an indented, shorter line.
How do we respond to form? to title? to "made-up" words as we respond to surface meaning?
I called attention to the multiple layers in the etymology of "Charms" , the ambiguous announcement of "Live Light" -- is it adjective, or verb? descriptor or command? As we read the poems, the repetitions, the play of dream to reality, use of common detail to something we can only hint out as we ponder how important anything is, what the "truth" of anything is.
We admired Richard Blanco's skill, both as inaugural poet, but also the way he "train stitched" the space between "there" and "here", the dreamed and dreaming, until the reader too is swept up in the scrolling wave, heartbeat, breath, and through enjambement, "nothing" defies touch, and can be read two ways
as "keeping nothing with nothing" /to deny the dark. How to you understand this accumulation? The epigram from Pascal -- where there is no misery if you keep in the quiet of your room... not defined by anything outside. The sole cause of a man's unhappiness
is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
--Pascal, Pensées
A beautiful meditation. What makes it convincing is the final sentence and, like the moon video Maura suggested we spend 4 minutes watching,we allow ourselves to BE the solitude
... never more beautiful, the arc of space
I travel through for a few hours, touching
nothing and keeping nothing, with nothing
to deny the night, the dark pines pointing
to the stars, this life, always moving and still.
Somewhere to... could be Paris, or dreamland, or wherever you have been, but are no longer. Which threaded nicely to Dorianne Laux's poem, embracing the "dark", like an incantation, a magic spell. I would say by consensus the favorite line was "bag like a lung filled with shadow and song." which describes "it" -- what is dragged in the past, something in us that longs to be named, something and the final line: "dreams of running, the keys to lost names." Again, the line breaks are such that "explaining this" cannot be done -- as the words don't spell anything out explicitly and the opening line "Eventually the future shows up everywhere" bears re-reading. What is true? What is important?
I loved the language play of the Grinwis, "a big question pops out of the frost cabbages" and his questioning starts to revolve (unlike the stonewheel, unable to rotate any direction) "Everyone is waiting/
for something. Why won’t it come?
Indeed "time strikes out at night like a loose bandoleer" --
Wendell Berry's soothing words take us to trees, tasks laid aside, to what is afraid of us, what we fear... finally the chance to listen to our own song.
The Hamby addresses aging, but also that yearning for a word that would help us pin down what can't be said... John brought up the story of Gertrude Stein chiding Picasso for his portrait of her: Stein – but I don’t look like this. Picasso: You will. Marcie brought in the quote:
People die. Life goes on. We are all people just walking each other home.
title – what it isn’t said. What friend? how lost? what is the relationship of the us. But poems aren't about facts pinned down -- but a a place we enter a deeper consciousness, recognize a feeling we might have been too busy to notice.
Somewhere to Paris – by Richard Blanco
Dark Charms by Dorianne Laux
Live Light by James Grinwis
from Timbered Choir -- Wendell Berry
Letter to a Lost Friend by Barbara Hamby
quotes of poetry by an art exhibit, Williams Gallery, UU Church, S. Winton Rd.
The first three poems used a single block approach, the Berry gathered into five lines stanzas, and the Hamby had a long line, followed by an indented, shorter line.
How do we respond to form? to title? to "made-up" words as we respond to surface meaning?
I called attention to the multiple layers in the etymology of "Charms" , the ambiguous announcement of "Live Light" -- is it adjective, or verb? descriptor or command? As we read the poems, the repetitions, the play of dream to reality, use of common detail to something we can only hint out as we ponder how important anything is, what the "truth" of anything is.
We admired Richard Blanco's skill, both as inaugural poet, but also the way he "train stitched" the space between "there" and "here", the dreamed and dreaming, until the reader too is swept up in the scrolling wave, heartbeat, breath, and through enjambement, "nothing" defies touch, and can be read two ways
as "keeping nothing with nothing" /to deny the dark. How to you understand this accumulation? The epigram from Pascal -- where there is no misery if you keep in the quiet of your room... not defined by anything outside. The sole cause of a man's unhappiness
is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
--Pascal, Pensées
A beautiful meditation. What makes it convincing is the final sentence and, like the moon video Maura suggested we spend 4 minutes watching,we allow ourselves to BE the solitude
... never more beautiful, the arc of space
I travel through for a few hours, touching
nothing and keeping nothing, with nothing
to deny the night, the dark pines pointing
to the stars, this life, always moving and still.
Somewhere to... could be Paris, or dreamland, or wherever you have been, but are no longer. Which threaded nicely to Dorianne Laux's poem, embracing the "dark", like an incantation, a magic spell. I would say by consensus the favorite line was "bag like a lung filled with shadow and song." which describes "it" -- what is dragged in the past, something in us that longs to be named, something and the final line: "dreams of running, the keys to lost names." Again, the line breaks are such that "explaining this" cannot be done -- as the words don't spell anything out explicitly and the opening line "Eventually the future shows up everywhere" bears re-reading. What is true? What is important?
I loved the language play of the Grinwis, "a big question pops out of the frost cabbages" and his questioning starts to revolve (unlike the stonewheel, unable to rotate any direction) "Everyone is waiting/
for something. Why won’t it come?
Indeed "time strikes out at night like a loose bandoleer" --
Wendell Berry's soothing words take us to trees, tasks laid aside, to what is afraid of us, what we fear... finally the chance to listen to our own song.
The Hamby addresses aging, but also that yearning for a word that would help us pin down what can't be said... John brought up the story of Gertrude Stein chiding Picasso for his portrait of her: Stein – but I don’t look like this. Picasso: You will. Marcie brought in the quote:
People die. Life goes on. We are all people just walking each other home.
title – what it isn’t said. What friend? how lost? what is the relationship of the us. But poems aren't about facts pinned down -- but a a place we enter a deeper consciousness, recognize a feeling we might have been too busy to notice.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Poems for January 14
New Year Resolve by May Sarton,
Flowers by Linda Pastan,
Above the Lake -- Stephen O’Connor (Verse Daily 1/7/13)
How it is -- Maxine Kumin
Bagel Shop Jazz – Bob Kaufmann
New Year Resolve:
We spent quite a bit of time on the May Sarton poem, admiring how the rhyme did not make a clunky appearance, but rather the sounds and repetitions created a pleasing effect. Unfortunately, I had the poems open with my comments, and didn't save them,
and in an unexpected shutdown of the computer, they were not saved, so I can only go by memory.
This is the perfect situation to allow her message of allowing silence, like a cat, to enter. Clutter enters twice in the first stanza, with an overtone of the “Walrus and the Carpenter’s “the time has come, to speak of many things”. Clutter clutters as noun and verb whereas, by the last stanza, “clutter” is shoved aside. Thus, the “firming of resolve” comes after the speaker considers the inner peace found in silence that allows clarity. Inner and outer world combine ending with a slant reference to the 23rd psalm.
We discussed at length the line, “all I have ever been/false or true/ will live again in my head” – with multiple takes on how “being” could be as an inside interpretation, as opposed to being run by “monkeymind” and outside clutter we have allowed without mindful attention.
Flowers is a sensuous run of couplets filled with colors and luscious sounds, names of flowers like “clivia” and a perfect touch of unusual adjectives – the “odd magenta”, “secular lilies” (without any mention of sacred), "notched" tulips. "The odd strangeness of flowers" in the chill of winter does indeed make one ask, “Is it real” -- and think about how juxtaposition changes our view of everything.
Above the Lake is a fine puzzle poem, filled with imbedded meanings, to the point that Sandra had the idea of substituting all the "this means that" to reduce the poem to this idea:
In this season, the snow, (woods, sky, mute roar)
is composed of abstraction (brook as diagonal gash, trees as lines, )
which is meaning (longing, loneliness accreting as quiet on quiet, white on bluish white)
Even if you don't read the poem this way, the way it is constructed, allows snow, abstraction and meaning to "accrete" and end on "white" (which is the color of blank).
We had a romp with that one -- and only just enough time to read the Maxine Kumin whose elegy for Anne Sexton is one of the most brilliant poems I know.
t
Flowers by Linda Pastan,
Above the Lake -- Stephen O’Connor (Verse Daily 1/7/13)
How it is -- Maxine Kumin
Bagel Shop Jazz – Bob Kaufmann
New Year Resolve:
We spent quite a bit of time on the May Sarton poem, admiring how the rhyme did not make a clunky appearance, but rather the sounds and repetitions created a pleasing effect. Unfortunately, I had the poems open with my comments, and didn't save them,
and in an unexpected shutdown of the computer, they were not saved, so I can only go by memory.
This is the perfect situation to allow her message of allowing silence, like a cat, to enter. Clutter enters twice in the first stanza, with an overtone of the “Walrus and the Carpenter’s “the time has come, to speak of many things”. Clutter clutters as noun and verb whereas, by the last stanza, “clutter” is shoved aside. Thus, the “firming of resolve” comes after the speaker considers the inner peace found in silence that allows clarity. Inner and outer world combine ending with a slant reference to the 23rd psalm.
We discussed at length the line, “all I have ever been/false or true/ will live again in my head” – with multiple takes on how “being” could be as an inside interpretation, as opposed to being run by “monkeymind” and outside clutter we have allowed without mindful attention.
Flowers is a sensuous run of couplets filled with colors and luscious sounds, names of flowers like “clivia” and a perfect touch of unusual adjectives – the “odd magenta”, “secular lilies” (without any mention of sacred), "notched" tulips. "The odd strangeness of flowers" in the chill of winter does indeed make one ask, “Is it real” -- and think about how juxtaposition changes our view of everything.
Above the Lake is a fine puzzle poem, filled with imbedded meanings, to the point that Sandra had the idea of substituting all the "this means that" to reduce the poem to this idea:
In this season, the snow, (woods, sky, mute roar)
is composed of abstraction (brook as diagonal gash, trees as lines, )
which is meaning (longing, loneliness accreting as quiet on quiet, white on bluish white)
Even if you don't read the poem this way, the way it is constructed, allows snow, abstraction and meaning to "accrete" and end on "white" (which is the color of blank).
We had a romp with that one -- and only just enough time to read the Maxine Kumin whose elegy for Anne Sexton is one of the most brilliant poems I know.
t
Thursday, January 3, 2013
2013! Poems for Jan. 7
Ode to Repetition by Ellen Bass
The Conductor by Jacqueline Berger
Frankly by Naomi Shihab Nye
Happiness by Jane Kenyon
Push Back the Catastrophes – by Jayne Cortez
How to start the new year... examine what "new" and "same" mean, and read a bit of Ellen Bass. What an audacious title -- an ODE to repetition -- so the same walk,
looking at the sea which not only cycles through tides but reflects the weather; wash the same dishes, and in the same breath think of the rhodendron making not just blossoms but "pink ceremony". Water then, will be a gift, lampposts will wear halos in the fog, and the moon will rinse parked cars as we age, and we can find reassurance in stars, call them faultless as they disappear into day. Well, of course, you can't paraphrase a poem, but you will want to enjoy the colloquial tone that Ellen Bass sprinkles with such unusual images. Have you ever thought of waves as "surf's drunk crashing into the cliffs like a car wreck."
We discussed at length the nature of repetition -- how especially in music, even though the notes might be the same, they aren't played the same way when repeated. The variation hanging on the repeated hanging on we do to the familiar. How Bass challenges the metaphor of the "fixed town of your life" with line breaks that suspend the possibilities only to surprise you. I'm grateful, is followed by an observation
that the toilet is in it's usual place; back in bed she finds that the same woman in bed is not the same; The opening of curtains repeated the second time has no closing. A wonderful poem to read to be reminded not so much of what happens (repeats over and over) to each of us, but the possibility of how we face that fact.
We could despair, be afraid, or watch how same wears a different face, as we do.
The next poem allows us to think of who we are -- from the front, or the back, old, young, healthy or stricken with a disease like parkinsons; the role of music; the role of "composing" or "constructing" a face. The two "I" sentences could be the conductor speaking, but just as easily the speaker of the poem, who seems to be able to "wear his skin". Twice the use of innocence, but the repetition expands into trying to pinpoint the meaning of "the face/unconstructed". The ending question, stretched over seven lines implies for how close he is to not being
able to be a conductor, or alive, twice, repeating the word "edge".
the description of Parkinsons' effect, "fingers tap their useless code" and what else can he do, but show us who he is/ a man standing too close to the edge,/ edge no one can call him back from.
Martin called on the fact that the poem comes from a book entitled, "The Gift that Arrives Broken"-- all of us are born with something slightly "broken" -- sometimes not apparent, sometimes declaring itself much later in life. Perhaps there is a play on the word "construct" and "conduct", which would accentuate the unconstructed smile, is attached to the person whose gift broken, will prevent him from conducting both music and his life.
We did not discuss "Frankly" by Naomi Shihab Nye very long, but admired the wry tone, and how indeed we do not know how to be with the dying, let alone make time for them.
What is labor? What do we bare, bear, as in carry, and what bores us in all the senses of the word, what penetrates through us, or cannot engage us.
Kenyon's poem, Happiness develops a fine context to show happiness as something
that appears as unpredictably as a prodigal son, an uncle you never knew about.
And so you feast, "and weep... to know that you were not abandoned" in those "unmerciful hours of despair". Three times she repeats in the final stanza,
"it comes" with the fourth time repeating, it even comes... followed by a list of inanimate objects: boulder, pine barrens, rain and wineglass. Why is it weary of
holding wine -- the waiting for celebration and feast -- as if to underline that
unpredictability of happiness.
The final poem, I wonder, if it were performed like Jayne Cortez' "endangered species" which is spoken with music, might come across better. But the message is clear. Whether it is Gaia, mother earth, or an endangered animal or human,
catastrophe is pushed back to the root cause: the catastrophers.
The Conductor by Jacqueline Berger
Frankly by Naomi Shihab Nye
Happiness by Jane Kenyon
Push Back the Catastrophes – by Jayne Cortez
How to start the new year... examine what "new" and "same" mean, and read a bit of Ellen Bass. What an audacious title -- an ODE to repetition -- so the same walk,
looking at the sea which not only cycles through tides but reflects the weather; wash the same dishes, and in the same breath think of the rhodendron making not just blossoms but "pink ceremony". Water then, will be a gift, lampposts will wear halos in the fog, and the moon will rinse parked cars as we age, and we can find reassurance in stars, call them faultless as they disappear into day. Well, of course, you can't paraphrase a poem, but you will want to enjoy the colloquial tone that Ellen Bass sprinkles with such unusual images. Have you ever thought of waves as "surf's drunk crashing into the cliffs like a car wreck."
We discussed at length the nature of repetition -- how especially in music, even though the notes might be the same, they aren't played the same way when repeated. The variation hanging on the repeated hanging on we do to the familiar. How Bass challenges the metaphor of the "fixed town of your life" with line breaks that suspend the possibilities only to surprise you. I'm grateful, is followed by an observation
that the toilet is in it's usual place; back in bed she finds that the same woman in bed is not the same; The opening of curtains repeated the second time has no closing. A wonderful poem to read to be reminded not so much of what happens (repeats over and over) to each of us, but the possibility of how we face that fact.
We could despair, be afraid, or watch how same wears a different face, as we do.
The next poem allows us to think of who we are -- from the front, or the back, old, young, healthy or stricken with a disease like parkinsons; the role of music; the role of "composing" or "constructing" a face. The two "I" sentences could be the conductor speaking, but just as easily the speaker of the poem, who seems to be able to "wear his skin". Twice the use of innocence, but the repetition expands into trying to pinpoint the meaning of "the face/unconstructed". The ending question, stretched over seven lines implies for how close he is to not being
able to be a conductor, or alive, twice, repeating the word "edge".
the description of Parkinsons' effect, "fingers tap their useless code" and what else can he do, but show us who he is/ a man standing too close to the edge,/ edge no one can call him back from.
Martin called on the fact that the poem comes from a book entitled, "The Gift that Arrives Broken"-- all of us are born with something slightly "broken" -- sometimes not apparent, sometimes declaring itself much later in life. Perhaps there is a play on the word "construct" and "conduct", which would accentuate the unconstructed smile, is attached to the person whose gift broken, will prevent him from conducting both music and his life.
We did not discuss "Frankly" by Naomi Shihab Nye very long, but admired the wry tone, and how indeed we do not know how to be with the dying, let alone make time for them.
What is labor? What do we bare, bear, as in carry, and what bores us in all the senses of the word, what penetrates through us, or cannot engage us.
Kenyon's poem, Happiness develops a fine context to show happiness as something
that appears as unpredictably as a prodigal son, an uncle you never knew about.
And so you feast, "and weep... to know that you were not abandoned" in those "unmerciful hours of despair". Three times she repeats in the final stanza,
"it comes" with the fourth time repeating, it even comes... followed by a list of inanimate objects: boulder, pine barrens, rain and wineglass. Why is it weary of
holding wine -- the waiting for celebration and feast -- as if to underline that
unpredictability of happiness.
The final poem, I wonder, if it were performed like Jayne Cortez' "endangered species" which is spoken with music, might come across better. But the message is clear. Whether it is Gaia, mother earth, or an endangered animal or human,
catastrophe is pushed back to the root cause: the catastrophers.
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