Poems for March 25 - discussion

A good poem for me, acts like Luis Alberto Urrea’s books: he says they are “ ways to toss a love note over the fence.” In this case, snapshots of the everyday, playing tennis with art...

Days of Future Dwell by Samuel Amadon (contemporary poet, lives/works in Houston)
String Quartet by Carl Dennis
Abstract Expressionism -- by Tony Hoagland
Homeland Security – by Patrick Cotter
Of the Divine as Absence and Single Letter by Idra Novey

Each one of the poems addressed in some form the viewer/reader's experience in front of a work of art -- whether it be a poem, music, a painting. Week after week, our discussions allow 18-25 "live" participants to share how a poem touches them, drawing on a variety of work and life experiences including retired teacher, social worker, psychologist, environmentalist, accountant, musician, artist, and many more.

Days of Future Dwell:
What does the title "associate" ? Days of Future is not usually followed by the biblical, prayer-tone of "Dwell" -- and how does this poet use the quatrains to his advantage,
and repeating "ell" sound.

David suggested that we read it twice, in a row, to hear the words spoken by different people.

One person was reminded of refrigerator art...Martin commended the poem for reproducing the way the mind stumbles over things...David appreciated how random detail turned metaphorical...
and the more we discussed, the more layers appeared to what ostensibly is a story of selling a house in which one used to dwell, but which will only linger to what is "tied to its bell". Could be cowbells, so one doesn't lose them; bells as warning -- or doorbells... or the sounds that fill a house, the voices that identify the people who live there.
In the first stanza, "windowed, countered,/ surfaced" act both as adjectives and multiple-meanings of verbs -- perhaps like an offer/counter offer; what's put on the table; seen/passed through the window, and all that is revealed when suddenly the physical shell will change hands.

For Marcie, it addressed unreadinesss that’s going to happen anyway which started a discussion about our individual smallness in face of life. That reminds me of ee cummings
and his Impressions VII from Tulips and Chimneys where he breaks down in-
fin-
i
tes-
i
mal-
ly
into a long column with two small i's.

**
Carl Dennis starts out Quartet with this line: "Art and life, I wouldn't want to confuse them." And then proceeds to compare listening to a quartet with a conversation. We all immediately recognized the flow -- or the person who has to play the "solo" part, the cello playing (Don thinks Pachelbel's canon) the same plodding line over and over. Favorite line:"voices of the quartet/In resisting the plots time hatches to make them unequal,

He returns to the crux of the matter here with a five line stanza question: "Would I be moved if I thought the music/Belonged to a world remote from this one,/If it didn't seem instead to be making the point/That conversation like this is available/At moments sufficiently free and self-forgetful?

We are moved when we make connection -- enriched when art enables us to do so.

**
On the same subject, Tony Hoagland's poem, Abstract Expressionism, gave rise to peals of laughter as we recognized ourselves in various personalities in front of a painting:
the amateur, naively going with associations/suggestions he tries to imagine as existing, the academic, the painterly painter. But really, standing in front of abstract expressionism is like standing in front of our own lives... paying attention to what is evoked in us.

Also from the Cortland Review is Patrick Cotter's poem which also has a dog. Unlike Hoagland's dog who has missed the boat, yet was there before it, Cotter's dog can "morse his message" which brings the speaker to wonder about how we decode messages -- whether in raindrops or barks. "If there are rules to this game/ I don't know what they are"

It is refreshing to laugh -- to have fresh and delightful ways of thinking about communication, art, how we are. The poem which had no artifice at all came at the end.
Idra Novey paints a perfect picture, as Marcie put it, of "hopeful expression of hopelessness." Re-read the title, "Of the Divine as Absence and Single Letter" and more appears as mystery. A suggestion, a hint, a real-ness in what is not.

Indeed, the details are real, oppositions of Holiday Inn and green; a beautiful flower called Joe Pye weed and peeling plaster; In the third stanza, the O sounds appear, a small tick of D on wind (hidden perhaps), owl, silo sliding to sticking, the doubled O in sorrow.
I’m listening to G now
but mean the owl, a wind playing the silo,
a sticking sorrow,

which then leaps to the actual snore of the visitor... and almost a prayer:
"make me kinder "-- and the double negative of "I’m not far from unfathoming it all."
Just as we cannot say the name of God, Yahweh, cannot fathom and cannot unfathom, if such a thing could be-- but there lies the confirmation of the mystery.




 

commentary on March 18: mystical writing

commentary on poems for March 18.

I love the synchronicity of hearing a Cornelius Eady sing, (see the link to his group “Rough Magic” http://www.reverbnation.com/corneliuseady/song/16559714-last-stop-ny-studio-version?1336410755 ) and then look up his poem on the poet walk and find that it resonates with the first poem presented by Rumi. “Love” says Eady... no matter the circumstances,
especially since things you think “weren’t supposed to occur/have happened,(anyway). Eady then finds the ease of breathing, like Rumi asking God to absorb him, his words, leaving only the silence of union...

What is it about mystic writing that moves us? “The quintessential somewhere; The mystical nowhere: The enigmatic anywhere ; My gift to you - the key to everywhere.
Place becomes a play of light and shadow where the mortal will find itself lost while the soul knows the way. Whether it is St. John of the Cross contemplating “The Dark Night of the Soul”, Wang Wei or Hayden Carruth meditating in twilight, or dreamlike state, the reader is invited to put on a new pair of eyes. Poems cast our words, our stories, what we choose, such as smiling, in the Carruth poem, for the simple reason we can (and how does that mean to him? or to you as reader?). If we agree with Weng Wei, then we too “watch the flow of clear water,/ dream of sitting on the uncarved rock (Tao)/
casting a line on the endless stream.(Tao).

Paul Muldoon has a different approach: unlike Rumi, Weng Wei, and Carruth whose measured, deliberate slow pace matches the softness of the scene, he seems to unwind ballads. In “Tell” it could be a rhymed story of a boy combining William Tell and Cowboys and Indians. What is the sound of an apple splitting above your head in such a childhood memory? I love that as readers we could think of 1916 and the troubles, think of father/son, the stakes of William Tell, and all that can be associated with the unknown.

In the “Mirror” his poem translates a story http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25580591?uid=3739832&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102026948817
by Michael Davitt (1846-1906), Irish hero for tenant protection from absentee landlords. but it would well be re-told by the Irish “Bob Dylan”, Michael Davitt who founded in 1970 the Irish-language literary journal Innti. (More than a poetry magazine, the Innti 'movement', akin to that of the Beats in the United States, revitalised poetry in the Irish language with its emphasis on contemporary concerns and sharp vernacular wit. By staging public readings across Ireland and literally bringing poetry back to the streets, a sense of excitement was generated in the Seventies and Eighties poetry scene which resembled that of the San Francisco renaissance during the previous two decades.)

But I digress. Consult http://www.complete-review.com/authors/muldoonp.htm to find out more about Muldoon. There you will read “gamesman, then, is another name for poet in Paul Muldoon's practice."
However it is, the three part story, which starts out at a wake, goes into the reason for the father’s death, and ends with the son putting the mirror in position, brought out much discussion. The “cold Paradox” of someone dead – “he was no longer my father, but I was his son” – what living is – what the next world is – how the mirror swallows one,
allows ghosts, transcendence from one world to the next – in a rather haunting “St. John of the Cross” tone. I think of Seamus Heaney and “The Spirit Level”. Which brings us to the poem, “The Frog” where the speaker is in the same “spirit level”...

The final poem This much I know.
In “Hay” Muldoon starts off with “This much I know”—and then remarks his observation of the hay, the raw itching hands, the light, and the “one” when one bursts,
can be both one of the hay accordions, (although for a fraction of a second, “one” seems to refer to a universal “you”) something takes flight/
from those hot and heavy box-pleats. This much, at least,/
I know.

And what is it that takes flight – and what is it then, we know? And does that alter,
like circumstances over which we have no control, anything? Keep breathing; love.

poems for March 18

Sometimes I forget completely by Rumi, (1207 –1273)transl. by Coleman Barks
Twilight Comes by Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)
Green Water-Stream by Wang Wei (8th Century Chinese Poet) for more poems by him: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Chinese/AllwaterWangWei.htm
4 poems by Paul Muldoon: 1951-- A Brief Biography of the Poet: http://www.paulmuldoon.net/biography.php4)
Tell, The Mirror, The Frog, Hay

Extra:
Poet Cornelius Eady (b. 1954 and raised in Rochester) is not only a fine poet, but part of a group, Rough Magic and writes the lyrics/music: http://www.reverbnation.com/corneliuseady/song/16559714-last-stop-ny-studio-version?1336410755 You can stream the poems and all downloads are free.
13th down is "Sam Patch w/ Emma Alabaster & Concetta Abbate.."

The Muldoon poems were shared from the Seattle library group -- he also has a group: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/paul-muldoon
First up is a link to the Wayside Shrines, Paul Muldoon's band, where you can listen to "It's Never Too Late for Rock 'N' Roll" and other songs with lyrics by Paul Muldoon. http://waysideshrines.org/

Poems for March 11

Poems for March 11

Last week, we witnessed how knowing something about the poem/poet, changes the poem. This week, I thought I’d share a few more poems like that. Do not feel obligated to read the references until you’ve had a chance to enjoy the poem –!


Fuel -- R.S. Thomas (29 March 1913 – 25 September 2000)
On the Farm by R.S. Thomas
http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com/2010/05/r-s-thomas-and-welsh.html
Zhuang Zhou, influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE
# 260 -- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Ode to My Suit – Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973)
Forgetfulness—Straight Up (hommage to any CRS (Can’t Remember Stuff)

Although we're not sure how to pronounce the names in Welsh in the first poem, we know
two brothers are "no good". No pronouncement about the third: only an open "What shall I say" followed by a whistling in the hedges. The feel is "as though" winter would never leave, and the trees deformed. Just like a painter choosing his colors, this creates a creepy foreshadowing, leading to the final stanza about the girl. Again, we do not know what is meant by "Beauty under some spell of the beast." The images are sharp, piercing, vivid just like the final sentence in a book the girl's face reveals like a lantern: you can hear a shriek "God is love" which feels anything but what you want to associate with the word.

The second poem, only two stanzas compare w/ The Gift which ends encouraging us to "drink from the pool given you." Here, it is machines who laugh up their sleeves. A lively discussion ensued about how we
are out of touch with ourselves because of machines. John summed it up saying, "the car is an elaborate wheelchair for a psychic invalid". We discussed "alloy" as strengthening of material... or desire... Don (I believe) mentioned de Toqueville’s letters about America. Ex. regarding all the indians drunk, after getting payment from the US government for what they traded. "Indians bring in furs and trade for the things which will be their undoing." Are we not doing the same with selling our souls to machines -- whether upgrades of internet, or abuse of Gutenberg's moveable type and printing press.
Every tool is potentially dangerous and it behooves us to examine and identify where the sharp edges are.

For the Man of Tao, we compared two translations -- the version on internet was shorter and had wording which did not reflect the same understanding of "Tao" as the version printed from Housden's anthology "Risking Everything". "The man in whom Tao/Acts without impediment" illustrates the paradox of involvement when absorbed in a task and resultant disappearance of self. This is very different than "The man of Tao acts without impediment". It is not about the man, rather about the Tao. We agreed that Merton's deletion of “he” line 2; his break after being, actions, and use of quotations around “kind” and “gentle” were to stress that the point is not to name and judge something as "kind" but to show it – as you ARE doing it... John brought up the point that this may have been an oral story, and that we are dealing with a culture that prints in ideograms... and further made us laugh when pushing the parallel that going to church does not make you a Christian by extension could mean going into a garage makes you a car.

Emily Dickinson's delightful "I'm Nobody, who are you" was refreshing. The "admiring Bog" now a days, Don offered, is perhaps a blog. We spoke about JD Salinger refusing interviews and how in our culture it is hard to stand up for the view that it is not a negative thing to want privacy. Marcie brought up her AP English teacher from 1966 who gave an example of someone very comfortable with herself and sharing the poem which was successful as the class respected her and could thus trust her to guide a discussion about the
problem of being somebody. There is such a delightful Asian feel to this poem– suggestive...humorous.
I diverted the discussion away from Emily's personal life (perhaps inspired by the energy of the poem which feels like spring peepers ready to multiply) and somehow David brought up Hyla Brook,
ghost of sleighbells in the ghost of snow... and John quoted
The Hours of Sleep:
Nature takes 5
Custom 7
Laziness 9
Wickedness 11


What fun, to imagine being nobodies together –

For the next poem, "Ode to my Suit", I used several different translations and tried to read a composite.. fabulous poem and wonderful way of thinking beyond how we "dress our part". Our skin as suit – what else we are... humanity as material goods.

Richard Feynman: walk w/ father. When you know the word for Nightingale is Rossignol in French, xyz in German, Russian, Turk, etc. when you know all that, you know nothing about Nightingale...

read outloud: Owl by Ellen Bryant Voigt -- which is organized into Stanzas, yet hard to imagine from the suspended lines with no punctuations.

forgetfulness... oversights. mental bad habits... brought up a reference to
Robert Darnton: 18th c. France.
The Great Cat Massacre... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Cat_Massacre

Terrific discussion, which was just that. No agenda, nothing to prove as the poems helped us shed a little light here and there on what it is to be human.

March 4 discussion

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.

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.

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.