Poems for May 29-30

For Memorial Day, Paul read us, "And the Band Played Walzing Matilda"
https://genius.com/Eric-bogle-and-the-band-played-waltzing-matilda-lyrics

 looked for Liam’ Clancy's version of singing and found this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFCekeoSTwg

you see the lyrics here.

https://www.irishsongs.com/lyrics.php?Action=view&Song_id=27 

That set the tone for the rest of the poems.  I thank each of you present for sharing so deeply. 

Of note from the discussion,  you might wish to consult:

 https://vimeo.com/126195546 :  Nathalie recites her poem with a background film of Ship’s Island

https://patschneider.com/pat/peters-poem-lost-in-plain-sight-on-poetry-in-america-today/  you can also consult   

https://patschneider.com/pat/category/pats-blog/

You can hear Peter recite his poem “Lost in Plain Sight” and see a picture of him, meet his wife, find out more about him.

Scroll down to Peter and Pat the poem starts at 1:50. 

You will want to hear “For This”.  6: 43

We discussed how knowing more about the poet, can enhance the poem… how some poems stand on their own.

Associations came up for instance  

The Night I Wore the Purple Dress by January Gill O’Neil brought up  popsicle toes : sung by Diana Krall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHdCmNtFZ3w

You can hear Philip Larkin reciting his poem: https://interestingliterature.com/2016/11/22/a-short-analysis-of-philip-larkins-days/

Line up:
Theories of Time and Space by Natasha Trethewey

 Lost in Plain Sightby Peter Schneider

A House Called Tomorrow  — Alberto Rios

The Doll Museum by Caitlin Doyle

The Falling Body  by Abby Murray  

The Night I Wore the Purple Dress by January Gill O’Neil

Tender Buttons [A Long Dress] Gertrude Stein
To the Rain by Ursula K. LeGuin

Days  by Philip Larkin

1. Theories: Delightful title... and invitation to reconsider how we "ground" the ideas "time" and "space".  background:  Native Guard:  Ship Island: confederate soldiers guarded by first  "Native Guard" of all black soldiers.

Hurricane Camille. Distortion of time… slavery… https://vimeo.com/126195546

I love that the boats become stitches... the reassurance that you must carry only the necessary... that the "tome" of memory has random blank pages... that this too, makes as much "sense" as anything else.

A day’s time repeats a lifetime.   (James Joyce, Ulysses) A picture of Dorian Gray. images of soldiers … daguerrotypes…  Maura: “the morning tells the day…for each newborn.

 Layers of history … its undeniable effect what is passed on in our genes through trauma…  buried terrain of the past… 

our whole environment changing… we think a photograph can capture something... but that too has blind spots.

2. Lost: It's funny until it isn’t. We can all associate with typical aging. The title and last line describe alzheimers.  Not sure who brought up WW 1 poets: Graves; Sassoon. Stairs and question of "What do I do now?"

The poem addresses a larger humanity and emptiness, not just a personal confessional or description of  fog rolling in. Another fine poem about loss, like Bishop:  One Art and the chapbook by

 Sarah Freligh, Sad Math.

3.  House:  We may have discussed this poem before, but it felt like a fitting antidote... The optimism of building a house of tomorrow offsets a sense of loss.  My favorite  comforting line: 

You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.

I will add what I told my grown-up kids:

OK, you could say… what proof, what definition, what anything is there of "good"… or, you could say, hmmmm… however I don’t understand exactly what is being said… I like the pairing of “good” as in bounty, as in nourishing for body, mind, spirit, and by extension… family, community, world… 

I greet the good in you — and by gum… I wager you will be greeted back by the good in others.

I have yet to see this fail in my 66+ years!

 it is equally true, as Mary Oliver says in “Wild Geese”, “you do not have to be good…

I think she’s pointing out, that goodness is part of the scheme of things.  http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_wildgeese.html

4. Doll Museum:  brilliant elegy... using Egyptian stone dolls, and those of a sister... curious end-rhyme that subtly reinforces the unfolding meaning.  tomb/room... guard/yard... life/knife... stone and mid-line, alone.

5.  Falling Body: brilliant portrayal of  ptsd at work... a little girl falls, and the father in his mind is the medic trying to help a buddy.  the red lotus carpet is a perfect detail for the scene. 

6. Purple dress.  Oh my!  Oh my!  the lines are so smooth... the zipper of the dress, the river... the blend of colors... and how that dress owned the narrator -- audience too captivated by " a condition of longing

that creates more longing."  

7.  paired with  Gertrude Stein, with an equally electric effect of layering... sensuality and philosophy!  what is current... as both machine but also fashion?  

"Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it."  So much in the long line... a line distinguishes it.  Just.

"Scaparoni" crowed Judith!  Indeed.

8, to the Rain:  LeGuin:

alliteration in every line but the varied vowels ensure it doesn’t thump.

Takes you into large universal.

alliteration: mental process.  we’re attracted to process.

comparative…

9.  Days: Oh my.  It's enough to praise the possibilities in days:

What are days for?

Days are where we live.   

They come, they wake us   

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:   

Where can we live but days?    

The second stanza brings doctor and priest who examine how do you lived them-- but of what use it that?

Poems for May 22-23

I Don’t Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We’ve Done to the Earthby Fatimah Asghar
The Conditional by Ada Limon

 The Creative Drive by Catherine Barnett

The Ghosts of Georgia O’Keeffe and Sigmund Freud Meet in New Mexico

by krstaten

White—Fatimah Asghar

Who is Less Than a Vapor?  by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Why the HG is Holy BY MARK HALLIDAY

 Dear P. [If you are] Victoria Chang

I don't know... a poem of semi-colons, set in unrhymed tercets to ponder what threatens our existence...  a Race War, and what we have done to each other, and our  equally undeclared, unacknowledged actions against the earth.  

The poem's question is acknowledged yet any answer avoided in the first line of the last stanza about trapping a butterfly... followed by an embrace of mindful fulness.  The last afterthought, a completed sentence of affirmation where the "it" can refer not only to the butterfly continuing...but also its world, replete with slavery...  but is the final sentence only confirmation of  wishful thinking?  What do we take for granted?  Why do we want to capture something?

so you trapped it in a jar & gave it to a girl   

you liked. I asked if it died. you say you like
to think it lived a long life. yes, it lived a long life. 

Comments: Truth has many forms.  is 2 wks long for a butterfly?  What is a long life?

Long life:  = memory.  Humans are like butterflies… in terms of Earth’s time.

 How do you tell the truth? It takes  3 generations to complete a migration between Canada to Peru.  

Happiness if like a butterfly, the more you chase it the more it eludes you.

The final sentence sounds as if the narrator is trying to convince herself to be optimistic.

We enjoyed the note: “I think about the ways that our world feels unsustainable—some of the most pressing ways being the race war that always feels like it’s boiling right under the surface, and climate change/disaster. This poem is about a day that I got lost in a conversation with a friend, and it felt like things slowed down around me, and I was able to put those fears aside and just appreciate what was around me. And how hopeful that is, getting lost in the words and presence of someone you love, having them put a pause on the impending doom that seems right around the corner at all times.”

The Conditional: a series introduced by anaphor "Say"... part conjecture, part imperative...

One day, won't our sun be gone?  And what will we say?  Can you see yourself saying the last three lines with conviction?  Or is considering that possibility enough?

Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be

enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive,

right here, feeling lucky. 

The title, The Creative Drive by Catherine Barnett could be  the fun of substituting poems for trees  as the prime augmenter of the value of a home but also a physical drive in a car around a suburb where trees have been cut down where efficiency is more important than beauty…

“We’ve created a system that is not healthy  

for poems,” said someone. Over the next thirty years,
there won’t be any poems where there are overhead wires.
Some poems may stay as a nuisance,

as a gorgeous marker of time.    

Group comments:  Clever. likeable.  The article the poet refers to is about neighborhoods where trees cut down…   cultural environment nurturing for poets also on the wan.   Do people still know Joyce Kilmer's poem, "Trees" (1913)? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12744/trees
 ... The systematic killing of trees reminiscent of ww2.  

Monty Python-esque…

The Ghosts: by k r staten: "loose cannon blogger"
We discussed at length who is talking -- O Keefe or Freud?  or a dialogue between both?  How that changes the understanding.  Perhaps it is the narrator/[poet saying the repeated (and final)
line:

I didn’t come here to talk about painting.

So, who is coming where to talk about what?  

Painting is a surface. Freud probing … 

Two realms don’t interface. Is Georgia’s ghost speaking to Freud’s insistence… is she bodying out what was inside?

Statement by O’Keefe about the importance of details.  It helps to know the lives of these ghosts!

White—Fatimah Asghar
The last word on each line is "white"... but like a ghazal, the meanings are strung like pearls to make
a complex necklace... race, snowstorm, erasure

Who is Less Than a Vapor?  by Rowan Ricardo Phillips PhD… 

 —after Donne’s Meditation XII[1][1]http://www.online-literature.com/donne/404/

Complex... The introduction of the Jester at the end allows a way to counteract ruthless power.  point out absurdities.   One person thought it was about DT, another was reminded of Rush Limbaugh as daffy duck, another of  Vaping… 

Why the HG is Holy BY MARK HALLIDAY 

Using a term Halliday coined, critic David Graham describes Halliday’s work as “ultra-talk.” The New Yorker has also praised Halliday’s poetry, noting, “He is prolix and quotidian, a Whitman in a supermarket, a confessional poet who does not take himself very seriously.”

Fun... immediate responses:

Mark Twain on heaven… This Life

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/248368/this-life-by-martin-hagglund/9781101870402/

Wendell Berry:  How to be a poet

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41087/how-to-be-a-poet

Title:  Why:  what is the purpose of having a Holy Ghost?  To save us

From our absurdity… 

Why is about telos or purpose.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/history-of-zero/?redirect=1

Bye bye Miss American Pie.

HG: more familiar
**
Chang poem: 
“This poem is a part of a series of epistolary poems that are in my forthcoming book, Barbie Chang. I wrote these to my children, knowing that despite the wisdom that comes with my own aging, they will still have to make all the same mistakes (more or less) that I have made, which is a scary thought.”
—Victoria Chang

IMHO SECTION. we don’t write letters anymore.

May 16 -- Poetry Oasis only

A Word on Statistics -- Wislawa Szymborska. (for O Pen, June 3)
Also Known As  by Jim Moore
Ruins by Eliza Griswold
Low Road by Marge Piercy

 Like You by Roque Dalton 

Szymborska:  What happens when you take numbers and apply them to abstract nouns? With her habitual wry humor, Szymborska addresses the human condition.

She starts with those who know better, and all the rest, who are unsure of every step.  Are there only

two categories? Humans should know better than to use an adverb like “always”, especially in the context of “good” barren of any defining context.  And will I be the first to admit that I struggle not to feel a titch of envy when I admire someone?  At least, there are 82 others per hundred like me, although I join a slightly smaller crowd of those “led to error”.  Do you live in constant fear? Where does your mind go with such a question—?  Do you imagine totalitarian state, make columns of which fears are real, which imaginary. And how about how you behave in a crowd?  Do you become savage?  Define cruelty, wisdom, justice… and each word in the phrase “getting nothing out of life except things”.  The discussion touched on several possibilities, such as,

things which are of value, things as part of contemptible capitalism, or things as what is considered “devoid of emotion.  The conceit of the poem comes from this juxtaposition of concrete measurement to subjective items.

What does it suggest about “ranking” and judgement?  Jim suggested this poem be shared with all departments

of sociology and psychology. And who might be the one out of 99 who is not worthy of empathy?

In the end, does any of this matter, since we all face inevitable death?

Jim Moore: We enjoyed the conversational tone, the clear thinking, the turn from the idea of someone dying in the first line, to the larger vision of “sky” which blankets the earth and the surprise of the ending.  In French, the word for sky is also the word for heaven or heavens, and indeed, if we compared Earth, as one small planet in the universe, to our brief existence on Earth, our personal story indeed does not need a loudspeaker. So, take time to wait, contemplate on that green bench… get over yourself!

Griswold: Take a cliché, say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and change it up.  The title comes from the closing line:  Rome is also built on ruins.  The Poet is a journalist  and one has the sense she has experienced horros up close.  The opening stanza alternates the repulsive with what could be appealing… Spring in Trastevere, a town outside Rome, Ragazzi, turquoise sneakers, paperwhites… but the day is oozing…the nuns sneakers clash with the ability to mount stairs, and the alliterative p treatment of pus in pimples pushing up like paperwhites describes the adolescents. Spring — and what springs up… Like the image of  a dead man left in the road in the Congo.  Like this. No, like that… How spring and the idea of eggs hatching and bulbs sneak into description of a heart.  The last stanza with the flock of tourists, like scavengers, but in matching hats. And the realization that being Rome’s ruins, are filled with life… the surprising healing of feeling alive, although she is too good a poet to say it that way.  It’s curious that we discussed Merwin and his poem where gratitude walks hand in hand 

with misery.

see below.

Piercy: This poem of resistance, well-known from the 60’s and 70s.  How would you finish these sentences:

“What can they do…

“It starts when you do…

But the line break finishes the sentences this way:  “What can they do/to you? with a graphic description of horrible things one could do to another.  

The second phrase: “It starts when you do… needs the context of an entire stanza:

It goes on one at a time,

it starts when you care

to act, it starts when you do

it again after they said no,

it starts when you say We

and know who you mean, and each

day you mean one more.

We decided that we would all make signs that say, “violence ends when you say WE”…

The final poem by Roque Dalton confirms the power of unanimous blood.  

Another wonderful session.

poems for May 15 -- O Pen only

For O Pen:  5/15
Ode on Melancholy by John Keats
After the Death of Orpheus by Ursula le Guin
John Henry Crosses the Threshhold by Shamiya Bashir
Medusa by Louise Bogan
Maenads  by Ursula le Guin
Ode to the Little "r"by Aracelis Girmay

Judith provided the 4 poems after the Keats.   Her comments:  Herewith attached my choices, all by modern women poets—to sort of sharpen the contrasts, as it were.  I have attached them in order I prefer, with the unusual John Henry poem deliberately hammering his way between the older more traditional subjects.  

                There are of course innumerable possible other choices—... 

  She had also included in her suggestions Penelope (#2) by Barbara Hamby

or Salome by Carol Ann Duffy.

What a wonderful discussion today!  Thank you Judith for culling a variety of modern treatments of Greek Myths!   Recommended reading that came up: Circe by Madeline Miller https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35959740-circe (thank you David) and many references to Robert Graves… Judith particularly recommends  Darien, Leda, Lament for Pasiphae, The Song of Blodeuwed,  the startling, superb Penthesileia… And Dowson’s mournful Villanelle of Acheron…and the final sonnet in the Fatal Interview sequence by Millay.  (Gorgeous, but lacks the edge of the contemporary ones!!  And the veiled mystery of Bogan’s.)

We started the discussion with the Keats, as a follow-up from poems that “Praise the mutilated world”.

When David read the second stanza, he did not pause at the end of the line, but carried through to allow the meaning to flow, emphasized the word, “glut”.  Melancholy is mistress, holds the keys, and will always have the final word.  The Ode, is praise for melancholy because it befriends

beauty, joy, pleasure— all of these fleeting states. We are wedded to change… so don’t try to forget, stamp out with drugs, or pray with a rosary of poisonous berries…we cannot escape mortality… so  find joy in what is not shrouded … feel the juice of life… yes… you will find melancholy in the best of what life offers that brings us joy because it cannot last forever.

For the poems on retelling myths, the joy, as Judith quoted from Kipling, lies in the 960 ways to tell a story— all of them right.  Myths are subjects for exploration, not answers!

After the Death of Orpheusby Ursula le Guin.   How can Orpheus, who made rocks cry from the beauty of his music, find the beginning of music after death?  Conundrum! You can’t call  the afterlife “hell” but rather going to the underground, the basis from where all life starts.  What is unsatisfying abot limbo, is that there is no satisfaction for ones desires.  “I’d rather be a slave in the living than king of underworld… “ the 

descent into silence embraces a yin/yang. “There is nothing to be said.//

Under the weightless boat

the waters of shadow ran silent

towards the beginning of all music.

We puzzled over that… how  music coming out of silence is like a blank canvas…

I did read the Barbara Hamby, and everyone roared! I had feared the sarcasm a little over the top— but in spite of the “noir”, it certainly worked. away.  Look at the language of the final lines:

 “As if they would.  A more ratty shiftless bunch

of creatures would be hard to rustle up. My bad luck,

they wanted to be king. I'd thought of giving them a lunch

of strychnine.  Then you showed up, a geriatric Huck

Finn.  So be my guest, finish them off.  Then I mean

to poison you. O Ithaka is mine.  I am queen.”

Everyone loved the propellers  in Ode to the Little "r"by Aracelis Girmay

                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZUOiZG84c0

We spoke of immigration…. the imagination and beauty that allows survival

John Henry Crosses the Threshholdby Shamiya Bashir: not a conventional sonnet, but, Judith calls it one.

the word Threshold is loaded… threshold of safety, rescuing slaves…of new life, but also  of death…  

Medusa by Louise Bogan: Judith chose this poem because although there are lots of Medusa she found this one interesting and vague. Bogan was first female Poet Laureate…and her biography compelling.  We discussed who the I is in the poem?  It is not Medusa speaking… (We spoke of the general mythology behind the gorgons, and story of Perseus…) We didn’t think it was Perseus… but for sure, you get the transition from movement to the stillness of death.

Maenads  by Ursula le Guin: Ah… those Bacchic debauches!  Here, it feels to be a poem in two parts:  the young, and the older middle-aged women protecting the younger ones— perhaps selves they had been…

I also had not included Salomé,by Carol Ann Duffy:  Judith read it.  Duffy is not Poet Laureate of England for no reason.  

In the mirror, I saw my eyes glitter.

I flung back the sticky red sheets.

and there, like I said—and ain't life a bitch—

was his head on a platter.

poems for May 8-9

FOR O PEN: 
The Speaking Tree by Muriel Rukeyser   
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/76186/until-you-look-again

13: 54 minute memorial by Gerald Stern. w/ his poem, “Rukeyser” 

you can hear Rukeyser read The Speaking Tree at 6:47-8:42 )
If you listen to the link, you will hear Gerald Stern say how he loves Rukeyser for her courage, originality, irony, radicalism.  How she makes herself culpable, not  aggrandizing.  

Her poem is indeed mysterious and beautiful... startling.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski  
taken from this site: from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/142028/poems-of-hope-and-resilience
Romanticism (The Blue Keats) by Roger Reeves
The Ball  by Wisława Szymborska
Our Valley by Philip Levine
The Thing Is by Ellen Bass

Joy Harjo reading her poem, Remember

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH0hp-n9gG8

FOR POETRY OASIS: Instead of the Rukeyser, The Blessing  by James Wright
Instead of the Levine and Ellen Bass, A Map to the Next World— Joy Harjo 

I find it reassuring that in spite of having TWO different line-ups, due to my oversight of not saving an updated "doc", both groups had wonderful discussions.  Both sets of poems reflect the theme
of making sense of life as we hold contradictions.  Actually, in my book, this seems to be one of
the primal powerful reminders of poetry.

Comments: 
The Speaking Tree:  Great Alexander... Tall Alexander... Stiff Alexander.  These small shifts in adjectives to tell of his transformation... The repeat of "turned... turning..." in the first stanza...
"The trunk coils, turns" in second stanza... where noun and verb also seem interchangeable...
Alexander and tree taking turns perhaps... snakes, fishes both noun and verb and part of all of the other animals in the tree.  Third stanza.  "He cannot turn.// But he is tree to turn."

The powerful diction, told like an Anglo-Saxon saga, the sounds, rhythms, especially end of
second stanza gives a convincing ring  of importance where myth becomes epic.
From Alexander who "walked the foam of ripples into this scene" we witness the people and animals of the speaking tree.

Three of them in their shore-dance, flames that stand

Where reeds are creatures and the foam is flame.

The final stanza is ripe with enigma. What kind of choice is there if you cannot turn, but are free to do so?  What happens in this speaking tree that divulges to us, the double-edge of "what we mean".  

(turning our words into sense but also what it is to be alive.)

Try to Praise the Mutilated World :  

One could dwell on the title, which repeats with slight variation four times.  Praise is not

the first verb to choose, facing a mutilated world, and yet, when praising, one is put into a

"higher state", the bigger picture of being grateful to be alive, with the "in spite of circumstances"

taking second place.

Try to praise... then becomes you must praise...  then the dutiful conditional, you should praise

until finally, simplified to the only things you need to do... praise.

The wild strawberries, the room with curtains, the concerts, the gathering of acorns, each can be seen as metaphors for pleasant memories which offset the thread of exile, the uncertain voyage, the sinister  joyfully attached to the executioners' song.  I admire the final sentence, in four lines, with three ands

the feather, the light, the loss and the return.  

It stands out against the strength of the powerful damage implied by mutilated.  By praising, we

are reminded to return to what is good.  

 

The Blessing:

Just like the accumulation of "and", the interconnection of touch in this scene, allows a transformation.  The horse nuzzles the speaker of the poem, the breeze moves him to caress her ear, which reminds him of the delicate skin of a young girl's wrist-- and the surprising realization,

of the possibility of breaking into blossom if stepping out of his body.  And how to explain that mystery?  In the context of the speaking tree, and "praise", it is a celebration of the good that

we can experience.  We did question why we need the setting of Rochester, MN, and the presumptions that the ponies' eyes darken with kindness... come gladly... can hardly contain their happiness... And yet... that is part of the magic.  The midpoint of the poem, "There is no loneliness like theirs" turns from observation to connection.  Indeed a blessing -- a breaking open to a higher

plane. 

Romanticism (The Blue Keats)

We discussed the title... perhaps the "blue" is referring to Melancholy and Keats Ode... how to find the "truest" melancholy... 

Like the Rukeyser, there are overtones of older poems... "baffled heart"... but also the clinks of chains

and slavery.   What is it we desire?  And how does the first mention of bamboo terrace and harp change at the end?    There is a sense of mosaic... of collage... and as one person described Leonardo's drawings... "completely unfettered way of leaping between subject matter.”

Although opaque at beginning there is a hint of wry humor... 

The end of the poem requires careful attention... 

... I want to know before

I am both house and savage wind, before all of the tents
In the city become tattered rags snagged in the hair
Of our children and the red-headed trees. I am careful
To want nothing that I cannot lose and be sad in the losing.
A terrace made of rotting bamboo. A harp lost in its singing.
My last name and the tomatoes falling from the vine. Woman,
I want this plum heart. And the dying that makes us possible.

**

 The Ball

The earth... and then a district fireman's ball...  from large and universal, to one small aspect...

we loved the anaphor, "as long as" which hopped along illogical premises that never finish...

but paint a picture of human nature... 

The Valley:

A perfect sequel to the Szymborska.  He draws a huge feeling from what we might call ordinary.

Now you say this is home,   

so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,   

wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

The thing is

I love this poem... its easy manner where the title spills into the poem, as if dropping a piece of advice... but the topic is how to deal with grief.  A pearl of a poem which shows how. 

A Map to the Next World 

This is a long but satisfying poem, blending Indian ways of old with the modern world... the sense

of "next world" as a "next way of being" understanding the complexity of loss of old traditions,

estrangement from nature... and so much more.

Poems for May 1-2

The Body Remembers  by Yusef Komunyakaa
Why Regret?  by Galway Kinnell
The Speaking Treeby Joy Harjo
You Called Me Corazón by Sandra Cisneros
Dust by Dorianne Laux

3 animations of Whitman’s poem below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jCw8ydqkrg

A noiseless patient spider, 

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, 

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, 

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, 

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. 

And you O my soul where you stand, 

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, 

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, 

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, 

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

DISCUSSION

**

We listened to Yusef recites his poem, which changes the way one hears it... more halting, almost like syncopated jazz, so the line breaks are not pronounced.  The title repeats in the 3rd couplet, and the 5th couplet before the end, How to understand these sentences:

"The body remembers every wish one lives for or doesn't, or even horror."

The body remembers the berry bushes heavy with sweetness shivering in a lonely woods, but I doubt it knows words live longer than clay & spit of flesh, as rock-bottom love.

I love how poetry parses a sentence, allows the ripening of syntax to provide multiple layers, unlike conversational speech or prose.

There are three questions:  

Do you remember how quickly we scrambled up an oak, ,,, how easy to trust the water to break our glorious leaps?

Does Johnny run fingers over the thick welt on his belly, days we were still invincible?  (two different memories, but triggered by the touch of the body).  And after the second "body remembers", the question, "Is it easier to remember pleasure /or does hurt ease truest hunger?  

We discussed "ease" as choice of verb, the paradox of hurt easing... and what it is we truly are hungry for... 

and what is this rock-bottom love?  How easy then, to trust... that pivotal moment and the recounting of it, "rocking back & forth, uprooting what's to come,"
and ending on the "weight" of the  shadow of the tree hinted at in the opening couplet, where one envisions the speaker of the poem weighing his self, without tilting the scales.  

It takes a group to appreciate such a complex poem, and parse out the rich sounds, double-entendres, as past, present, memory,  remembering in the body, a half-forgotten  ballad.

**

Galway Kinnel asks a great question:  Why Regret?  The strategy of questions, (Didn't you like... wasn't it a revelation... didn't you almost... What did you imagine... didn't it seem,  didn't you find it calming... didn't you glimpse, weren't you reassured.) allow a shaggy-dog poem of vignettes that paint innocence, iconic pictures, experiences, observations about nasty discharges, ephermoptera, Casanova, pinworms, Monarchs...   And just as the reader might say, 
"enough already", the simple last question,

 Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert/to wake in the night and find ourselves/holding hands in our sleep.

The "it" is so big... so teeming with life... and indeed, back to the title.  Why regret.  

The one non-question comes haiku-style mid-poem:  "Think of the wren/and how little flesh is needed/to make a song.

Delightful poem!

**

Joy Harjo as a native American quotes Sandra Cisneros, Mexican poet.  I looked up "Harjo" and found it means, "crazy, or so brave as to seem crazy".

The unspeakable could be horrifying... or so enormous, words cannot explain it... 

the use of em-dashes, echo the broken, followed by another line, then again broken.  Indeed, "what shall I do with all this heartache?"

The speaking tree is our witness... and our model providing the advice in italics at the end of the poem... drinking deep what is undrinkable. 

Discussion about myths of trees, references to Ents, and Shel Silverstein's "poet tree" came up.  

**

You called me Corazon.  The use of "heart" in Spanish in the title, 2nd and final stanza build up to the untranslatable feeling of a homeland, the bond between mother and child.  

**I read aloud the English of this:  Cisneros poem :http://365traducciones.blogspot.com/2005/06/once-again-i-prove-theory-of_09.html
**
 Dorianne Laux, "Dust".  Such a loaded word!!!!
How do you remember the "flavor" of something?  again... the sense of something that cannot be pinned down in words.  We discussed the contrast of "bright light/black wings" -- the sense of the ineffable, the shadow... and  truth… dusting of small particles…
**
I read aloud Whitman's noiseless patient spider... seems to gather all the filaments of the poems discussed in a satisfying manner.  As ever, I thank everyone for their sharing and participation. 

poems for O Pen: April 24

David Sanders kindly has offered to lead the discussion, using poems about Spring by Robert Frost.

A Boundless Moment  by Robert Frost
Mending Wall by Robert Frost
The Pasture by Robert Frost
Spring Pools  by Robert Frost
In Hardwood Groves  by Robert Frost
Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost