Poems for September 21 (Poet Laureates)

 Robert Frost ( NPC 1958) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Frost

Richard Eberhart (NPC 1959-61) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Eberhart

Louis Untermeyer (NPC 1961-63) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Untermeyer

Howard Nemerov (NPC 1963-4; NPL 1988-90) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Howard-Nemerov

Reed Whittemore (NPC twice: In 1964–65;1984–85) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Reed-Whittemore

Robert Penn Warren (NPL 1986)  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Penn-Warren

 

https://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2017/11/on-this-day-robert-frosts-first-professionally-published-poem-my-butterfly-appears-in-the-independent/

At Woodward's Gardens by Robert Frost

 

A boy, presuming on his intellect,

Once showed two little monkeys in a cage

A burning-glass they could not understand,

And never could be made to understand.

Words are no good: to say it was a lens

For gathering solar rays would not have helped.

But let him show them how the weapon worked,

He made the sun a pin-point on the nose

Of first one, then the other, till it brought

A look of puzzled dimness to their eyes

That blinking could not seem to blink away.

 

(April 1936) 

 

https://interestingliterature.com/2017/06/10-of-the-best-robert-frost-poems-everyone-should-read/

 

Anglo-Saxon Song  by Richard Eberhart

 

I must think of man as a suffering being.

Happiness, the bright boon of warriors, disappears.

I must think; I have felt over-much; love

Drives into the heart the poisonous shaft.

 

I must hoard all sufferings of men.

O pride of accomplishment, the hero's banner ;

Dare to feel, to sense again illusion.

Ornaments of conquest; peace, hard hearth-stone.

 

I must not peer into the crooked reach

Where mind crumbles, spills out hot gore, heart!

The dark threat of being born; "the pain

Of living"; inconsequence of mighty death.

 

Poem

 

If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness

When everything is as it was in my childhood

Violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility

That the sun and the moon broke over my head.

 

Then I cast time out of the trees and fields,

Then I stood immaculate in the Ego;

Then I eyed the world with all delight,

Reality was the perfection of my sight.

 

(Jan. 1938)

 

Beauty  by Louis Untermeyer

 

Beauty shall not lead me-

No, on no more passionate and never-ending quests.

I am tired of stumbling after her

Through wild, familiar forests and strange morasses-

Tired of breaking my heart and losing my sleep, following

a fitful gleam.

 

Beauty, you shall fly before me no longer-

Smiling, looking back over your shoulder with beckoning

blushes-

Wanton, trickster, trifler with weak men;

Demanding all and giving nothing in return

But furious dreams and shattering visions.

 

Beauty, I shall have you-

Not in imagination only, but in the flesh.

You will pursue me with untiring breath, you will press

by my side wherever I go.

Even in the muddy squalor and the thick welter of ugliness,

You shall run to me and put your arms about my hips, and

cling to me;

And, try as I will, you will never be shaken off.

 

Beauty, I know you now-

And knowing (and loving) you, I will thirst for you no

longer. . . 

(June 1916)

 

Beginner's Guide  by Howard Nemerov

 

They stand in the corner, on a shadowy shelf,

Field Books of This, Beginner's Guides to That,

Remainders of an abdicated self

That wanted knowledge of no matter what.

 

Of flowers, was it? Every spring he'd tear

From their hiding-places, press and memorize

A dozen pale beginners of the year

That open almost among the melting snows,

 

And for a month thereafter rule his realm

Of small and few and homey in such minds

As his, until full summer came to whelm

Him under the flood and number of her kinds.

 

Or birds? At least the flowers would stand still

For amateurs, but these flighty alightings

Would not; and as he still refused to kill

In confirmation of his rarer sightings

 

The ornithologists were not his dish,

And. he made do with sedentary birds

Who watched his watching as it were their wish

To check with Peterson, pictures and words.

 

And even so, before he got them straight

As like as not they'd not be there at all.

On the wings and wits God gave 'em they'd migrate;

"Confusing Fall Warblers" were, each Fall, his fall.

 

The world would not, nor he could not, stand still.

The longest life might be too short a one

 

more poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/howard-nemerov

 

A Tale of a Poem and a Squash  by Reed Whittemore

 

Let me take this acorn squash, grown in my garden,

And place beside it a poem grown in a hothouse.

You will note the difference at once; the former is jolly

And fat, self-contained, the latter anaemic,

Colorless, tasteless, the clearest evidence

That a poem does not make a squash. But now take the squash,

And shoving its roundness into a lyric book,

Look!

How those covers squinch, being quashed, to elucidate

Something or other

                        where was I?

                                                Of late

I have been reading too much on this subject.

Art is not life, I am told, and thus in my garden

(Which as a matter of fact has no squashes,

Just toads), I fund myself gathering

Wool mostly, a few old tomatoes of rhymes,

And a mythical rosebud or two in the hope that these items

Will store well against winter, my chosen season,

When nothing from nature is blooming except my

Dog, a few plants on a windowsill, and of course people,

Most of whom,

Like myself,

Are not of the soil, the good earth, and in winter look

More like a poem than a

                                    but, as I say,

This subject unnerves me.

Where,

Where does one go—into war? poverty?—

 

more poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/reed-whittemore

 

Aspen Leaf in Windless World  by Robert Penn Warren

 

Watch how the aspen leaf, pale and windless, waggles,

While one white cloud loiters motionless over Wyoming,

And think how delicately the heart may flutter

In the windless joy of unworded revelation.

Look how the sea-foam, white, makes its Arabic scrawl

On the unruffled sand of the beach's faint-tilted plane.

Is there a message there for you to decipher?

Or only the joy of its sunlit intricacy?

Is there a sign Truth gives that we recognize?

Can we fix our eyes on the flight of birds for answer?

Can the bloody-armed augurs declare expediency?

What does dew on stretched woolfleece, the grass dry,

mean?

Have you stood on the night-lawn, in blackness of oaks,

and heard

From bough-crotch to bough-crotch, the moon-eyed

tree toad utter,

Again and again, that quavery croak, and asked

If it means there'll be rain? Toward dawn? Or early

tomorrow?

We were not by when Aaron laid down his rod

That suddenly twisted, went scaley, and heaved the

fanged head,

And when Egypt's high magi probed their own lore for

the trick.

Well, the sacred serpent devoured that brood. What,

then,

Would you've made of that? Yes, we wander our world

Of miracles, whispers, high-jinks, and metaphor.

Yes, why is the wind in the cedar the sub-sob of grief?

And the puppy--why is his tongue on your palm so

sweet?

(November 1979)  More poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-penn-warren; https://www.best-poems.net/robert_penn_warren/index.html

 

BELOW: A CONTEMPORARY  POEM NOT BY  A POET LAUREATE! https://www.thesunlightpress.com/2022/04/07/september-clouds/

 

September Clouds by Maggie Kennedy

 

Some clouds could

never understand:

floating puffs of moisture,

decorations with no entanglements,

or striated streaks stretched

too thin to take on

another trouble.

 

Others speak,

sum up a season:

rifts ablaze, valleys solemn,

having absorbed in their

slow migration

 

salty sweat

stagnant breath

morning dew

morning jitters

cry a river

laugh till it hurts

spit in the ocean

spit in the eye

spilled milk

spilled words

 

Standing beneath

is to be enfolded

known, accepted,

part of the unnerving blue.

 

 

 

Poems for September 14 (Poet Laureates)

Robert Lowell (NPC 1947-48) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Lowell-Jr

Leonie Adams (NPC 1948-49) I wasn't particularly attracted by any of Leonie Adams' poems, or her story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léonie_Adamsif you find any you'd like to discuss, please let me know! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/laeonie-adams

Elizabeth Bishop (NPC) 1949-50 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elizabeth-Bishop

Conrad Aiken (NPC) 1950-52

Randall Jarrell (1953-8) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Randall-Jarrell

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Penn-Warren

 

 

Skunk Hour by Robert Lowell

(For Elizabeth Bishop)[1]

Nautilus Island’s hermit

heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;

her sheep still graze above the sea.

Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer

is first selectman in our village;

she’s in her dotage.

 

Thirsting for

the hierarchic privacy

of Queen Victoria’s century,

she buys up all

the eyesores facing her shore,

and lets them fall.

 

The season’s ill—

we’ve lost our summer millionaire,

who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean

catalogue. His nine-knot yawl

was auctioned off to lobstermen.

A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

 

And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall;

his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,

orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;

there is no money in his work,

he’d rather marry.

 

One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;

I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .

My mind’s not right.

 

A car radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat. . . .

I myself am hell;

nobody’s here—

 

only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up Main Street:

white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire

under the chalk-dry and spar spire

of the Trinitarian Church.

 

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air—

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.

 

more poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-lowell - tab-poems

 

The Armadillo  by Elizabeth Bishop

for Robert Lowell

 

This is the time of year

when almost every night

the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.

Climbing the mountain height,

 

rising toward a saint

still honored in these parts,

the paper chambers flush and fill with light

that comes and goes, like hearts.

 

Once up against the sky it's hard

to tell them from the stars—

planets, that is—the tinted ones:

Venus going down, or Mars,

 

or the pale green one. With a wind,

they flare and falter, wobble and toss;

but if it's still they steer between

the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly

and steadily forsaking us,

or, in the downdraft from a peak,

suddenly turning dangerous.

 

Last night another big one fell.

It splattered like an egg of fire

against the cliff behind the house.

The flame ran down. We saw the pair

 

of owls who nest there flying up

and up, their whirling black-and-white

stained bright pink underneath, until

they shrieked up out of sight.

 

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.

Hastily, all alone,

a glistening armadillo left the scene,

rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

 

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,

short-eared, to our surprise.

So soft!—a handful of intangible ash

with fixed, ignited eyes.

 

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!

O falling fire and piercing cry 

and panic, and a weak mailed fist

clenched ignorant against the sky!

 

 

Haunted Chambers by Conrad Aiken. (From “Many Evenings”)

 

THE LAMP-LIT page is turned, the dream forgotten;          

The music changes tone, you wake, remember          

Deep worlds you lived before, deep worlds hereafter            

Of leaf on falling leaf, music on music,         

Rain and sorrow and wind and dust and laughter.             5

 

Helen was late, and Miriam came too soon;  

Joseph was dead, his wife and children starving;       

Elaine was married and soon to have a child.

You dreamed last night of fiddler crabs with fiddles.

They played a buzzing melody, and you smiled.               10

 

Tomorrow—what? And what of yesterday?  

Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass,     

Through many doors to the one door of all.   

Soon as it’s opened we shall hear a music:    

Or see a skeleton fall.         15

 

We walk with you. Where is it that you lead us?       

We climbed the muffled stairs beneath high lanterns.           

We descend again. We grope through darkened cells.           

You say: “This darkness, here, will slowly kill me—            

It creeps and weighs upon me …. is full of bells.              20

 

“This is the thing remembered I would forget:          

No matter where I go, how soft I tread,          

This windy gesture menaces me with death.  

‘Fatigue!’ it says—and points its finger at me;          

Touches my throat and stops my breath.                25

 

"My fans, my jewels, the portrait of my husband,

The torn certificate for my daughter's grave-

These are but mortal seconds in immortal time.

They brush me, fade away-like drops of water.

They signify no crime.

 

"Let us retrace our steps: I have deceived you!

Nothing is here I could not frankly tell you-

No hint of guilt, or faithlessness, or threat.

Dreams--they are madness; staring eyes-illusion.

Let us return, hear music, and forget."

 

Next Day Randall Jarrell - 1914-1965

 

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,

I take a box

And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.

The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical

Food-gathering flocks

Are selves I overlook.  Wisdom, said William James,

 

Is learning what to overlook.  And I am wise

If that is wisdom.

Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves

And the boy takes it to my station wagon,

What I've become

Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

 

When I was young and miserable and pretty

And poor, I'd wish

What all girls wish: to have a husband,

A house and children.  Now that I'm old, my wish

Is womanish:

That the boy putting groceries in my car

 

See me.  It bewilders me he doesn't see me.

For so many years

I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me

And its mouth watered.  How often they have undressed me,

The eyes of strangers!

And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

 

Imaginings within my imagining,

I too have taken

The chance of life.  Now the boy pats my dog

And we start home.  Now I am good.

The last mistaken,

Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

 

Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm

Some soap and water-- 

It was so long ago, back in some Gay

Twenties, Nineties, I don't know . . . Today I miss

My lovely daughter

Away at school, my sons away at school,

 

My husband away at work--I wish for them.

The dog, the maid,

And I go through the sure unvarying days

At home in them.  As I look at my life,

I am afraid

Only that it will change, as I am changing:

 

I am afraid, this morning, of my face.

It looks at me

From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,

The smile I hate.  Its plain, lined look

Of gray discovery

Repeats to me: "You're old."  That's all, I'm old.

 

And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral

I went to yesterday.

My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,

Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body

Were my face and body.

As I think of her I hear her telling me

 

How young I seem; I am exceptional;

I think of all I have.

But really no one is exceptional,

No one has anything, I'm anybody,

I stand beside my grave

Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

Poems for September: 7

 Poems from Poet Laureates

September 7 

Joseph Auslander (1897-1965) Between 1937 and 1941 Auslander served as the first consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that would later become that of poet laureate of the United States.  Note the title didn't change until 1986!!!!  almost 50 years later. 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Auslander

Allen Tate: (1899-1979) NPC 1943 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Allen-Tate

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) (NPC  1944 (NPL 1986) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Penn-Warren

Louise Bogan (1897-1970) NPC 1945-6 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louise-Bogan

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/louise-bogan

Karl Shapiro (1913 –2000) (NPC 1946-47) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Shapiro

Words That Stay Over by Joseph Auslander

Brief Message by Allen Tate

A Way to Love God by Robert Penn Warren

Elders  by Louise Bogan

Americans Are Afraid of Lizards by Karl Shapiro

Why Do You Love the Poem? by Charles Bernstein

THE POEMS:  

Words That Stay Over by Joseph Auslander

 

Having watched the wild gulls gather, disperse,

And knowing no better and no worse

What beauty is and the beating of wings in my eyes

And the wind beating in their cries;

Having seen white breast colour and of beaks

The rapid flash and the whistling streaks —

Something in me not to be quieted

Asserts itself like the sound of birds over water and speaks:

 

And I say: It would be a simple thing to bear

The weight of death, the impact of despair,

The pressure of contempt or even silence or yet

Endure a clamour I cannot forget;

All this would be a simple thing if words

And water and the bitterly radiant birds,

Gold dark twilight and one throat and one

Face mirroring stars, one mouth murmuring and eyes still wet —

 

If all this and all these and the little things

That have such terrible strength could beat like wings

On water once, like wings beating, like swords

On water beating ... and then no more! ... But words,

Words that stay over though the voice is dead

To the words; the terror of something someone said

Long ago somewhere and laughed at long ago —

These rust in the brain and grope like a wound that has never bled.

 

more poems: https://www.best-poems.net/joseph-auslander/poems.html

 

Brief Message by Allen Tate

 

This, Warren, is our trouble now:

Not even fools could disavow

Three centuries of piety

Grown bare as a cottonwood tree

(A timber seldom drawn and sawn

And chiefly used to hang men on),

So face with calm that heritage

And earn contempt before the age.

 

more poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/allen-tate

 

A Way to Love God by Robert Penn Warren

 

Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.

And the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific

First leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know

About submarine geography, and your father's death rattle

Provides all biographical data required for the Who's Who of the dead.

 

I cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least

I can say how night-long I have lain under the stars and

Heard mountains moan in their sleep.By daylight,

They remember nothing, and go about their lawful occasions

Of not going anywhere except in slow disintegration.At night

They remember, however, that there is something they cannot remember.

So moan.Theirs is the perfected pain of conscience that

Of forgetting the crime, and I hope you have not suffered it.I have.

 

I do not recall what had burdened my tongue, but urge you

To think on the slug's white belly, how sick-slick and soft,

On the hairiness of stars, silver, silver, while the silence

Blows like wind by, and on the sea's virgin bosom unveiled

To give suck to the wavering serpent of the moon; and,

In the distance, in plaza, piazza, place, platz, and square,

Boot heels, like history being born, on cobbles bang.

 

Everything seems an echo of something else.

 

And when, by the hair, the headsman held up the head

Of Mary of Scots, the lips kept on moving,

But without sound.The lips,

They were trying to say something very important.

 

But I had forgotten to mention an upland

Of wind-tortured stone white in darkness, and tall, but when

No wind, mist gathers, and once on the Sarré at midnight,

I watched the sheep huddling.Their eyes

Stared into nothingness.In that mist-diffused light their eyes

Were stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water,

Or of a scholar who has lost faith in his calling.

 

Their jaws did not move.Shreds

Of dry grass, gray in the gray mist-light, hung

From the side of a jaw, unmoving.

 

You would think that nothing would ever again happen.

 

That may be a way to love God.

 

more poems: https://www.best-poems.net/robert_penn_warren/true_love.html

 

 

Elders  by Louise Bogan

 

At night the moon shakes the bright dice of the water;

And the elders, their flower light as broken snow upon the

bush,

Repeat the circle of the moon.

Within the month

Black fruit breaks from the white flower.

The black-wheeled berries turn

Weighing the boughs over the road.

There is no harvest.

Heavy to withering, the black wheels bend

Ripe for the mouths of chance lovers,

Or birds.

Twigs show again in the quick cleavage of season and

season.

The elders sag over the powdery road-bank.

As though they bore, and it were too much,

The seed of the year beyond the year.

 

More poems: https://poets.org/poet/louise-bogan

 

Americans Are Afraid of Lizards by Karl Shapiro

 

My American host in Madras in his moist air-conditioned apart-

ment

Spotted a lizard and yelled for a servant to kill it, kill it!

And a beautifully turbaned, silent and grinning Hindu, beauti-

fully barefooted, beautifully servant,

Rushed in with a towel and pretending to smack it to death

Impounded it gently and carried it off to the gorgeous and sweat-

ing garden

To let it go.

In earlier years, on my first trip to the tropics,

I screamed at a lizard on my pillow,

And the fat Tahitian lady stuffed it in her hand

And grinned toothlessly and pointed to the ceiling

Frescoed with twenty or thirty of the pretty beasts

All vividly flicking their tongues at mosquitoes,

Or playing at making designs.

 

more poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/karl-shapiro - tab-poems

 

Why Do You Love the Poem? by Charles Bernstein

https://dcs.megaphone.fm/POETS9781963679.mp3?key=b20e75aa44b8356062842f173b827cca

 

For the sentiment. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the sentiment.

For the message. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the message.

For the music. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the music.

For the spirit. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the spirit.

For the intelligence. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the intelligence. 

For the courage. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the courage.

For the inspiration. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the inspiration. 

For the emotion. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the emotion. 

For the vocabulary. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the vocabulary. 

For the poet. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the poet.

For the meaning. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the meaning.

For what it stands for. — Then you don’t love the poem you love what it stands for.

For the words. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the words.

For the syntax. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the syntax.

For the politics. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the politics.

For the beauty. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the beauty.

For the outrage. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the outrage.

For the tenderness. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the tenderness.

For the hope. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the hope. 

For itself. — Then you love the poem.

 

About this poem: “I’d prefer to leave this commentary blank. The kind of poetry I want doesn’t follow rules: it makes up its own rules. Perhaps my commentary needs a commentary? The poem is itself a series of commentaries. The idea of ‘blank’—letting the work stand for itself—is my commentary on the poem. In other words, if you love the poem for what it is about, you don’t love the poem but what it’s about. Or perhaps you could say the commentary is the poem and the poem the commentary. I get things all, well, Topsy-Turvy.”—Charles Bernstein

 

Note: Next week: Note, that  Wm Carlos Williams --was  appointed in 1952 but did not serve due to ill health but then also a political retraction withdrawing the invitation:    check out: 

https://www.nj.com/inside-jersey/2018/06/how_one_of_njs_most_famous_poets_ended_up_under_fbi_investigation.html

 

In Al Que Quiere! (1917; “To Him Who Wants It!”) his style was distinctly his own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Que_Quiere!

Poems for Aug. 31

At the Church Door by Louis Simpson

Swinging From Parents by Ted Kooser

Self Portrait with Impending War by Lauren K. Alleyne

The Dead by Rupert Brooke

The Bell by Richard Jones

The Guitar by Federico García Lorca - 1898-1936

Sparklers by Ted Kooser

Sparklers  by Barb Crooker

Nutshell:

What makes a good poem?  

Simpson, Kooser use simple, familiar language that allows us to relate to the experience shared.  In the case of the scene at the church door, the poem begins and ends there, allowing the reader the full implication of the setting, the reason for the speaker leaving (and each reader's memory of leaving situations).  The trusting question of the child,  the opening of the door, the reassurance... and then a second leaving, quite different from the first, where he takes care where he steps.  Perhaps we have associations with church, as a place where prayers will be answered; perhaps each of us have had such small requests for help, that remind us to stay available, and how simple it is to do a kind deed.  You never know what lifts our spirits.

Kooser, in the Swinging from parents... already in the title has a 3-fold meaning.  Two parents, and what stems from them, how one relates to them and how a child swings away from them to try out the world.  The play with the shape of letters matching to the words infancy, love, father, forever, is not overdone.  That first r of forever, is what comes before the r in future, and that second, final r.

Alleyne, is a young poet from Trinidad.  Most of the participants in O Pen are of grandparent age, and think about the young parents with young children, facing dire reports that the Earth is doomed and life as we know it will be over in 50 years.   The title is universal at this point:  war is impending on all fronts, whether ecological, sociological, international, metaphorical.  The self-portrait is missing, like the home, at first described as hodgepodge house, then continent with confused seasons, this planet scarred by too much stuff.  The strange syntax, Home be this small silence, could be a small  incantation or mantra, a desperate prayer, perhaps possibility up to you to create.  The questions at the end are unanswerable, and ones we all will experience as we "run to everywhere" and weep the loss of home.  Perhaps there will be a change for the better in the answer of what is going to be gone... in the sense of inequality, inequity, violence, war... or maybe it will take extinction of humans for it to be gone.  How does one prepare a child for the end of the world?

The "good poem" in the case of the turn of the 20th century, might be the approved romanticism of Rupert Brooke in his beautifully cadenced Petrarchan sonnet.  The first part, life, and all the beautiful sights and music, and relationships.  The turn on the 8th line:  All this is ended.  The second part is death, the afterlife.  Paul filled us in on the biography of Brooke, how he was on ship at Skyros in Greece, delivering men for the battle of Gallipoli where they would be slaughtered by the Turks.  He alas (to him) never saw action,  suffered from sepsis and died.  His style, quite different from Wilfred Owen and F. Sassoon, discussed in the book highly recommended by Rose Marie: Regeneration by Pat Barker.

The good poem in the case of Richard Jones, uses sound and repetition equating a bell to a man, the connection to other bells, men, as something both heard, and capable of making sound.

The Lorca has many translations, but the Spanish will not stumble on the effect of the weeping, the use of those "5 swords" that mortally wound the heart... of Spain, the guitar.  It is hard not to think of George Harrison (Beatles) While my guitar gently weeps.  Kathy highly recommends this u tube of Prince who indeed plays it so it weeps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWRCooFKk3c

The two Sparkler poems both demonstrate how to talk about relationships:  in the first, a love story... a brief flash of a romance on a summer night.  In the second, what sounds like a happy July 4th with trivial sounds such as "sizzles of light", spit and fizz, transforms into a eulogy for the poet's mother as she "brands" the night air with her name.

We ended on Santayana, who was born in Madrid, and although he taught at Harvard for 40 years, never became a US citizen.  Paul told us about his background and cited many quotations.  "Only the dead have seen the end of war."  "I am. eternal rumor of war."  

My response to Brooke.  

Dead

            will often be what some wish to be,

no food, no water... no work that makes

them glad, and I have yet to see

sorrow wash marvelously. What makes

tears?  They may wring out grief,

but cares and joys are not brief.

 

Dead, a word we dread, forced to use

about life on our earth, our ability to care

for the living.  We'll always sing the blues

about war, love lost, dreams where we dare

to dream of waters blown to laughter.

But we have pushed selfish wants too far

without care for all.  The door is ajar.

Do you go in? How will you find the hereafter?

 

 

 

Poems for Aug. 24

Surprise Comes Slowly by David Oates

Grief Symphony by Noor Hindi

Messenger by Mary Oliver

Around Us by Marvin Bell 

It’s a Woman’s World by Eavan Boland[1]

Instead of Her Own by Molly Peacock

Nutshell discussion:

Surprise Comes Slowly: The title surprises, as "slowly" is not how we think of surprise... and yet

those signals which indicate something is amiss, such as slow destruction of rain forest, of redwoods, of all that lives on our planet, are often dismissed... and indeed, we are "taken by surprise".  Oates provides in the first stanza possible synonyms:  surprise as remorse, grief, a feeling of "that which has not been

done."   

In 6 quatrains, an unrolling interaction of surprise and redwood... and our place, where we observe, but cannot experience, dropped cones, the rain, mist from the sea integral to a redwood's well-being. Judith was prompted to speak of Ursula Le Guin and her essay on "being a tree".  We all spoke of the environment... and for some the "lesson" of interconnection, roots, of another, another and another, laden with time, could apply to the war in Ukraine, unexpected, and yet, the signs have been there, not just in the 20th century, but the century before.  Connection is "comforting; promising remembrance yet to come"--

but then the opening line repeats.  The disappearance, the absence of connection clear.  It isn't only

the forest forgetting itself in generations faster and hotter-- this is humans at work.  

There is a cryptic tone in the final stanza.  The short drop of one word, comforting (3 syllables) now

inevitable (5 syllables) seem to confirm the worst.   Followed by two 3 syllable words:  surprising.  Nonetheless.

Grief Symphony:  This poem by the Palestinian-American poet Noor Hindi, honors Isra Ghrayeb, murdered in an "honor killing".  The name Isra, brought up associations with women's groups, night journeys, and the poet's name, associations with Arabic culture in the Middle East.  Spare lines interrupted by fenced slashes.  Although the discussion did not approach the metaphor of slicing open a cherry, it feels clear it stands for women, the whole woman, in her heart, her sweetness.  The appeal to the olive tree, ancient,  integral to the Middle East, symbol of peace, survival, who has seen "so much red" contrasts with the horror of the deed.

Messenger:  Who is the messenger-- the poet, the love for the world, the world itself?  No matter, the message is clear.  Shouldn't we all undertake this work of loving the world-- and record it as message to the world, so that is goes on?  We all seek sweetness... 

What is in this work?  Mindfulness... to be aware of the astonishing... the "ingredients" which cause rejoicing, gratitude.  The contrast between the "old boots, torn coat" in stanza two and the "body-clothes", 

at the end, echoes the state of the clam, at first, buried deep in the sand, and at the end "dug-up" revealed, and revealed to, bringing the message to all living (with shouts of joy): As long as we love, we are part of the circle of life.

Around Us:  I was lucky to know Marvin as one of the faculty at Pacific University.  In his book, Nightworks: poems 1962-2000 he is praised for his prophetic, candid, voice, his wit and skilled, imaginative leaps.    

Around Us appeared in 2018-2019  in Narrative Magazine: https://www.narrativemagazine.com/authors/marvin-bell

For those wishing more info about him, this is a lovely tribute: https://airlightmagazine.org/airlight/issue-3/bell-discussion/

A delightful portrayal of his personality and humanity with his poem to his wife, often used for weddings and funerals here: https://therumpus.net/2018/03/23/poetry-is-a-manifestation-of-a-life-talking-with-marvin-bell/. About the Dead Man poems: The Dead Man offers searing insight into the joys, as well as the catastrophes, of fluctuating cultural and political moments.

Around us, starts with what we need... with that delightful twist from need to (pine) needles to pad

"the rumble that fills the mind", observing with an almost humorous touch what we all share as humans.

A zipper, a snap of a little sound of thanks... as Maura remarked, feels like bundling up a child before s/he goes outside in winter.  Yes... as Oliver puts it, gratitude.  In terms of craft, it is fun to compare this poem with "Messenger". 

It's a woman's world: Eaven Boland, 1944-2000.  Just as with Marvin Bell, it is not fair to judge Eaven Boland by just one poem.  When did she write it?  Is she  not being ironic, when you look at her other work?  I love the sounds of her opening stanza... those w's of "Woman's World" whirl into the fact we keep repeating the same old, just like the "wheel, that first whetted a knife"... 

The use of nouns as verbs is highly effective:  we milestone our lives (funny, the computer wanted to change that to we millstone our lives).  The w's of washing power, wrapped, wash left wet... the what's of what we forget and will never be.  Judith commented on the power of "it".  It, such a small, 2-letter word that refers to the immensity of all it contains.  It's all the same... Is this the same "It" as the one in the title?

Perhaps the negative and narrow view of a woman's world, in the title, and the final gristing bread, getting recipes for good soup, is commentary on our small role as history goes on, without us on the scene.

Interesting that "seeing" and "scene" are homonyms.  Did we see how the king's head GORED its basket?

What a curious and powerful image... Does each head have a basket, and what causes the goring?

This poem wheels and whets plenty of questions!

Instead of her own: The gesture of a grandmother washing her granddaughter's hair, ideally, would invoke a tender, loving act,  selfless, in the sense of tending first to the granddaughter, instead of herself.

The repeated "cold" will convince you otherwise.  Why was the grandmother not taking care of her own hair?  And how was she doing this washing?  It certainly seemed to be far from a pleasurable experience.  It evoked some bad memories for Judith.  Is moist mouse straw just referring to color, or a more complex metaphor for hair on a girl's head?  What substitution is the grandmother making, forming, knuckling?

Unsettling and enigmatic.  

 

 

 

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[1] https://genius.com/Eavan-boland-its-a-womans-world-annotated