O pen 2/15/2010

Poems:

Considerations: What have we borrowed from oriental poems?
Ezra Pound stole the following to come up with his definition of
poetry: the most concentrated form of verbal expression:

strong emphasis on internal alliteration and assonance
absence of rhyme
use of ellipsis
concrete imagery

Japanese language does not lend itself to expansive forms… small is better and more powerful.
communication: notes passed from sleeve to sleeve – or conundrums, furtive exchanges… and a high sense of decorum…

How does "organized vitality" work in the following?

Ted Kooser: This Paper Boat
(the delicacy of image; concept of "iki" or understated elegance. Contrast with the two page adjective-ladled, compounded love in Terri Ford (see Valentines - 2010)

Tao-Sheng (360-434): Married Love
the simplicity of cycles -- love as clay carried to fire, baked, broken, clay figurines remolded, sharing a quilt, a coffin.

John Ashbery: Breathlike
Does it matter how many "B" poems there are in Planisphere... where this one stands in the collection.. how Zone relates to the Zero or Zymurgy... how Ashbery takes cliches and turns them -- how to understand squirt conditions, the new interest in zoning... sexual interpretations of cup and ball game and throughout... or just how a RUT has anything to do with breathless if not... "The rut glimmered
through centuries of snow and after.
I suppose it was trying to make some point
but we never found out about that,"


Mark Doty : Crepe de Chine : an example of pushing concrete image to more image... Masterfully linked. Sensory associations and double entendres -- how do you understand "call me" in 4 different ways. Images, and a sense of "big" and the oversibilance cracked with "click of compact" and "clatter of a covenant of heels". Kim brought in an ad for perfume... how we buy into dreams... and tumblings of coiffeurs of heaven... what -- discarding halos, or trying to put them on... or simply clouds in the sky...
Pescadero: in recent New Yorker. By comparison, short poem, delightful goat, and the reassurance of being welcomed by animal... the "loves me, loves me not" game tellingly done... how often are we guilty of "good-natured indifference."
read outloud:

TO JOAN MITCHELL*
by Mark Doty

At twilight the locusts begin,
waves and waves,
nothing to do with lamentation.
No one’s told them the world is ending;
they proceed as always,
everything subsumed into—
you can’t call it a cry, exactly, no singularity in it,
but the thousands, the ten thousand
—voices?

Not singing.
Audible undulation, the waves
these bodies make. Seamless, encompassing,
filling Branard Street—

As it should be.
I want them not knowing,
in this way the sound becomes a kind of refuge,
filled with safety and splendor.

* Reprinted from Fire to Fire:

-- discussion of music... How Russian poet, Vera Pavlova talks of poems as a trinity of image, thought and music. How does Doty do this here?

Valentines 2/14/2010

Valentines…
I
So many sites sported valentine poems… Today, I started off O Pen with “Valentine” by Terri Ford, the poem for 2/14 on “Your Daily Poem”. If I say “valentine” – what do you think of ? Red, hearts, love, Rudi (as in Valentino)… and so let’s move on to “love”.

Check your adjectives, similes, and 5 lines packed with implied action
Valentine -- by Terri Ford

Hovering insectile love. Fretful love, every
two mile check-up love, nerve pill rope-end indecisive highly
diagnostic love. Bracing love. Speedy

love. Medieval leeching what ho troubadour head-
lopping dulcimer lost
ark love. Manifesto
love. Give up the throne
love. Love as truce. Tectonic plate
rearrangement love. Ultimatum bad

dog love. Ziplock
suffocation love. Bottom
feeder plankton love. Trophy preener
improvement love. Pink pluming
hope burning diary teen
reversion love. Blurt
out love. Perpendicular
gridlock love, hall
monitor love, detention love. Bad
press love. Half-Nelson Gladiator
headlock uncle you say it blood-

spitting hard-breathing down
for count head
injury love. Log-rolling jolly
motion river gusto wet and
galvanized love. Sympathetic

Red Cross love. Sinatra, Iglesias, Don Ho, Yo-
Yo, Dvorak, Monk Chant, Yanni love. Not entirely
believable love. Wild
love, burned at the stake love, iron
lung love, bone marrow pacemaker
toupee love. Love in remission,
amputee love, Federal Witness
Protection love, in hiding subtext
Morse Code spy love. Revisionist

love. Open book test
love. Boundless applause in the front
row love. African trumpeting large
flap love. Stealth Bomber
love. Slow me down
love. Keyhole light
love. Pebbled
bird’s egg love. Name it to
your face love, woke

up love, count on it
stouthearted no-leak no-fault
high octane 911 in the daylight unashamed
long haul fearful but right here intergalactic
Hovercraft love.

From Why The Ships Are She (Four Way, 2001)

II
I didn’t share this poem on Narrative
where love oscillates between verb and noun,
between mind and body. How why in the plural/ line break/sounds like wise.
I’d like to know what Heather McHugh would think of it…


Mind Loves -- by Jenny Factor

Who mind loved would not rather be loved body too.
Since all is all. Want eyes through everything. Like
comb through hair. Like water washing gold. Who
mind loved would not rather love body to body since
all is more than map making map that looks like man.
Who’d mind love. Who would rather love mind when
body needs body. Wants swing. Wants stone.
Wants flesh. Wants glass. If minds love (must love) (do
love) why not bodies love also. If not you who. Why
wise the uncertainty.

From Unraveling at the Name

**
Ted Kooser’s This Paper Boat from his book Valentines is far more satisfying.
See notes about 2/15.

February 8

John Ashbery

Today’s discussion was lively and fun, starting with definitions, such as offusqué (offended) and fakir -- Hindu ascetic (e.g., sadhus, gurus, swamis and yogis) as well as Sufi mystics. It can also be used pejoratively, to refer to a common street beggar who chants holy names, scriptures or verses. From Arabic, faqr (poverty).

Variation in the Key of C
A two-stanza poem which opens conversationally with “I don’t know, I favor a little more crispness/ in the attack (as in “attack”)." This opens up the subject of variation on meanings of words… and what should be a simple scale of white notes on the piano, without sharps, already daggers in an edge, which is confirmed with “wherever you go shivers you.” We enjoyed the confusion between the conversational tone and the poetic intervention of “rain is toothsome” the funny placement of “all” in the final “and you get all out of debt like that” which plays on getting all, but having nothing, like the Fakirs pursuing us, or clichés like “all out of whack (prepared by "day arriving with a thwack" in the first stanza.)
or “all out of joint”, and if sweeping reassurances that sunset calms, rain has a bite to it,
there is no logic for debt, whether forgiven or not… with a slant allusion to the Lord’s Prayer. I asked Jim to talk about Jazz, and he mentioned it is largely a question of “the ear of the beholder” and what he likes is jazz that has a harmonic structure. He told the anecdote of Leonard Bernstein listening to Ornette Coleman, and how he couldn’t follow a single note.

Uptick
Ends on the notion of poetry which “dissolves in/brilliant moisture and reads us/ to us.//
A faint notion. Too many words,/ but precious."
Like the emperor saying to Mozart, “too many notes” and Mozart replying, “which ones would you dispense with” and Salieri saying, “Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall”.
I brought up “preciosity” – that affectation of knowing something and the irony with which Ashbery uses the word “precious” both literally and in the pejoratively figurative sense.

And what is the title “uptick” referring to with the sound of a ticking clock? The definition is the ticket price going up; a stock market transaction (or sometimes, a quote) at a price higher than the preceding one for the same security.

The first stanza is like an upbeat, where “it” doesn’t dovetail: time/ -- which isn’t saying “time doesn’t dovetail” – but implies it – and that one minute running faster than the one “it catches up to” which gives a dizzying sense of velocity. And the idea of nothing wasted. Followed by the second stanza with the downbeat in a sentence with 3 commas, 6 lines, which compares viewing a painting, “half turning around, slightly apprehensive,/but it has to pay attention /to what’s up ahead: a vision. That same “it”.

These short poems beg to be repeated in their entirety, as you take out one note, and the structure does indeed fall down.

Alcove: from Arabic, al qubbah, the arch.

Again, two stanzas. Referring to Spring, seasons which "coagulate/into years". We all enjoyed the “mugwump of the final hour” – and slant reference to political indecision which entered American English in 1884. And the word "breathy" dropped in conversationally so we don't suffocate in the collapse in the hole dug in the sand. … and what and who we shelter, in a nook, where “breathing could be heard clearly.” And how to make sense of the final two sentences.
“Terrible incidents happen/ daily. That’s how we get around obstacles.”

Lorrie mentioned about Maine and how everyone there loves the idea of Spring –
“we love it because we’ve seen pictures of it.”

At this point, I quoted the NY Times review of Hoagland’s book “Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty”. “Any pierced undergraduate in a Baudrillard seminar can tell you that in contemporary America, “Nothing means what its says,/and it says it all the time.”
Which led into a discussion of Voice-Over.

6 stanzas and a delightful final valentine – a goodbye to a relationship…
and trying to find the subject of the verb “halts”, or is it a noun, resting lonely on one line.
How another person, in a great deal of trouble/signals enough has been done/already,/tells us how time has shrunk…


and in a matter of time
halts
the comma, peels the tonsil
of the complete serenade.

But it IS a voice-over after all… someone else’s voice pasted over the situation…

And that last stanza:
We are the day of the book.
Knaves that came along,
fig-roasts in the fall
in film chatter came to the same
albeit difference conclusion.

We all have a measure in which our lives live out – whether noticed in doses supplied by Prufrockian coffee spoons or egg-timers, or not remarked at all, without a notion of time. But one thing is sure. We all know the end is the end.

**
This little book delighted me. Arranged alphabetically from Alcove to Zymurgy --
(that branch of chemistry which deals with wine-making and brewing, 1868, from Gk. zymo-, comb. form of zyme "a leaven" (from PIE base *yus-; see juice) + -ourgia "a working," from ergon "work" (see urge (v.)). The last word in many standard English dictionaries; but in the OED [2nd ed.] the last word is zyxt, an obsolete Kentish form of the second person singular of see (v.).

In the title poem, Planisphere the reader is jolted on a train ride “in the observation car of their dreams”. Indeed, nothing like putting off a journey/until the next convenient interruption swamps/onlookers and ticket holders alike."

"We all more or less/ ressembled each other, until that fatal day in 1861/when the walkways fell off the mountains and the spruces/spruced down."

So I dutifully look up 1861: the beginning of the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as President and appointment of Lincoln as 16th President of USA.
The Battle of Bull Run… As for the spruces/spruced, I found an article about Roosevelt’s “tree army” turning Indian land into National Parks…

Ah… Helen Vendler finds meaning in Planisphere’s title. She notes that it comes from Marvell’s poem “The Definition of Love,” sees that the book is dedicated to Ashbery’s long-time partner, and claims that its two-dimensional suggestion somehow makes it so that “the distant poles at last can touch.” another review reassures me… these poems, arranged alphabetically, tease us, but delightfully.

It makes sense: A planisphere is a star chart analog computing instrument in the form of two adjustable disks that rotate on a common pivot. It can be adjusted to display the visible stars for any time and date. It is an instrument to assist in learning how to recognize stars and constellations. The astrolabe, an instrument that has its origins in the Hellenistic civilization, is a predecessor of the modern planisphere

The Cabbage Rabbit (Jan. 10, 2010) says this: "But Ashbery puts platitude to unexpected use in unexpected places. Or he wrings something out of them, saying, for example, “There were two ways about it,” the missing “no” bringing “you and me” as well as sun and stars and hope and futility together. This is an old Ashbery trick, keeping his ear to the ground and hearing a stampede. He does the same thing with individual words, turning nouns into verbs, adjectives into nouns and pronouns into other pronouns.

What Ashbery’s done is invented a new use for language, a new way to communicate. Words sweat from working overtime. He pulls sound and symbol from them as well as layers of meaning, like onion skins, at a pace to leave us crying."

**
I read the entire book once, and couldn’t stop turning the pages… made notes,
selected poems to discuss. In typing up these notes, I re-discovered more, on the 4th reading of : Alcove, Uptick, Variations in the Key of C, Voice-Over. We ended with one that Kim enjoyed, Breathlike

Breathlike

Just as the day could use another hour,
I need another idea. Not a concept
or a slogan. Something more like a rut
made of thousands of years ago by one of the first
wheels as it rolled along. It never came back
to see what it had done, and the rut
just stayed there, not thinking of itself
or calling attention to itself in any way.
Sun baked it. Water stood, or rather sat
in it. Wind covered it with dust, then blew it
away. Always it was available to itself
when it wished to be, which wasn’t often.

Then there was a cup and ball theory
I told you about. A lot of people had left the coast.
Squirt conditions obtained. I forgot I overwhelmed you
once upon a time, between everybody’s sound sleep
and waking afterward, trying to piece together
what had happened. The rut glimmered
through centuries of snow and after.
I suppose it was trying to make some point
but we never found out about that,
having come to know each other years later
when our interest in zoning had revived again.

**
How does he do this – an entire book, threaded like a strange necklace, baubled by gems of all shapes and sizes, experimental jewelry pieces, and yet it all hangs together.

I will keep very happy memories of our discussion -- grateful for a book which delights in language, even if it irritates us by the nature of language which indeed has pitfalls created by it's elasticity to embrace so much more than what is "said". Our discussion confirms the need for many readers' ears, and the sharing of what was heard by each one.

TS Eliot... and more Feb. 1, 2010

When I say hourglass, what do you think of?
egg timers, the sand adopting various speeds as it squeezes from one bulb to the other, memories of watching it in church, or silently observing it mark time on the kitchen table as naughty children.. I read the opening lines of Hayden Carruth's poem, Testament (on Writer's Almanac in Dec. 2007, but appeared again in Narrative)

So often it has been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away — I'm sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDs, IRAs, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I've made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can't go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow's mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I'm no financier doing
the world's great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

**
And then, Prufrock... reading aloud the Italian and translation...
Is this how you would start a love poem?

So here is the speaker in the 8th circle of hell, or is it we, with a deceased loved one,
or any of the fraudulent... and evening is etherised and these hissing adjectives
half-deserted, restless, sawdust, tedious, insidious, join the sibilance of sky, streets, retreats, restaurants, oyster-shells, question, visit.

There is something absolutely delicious in pronouncing the first stanza -- and I had people repeat words from the 2nd to feel how the tongue manages the labials in yellow, licked, lingered, let fall, how "slip" prepares "leap", how the tongue curls around the sound of "curl".

Comments of note: Annie: how when she went to college in the thirties, she thought the poem was a waste of her time; Charlene imitate Carl Sagan, "Do I dare disturb the universe"... and Jim thinking of Eastern philosophy and our interconnectedness.
Joyce making a connection with the Peach Boy;

We tried out suggestions to explain only two appearances of "The Women come and go, Talking of Michelangelo" and worked the uneven line, rich rhymes, end rhymes, repetitions, the mosaic effect.

Just as in Burnt Norton, time is past, present, future.
Speaking with such conviction "there will be time"
and the play, "In a minute there is time/ for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

I have known them all already...

A proustian evocation with the magic lantern and we all enjoyed imagining the shadows of 1910 and our own subconscious currents a whole century later!

Snodgrass

January 18, 2010

Oh Snodsy, thank you for your poem "Looking" and thank you Garrison Keilor for posting it.

What was I looking for today?
Lovely stanzas of six with lines 3+5; 2+ 6 rhyming.
rugs, drugs; chairs, stairs;

Everywhere I was, was wrong...
then, again; door for...

Where did the rest of the time go?
recall, all; last, past.

Clever, fun -- can be read in lots of different ways.
What do we really want? Is that what we really want?

Poetry saves me again and again.
I lost things, printed things, lost them again, tried to organize all morning... and then,
it really didn't matter. I discussed 4 wonderful poems with 10 wonderful people and we had ideas flying all around us
and who could have more fun than that...

Other Snodgrass poems discussed in O Pen: We had a really good time with his book, "De-Compositions" in March, 2009.
In February 2009: from his Selected Poems : The Lovers Go Fly a Kite : p. 90 (1963 – publ. in New Yorker)
Matisse: The red Studio : 105
If Birds Build with your hair. 175
198
201
213 //222
A darkling alphabet.

Heart's Needle. :
from the Middle-Irish Romance, The Madness of Suibhne
Your Father is dead : I’m sorry
Your mother : All pity for me has gone out of the world
Your sister: the mild sun rests on every ditch; a sister loves even though not loved
your daughter is dead: an only daughter is the needle of the heart
your little boy who used to call you Daddy, he is dead. Aye… that’s the drop that brings a man to the ground.

Denise Levertov

January 18, 2010

Today's O Pen included two poems by Denise Levertov:
Come into Animal Presence
Matins

Jim mentioned a book he's just finished: "The Beak of the Finch" which explains evolution and how homo sapiens took "the thinking nitch"...

In this two stanza poem, we humans are invited to come into animal presence: to reconsider the serpent, observe the white rabbit-star-silence; the dignified llama, the insouciant armadillo. The word "joy" comes up three times -- After the 3rd sentence, line 10 of the first stanza, as a question, "What is this joy" to start the second stanza and "an old joy" in the final line.

The serpent is guileless, has no blemish. Who made up that story in the Garden of Eden? How do we judge animals, determine that a llama disdains or that an armadillo would roll into a prickly ball at the sight of us? Levertov assures us, that a llama mildly disregards human approval, the armadillo doesn't quicken his trotting, but rather has his own intention to pursue in the palm forest. The rabbit is enigmatic whether a star twitching its ears at the rain, inspecting his surroundings.
Each animal is replete doing what it knows it must do. And this is joy. This is holiness and our reminder of holiness, and this presence is perhaps captured in a bronze statue or like bronzed baby shoes, etched into our memory. It isn't that anything changes, only that our vision and perception might falter. And would you not want to be in this archaic animal presence, this whole and connected holiness?

Matins is a poem filled with "Aha" moments! Kathy mentioned "moment of grace that we cannot summon" --
and we thought of Ellen Bass' poem "Pray for Peace" in part V.
7 sections, the words, " The Authentic!" starting out sections i. ii, vi, with a doubling of it in section 2. Shadows, dreams, Plato's cave, a sense of Gide's "authentique" and the early pre-dawn meditation of matins in a rhythmic, incantatory style.
Where is truth -- verisimilitude and we follow through, follow through, follow/transformations of day/in its turning, in its becoming. (part iv) part v and the child and rushing to save his clear sight by following him to give him his glasses...
and how the Authentic rolls just out of reach. Myth enters, perhaps a Greek layer of Poseidon and sea/horse/sacrifice.
An incantation to "Marvelous Truth!" a plea to know all sides of joy.


Discussion of Life at War :
I was given the chance to read this outloud with one of my poet colleagues, George Wallace, I believe just a year ago, or was it two...
and I remember the feeling resembling "lumps of raw dough" as if I had been the child helping on baking day... and wondering how contents of a heart can feel like a formless lump -- and the cringe of feeling grits of war pocking my lungs -- and it's not just war, it's all we do (myself and by extension, others do) as humans, that sits heavy in the gut, numbs feelings into doughy lumps, our actions that spit like shards of ice cutting our breath. But that's only to repeat Levertov's images. And then again, see how her spirit and love "jostle for space" and that word joy is mentioned again, and we have the knowledge that "our language imagines MERCY, LOVINGKINDNESS, and belief one another mirrored forms of a God we felt as good --", and that gives me such conviction to say the last three lines, to repeat that "nothing" until it feels possible, to strive for that deep intelligence, to work to turn words and actions into living peace.



Levertov Poems discussed in 2009 :
Dog of Art
A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England


Poems from "This Great Unknowing" (discussed for Jan. 26, 2009)
From Below
For the Asking
Celebration
Patience
Ancient Stairway
First Love
Beyond the Field
The Metier of Blossoming
A Hundred a Day
That Day
Elephant Ears

Poems discussed 2/9/2009
O Taste and See
To The Snake
The Great Black Heron
The Ache of Marriage
Talking to Grief
September 1961
In Mind
Untitled
Aware
Once Only
The Jacobs Ladder
Variation on a Theme by Rilke

O Pen

January 18, 2010 -- A Look at Henry Reed

Each Monday, a group of us meet to discuss poems... It started in February 2008, with 6 people showing up, for a six-week trial period at the local library in Pittsford, NY. Now, with a roster of 45 people, we continue to meet every week...

Today's problem: How to organize two years worth of poetry and poetry discussion?
I've decided to jot down a few notes by poet author...

January 4, 2010
Henry Reed : The Naming of Parts from Lessons of War http://www.solearabiantree.net/namingofparts/namingofparts.html
The epigram is from one of Horace’s Odes, “For ladies’ love I late was fit,/And good success my warfare blest.”

January 11, we read part six of "Lessons of War"
and today, the 18th, we read his clever satire of TSE, Burnt Norton. "Chard Whitlow". Human kind indeed cannot bear very much reality, and we get caught up in time. Is anything different from then? (section 3: "Distracted from distraction by distraction/Filled with fancies and empty of meaning/Tumid apathy with no concentration/ Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind/That blows before and after time,/ Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs/Time before and time after.)

Words after speech, reach/Into the silence.

It is good to meditate on blasts of heaven such as the hurricane in Haiti -- the wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;

**
How different his "Naming of Parts". It is read with two voices which accentuates the tension between the drill sargent and the natural images of Japonica, branches holding silent eloquent gestures in the garden, blossoms, bees fumbling the flowers, almond blossoms.

This five stanza poem also addresses time opening and closing both the first stanza and poem with the line "Today, we have naming of parts" repeated three times in the first stanza.
Today is sandwiched between daily cleaning of yesterday, which perhaps is the same as tomorrow's
"what to do after firing". Swivels, for parts you will have or never will have; safety catch; bolt; spring are explained.
Strength of thumb, sliding. We have not got point of balance and piling swivels.

The second Part: Judging Distances is also time related: "Not only how far away, but the way the you say it / Is very important. Perhaps you may never get/The Knack of judging a distance, but at least you know/How to report on a landscape.

We discussed the sixth and final part, "Returning of Issue". What is issued to a soldier -- what does he return if he does not rejoin? To what does he return? What is restored? The item a soldier is allowed to keep, "his shirt. And whatever you wear underneath."

How would you feel, choosing "to learn once more the things I shall one day teach: /A rhetoric instead of words; instead of a love, the use/ Of accoutrements, impedimenta, and fittings and military garments,/and harlots and riotous living.

On a different note, we discussed Reed's "A Map of Verona" -- whose epigram is from Rimbaud, "Villes" .
Here, the 2nd and 4th lines rhyme in each of the 12 quatrains. Verona, river-embraced, setting of a the best -known love story, Verona as Green Earth, home of Mona Lisa, Verona, as an open map waiting exploration.
Naples, the youthful chapter, and plans, as in the French "plan" or city map, is an indication of place, "not time, nor can they say the surprising height and colour of a building, nor where the groups of people bar the way."

Arms -- as in embracing arms, arms as in armed and ready, capital A Arms, as if arms of God or death.. What propitious hour restores a region "from whence my dreams and slightest movements rise."