poems for October 1

Celebration by Denise Levertov- (October 24, 1923 – December 20, 1997)
Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain by Louis Simpson (1923-2012)
The President Flies Over by Patricia Smith (b. 1955- )
Enuresis by Cid Corman (June 29, 1924 – March 12, 2004)
Fado by Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953 --) (Fado: A type of popular Portuguese song, usually with a melancholy theme and accompanied by mandolins or guitars.)
Big Game -- by Brenda Shaughnessy (b. 1970- )

A sampler of poems that echo Dickinson's formal "ecstasy" and Whitman's exhuberance from last week; a glance at modernist technique...


I couldn’t help smiling at Levertov’s brilliance – the musical images – the “exceptional”expressed as youthful (green, young virtuoso, prodigy), how the wind provides an oceanic chant,
and all is light, song and sacred, with a touch of Wales providing a backdrop contrast of “reasonable gloom”... It tickles the heart with a gladness of being! Enviable writing! We’re just entering the energetic days of Fall – where the “sh” of shadows contrasts the sound of the other “sh”words (sharpest/oceanic/shine/impatient) which are far from any hush – rather, part of the bright, brassy song such brilliance plays. A great poem to read to snap one’s thoughts to gratitude for living! David pointed out the form as an inverted sonnet -- the volta arriving in the split line after the sestet, where on the 8th line one arrives at "blessing" and the festive rite. A poem evoking "how Green was my Valley" -- the excitement of a Welsh "Breakout" when everything stops, to celebrate the sudden arrival of sun.

Simpson's poem seems a reverse celebration, contrasting Whitman's statue, and memory of Walt's exuberance with the parts of America we might prefer to ignore -- "used car lots", and fatigue of "light sick to death"and our fate, just like Greece and Rome,
is the future in ruins. The two exclamation points, after "cancelled" and ruins,
scissor in an extra shadow of irony, and turn to the final stanza where we can imagine red. We discussed these lines at length as well as "the housewife who knows she's dumb". Dumb, as mute? as the "advertisement" of the myth of the ideal blond,
just as Walt did not "prophesise" but "advertise" ? Note how Simpson speaks for all poets, through Walt, happy at being found out, -- comfortable with the image of
"a crocodile in wrinkled metal" -- loafing -- as if to equate the role of the poet
to be the sly and dangerous animal lying in wait for the red of revolution --
is Italy, the country in the shape of the boot, dancing on Greece? the angel at the gate, perhaps ready to cast out Adam and Eve, imagines red, as Nancy pointed out, a stronger red than that actually painted, a red that has not happened yet -- leaving the reader to imagine what that might be.
David Michael offered a reference to Robinson Jeffers: we’re really ruining things – it will be OK if we get rid of people. Martin offered the optimism of seeing nature blossoming again in Chernobyl...

The Patricia Smith poem is one of a collection about hurricane Katrina, in her book, "Blood Dazzler" but the beauty of her poem is that it could be any President "flying over" -- passing by, one of
"My flyboys memorize flip and soar.
They’ll never swoop real enough
to resurrect that other country,

won’t ever get close enough to give name
to tonight’s dreams darkening the water.

**
It isn't only the president.. but all of us are at risk for memorizing "flip and soar"... how to turn away from the "other" and soar towards what looks to be "heaven". The discussion revolved around the 1% who are gaining by an astronomical
600%, leaving others behind... the hurricane is like a huge water balloon/elephant,
the last line in the poem " I understand that somewhere it has rained."
equivalent to reporting on a second hand report of the elephant, without ever naming it from trunk to tail. How do we respond to catastrophe? Do we reduce it to a report of rain? a rhetorical turn?


Cid Corman's Enuresis captures a different response to this being human
that of a child fearing punishment, and witnessing the "I am" in the terrible "slam" of the parents fighting. It made us grateful that we didn't have such catastrophe.


Jane Hirschfield's Fado, takes an approach, that embraces the magic of possibility with the hardship of reality. The prestidigitator (quick fingered magician) produces a dove from the quarter behind the girl's ear, and such amazement (comparing the two) then moves to another "half-stopped moment" to a woman in Portugal singing a Fado that balances, like copper bowls, the living with the song. Seamless mastery!

We read the Shaughnessy, but will discuss it next week!

Carmin sent me this afterwards: it reflected our discussion!

"There were a few references in today's poems of finding beauty where you are - a coal-dusty village, singing woman in wheelchair in Portugal, Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain angel in the gate, flowering plum, dances etc.

Though Luis Albert Urrea's books often are in a setting of poverty, displaced people, discrimination, with sometimes vulgar and ugly settings, he seems to find beauty in the people and places. One of my bookclub friends didn't like INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH - "too many smells, too many fluids", she said. While this is true, lots of smells and fluids, how can it be otherwise with the people and locations he writes about?"


The following is from DOMPE DAYS, a short story in the book, BY THE LAKE OF SLEEPING CHILDREN.

Imagine this: a muscular storm came in during the last days, and as we drove into the Tijuana dump, we were greeted by an apocalyptic scene. Let me try to describe it. The dump, as you know, is cheek by jowl with the rangy home-built cemetery. In fact, many of the graves are partially covered by trash. The garbage used to be in the canyon about 150 feet deep; it is now a hill about 40 feet high. Above this hill is a seething crown of 10,000 gulls, crows, pigeons. But mostly gulls. Imagine, further, mud. Running yellow mud; brown, reddish, black wastewater mixed with dust, ashes and clay. The few graves with cement slabs over them glisten with the rain. The mud is a gray so dark it verges on black. The sky is raging. Knots of clouds speed east, far above the gulls, and the gulls rise so high that they seem an optical illusion; from the huge birds to nearly invisible specks in the sky, they seem to hang on wires, a mad museum display, held in place by the violent wind.

Now we drive in, and the muddy graves are pale blue and pale green and pale brown as their wooden crosses fade; the cement headstones are all white or streaked rainy gray. And from the hill of trash, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of plastic bags -- tan bags, blue bags, white supermarket bags, black trash bags, yellow bread wrappers and video store bags -- book paper, newspapers open like wings, ribbons of toilet paper, tissues like dancing moths, even half-dead balloons, are caught in the backdraft and are rising and falling in vast slow waves behind the hill, slow motion, a ballet in the air of the parti-colored landscape, looking like special effects, like some art department's million-dollar creation, Lucifer's lava lamp, silent ghostly, stately, for half a mile, turning in the air, rolling, looping.

And up top, exposed to the elements, the garbage is flying like a snowstorm.

........about 40 pages later he writes: There was nothing left here. Not a voice. I felt watched by shadows as I climbed out, hurried away from the traces of sorrow downwind of the city.


She concluded, "The phrases "optical illusion", "mad museum display", "some art department's million-dollar creation", "Lucifer's lava lamp" fit so well with the scene. I guess this is a pretty eerie beauty but maybe better than seeing only the dump."

I agree.

poems for Sept. 24

A Supermarket in California – Allen Ginsberg
Whitman at Armory Square -- by M.C. Allan (published by Linebreak, Sept. 17)
a few lines from Whitman, Song of Myself
I taste a liquor never brewed -- Emily Dickinson
Spring and Fall – Gerard Manley Hopkins
Cello - by Dorianne Laux
Porch Swing in September by Ted Kooser


Inspired by the Filreis Modern Contemporary Poetry, a quick look at our American modernist stage-setters: how are they still alive? Does rhyme stop us from singing "all truths (that) wait in things" -- what makes a poem "successful" for you? Do you have expectations or come with an empty mind? When you make associations, are there judgements involved? Just as representational painting shows us something we might see and recognize, words paint both physical (sensory) and emotional experience.
How do such diverse poets do this-- and what contexts and philosophy do they reveal in so doing?

**

The first two poems reflect the ever-reaching influences of Whitman. As I shared with those present on 9/24, I am enjoying thoroughly the free on-line course offered by Al Filreis, U Penn, and faculty advisor of the Kelly center, called “Mod-Po” or Modern Contemporary American Poetry. (To see the endless FREE courses on-line: Re: https://www.coursera.org/courses
To see the Mod-Poetry course: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry

Whitman’s exhuberance can feel arrogant, until you consider his “democratic” understanding that we all have access to “truth” which waits in things. “In all people I see myself – none more and not one barleycorn and the fool less, and the good or bad, I say of myself, I say of them.” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass). He identifies with a collective self, becomes the voice-piece of America in this role,
singing the vitality of a new nation. His enumerations, capturing the “blab of the pave”, his almost overwhelming celebration of the sensory and sensual self, opened a door for poetry, loosened from strict meter and rhyme, and nourished by experience, not thoughts.

Ginsberg captures the spirit – starting with the nourishment of supermarket, which spills into his own “blab of the pave” including Lorca by the watermelons. Almost a century later, Whitman is called “a lonely old grubber” which is a sharp contrast from what one called Whitman’s “playful lechery”. “Which way does your beard point tonight” in the penultimate stanza has a “we” which could be Ginsberg and Walt, or a larger we. The role of pronouns in Ginsberg’s poem allow an open-ness, characteristic of modern poetry to be more than one thing: “we” as reference to gay men/ gay people or a larger collective, including the reader...
The final image gives due homage to Whitman as “courage-teacher”, and leaves us with the finality of death... our own, and that of our country Whitman had once sung with such celebration. Which bank is smoking? The one of the living or the dead? And we are reminded of the river of forgetfulness, the final word, “Lethe”.
Certainly questions remain: what meanings does Ginsberg ascribe to the lost America of love? And you, the reader?

The next poem by M.C. Allen we read with Elaine reading the regular type, and the rest of us reading the italics as a chorus. The form of the poem could be a collage of two poems, the regular type as one, the italics as another, drawing on Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser”, although not quite. Chilling reminder of the Civil war, but also of the need for healing. Because the poem is a collage, open-ness of interpretation is not limited to a sexualizing of Whitman, but a more general call on his long-lined, confident poetry which can uplift the spirit, and a celebration of writing. Perhaps the threading of what was this way, is a reminder of what continues in the voice of the wounded.

The Dickinson poem uses an economy of meter, rhyme, a breathlessness of dashes which hint at what is not spoken, shifting metaphor, to fully embrace an earthly experience which transports the spirit. We discussed the capitalization of certain nouns, as one does in German, and the hymn-like rhyhms, where the beats alternate from 8 syllables to 6, except for the “tippled” penultimate line. Informed by Emerson, Emily’s introspection brings her to imagine a world of possibilities which leaves the reader to discover. Marcie summed it up as the “Omigod – sex with the air” on one of those days one feel exhilarated by the energy of a beautiful day. Emily spoke of a program in which experts have determined that Emily was quite the lush and “hit the bars of Amherst” at night.
There’s so much more to know about a person – such as the “meaning” of dashes rising up, or slanting down – all we can trust is the poem itself and the clues it provides.
On a personal note, I thoroughly enjoyed writing an essay on this charming poem, and reading other students’ essays as part of the Filreis course.

The Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring and Fall” was missing the final line:
“It is Margaret you mourn for” and some of the accent marks.
We agreed that wanwood would be “pale” wood and thought of the physical fall,
(Goldengrove, leafmeal, colder) juxtaposed with the fresh innocence of Margaret—
can one grieve loss in such a state? Perhaps the greatest loss, David suggested implied in the word “blight” is Man’s fall from grace, symbolized by being cast out of the Garden of Eden. We do not grieve that as much as watching a Margaret change from child to suffering adult.

Dorianne’s poem, Cello is a true chef-d’oeuvre. Three sentences, 2 ½ lines , 5 ½ lines, 7 ½ lines long. The lengthening of the lines of the repeated adjectives in “ish”, the accumulative sounds of the “dead music” juxtaposed with the “rosined bow sound of the living”. Like Hopkins’ “heart heard... ghost guessed”, it is up to us to shoulder our losses and departed loved ones.

Kooser’s sonnet, “Porch Swing in September” allows us to admire the detail of a spider’s work in the fulcrum of man-made swing and seasons, wind. The intricacy of each “world” is caught with sounds of wood, “soft vibrations of moths/the wasp tapping....”
I can’t think of a spider at work in morning on her dew-jeweled web without imagining
“time for the cool dewdrops to brush from her work” – each one reflecting both itself, the worlds we don’t usually see, and the web. Perfect imagery without any artifice that captures the sense of the ephemeral without hounding the reader about change.

poems for September 17

Excerpts fom the Pope in St. Lucia by Laurence Lieberman (p. 38-40 APR)
Writers Writing Dying by C.K. Williams (p. 46, APR)
Full Moon and Little Frieda by Ted Hughes
American Wedding by Joseph Millar
Facts about the Moon -- Dorianne Laux

Don't miss Dorianne's reading at the MAG (part of BOA's wine and dine) 3 pm,
Sunday September 23.

Although we only had excerpts of a very long poem, Lieberman gives us a snapshot of Dunstan St. Omer and refers to the cathedral he prepared for the pope’s visit to St. Lucia,
some refer to as an undertaking as daunting as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. I had little knowledge of Carribean culture, aside Derek Walcott’s “Omeros”, nor much knowledge of Lieberman, who says that His goal as poet and traveller is to 'take in my hands, all, all! that I touch! and leave/ no fingerprints. No signature.'
In the small example provided, certainly this is true. We have a snapshot about a situation, and learn something about the man whose hands will restore the peeling murals. Lieberman paints a scene where the artist’s soul wrestles with God – but it is only reading more about St. Omer, that I found out he was the first to paint Christ as a black man, to make him accessible to the West Indian people living Castries.

For more about St. Omer: http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-13/hail-mary-art-dunstan-st-omer.
Lieberman uses a rolling line, which surges like the sea in the “three unveilings”, as it tells the story of the painter, the painting, and what it is to paint the house of God.

The next selection, of CK Williams’ prose poem, Writers Writing Dying engages us with a vernacular wit that makes a serious subject (how we spend our lives before we die) an accessibly interesting subject. The title alone gives pause for thought: Is is writers writing the word “dying”;
writers engaged in producing writing, with an obviated “about” before dying... or perhaps a triumvirate of writers, writing and dying, or any combination thereof? In the opening paragraph, composed of two sentences, Williams employs a dash – followed by a humorous and long commentary on the reaction of a person who died while sleeping which of course, is an exercise in imagination— a projection on the part of the writer, of the position of the now dead person’s voice. I am reminded of the Oliver Herford poem, “The Elf and the Dormouse” where an elf gaily absconds with a mushroom as umbrella, under which a dormouse was protectedly sleeping. “"Where is my toadstool?" loud he lamented.” arrives in the penultimate couplet. see: http://www.bartleby.com/104/28.html (1)

Of course, Williams carries the lament further, with a delightful image of rubber gloves, and human nature idealizing the “way we want to go”.
“and never forgiven the death they’d construed for themselves
being stolen from them so rudely, so crudely, without feeling themselves like rubber gloves
stickily stripped from the innermostness they’d contrived to hoard for themselves.”

The poem sallies forth, ending on a note like Li Po’s poem about Chuang-zu and the butterfly and the fun of wondering whether one is the man dreaming he becomes a butterfly, or butterfly becoming Chuang-zu at waking.
See poem here: http://www.the-professor-mon.com/general-taoism/PoetryLiPo.html (2)
The ending words, “what for” has the same feel as the “so what” – and Williams ends on a note of celebration for the fun of writing – which is the way we defy dying, which we are doing of course, while living.

Since Williams had referred to writers, coupling Sylvia Plath/Hart Crane, whose suicides deprive us of more stanzas they might have written, the next poem provides a snapshot of Plath’s daughter and husband. We questioned the lines in the second stanza that bridge the cows going home and the exclamation of “moon” by little Frieda: “A dark river of blood, many boulders, /Balancing unspilled milk.” which act rather like a separation between visible (daylight) of familiar (cows) and the not yet that we cannot foresee and the mysterious (moon, which has the sound of a cow, closed by an “n” ).

Joe Millar’s poem is packed with nouns that paint a dancing portrait of a family at a wedding that has nothing static or posed. One adjective that stood out, plangent, has a double edge to its meaning: both loud and reverberating, and expressive, plaintive. It’s dropped in the opening part of the poem like the Yiddish words in the opening line, and the Ketubah that follows. The image “unschooled like a map of the world” works for both the father-observer, and the new couple who have yet to discover what the promise means to them.

Eating, listening, observing, and two stanzas of what their future might entail, (with humorous details that the father knows from experience... ) lead to the final stanza where everything is swallowed whole. The moon isn’t just any moon, but speckled, torn, hinting at the emotion of the father giving away his daughter in marriage. The moonlight, the perfume of the rose on his “worsted” lapel where “worst” and “stead” combine sounds with material all twist like the worsted: yarn or thread spun from combed, stapled wool fibers of the same length. And yes, as reader, one swallows the nuptial wine with confidence, ready to cheer the father about to “dance all night” on this occasion of two families woven together by a wedding.

To repeat the “blurbs”: "If you want the real news of how America lives, of what it's like to be here with us...Millar will tell you with exactitude and delicacy in poems like none you've read before. He knows a country, an America, that's been here all along waiting for its voice. It's time we listened." -Philip Levine

"Millar can ride a poem into some wildly imaginative territory, and he knows how to sound the blue note at just the right moment. His impulse is to tell a story, but he never forgets, as a poet, to tell it one line at a time." -Billy Collins

In honor of her upcoming reading on Sunday, we closed with “Facts about the Moon” by Dorianne Laux.
The title announces facts, and indeed, it starts with one which points to the impermanence of the moon’s position, and our own. The rhetorical vernacular, “What’s a person supposed to do” in response, allows
the reader to join in the vulnerability of being human, where life is rarely governed by fact.
The collective responsibility of “we” stands out by rejecting the attitude of “don’t worry about that”, and the petulant truth of the speaker’s opinion.
“And please don't tell me
what I already know, that it won't happen
for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we've done.”

The “secret pity for the moon” bridges into the empathy we owe anyone in trouble, and the moon turns into troubled mother. This allows the facts about the moon’s role as gravity regulator for oceans and poles, to take on new gravitas, where moon and mother have no choice but to accept the inevitable pull no matter if harboring the undeserving.

Poems for September 10

Pebble by Zbigniew Herbert
I’ll Explain Some Things by Pablo Neruda
Consolation and the Order of the World by Wright
two poems by Wislawa Szymborska: Everything;
A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth
Somethings, Say the Wise Ones by Mary Oliver

poems for Aug. 27

Bruegel – by Paul Carroll
War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy
Two poems by Sherman Alexie
Dear Emily Dickinson; Curse #7 (p. 20, APR)
Studying Poetry 3,000 years from Now by Dara Wier (p. 31 APR)
Late Night TV by Dorianne Laux


Maura brought in Billy Collins' poem "Moon" -- reminding me of the power we have to "people our imagination" and not feel so lonely. Hello Moon -- let me introduce to you to a part of me, and put things into perspective. Delightful.

So was the first poem, "Bruegel" filled with vivid imagery (children cough and drop away like loose buttons), cold (magpies/thicken their feathers for the night) and hunger of winter under the endless green sky hanging like "a block of ice above/endless plots of snow, the sense of the precariousness of life, swinging like the sign by the inn, by one hinge. Without going into the suffering of the narrator, the painting of the Hunters by Brueghel reminds us that life was not easy then, much as we might idealize peasants dancing... Brueghel,
as title, is tribute to this genius who could paint "people caught in a breath, the death to come, hidden." Brilliant poem, where, to reference Mark Twain, the "lightening" is at work, not a mere description of lightening bug.

We remembered the uncertainty of Breughel's time... the massacre of the Innocents, the protestant revolt -- and this morning, hearing the massacre of more innocents in Syria... Interesting that Paul Carroll is dancer and lawyer, defending environmental rights... which perhaps are responsible for the hint of stilled movement and justice. into the nested layers. Carroll does not say "who is near the end" -- or who "we" represents linked to the Breughel painting -- but binds us all together with it.

**
Carol Duffy, British poet laureate captures the difficulty of being a war photographer -- how, to witness suffering, and in order to "do the job" be impassive. The etymology is interesting, coming from 1660s, "not feeling pain," the meaning "void of emotions" is from 1690s. Photographic vocabulary is a perfect metaphor -- for instance, the pain arriving in the "development", which Duffy captures: "Solutions slop in trays/beneath his hands which did not tremble then/
though seem to now." The poem goes on switching from war zone to two words: "Rural England. Home again/to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel" -- ordinary pain? The poem veers back to the emerging photo ("Something is happening") recalling the stranger caught in the photograph, the cries of his wife, the blood in the dust.
To juxtapose the "job" with human concerns hits with full force here: A hundred agonies in black-and-white/from which his editor will pick out five or six/
for Sunday's supplement.
The use of rhyme, (must/dust; tears/pre-lunch beers... where/care) reinforces job/feeling disparity.
Rich remembers Brahms Requiem and the lyrics "all grass disappears", and talk came up of the civil war...

Sherman Alexie is a refreshing poet -- able with a sense of humor which yet works like acid to carve out a point. We enjoyed imagining the world of Emily Dickinson, and the civil war, how "God-hungry" is also "God-defying"-- what did she know of what happened in the "greasy grass" oiled by guns, carts, men?

Curse #7, makes you wonder what the other curses are... did he write Curse #1-6?
What a brilliant move to make someone feel both sides where two wrongs have a chance to re-assess what needs to be right...

Dara Wier takes us through odd syntax to read through her lines a few times,
as if in a double-take. We started the discussion speaking of uncertainty, of negative capability... echoes of Auden's "Of suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters" -- but who are the "old Masters" we will remember next century, let alone next in the next millenium...

Dorianne Laux' poem has amazing turns, creating all the spooky "unrest" of late night, insinuating some TV but what is striking is the role of the "I" -- who has the power to make a creepy character disappear -- and then the choice:
" though if I do the darkness / will swallow me, drown me."
It is good to ponder "By what untraceable set of circumstances" the late night character on TV... simultaneously with the idea that
"Somewhere in the universe is a palace/ where each of us is imprinted with a map."

poems for Aug. 20

Wondrous by Sarah Freligh
Alphabets by Seamus Heaney
Alphabet Poem Skipping Rope by y.t.
two poems for the Olympic games
The Wrestler by Kazim Ali
Lifting by Ouyang Yu

Show and tell: July/Aug. 2012 APR p. 24-28
Four Hundred Men on the Cross

**
The poems today gave a chance to appreciate the weave of life over time through books, past history, the nature of knowledge, memory and the magic of imagination. After the Heaney poem Kathy had mentioned reading Tranströmer’s memoirs. I was reminded me of “Preludes” where Tranströmer says, “Two truths approach each other – one from inside the other from outside and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.”

Today’s discussion was like that. Sarah’s poem with the layering of story, the mother, the author of the story, a sort of elegiac math with the image of loss as multiplication, “ every subtraction is exponential”, “how each grief” (followed by line/stanza break...) multiplies the one preceding it. Wondrous as a fitting title for what makes us wonder, as well as the sense of awe of that which cannot be pinned down by fact and number.

I brought up the term, Sprezzatura, translated in various ways as rehearsed spontaneity, studied carelessness, well-practiced naturalness that lies at the center of persuasive discourse of any sort. It suits this poem.

Seamus Heaney’s poem with its range of tones, and times, does feel like a memoir, not of learning letters, or history, or a parading through latinate and anglo-saxon flavors of language, but a tribute to the power of imagination as a coping skill. As Martin said, “we are not genetically built for schools”.
Maura encouraged us to go to the Eastman house to see the alphabet in pictures (Neil Winokur’s “A to Z” portfolio) part of the exhibit “Untold Stories” which is showing until Sept. 16.

The two Olympic games poems brought forth ideas about sports, Olympics, games and much more. The beauty of “wordlifting” as a concept, of being "between the thing and gravity..." as David put it, or perhaps between idea and word... which calls to mind the bicycle series where the actual bicycle has been erased digitally, leaving only a suspended rider and the shadow of the bicycle. http://www.ignant.de/2012/07/17/floating/

Wrestling, from the sheer physicality of it, could also be metaphoric wrestling,
or relating, one person to another, one person to an idea. We ended with Longenbach's Mist Valley, two angles of August – which for a teacher means the last days before resuming school -- but for all of us perhaps, that time when the alphabet is ripe and waiting for harvest before we taste the soup of sounds, sense it makes.

What a wonderful group. So grateful for all the sharing of insights.

Poems for August 13

Poems for August 13
Crossing Over By William Meredith
Only in Things -- W.S. di Piero
A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima) – by Jeanine Gailey
I could take -- by Hayden Carruth
After Television – by Hayden Carruth
A Mown Lawn by Lydia Davis

he first “sunbeam” quote in The Sun, August 2012 issue:
“Life is bitter and fatal, yet men cherish it and beget children to suffer the same fate.”


The poems discussed today embraced the difficulty of living with uncertainty, whether as slave crossing the Ohio river on ice floes, navigating through a relationship, or witness to “centuries of egomania”. Meredith takes the ice floe image, separating, enjambing subject/verb as lines leap from couplet to couplet: the “whole river/ “is milling”,
we/ to are going to find new ways of understanding the opening line: “That’s what love is like.” How wonderful to have a line like like, “I contemplate this unfavorable aspect of things” taken straight from the passage cited from Uncle Tom, just as is “undulated raft”. As Kathy remarked, the cultural background of the epigram is taken to the personal. The ending couplet starts with an enjambed “anyhow.” What we do in spite of anything? We discussed the role of the fool – the one who is wise enough to be outside of society and point a finger at it. How to learn to deal with our weight (carbon footprint perhaps?) and walk light. Rich cited the new report by Jorgen Randers, Club of Rome, see http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=703
and his forthcoming book, 2052.
Love as an important thread – I can’t remember how Martin arrived at citing the 60 minutes program interviewing Louis Zanparini – how if we do not forgive, we will remain poisoned by what has harmed us.


The 14 line poem Only in Things by di Piero uses nouns with full weight. Swaths of sky; leafage; tailpipes, smokestacks orating sepia exhaust;
nature (pistil) and man-made (mailbox key) rendered as smaller enthusiasms, the whale-gray taken up again by unchanged half-tones yet changing (expressed by wheel, wind-trash, revolving doors). The question: Who can stare at .... and not weep... Our choices: wakefulness or distraction. be woven or dumped into? and into what?
The volta (turn) lands on the 9th line, a fragment. “This constant stream of qualia we feel in our stomachs. Emily wished there were more of the “sun arriving” – Rich remarking that sun is treated as rare, a stranger... and that draws to mind the sacred worship of the sun, sense of holy...
the “rain rushes us” is stopped by a line break, and the enigmatic “love to love”
and further enigmatic stop to stop with a comma before listing what perhaps is in pursuit of us
and what we are becoming. Unsettling.

Back to Meredith, how do we walk light through it?
A poem like Carruth’s “I could take” brings hope. The poem eases into the complexity of an act of sharing (shearing) a leaf, a word, piecing together the two torn edges, unique, raggedy, “imperfections that match”.

Some thought Meredith’s poem would be appropriate for a wedding ceremony. Carruth’s poem, for a celebration of such union on anniversaries!

Just what are we doing with our environment, and how do we love, seem to be parallel threads to living. Jeanine Gailey’s poem, A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima) promoted a lively discussion of what we think will help the environment, with some finding it optimistic to use lanterns, seeds, -- build, plant, set things alight in all the senses of the word.
Discussion ranged from wondering at the negligence of government not taking into account what scientists warn...how even science cannot control... and how a poem can transform something so scary it terrifies us, into a thing of beauty and give us hope to keep trying.

“After Television” by Hayden Carruth is fun to analyze by looking at how he handles linebreaks and enjambments – and where not. Discussion revolved around how easily we toss out animals, family, the effect of television can be numbing, but also make us think we can turn on and off any aspect of life. Watching a nature program, we can feel marvel, distress, but that changes nothing in how we relate to nature... The topic of safari clubs providing animals for a fee came up. How, not only are we cut off from animals, our animal nature, but also our literature. TV= pragmatism – but are we willing to accept that as our definition?

We ended by my reading “Mown Lawn” – witty and fun, but driving home an unease.

Ah... poems. Thank you. Poets would be dead without readers