Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Poems for August 25
How do we remember -- what details help unleash a story, "the taste of a hush from far away" (see Merwin's poem "Drinking Tea in the Small Hours"... how do we perceive "Loss" -- like a last name, a brother named, then taken away, the nearness sensed, in words that do not belong to us, (and as reader, feeling they breathe...)
from APR, July/August 2014
Locked by Jennifer Grotz (note last line: "I mean the man" not "I mean the mean"
three of the Nine poems by W.S. Merwin
The Laughing Child
Cowbell
The Mapmaker
World Without Glass by Pamela Sutton (correction: worship, not worship)
Swift Trucks by Erika Meitner
the selection of poems also echoes some of the themes of last week: “It’s never the aboutness of anything but the wailing underneath it” (Frank X. Gaspar.)
Line up: a young poet reading her poem stanza by stanza; 3 poems by an older poet using the "suspended, unpunctuated line" -- read line by line; A poem squeezing meaning out of stone; a composite poem starting with trucks. (the last two poems read stanza by stanza).
Forgive the typos-- lately I have been making interesting ones... Female Futurity became “female futility”… and there were several in the poems. Reading out loud is a good check!
Discussion:
We started by saying outloud "the taste of a hush from far away” -- a little magic to sprinkle into the idea of 5 Thurs; 5 Fri; 5 Sat. and 5 Sundays in the month of August, only to set the tone of energy into 5’s which morphed into a small excursion of polyhedrons … I love a group that can be comfortable with such a start!
There were multiple points where we quoted Steiner's “All acts of communication are acts of translation” as we took words, crafting ideas about a poet’s intention and our own ideas to match to them…
Locked: Martin pointed out the psychological, David and Judith the lack of craft of the metaphysical poets…yet a poem working the sound and conceit as if to follow their footsteps. David said about this line:
"but now there is nothing left to be solved like a riddle" (“If it had been my student, I would have said, take more force than finesse—) DS
Other points of intrigue about this inner landscape poem-- how it ends, bringing in God -- how He only loves the "strong thief /I mean the man who breaks his heart for God
(strong…. is the important word — like Donne’s "batter my heart”— but thief implies a different cunning and there's a discordant unrest of the urgency of breaking the locked heart--to seize "what is left". we don't know the why behind the lurching from what the speaker "thought I wanted to be" -- not the key, but the instrument for the key... we sense her awareness of something dramatic holding her away from life... Many felt the rhyming trees/key; lock/block/ sends/ascends detracted from the strength, as if she were having more fun with sound play than crafting an image.
**
Merwin’s poems have the mark of experience the abstractions of the first poem lacked and brought forth a lot of meaningful memories and good discussion.
In the first poem, the innocence of childhood, the wisdom of experience looking back combine using the perspective of the mother and retrospective "later" used twice more. The idea of wicker, and “wick” as “quick” or life… the shaking of the carriage layers a "shake of memory" to imagine the instant, and how it was captured in words-- and ending on the feel of being that happy child, laughing.
Cowbells too “rang” lots of echoes…including a reference to
Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae by Ernest Dowson:
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind...[7]
The idea of sound shepherding memory...
the sound of it will make you remember (implies "you’re from around here; I give this bell to you")
My question to the group: how does Merwin earn the last lines…
" he did not tell me that there is no question
in its sound and no place or promise
only the calling of one note at a time"
They seem to flow, naturally, without imposition. Is it the double negative… or two different things. one note: present in moment— one note: sound of the plurality of the legacy.
We enjoyed discussing this, the singularity of being called, outside of a crowd of memories, hints of forbears, history...
In Merwin’s “Mapmaker” he references Vermeer’s geographer — we didn’t discuss the nuances of the differences — of what does a map maker does in the 20th c. that is different from what a geographer in the late 17th c. would do. Vermeer used the same light from a corner window in his paintings; For us, the window frames the inside man and map, outside world: interiority/exteriority ( and the shape of the cosmos imagined in 1668–1669).
John brought up this story: Richard Powers: Galatea 2.2
2 patients – the one by window tells what he sees. Day after day, a story evolves. One day he falls extremely sick and the second patient doesn’t say anything, because he wants the “window bed”. When he is moved there all he sees is a brick wall.
The geographer has to imagine what can’t be seen. The poem is “stilled” in the present suggestion of future, calling on the past.
In Sutton’s poem, David filled us in on the excerpt of Frost:
“between the woods and frozen lake
the darkest evening of the year.”
("stopping by woods…” was written on a June evening — maybe the longest day of the year —anniversary of the death of his daughter. allure of the darkness. giving it all up.)
Quite a bit of discussion about associations with stone… the stoning of women, the “braided stone” (Scottish, says Judith: braid= broad) - how we carve stone vs. print on it… the allusions in the beginning of the poem of glass… something to see out of, into, shattered, the desolation without any vision at all… vs. the end of the poem, in a world without glass, but a crystalline morning… and shattering of wings by wars.
We looked at the last poem from the viewpoint of the composite poem — how the poet captures a chaos, a disturbingness.
We could have discussed all afternoon.
Alan Watts... spontaneity vs. caprice...
Tony Hoagland: Characteristics of the Composite Poem:
1. it likes information; range of realms.
2. aims to capture the irregular character of experience, it’s lopsidedness and illogic. disproportionate and disheveled by design.
3. relative tonal impersonality, offering an appearance of detachment.
4. it refuses the paradigm of a singular heroic speaker... instead brings together diverse voices and sources which exist in counterpoint and , only collectively, create a field of knowing.
5. when the composite poem fails, it might be from an over-indulgence of randomness... susceptible to a lack of progression or to passivity. ideally the parts must complicate and activate each other.
p. 38 – Tony Hoagland – Towards a Postmodern Humanism – APR Mar/Apr. 2014
Monday, August 4, 2014
poems for August 11
The Tuft of Flowers by Robert Frost (to read and think about -- we won't have time to discuss it but do thank David for mentioning it 8/4!)
Yhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173540
Poems allow us to project, lay claim on the world, without being chained to any one truth. I look forward to our discussion and sharing of next weeks poems.
Living With The News by W.S. Merwin
(We grow accustomed to the Dark) #428 - Emily Dickinson
What Gorgeous Thing by Mary Oliver
A Poem – by Wisława Szymborska
Before and Every After – Marianne Boruch
**
What does it mean to "be the daylight" and what is darkness?
The first poem with its suspended lines, can be read line by line slowly, or one voice in a big whoosh...
What news? That someone has died, that your moment of death is coming near, or some news that grabs you with a tenacious immediacy.. In this 17 line poem, only the second line does not complete a phrase.
tide keeps///
coming in faster
Who is this someone, who happens to be me? The poem gives clues that lead into different directions. We particularly enjoyed "real estate" as in reading the paper, right before the obits.
**
Dickinson with her inconsistent Capitals, M-dashes, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, allows us to enter, or exit darkness, as one person remarked, rather like the experience of a bi-polar person.
**
Juxtaposed next to Oliver, the question of craft comes up -- which for Oliver is whether it is strong enough to save her from sentimentality"?
Some thought yes. One thought no. Look at the proposed revision and discussion below.
— ing rings through out the poem, even in “pin…k” She is not preaching, and uses the G of gorgeous, a rather flamboyant word, to end with G of grateful at the end.
With condensing, does this poem reach the reader more directly?
"I do not know what
the bluebird keeps saying.
Sometimes
it seems the only thing in the world
that is without dark thoughts
without questions."
**
Szymborska's poem brought up a host of ideas with her use of double negatives and perspective of an "otherworld".
Who is "you" -- and what miracle is it that there is nothing/usual in being brought together.
Carmin shared a poem her sister had written, written at her memorial. The gist is this:
“Our moment in time.”
In a nanosecond, (3 hundred billion+ years from now)
will your molecules and mine collect together into you and me again
for a brief reunion...
and wonder if we’ve lived countless other lives before and after.
Other thoughts:
form is emptiness and emptiness is form... nothingness and everythingness...
Robert Graves: inside out ...
John brought up “The night inside me.” Jackson Brown...
"I used to lay out in a field under the Milky Way
With everything that I was feeling that I could not say
With every doubt and every sorrow that was in my way
Tearing around inside my head like it was there to stay
Night in my eyes, the night inside me
There where the shadows and the night could hide me
Night in my eyes
Sky full of stars turning over me
Waiting for night to set me free"...
when we exist we occupy space... miracle that we disappear back into non-space...
title: ars poetica... how a poem comes into being... Chapman’s Homer. David quoted the final stanza of Frost's Desert Places:
"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."
Judith quoted Pascal and we could have continued all afternoon.
**
The final poem
is complex, rife with the history of the world. Kathy kindly shared a context of medical students brought into contact with art. It is the kind of poem that needs a group -- for instance... Bertram is not Bertrand in the "what would Russell do" -- but I shared the quotations on this site which shed their light on the poem.
http://www.mkpotter.com/2012/05/what-would-bertrand-russell-do.html
Much more to say on all the poems, but as ever, a quite enjoyable read aloud and discussion.
Yhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173540
Poems allow us to project, lay claim on the world, without being chained to any one truth. I look forward to our discussion and sharing of next weeks poems.
Living With The News by W.S. Merwin
(We grow accustomed to the Dark) #428 - Emily Dickinson
What Gorgeous Thing by Mary Oliver
A Poem – by Wisława Szymborska
Before and Every After – Marianne Boruch
**
What does it mean to "be the daylight" and what is darkness?
The first poem with its suspended lines, can be read line by line slowly, or one voice in a big whoosh...
What news? That someone has died, that your moment of death is coming near, or some news that grabs you with a tenacious immediacy.. In this 17 line poem, only the second line does not complete a phrase.
tide keeps///
coming in faster
Who is this someone, who happens to be me? The poem gives clues that lead into different directions. We particularly enjoyed "real estate" as in reading the paper, right before the obits.
**
Dickinson with her inconsistent Capitals, M-dashes, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, allows us to enter, or exit darkness, as one person remarked, rather like the experience of a bi-polar person.
**
Juxtaposed next to Oliver, the question of craft comes up -- which for Oliver is whether it is strong enough to save her from sentimentality"?
Some thought yes. One thought no. Look at the proposed revision and discussion below.
— ing rings through out the poem, even in “pin…k” She is not preaching, and uses the G of gorgeous, a rather flamboyant word, to end with G of grateful at the end.
With condensing, does this poem reach the reader more directly?
"I do not know what
the bluebird keeps saying.
Sometimes
it seems the only thing in the world
that is without dark thoughts
without questions."
**
Szymborska's poem brought up a host of ideas with her use of double negatives and perspective of an "otherworld".
Who is "you" -- and what miracle is it that there is nothing/usual in being brought together.
Carmin shared a poem her sister had written, written at her memorial. The gist is this:
“Our moment in time.”
In a nanosecond, (3 hundred billion+ years from now)
will your molecules and mine collect together into you and me again
for a brief reunion...
and wonder if we’ve lived countless other lives before and after.
Other thoughts:
form is emptiness and emptiness is form... nothingness and everythingness...
Robert Graves: inside out ...
John brought up “The night inside me.” Jackson Brown...
"I used to lay out in a field under the Milky Way
With everything that I was feeling that I could not say
With every doubt and every sorrow that was in my way
Tearing around inside my head like it was there to stay
Night in my eyes, the night inside me
There where the shadows and the night could hide me
Night in my eyes
Sky full of stars turning over me
Waiting for night to set me free"...
when we exist we occupy space... miracle that we disappear back into non-space...
title: ars poetica... how a poem comes into being... Chapman’s Homer. David quoted the final stanza of Frost's Desert Places:
"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."
Judith quoted Pascal and we could have continued all afternoon.
**
The final poem
is complex, rife with the history of the world. Kathy kindly shared a context of medical students brought into contact with art. It is the kind of poem that needs a group -- for instance... Bertram is not Bertrand in the "what would Russell do" -- but I shared the quotations on this site which shed their light on the poem.
http://www.mkpotter.com/2012/05/what-would-bertrand-russell-do.html
Much more to say on all the poems, but as ever, a quite enjoyable read aloud and discussion.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Poems for August 4
By Charles Wright:
The first four from Sestets, publ. in 2009
-- On the Night of the First Snow,
Thinking About Tennessee
-- Autumn Thoughts on the East Fork
-- Consolation and the Order of the World
-- Little Meditation Above the Meadow
-- Envoi (from Negative Blue -- the last trilogy of trilogies!)
Happiness by Raymond Carver
Last August Hours Before the Year 2000 by Naomi Shihab Nye
For the reading of the Charles Wright sestets, we first read each line, paying attention to the capital letters to know which was "dropped line" and which a new line; then we read syntactically, in sentences.
For Charles Wright, as he explained in an interview with the Paris Review, his writing is "gists and piths", addressing three things: landscape (not nature, which is sentimental) as a tool for the divine (a tool for transcendence), language and the idea of God.
His ability to bridge the conversational style with a dropped line, allows a long line without sounding prosy,
and "to keep the line from breaking under its own weight".
Here is the prose version in 3 sentences.
It's dark now, the horses have had their half-apple, mist and rain, down in the meadow just a few degrees above snow.
I stand in front of the propane stove, warming my legs.
If the door were open, I'd listen to creek water and think I heard voices from long ago, distinct and calling me home.
Statement, a little mystery about "a few degrees above snow" -- linking to the snow in the title, and perhaps an association to Villon, "où song les neighs d'antan", which actually my computer wants to change to "neighs" --
echoes of American horses to a dead French poet from the 15th century sighing about "yesteryear".
Straight forward S-V format with an "if" clause. Progression of pluperfect; past, the "if" embracing imperfect and condition, ending in the present.
With the dropped line, "mist and rain" connects visually to "distinct and calling me home" but also contains its own echo:
mist and rain bridge the horses... the present tense of the title, and this echo of "time past".
He carries this idea through with the effect of this in the second dropped line.
The poem demonstrates so beautifully, yet without clobbering the reader by telling, the feel of how the past works in us, like a mirror where we feel there, but then not.
A sibilant quality threaded by "st" in each line (mist, stand, stove, distinct, past) mimics a wet hissing on the stove as snow/memory melts.
Is the propane stove present tense, or is it the stove in his mind's eye, back in time, in Tennessee, or both at once. The middle sentence bridges both past, possibility, and present.
**
So, each sestet, read carefully in two ways begins to yield a multiplicity of meanings, landscape as suggestion, music and substance (perceptions of the 10,000 things of the physical world), language as a voice box of present and past, seen, unseen.
Wright explains his belief that the world is composed of things, not language, which exude an aura of language like mist. "the poet's occupation is to navigate that mist." He humbly admits that he used to talk about his poems when he didn't know what he was doing, but now, he knows he will never know what he is doing. They are what they are.
I would add, his style signals to each reader, a beautiful balance of tactile/metaphorical, abstract/concrete,
in what could be called the "metaphysics of the quotidian.
**
Autumn Thoughts:
Time, boredom, contentment -- and a line which led us to ponder "engendering" --
"Contentment embraces me
With its spidery arms and its spade-tipped, engendering tail"
But the "sentence" starts with "But in between" -- which reminds me of the French expression,
"entre chien et loup" -- dusk, between the familiar dog, and the lurking danger of possible wolf."
Chinese characters are not simple -- and his insistence that they should be one to capture this
in-between time, when "evening drains the seen world into the unseen"... where seemingly the speaker of the poem enters the actual moment, which allows an alternative to a perception ensconced in boredom.
**
Consolation and the Order of the World:
We had a lot of fun with this poem, looking at the tone which seems arrogant, the wonderful internal rhyme, the image of a camera (focus drops a stop, flash fails, snaps), and the powerful ending image where darkness thrusts in-- some thought, to give the vain their "come-uppance".
"Fir shadows needling out of the woods,
night with its full syringe."
The title bears some thought -- who finds what "consolation" and "order of the world" -- how to understand?
The topic of lines that are hard to memorize came up: sometimes, something is hard to memorize, because it is not understood, or because of the sound and rhythm, or it surprises us out of a "order of the world" that allows us
to find a slot. There is no one answer to this, just as there is no one way to understand, and we are chided
about our own inevitable hubris.
In Envoi, Wright addresses this again: the ending repeats-- but you realize the speaker of the poem is mirroring a speaker of the poem...
"I like the whole thing, but this bit is my favorite:
My life has become like that,
Half uninterpretable, half new geography…
In a way I can’t fully articulate, I know what he means…"
**
Things have destinies, of course,
on-lines and downloads mysterious as the language of clouds.
My life has become like that,
Half uninterpretable, half new geography,
Landscapes stilled and adumbrated, memory unratcheting, outlined...
Its voice-over not my own.
** The "in-between part" "As for me..." allows us as reader to imagine what we would say...
We ended with Carver's "Happiness" --
I love how the poem starts in an in between time...and sets mood to pay attention. I chuckle at the second sentence:
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
Then comes a snapshot of a moment, where happiness can be felt, but is not pegged until put into words in retrospect.
"Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it."
David brought up the role of projection -- how the observation of the two boys is a claim the speaker makes that cannot be proven. We don't know that the boys are experiencing happiness -- but we do know the speaker feels happiness, because of them.
We ran out of time for a full discussion of "Last August Hours Before the Year 2000" by Naomi Shihab Nye--
but I was glad people brought up all the panic of 1999, and projections of "end of the world" stuff.
How reassuring to delight in August. She ends with the idea of Wright's layers...a bit like an incantation and advice for an afterlife in his "Appalachian Book of the Dead" ... but a reminder again, Paradise is here,
not something to be yearned for.
"I want to know the root goes deep
on all that came before,
you could lay a soaker hose across
your whole life and know
there was something
under layers of packed summer earth
and dry blown grass
to moisten."
The first four from Sestets, publ. in 2009
-- On the Night of the First Snow,
Thinking About Tennessee
-- Autumn Thoughts on the East Fork
-- Consolation and the Order of the World
-- Little Meditation Above the Meadow
-- Envoi (from Negative Blue -- the last trilogy of trilogies!)
Happiness by Raymond Carver
Last August Hours Before the Year 2000 by Naomi Shihab Nye
For the reading of the Charles Wright sestets, we first read each line, paying attention to the capital letters to know which was "dropped line" and which a new line; then we read syntactically, in sentences.
For Charles Wright, as he explained in an interview with the Paris Review, his writing is "gists and piths", addressing three things: landscape (not nature, which is sentimental) as a tool for the divine (a tool for transcendence), language and the idea of God.
His ability to bridge the conversational style with a dropped line, allows a long line without sounding prosy,
and "to keep the line from breaking under its own weight".
Here is the prose version in 3 sentences.
It's dark now, the horses have had their half-apple, mist and rain, down in the meadow just a few degrees above snow.
I stand in front of the propane stove, warming my legs.
If the door were open, I'd listen to creek water and think I heard voices from long ago, distinct and calling me home.
Statement, a little mystery about "a few degrees above snow" -- linking to the snow in the title, and perhaps an association to Villon, "où song les neighs d'antan", which actually my computer wants to change to "neighs" --
echoes of American horses to a dead French poet from the 15th century sighing about "yesteryear".
Straight forward S-V format with an "if" clause. Progression of pluperfect; past, the "if" embracing imperfect and condition, ending in the present.
With the dropped line, "mist and rain" connects visually to "distinct and calling me home" but also contains its own echo:
mist and rain bridge the horses... the present tense of the title, and this echo of "time past".
He carries this idea through with the effect of this in the second dropped line.
The poem demonstrates so beautifully, yet without clobbering the reader by telling, the feel of how the past works in us, like a mirror where we feel there, but then not.
A sibilant quality threaded by "st" in each line (mist, stand, stove, distinct, past) mimics a wet hissing on the stove as snow/memory melts.
Is the propane stove present tense, or is it the stove in his mind's eye, back in time, in Tennessee, or both at once. The middle sentence bridges both past, possibility, and present.
**
So, each sestet, read carefully in two ways begins to yield a multiplicity of meanings, landscape as suggestion, music and substance (perceptions of the 10,000 things of the physical world), language as a voice box of present and past, seen, unseen.
Wright explains his belief that the world is composed of things, not language, which exude an aura of language like mist. "the poet's occupation is to navigate that mist." He humbly admits that he used to talk about his poems when he didn't know what he was doing, but now, he knows he will never know what he is doing. They are what they are.
I would add, his style signals to each reader, a beautiful balance of tactile/metaphorical, abstract/concrete,
in what could be called the "metaphysics of the quotidian.
**
Autumn Thoughts:
Time, boredom, contentment -- and a line which led us to ponder "engendering" --
"Contentment embraces me
With its spidery arms and its spade-tipped, engendering tail"
But the "sentence" starts with "But in between" -- which reminds me of the French expression,
"entre chien et loup" -- dusk, between the familiar dog, and the lurking danger of possible wolf."
Chinese characters are not simple -- and his insistence that they should be one to capture this
in-between time, when "evening drains the seen world into the unseen"... where seemingly the speaker of the poem enters the actual moment, which allows an alternative to a perception ensconced in boredom.
**
Consolation and the Order of the World:
We had a lot of fun with this poem, looking at the tone which seems arrogant, the wonderful internal rhyme, the image of a camera (focus drops a stop, flash fails, snaps), and the powerful ending image where darkness thrusts in-- some thought, to give the vain their "come-uppance".
"Fir shadows needling out of the woods,
night with its full syringe."
The title bears some thought -- who finds what "consolation" and "order of the world" -- how to understand?
The topic of lines that are hard to memorize came up: sometimes, something is hard to memorize, because it is not understood, or because of the sound and rhythm, or it surprises us out of a "order of the world" that allows us
to find a slot. There is no one answer to this, just as there is no one way to understand, and we are chided
about our own inevitable hubris.
In Envoi, Wright addresses this again: the ending repeats-- but you realize the speaker of the poem is mirroring a speaker of the poem...
"I like the whole thing, but this bit is my favorite:
My life has become like that,
Half uninterpretable, half new geography…
In a way I can’t fully articulate, I know what he means…"
**
Things have destinies, of course,
on-lines and downloads mysterious as the language of clouds.
My life has become like that,
Half uninterpretable, half new geography,
Landscapes stilled and adumbrated, memory unratcheting, outlined...
Its voice-over not my own.
** The "in-between part" "As for me..." allows us as reader to imagine what we would say...
We ended with Carver's "Happiness" --
I love how the poem starts in an in between time...and sets mood to pay attention. I chuckle at the second sentence:
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
Then comes a snapshot of a moment, where happiness can be felt, but is not pegged until put into words in retrospect.
"Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it."
David brought up the role of projection -- how the observation of the two boys is a claim the speaker makes that cannot be proven. We don't know that the boys are experiencing happiness -- but we do know the speaker feels happiness, because of them.
We ran out of time for a full discussion of "Last August Hours Before the Year 2000" by Naomi Shihab Nye--
but I was glad people brought up all the panic of 1999, and projections of "end of the world" stuff.
How reassuring to delight in August. She ends with the idea of Wright's layers...a bit like an incantation and advice for an afterlife in his "Appalachian Book of the Dead" ... but a reminder again, Paradise is here,
not something to be yearned for.
"I want to know the root goes deep
on all that came before,
you could lay a soaker hose across
your whole life and know
there was something
under layers of packed summer earth
and dry blown grass
to moisten."
Monday, July 21, 2014
July 21, 2014~
I've missed O Pen -- and so grateful that the group wanted to carry on and self-propel over the summer. Next week, David and Judith will carry on, and then I resume August 4 as moderator. What an honor.
There is something sacred about reading words of poems aloud -- like prayers.
Today, we shared "humorous" poems each reading aloud individual picks. In no particular order:
David: "In a Poetry Workshop" by Richard Wakefield
Joyce: "The Cure" by Ginger Andrews
me: "Immigrant Picnic" by Gregory Djanikian
Kathy: "A Downward Look" and "The Candid Decorator" by James Merrill
Elaine R: "last poem in the world" (2-liner by Hayden Carruth; "Local 328" by Michal Donaghy; and "Denial" by David Lehman.
Judith: How the Helpmate of Blue-Beard Made Free with a Door -- Guy Wetmore Carryl
Susan and Don both picked William Carlos Williams, "This is just to say"
Don added fresh plums and "Variations on a Theme by WCW" by Kenneth Koch.
Bernie brought in examples from "Haiku Humor" by Stephen Addiss w/ Fumiko and Akira Yamamoto as well as Sharon Olds, "Self-Portrait, Rear View".
Cindy: "No Place to Go" by Edgar Guest
Carmen: "Gold Rush" by Jan Boyley Taupe (another 2 liner) and Japanese microsoft error messages as haiku expressing a universal, timeless message, powerful insight through extreme brevity.
Elaine O. "The Lived In Look" by Marge Piercy
Martin: I met my grandmother in Italy
**
Can you guess which line came from which poem?
"I find her where I least expect her"
"This is the sweet imprint of your life/and loves upon the rumpled sheets/of your days."
"First snow, then silence.
This thousand-dollar screen dies
so beautifully."
"... the joy of having/no place to go."
"-- even the word saddlebags has a/smooth calfskin feel to it."
"Taking a nap / looks more refined / when holding a book."
"Forgive me, I simply do not know what I am doing."
"so sweet / and so cold"
"But here's the truth unqualified, / her husband wasn't mollified / her head is in the bloody/ little study/ with the rest."
"An Irish doorman foresees his death,/waves ad runs to help it with its packages."
"... On high, the love
... still radiates new projects as old as day."
"you could grow nuts listening to us,"
"she's been suffering/from a bad case of the mulleygrubs."
**
We spoke at the end of Why is something funny? Why does linking familiar with unfamiliar make us laugh?
Is it only incongruity? infractions? predictable form with unpredictable message.
Regardless, it was great sharing and a wonderful time.
There is something sacred about reading words of poems aloud -- like prayers.
Today, we shared "humorous" poems each reading aloud individual picks. In no particular order:
David: "In a Poetry Workshop" by Richard Wakefield
Joyce: "The Cure" by Ginger Andrews
me: "Immigrant Picnic" by Gregory Djanikian
Kathy: "A Downward Look" and "The Candid Decorator" by James Merrill
Elaine R: "last poem in the world" (2-liner by Hayden Carruth; "Local 328" by Michal Donaghy; and "Denial" by David Lehman.
Judith: How the Helpmate of Blue-Beard Made Free with a Door -- Guy Wetmore Carryl
Susan and Don both picked William Carlos Williams, "This is just to say"
Don added fresh plums and "Variations on a Theme by WCW" by Kenneth Koch.
Bernie brought in examples from "Haiku Humor" by Stephen Addiss w/ Fumiko and Akira Yamamoto as well as Sharon Olds, "Self-Portrait, Rear View".
Cindy: "No Place to Go" by Edgar Guest
Carmen: "Gold Rush" by Jan Boyley Taupe (another 2 liner) and Japanese microsoft error messages as haiku expressing a universal, timeless message, powerful insight through extreme brevity.
Elaine O. "The Lived In Look" by Marge Piercy
Martin: I met my grandmother in Italy
**
Can you guess which line came from which poem?
"I find her where I least expect her"
"This is the sweet imprint of your life/and loves upon the rumpled sheets/of your days."
"First snow, then silence.
This thousand-dollar screen dies
so beautifully."
"... the joy of having/no place to go."
"-- even the word saddlebags has a/smooth calfskin feel to it."
"Taking a nap / looks more refined / when holding a book."
"Forgive me, I simply do not know what I am doing."
"so sweet / and so cold"
"But here's the truth unqualified, / her husband wasn't mollified / her head is in the bloody/ little study/ with the rest."
"An Irish doorman foresees his death,/waves ad runs to help it with its packages."
"... On high, the love
... still radiates new projects as old as day."
"you could grow nuts listening to us,"
"she's been suffering/from a bad case of the mulleygrubs."
**
We spoke at the end of Why is something funny? Why does linking familiar with unfamiliar make us laugh?
Is it only incongruity? infractions? predictable form with unpredictable message.
Regardless, it was great sharing and a wonderful time.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Poems for Lunch May 29
To my Mother by Mahmoud Darwish
For Once Then Something by Robert Frost
Affirmative Action Babies by Amaud Jamaul Johnson
Map by Wislawa Szymborska
Choices by Nikki Giovanni
Twigs by Taha Muhammad Ali
Depending on which translation of the Darwish poem you use, the reference to "mother" takes on a yearning for homeland (Palestine) as opposed to the physical birth-mother.
Jim felt both poems sought approval by "the mother". The more literal translation gives a sense of great love and supplication:
Because I’ve lost my strength to stand
بدون صلاة نهارك
Without the prayer of your day
هَرِمْتُ، فردّي نجوم الطفولة
I’ve grown old… return the stars of childhood
حتى أُشارك
So I can share
صغار العصافير
with the sparrow chicks
درب الرجوع ..
The way back
I appreciate the many comments and insights of our group! Especially for the Frost poem, where logic and emotion reflect each other in the well, water. How to read,
For once (and see the divide of the 15 line poem, "Once... ) the pause after then,
something, which refers back to "a something white"... our discussion revolved around the play of time, the different ways to understand repetitions. What is the "sound of sense" in this poem -- how does it help lead the reader through ambiguity?
We didn't spend long on the Affirmative Action Babies-- picked up on the sarcastic tone,general bitterness and tried to imagine where the poem takes place -- perhaps Mexico, the south west... a metaphorical Ellis Island...
How much more refreshing to read the Szymborska, which teases us, yet giving us depth in which to consider how we trade reality for a map, given adverbs such as "kindly blue" and "great-heartedly/good-naturedly spread" a counter-world without access to"vicious truth". What do we record? remember? Maps are temporary records (I mentioned the map which clicks through 1,000 years of history and the shifting boundaries which reflect rise and fall of power) and indeed, the who we are where we are on them indicated by tiny black pinpricks, of very tiny consequence indeed.
We ended on Giovanni's poem, discussing the conscious/unconscious, and poetry as a way for us to survive, maintaining feeling... One of Maya Angelou's quotes
came to mind --
People will forget what you said/People will forget what you did/
But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Thus concludes a wonderful season of sharing poetry -- to resume September 4th.
For Once Then Something by Robert Frost
Affirmative Action Babies by Amaud Jamaul Johnson
Map by Wislawa Szymborska
Choices by Nikki Giovanni
Twigs by Taha Muhammad Ali
Depending on which translation of the Darwish poem you use, the reference to "mother" takes on a yearning for homeland (Palestine) as opposed to the physical birth-mother.
Jim felt both poems sought approval by "the mother". The more literal translation gives a sense of great love and supplication:
Because I’ve lost my strength to stand
بدون صلاة نهارك
Without the prayer of your day
هَرِمْتُ، فردّي نجوم الطفولة
I’ve grown old… return the stars of childhood
حتى أُشارك
So I can share
صغار العصافير
with the sparrow chicks
درب الرجوع ..
The way back
I appreciate the many comments and insights of our group! Especially for the Frost poem, where logic and emotion reflect each other in the well, water. How to read,
For once (and see the divide of the 15 line poem, "Once... ) the pause after then,
something, which refers back to "a something white"... our discussion revolved around the play of time, the different ways to understand repetitions. What is the "sound of sense" in this poem -- how does it help lead the reader through ambiguity?
We didn't spend long on the Affirmative Action Babies-- picked up on the sarcastic tone,general bitterness and tried to imagine where the poem takes place -- perhaps Mexico, the south west... a metaphorical Ellis Island...
How much more refreshing to read the Szymborska, which teases us, yet giving us depth in which to consider how we trade reality for a map, given adverbs such as "kindly blue" and "great-heartedly/good-naturedly spread" a counter-world without access to"vicious truth". What do we record? remember? Maps are temporary records (I mentioned the map which clicks through 1,000 years of history and the shifting boundaries which reflect rise and fall of power) and indeed, the who we are where we are on them indicated by tiny black pinpricks, of very tiny consequence indeed.
We ended on Giovanni's poem, discussing the conscious/unconscious, and poetry as a way for us to survive, maintaining feeling... One of Maya Angelou's quotes
came to mind --
People will forget what you said/People will forget what you did/
But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Thus concludes a wonderful season of sharing poetry -- to resume September 4th.
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Poems for May 19
I will be taking a break from O Pen and Poems for Lunch over the summer,
back in August for O Pen, and in September for Poems for Lunch at Rundel.
Do mark your calendars: Sunday, October 5, at 2 pm, I will be giving a powerpoint talk, "When Painting Speaks and Poetry Paints" using some of my Ekphrastic Poetry.
I share these poems for our last meeting before I return in August:
Images: 1490, Bosch; 2012 Nikon
In Mother's Kitchen
Girl with Gingerale
Visiting the Magritte Museum
Plane and Boy
Gathering
**
for discussion:
One Hand in the Fig Basket by Catherine Blauvelt (winner of Boston Review Discovery" Poetry Contest. May 01, 2013
Revenge by Taha Muhammad Ali,
translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin
Each poet comes with his baggage of culture, experience, his personality and style, his choices of words and sounds to create a spoken tapestry to share a glimpse of what it is to be alive and human. And in our group, each of us responds with our baggage of culture, experience, personality and style to these choices in different ways, sharing what each poem gives to us. And is that not the greatest gift that draws us to feel amazement?
I first heard Taha Muhammad Ali and Peter Cole in Seattle in 2007 when we were there on sabbatical. He, like Naomi Shihab Nye, who I had meet in 2005, and met also in Seattle that year, gave me courage to believe in the power of poetry and to work for my MFA at Pacific University. If we could all take the time to see each other, imagine the peace of understanding.
**
The comments:
sincerity in every word-- and yet associations abounded:
Kipling's story, "Dayspring mishandled" (http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_dayspring1.htm) which tells of rivalry of two men
and why the one who worked so hard for revenge refused at the end to reveal his scheme.
The more we addressed the complexity of revenge, tied to our human need for connection, the more we fell into specifics: how we punish with prison, how with programs such as "Pathways to Peace" they still fail to save the youth who will follow the same path of those who respond to their anger with violence.
We spoke of the spirit of the Middle East, the gentle aspects of the Arab culture, and the various attempts by prophets (Navi) to bring peace... yet another modern version of Gabriel speaking to Mohammad...
I shared the poem "Twig" for yet another inspiring poem by Taha Muhammad Ali-- I believe his last sentence:
"After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we’ve done,
and on all that we’ve longed for,
and all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to turn to dust
within us."
back in August for O Pen, and in September for Poems for Lunch at Rundel.
Do mark your calendars: Sunday, October 5, at 2 pm, I will be giving a powerpoint talk, "When Painting Speaks and Poetry Paints" using some of my Ekphrastic Poetry.
I share these poems for our last meeting before I return in August:
Images: 1490, Bosch; 2012 Nikon
In Mother's Kitchen
Girl with Gingerale
Visiting the Magritte Museum
Plane and Boy
Gathering
**
for discussion:
One Hand in the Fig Basket by Catherine Blauvelt (winner of Boston Review Discovery" Poetry Contest. May 01, 2013
Revenge by Taha Muhammad Ali,
translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin
Each poet comes with his baggage of culture, experience, his personality and style, his choices of words and sounds to create a spoken tapestry to share a glimpse of what it is to be alive and human. And in our group, each of us responds with our baggage of culture, experience, personality and style to these choices in different ways, sharing what each poem gives to us. And is that not the greatest gift that draws us to feel amazement?
I first heard Taha Muhammad Ali and Peter Cole in Seattle in 2007 when we were there on sabbatical. He, like Naomi Shihab Nye, who I had meet in 2005, and met also in Seattle that year, gave me courage to believe in the power of poetry and to work for my MFA at Pacific University. If we could all take the time to see each other, imagine the peace of understanding.
**
The comments:
sincerity in every word-- and yet associations abounded:
Kipling's story, "Dayspring mishandled" (http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_dayspring1.htm) which tells of rivalry of two men
and why the one who worked so hard for revenge refused at the end to reveal his scheme.
The more we addressed the complexity of revenge, tied to our human need for connection, the more we fell into specifics: how we punish with prison, how with programs such as "Pathways to Peace" they still fail to save the youth who will follow the same path of those who respond to their anger with violence.
We spoke of the spirit of the Middle East, the gentle aspects of the Arab culture, and the various attempts by prophets (Navi) to bring peace... yet another modern version of Gabriel speaking to Mohammad...
I shared the poem "Twig" for yet another inspiring poem by Taha Muhammad Ali-- I believe his last sentence:
"After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we’ve done,
and on all that we’ve longed for,
and all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to turn to dust
within us."
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Poems for Lunch May 15 + 22
to finish up from May 8: /Rain Song, by Mattawa (see May 12)
The Pregnancy of Words by Bob Hicok
from the sequence The Word and the World by Gregory Orr “There’s a Japanese term...”
They Flee From Me by Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sonnet 135 by William Shakespeare
For the Anniversary of My Death by W. S. Merwin
for May 22
Hard Life with Memory Wisława Szymborska, (see May 12)
Mirror by Sylvia Plath (see May 12)
Autobiography by John Skoyles
Triolet with Pachyderm by Hayley Leithauser
Northern Motive by Philip Levine
I will not be there to comment on the Skoyles, Leithauser and Levine May 22.
The first question I posed after we slid through the Hicok poem, sentence by sentence, was how the poem left you feeling. It took a bit of work for some to slide through the homonyms, the double possibility of pronouncing "live" as verb and adjective; "read" as present or past tense, the backwards spellings. The sound and play is very strong, but it was only after discussing how the poem provides a commentary on words, that Nancy, new to the group, pinned an aggressive tone, with a sense of raping, especially getting to the anal egg. Is the poem purposely arrogant, or pretending to shrug off
responsibility as we "tinker and smash", and ignore that we have no clue to our nature as a disaster. Finally, the crux of the poem reminds us that words need a "u" an audience to hear them, discuss them.
For the Word and the World, a very different approach to word, and use of a foreign language. Sabi, which if from the Japanese Wabi-Sabi meaning transience and imperfection, would be the loneliness of things. In the final stanza he does not repeat "the heart doesn't change" -- but repeats the loneliness of things.
Poets as connectors, poems as needing "midwifery"-- a bit of gestation as we read them line by line, and discuss.
Because "newfangled" came from the Wyatt, we look at the Wyatt poem which addresses love, the fickleness of those who give it. We find it is no dream, and yet, it feels
dreamlike "through gentleness into a strange fashion of forsaking".
And from Wyatt, to whom the Ballad of Will is uncertainly attributed, why not Shakespeare's sonnet where "will" is not only desire, but filled with bawdy puns and definitions of "will" and Will as male and female sex organs, lust, obstinacy, and the name of William.
We ended on Merwin's poem, "For the Anniversary of my Death".
Such an unusual title -- to celebrate something which has not yet happened.
What is beloved is yet to be discovered. How do the stanzas bow to each other?
Role of "And" -- the suspension of each line. We addressed the second stanza as a way of summarizing Merwin's biography, but also the distraction of "and the love of one woman/and the shamelessness of men which could take a biblic turn.
coupled with the other two "And"s, one with the final line; one in the first stanza
"And the silence will set out."
We did note the 3 days (time between death and resurrection) and wren. The Celtic symbolism would suggest that since both male and female birds take part in raising the young, they represent a fresh, innovative angle... and since they don't rest on their laurels, they further suggest that progress is made each day.
And so,with the wren in mind, we bowed, with humility, deference, to the unknown, to the one thing that is true to all, yet not yet clear and may (in the sense of perhaps might) never be known.
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