Final Session Considers Stories

In our last meeting for 2015 we considered what else has been lost--the art of storytelling, as explained by Stephen Dunn. "Stories" is in part a commentary on television but mostly an evoking of telling details from the late 40's and early 50's, that innocent time in which most of us came of age. What the hey. Sadly, all the grandfathers died.

Something that has not been lost is the powerful imprint of family and of prejudice on the work of Natasha Trethewey, as contained in "Southern Gothic," part of the collection Native Guard which was published in 2007 and won the Pulitzer. To repeat: if you live in the South and read poetry, you are required to be familiar with the work of Trethewey.

Again, I wish you health and happiness, good reading and good writing, until we reconvene in January 2016.

The Connectedness of Things

Week #5 brought us two poets new to us, Stanley Plumly and Faith Shearin. We pondered "those accidents of timing that greets the very nature/ of artifice"--are things connected or not, why do things happen as they do, and what indeed do we think of the "man standing at the dead end of the pier"? With his waving arms he may be tolling a bell. A good example of a poem that seems at first reading easier than it actually is.

With Shearin, we grieve and hope for the luckless geese. There is the casual tone of a neighborhood and a nice tension between "the wet nest of death" and "the soft, heavenly weather of arrival."

We look ahead to our last session and the Stories and Histories of Stephen Dunn and Natasha Trethewey. We might well ask: What else has been lost.

What Has Been Lost

In Week #4 we read powerful poems by Eavan Boland and David Ferry, which seemed to be, on one level, a consideration of writing and communication but, more importantly, spoke in elegiac terms of what has been lost.

David Ferry offers us a very long poem without stanza breaks but, it appears, three distinct sections: first, observations of the lake, outside his office window in Massachusetts, which leads the poet to language ("The surface of the page is like lake water"), and finally to the shortest and strongest section, beginning with "When, moments after she died..." And we learn what has been lost.

Boland leads us forward and backward in space and time and among unidentified people. We are aware of fields and memory occurring twice in consecutive lines, that "an art is lost when it no longer knows/How to teach a sorrow to speak..." We wonder who are the they who will never see the edge of the new town, and what is meant by it in "is it still there?"  One wants to guess the land, the past, Ireland--but one might be wrong.

In "Top of the Stove" David Baker said, "Language remains." That a poem does not admit of paraphrasing, that it contains more illusions and images than one can grasp--these only make it a stronger poem. That is part of the beauty and power of poetry.

Week #3: The Sound of Music

George Bilgere showed us again how to use a light, even amusing tone to make a very serious point. In "Tosca" we considered three couples: the narrator and his sister, Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi, and, of course, the narrator's parents. Two "lovely, cornball" melodramas--even Tosca has begun to weep.

Donald Justice gives us "quiet but compelling insights" into the shy boy at his piano lesson. We noted that nothing is said of the teacher (except for the "mysterious scents" of the teacher's quarters). A very hopeful poem--the ritual of dealing with "the dread Czerny" has left us "Stupid and wild with love equally for the storms / of C# minor and the calms of C."

As we look to the wonderful and challenging poems of Eavan Boland and David Ferry for this Thursday, ask yourself "What has been lost?"

Poems of P.K. Page Read in Week #2

In our second session we read a poet new to us, P.K. (Patricia Kathleen) Page, a Canadian author of some 30 books, as well as an artist whose work hangs in the National Gallery of Canada. Her poetry is praised for "wit, wisdom, moral sensibility and a passionate yet objective view of human nature and relationships." We particularly enjoyed "The Selves" and "Funeral Mass," which reminded us of a poem by Jane Kenyon but took on also the broader topic of "the sacred light of the church."

The full quotation I had meant to read spoke of her as "talented, privileged, outwardly sturdy and elegant, inwardly delicate and searching."

Appetites for Poetry Whetted in Week #1

Our Spring term began with poems related to cooking. In Paul Violi's "Counterman" we saw that a very funny poem can also make serious points about listening and communicating. We explored the question of how many voices we hear in the poem, and we see Violi's knowledge of architecture used to make a comic and perhaps social point. Next!

David Baker, whose "Never-Ending Birds" we had enjoyed in a previous term, conveys a strong sense of time in talking about a relationship, a period in one's life, about memory and nostalgia--language remains.

In Session #2 we will take up the work of the Canadian poet P.K. Page.

Links for further reading:

Paul Violi obit from New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/books/paul-violi-poet-dies-at-66.html?_r=0

Disappearances and Reappearances in Week #5

We found in David Harsent's "Ghosts" a challenging and fascinating poem with the shades of the departed returning with "tokens of themselves," to find a Peaceable Kingdom turned upside down ("horizons gone askew"), with "long-lost hopes," personal and societal goals abandoned, a "matchless sorrow, as would, for sure/stop the heart of whoever it is they take you for." The dead hope we would recognize them, and they us. The "dew of death" reminded us of Franz Wright's visit to Zanesville, Ohio.

Charles Simic's "The One Who Disappeared" is more straightforward, but with the tantalizing riddle and the end--"as if she already carried a secret,/Or was heartbroken that she didn't have one."