Songs of Self and Perception Highlight Fourth Week

This week we looked into two poems that offered challenges and opportunities for insight and interpretation.

In Elizabeth Macklin's "Three Views of a Woman Inhaling," we were dazzled by images of sound, sight and small as we pondered "the mysteries," which. we concluded, referred to the wonder and necessity of sensory perception. I found an interesting critical appreciation of Macklin's work:

Elizabeth Macklin is a poet of the city. Her subjects are everywhere: inside apartment houses and alongside towering buildings, on streets and sidewalks, or beneath them, at the water's edge and in the changing heavens. Here the large questions are posed, the small joys celebrated. 'Here a loving sky's come out of a deep clear blue.' From beginning to end, in her able hands, through her painterly eye (Italics mine) and rich vision, the odd scraps of urban life are converted into a sort of Platonic dialogue of fruitful enigmas, paradoxes and playful epiphanies."

Melanie Rehak's poem held for some a deeper resonance, a love poem of a sort, certainly a carpe diem poem--reminding her and us to "seize the day"--balancing the seasons of the "sweet green park" with the individual who longs for the near-misses of her life. The trees, "certain their time has come," are aware that they are part of a perpetual cycle (their "delicate arrogance") and we have only once shot. Or is there more than that?

Regarding the title and subtitle: Clear enough why these are appropriate musings for a birthday. Modernism refers, in part, to a movement in literature and the arts following World War I that challenged the traditions and assumptions of the past--poets like Pound and Eliot; novels such as James Joyce's Ulysses; Picasso, Dali and Duchamp in art; and the composer Stravinsky are all examples. You see the phrase "the modernist impulse" in book titles, such as The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, and The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women's Poetry. So how Rehak sees 'the modernist impulse' applying to her life and narrative is still not completely clear, and may even be used ironically.

In Kathy's poem--Walt Whitman on Facebook--there is a layer of social commentary ("aisles of tuna, paper towels), but beneath that, phrased mostly as questions, a tender evoking of what is truly important.

Remember that we will not meet on Thursday, February 21. For our last session on February 28, please note two corrections to the text, in "At the Art Museum": in the sixth line, tips should read tops, and the second line in the last stanza should read "...in the Rodin courtyard."