Visits to the Exercise Room and a Motel Room

In Robert Pinsky's "A Poetry Reading at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas" we considered the place of poetry in American life--relegated to smaller quarters, poetry ("when the words all agreed to point in one direction") has the power to be uplifting and ennobling: "Maybe we could all do something brave if we tried...Our lives might change today."  We saw again that the actual source material matters far less than the poem itself, and when we suspected that a reading my Robert Bly had inspired this poem (http://www.robertbly.com/r_e_billstafford.html), it was the words of Robert Pinsky that put us in the room with Sister Faith.

In another room--a shabby motel--Peter Cooley's narrator provides telling details (red shoe under the bed...tracery of cigarette ash) and ponders "what has been ended here/or what begun"). But against the tawdry stories of past occupants of this room is the narrator's life, a long marriage with "repeated passages of middling weather." His conference is over, he is going home: a lovely and unusual tribute to a certain kind of love.

In Session #6 will will consider again the evoking of time and place, and then conclude on June 5 with our luncheon meeting at Penny Byrn in High Point.