Collins, Bilgere prompt smiles, thoughts

We found in Billy Collins the ever-present wit and good will, making the reader a participant in the poem, and, just at the point at which we thought it was supposed to be funny, jolting us with an image that demands further consideration (in this poem, the "ripples that move toward,/not away from, a stone tossed into a pond.").

We could readily understand why Collins chose George Bilgere for the University of Akron Poetry Award in 2002. "Grecian Temples" is enjoyed most when read aloud and rapidly, and contains much recurring imagery that, again, has a deeper point in mind. For more of George Bilgere, check http://www.georgebilgere.com/unwise.html and http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/george-bilgere

There are almost 5 million Google entries for Billy Collins. The poem by David Orr, which is a review of The Trouble with Poetry written in the style of Billy Collins, can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/books/review/08orr.html?_r=1&ref=billycollins

The very long essay by Ernest Hilbert that takes a rather negative view of Collins can be found athttp://www.cprw.com/Hilbert/collins2.htm.

On Thursday we will look at a long poem by Claudia Emerson, a recent Pulitzer winner who did a reading at Elon a few years ago.

Merwin addresses "the profound power of memory"

Some readers are put off initially by the fact that W.S. Merwin does not use punctuation, but we found in our reading of "A Single Autumn," "Near Field," and "Rain Light," three poems that address "the nature of time and mortality" that the "words wash over you" and make you concentrate on the power of the imagery. We come away convinced of the precept I was given some years back, that you cannot study contemporary poetry without considering W.S. Merwin. There are numerous articles to be found about Merwin on the internet. Here are a couple of very accessible ones:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06262009/profile.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/pdmerwin.htm

On Thursday, May 10, we will find Billy Collins, as always, hugely entertaining and with something extra to say. Likewise George Bilgere, the winner of a competition that Collins judged.

Poems by Olds, Chiasson

In the April 26 session, we continued our look at poems of family relationships, Sharon Olds' "My Son, the Man" and "Man and Derailment" by Dan Chiasson.

There was emotional power (but no "raw language") in Olds' poem, an examination of a mother's feelings as a son approaches manhood. Images of the escape artist Harry Houdini are used to convey a young person's breaking out: "Now, he looks at me/the way Houdini studied a box/to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled."

In Dan Chiasson, we knew to look for an "analytical, nervous and often literary sensibility" as he "juxtaposes childhood memories of his own father with a decidedly adult consciousness." Several of us recalled having been placed in a situation similar to that of the narrator of "Man and Derailment."

Elmer Billman's "My Cardinal" (another 'never-ending bird') showed again how a nature poem contains important personal truths, and Martha Golensky reminded us in "Ten and Counting" that the poet can present as a persuasive first-person narrative the voice of another person.

Next week we will look at three poems by W.S. Merwin, whose Pulitzer Prize citation spoke of "luminous, often tender poems that focus on the profound power of memory."

2012 Spring Term Begins with Baker, Mazzocco

The spring term began April 19 for the Shepherd's Center Poetry Group, with 15 present to consider poems by David Baker and Robert Mazzocco.

In Baker's "Never-Ending Birds," we seemed to leaf through a photo album of loss and regret, as a father reflects wistfully on a family life now in the past (probably divorce--"I have another house; now you have two"--but possibly death), illustrating nicely one critic's observation: (Baker's poetry) "is steeped in story--divorce, loss, raising a child, uncovering old worlds and new loves, poems gracefully lived in, lived through, with mystery and beauty."

Robert Mazzocco's "Dead of Night," published in 1976, is more complex and admits of more possibilities. We note in the haunting couplets repetition and variation of physical details (The oaks glisten and then are bare.) You perhaps noticed (and I neglected to point out) that there is no punctuation in this poem, a technique we will examine further when we read W.S. Merwin.

The first part of "Dead of Night" seems clear enough: the narrator, who refers to himself as "you," appears to be recounting the birth of his son's son. But "then the weather changes," and we see another delivery with blood and screaming.

What are we to make of this second delivery? Our interpretations depend in part on the identity of the people indicated by pronouns deliberately left ambiguous. If "you" is the father and "he" his son, then perhaps the narrator is reflecting on his own birth, in which his mother may have died. Or, if we relax our requirement about the pronouns, then the second birth might be that of the new father, not the grandfather. Both of these readings allow us to see a sad foreshadowing in the lines "On another June/You will be gone."

These readings, though, may not take full advantage of the powerful lines:

And you must not tell him

What you both know

That you are the son

Who has just been born

So we are left with the possibility of two births or three, or even one: we can also ask if the entire poem represents two ways of looking at the same birth: all deliveries are difficult, that being born is difficult and temporary.

But this last reading does not take into account the couplet about the narrator being gone, and the concluding lines about being close.

Fortunately Robert Mazzocco does not require of us a conclusion or consensus--a beauty of good poems is that they say different things to different people.

Next week we will continue our study of families, with two poems about parents and sons, Sharon Olds' "My Son, the Man" and Don Chiasson's "Man and Derailment."

Winter Term Concludes; Spring Begins April 19

Our winter term at the Shepherd's Center concluded February 9 with a session on Images of Place, featuring poems by Nancy Willard and W.S. Merwin.

The spring term begins April 19 at First Baptist Church. We will be looking at some familiar poets such as Billy Collins and Sharon Olds, taking a full session for W.S. Merwin, and trying out some poets new to us, including David Baker, George Bilgere and Barbara Ras.

Our mornings together were greatly enriched by the poems you brought in. We will again publish our "Shepherd's Center Anthology" at the end of the spring term.

In the meantime, a few links for your further reading:

Article on Nancy Willard:

http://www.enotes.com/nancy-willard-criticism/willard-nancy/willard-nancy-1936

On one of the new poets for spring term:

http://www.georgebilgere.com/unwise.html

Poems by group members:

http://grassminstrel.blogspot.com/

http://www.demareepoetry.blogspot.com/

Please let me know if you would like me to post links to other poets, including yourselves.

Before I forget, regarding punctuation in the poem by Merwin: we surmised correctly--the period should not have been there. The period should never be there...

Shepherd's Center Poetry: February 2012

Several of our number were away this past Thursday, and so I thought I’d post a summary of our discussion on the “Learning and Becoming” poems.

We had guessed the previous week that William Logan’s “Mysteries of the Armchair” might be a recollection of a less-than-perfect upbringing—I think we can be absolutely certain that is the case with the poems by Sharon Olds and Franz Wright. Perhaps a better title for the session would have been the last line of Olds’ poem: Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

In “I Go Back to 1937” we see her parents at their college graduations, perhaps in different parts of the country (him definitely in the west, maybe California, where Olds grew up), the father arrogant, the mother vulnerable, both unfit for the marriage and parenthood that followed. There is anger in this poem, but also regret and sadness. After all, she did want to be born; this was her life, her growing up. The poem moves rapidly, sped along by commas. Olds does not reveal much autobiographical information in her interviews, but there is reason to think this poem is based mostly on fact.

Franz Wright’s “unavailable” father was the poet James (not Charles) Wright—they constitute the only parent-child combination to win the Pulitzer for poetry. But his childhood—an absent father, a hostile stepfather and, again, a vulnerable mother—was wrapped up in books. The key seems to be the line “I get down on my knees and thank God for them”—them, referring both back to the"loneliness, boredom and terror" that formed his motivation, and ahead into the four texts mentioned in the last stanza. Du Fu was an 8th century BCE Chinese poet. The last two lines present the reverse of what we might have expected. Carolyn summarized the poem nicely with a quotation recalled from “Dead Poets Society”: we read to know that we are not alone.

“School Tie” served as a footnote to the themes discussed above.

We heard a poem by Audrey Elmore that had a lovely movement to it, noting the milestones in three generations of a family.

We had several visitors last Thursday from a class that was not meeting that day. Remember that there is no class next Thursday (February 16), and we will meet February 23 for our last session on “Images of Place.”

We have learned that the Shepherd’s Center does plan to offer the poetry group again in the spring, starting April 19 at First Baptist Church.

Icarus Myth Informs Poetry, Science, Popular Culture

In our January 26, 2012, session on Icarus poems, we found that while the three poems all involved the myth as told in Ovid, they had different emphases, with both Auden and Williams noting a "rueful recognition of the world's indifference to martyrdom" (Williams stressing the compression of later free verse and limiting himself to the Icarus painting) and Mary Jo Bang, telling a personal story of loss that we found extremely powerful.

As was suggested, the early passages of Auden's poem probably do refer to two other Bruegel poems at the museum in Brussels:

Bruegel, "Census at Bethlehem"

http://www.artbible.info/art/large/151.html

Bruegel, "Massacre of the Innocents"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BRUEGEL_the_Elder,_Pieter_-_Massacre_of_the_Innocents_(1565-7).JPG

Both paintings seem to support the notion of "the religious acceptance of suffering" that can be understood in the first part of the poem.

As was also suggested yesterday, the Icarus story has found to be useful in psychology and psychiatry, and elsewhere in contemporary culture. For further reading, you can Google "Icarus complex" ('A constellation of mental conflicts, the degree of which reflects the imbalance between a person's desire for success, achievement, or material goods, and the ability to achieve those goals; the greater the gap between the idealized goal and reality, the greater the likelihood of failure'). Interesting sidelights: the "Icarus Project", which seems to represent a very different approach to the phenomenon, "The Icarus Syndrome," a book about 'American hubris--a century of unwise military adventures, and "Icarus Complex," which seems to be a rock group.