18 posts tagged “poetry”

"OK," I ask myself, "Be honest. To what extent does my blog tell anyone who I am." What is being left out? Do I ever say mean things here? Do I ever say things that get stuck under the skin and hurt? Do I ever supply evidence to hang me? Or do I protect my cards from your prying unknown public eyes?

Question for Comment: What would you like to know that my blog does not tell you?

Adam’s Game

Now I know how Adam felt
Walking woods alone
Naming pairs that
Always came in sets
Until he began missing . . .
Or was it, brother Adam, aching
For the counterpart he’d never seen.
Indeed who was not even there yet.
I have to think that the task
Began as such a blast.

“Sun” God had said pointing at the round thing in the sky.
“Moon” God had said, pointing at another round thing later.
“Sky” God had said, pointing at the blue heavens.
“Land” God had said, pointing at the ground.
“Sea” God had said, pointing at the water.
“Ish” God said pointing at Adam

“Now you try” God must have said to his bright-eyed pupil.
“Worm” said Adam, pointing to the ground.
“Oh Good,” said God. “Jolly Good! We’ll call that little thing a worm. Do it again.”
“Zebra” Adam must have exclaimed all proud of himself.
“Zebra it is,” God laughed. “Excellent”
And then he would have pointed to a female Zebra and named that too,
Adding the feminine suffix.
“Ez” [goat] said Adam. “and ezah” God responded.
“Nesher” [eagle] said Adam. “and Nesherah” said God.
“ahh,” Adam would have noted after working through the process for several animals.
“How cool is that!” Everything has a counterpart.”
“Shual . . . and shualah” he would have said looking at a pair of foxes.
“Dob . . .” said Adam, looking at the brown furry thing in the brush.
“. . .  and dobbah” he chuckled a moment later when he caught a flash of
the same brown fur on the other side of the clearing.
“Dob and Dobba it is then,” said God laughing, “Brilliant. Exactly. Can you find another pair?”

And so the game went for the rest of the afternoon.
Oh Brother Adam, brother Adam!
When did the game stop being fun for you?
How many of those animals did you name before
The game became a search for isha?
The bone of your bone.
The flesh of your flesh.

Counterpart.

Eyes peeled, brother Adam.
Don’t settle for a barnacle.

----snip----

What if I AM the barnacle?

THE PREACHER RUMINATES BEHIND THE SERMON
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of his importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit's gaze.

But who walks with Him?--dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps--who knows?--He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

Question for Comment: Some would regard the notion of God being lonely ... or of just wanting to enjoy a beer with buddies as suspect if not sacrilegious. can you conceive of God in these terms? Why or why not?

Simple Song by Marge Piercy

When we are going towards someone we say
you are just like me
your thoughts are my brothers
word matches word
how easy to be together

when we are leaving someone we say
how strange you are
we cannot communicate
we can never agree
how hard, hard and weary to be together.

we are not different nor alike
But each strange in his leather body
sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands
and loving as an act
that cannot outlive
the open hand
the open eye
the door in the chest standing open.

The Story by Lisel Mueller

You are telling a story;
How Fire Took Water to Wife
 its always like this you say
opposites attract
They want to enter each other,
be one,
so he burns her as hard as he can
and she tries to drown him
its called love at first sight
and it doesn't hurt.
but after a while she weeps
and says he is killing her
he shouts that he cannot breath
underwater.

"The poet sheds his blood in the ring and calls the pools poems." George Barker

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the readers recognize as their own" Salvatore Quasimodo

"Poems are like dreams. In them you put what you do not know that you know.'"Adrienne Rich

Question for Comment: Are you going towards someone or leaving someone right now? Are you finding this first poem to be true? What causes people to  close that "door in the chest" the poet speaks of?

The longer I teach, the more I feel like teachers should spend more of their time learning from poets than they do. The art and skill of teaching is not to be found in technical journals so much as to be found in the conversational genius of those with gifts of communication. Listen for instance to how Robert Frost talks about how he himself communicates. There is more inspiration in a few paragraphs of this sort of reflection about the work of online educators than in any textbook I read in Grad School on the subject. I would love to get a group of online teaching faculty together to talk about the "craft" element of what they do by means of a discussion of this sort of reflection. In teaching, education is important but giftedness is essential. As the article below puts it, "It is nothing acquired but something the poet has as his birthright (July I, 1949)".

 

Frost on Frost: The Making of Poems

Reginald L. Cook

American Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1. (Mar., 1956), pp. 62-72.

 

ROBERT FROST is a gifted poet and not least among his gifts is the ability, in an Emersonian phrase, "to think on his legs." A ready, impromptu talker, he relaxes in the fields of conversation like an athlete on the playing-ground. What co-ordination, timing, and rhythm are to the athlete, gesture, allusion, anecdote, pause, and intonation are to Frost.

 

. . . Acclimatized to meditation, he takes time to examine observations and events closely. When whirl is king, he applies the counter-friction of meditation. Touching his foot to the treadle, he slows things down to his own deliberate pace. "Let's go slow so I can see the flowers," he suggests when he starts out for a ride around the Vermont countryside (July 2,1949). Experience is something that he meets deliberately.

 

Speaking for the poets, he says, "our object is to entertain you by making play with things we trust you already know.'' Making play with symbol and image, rhyme and phrasing is "the height of it-the apex'' (July 5, 1954).

 

. . . . Consequently, Frost aims not at the 5 per cent but at the 95 per cent (May 28,1948).

 

. . . Not everyone will know the difference between a said-in-jest poem and a serious one. Nor is it everyone who will see that what seems play at the surface is really play for "mortal stakes." In the poet's protocol with the world Frost trusts his reader to know either by. experience or instinctively what he is about.

 

. . . Frost's play is belied by undemonstrativeness. It consists in the art of concealing the act of disclosure. The reader has to learn how to take hints. Some readers try too hard and misread the poem; and either through obtuseness or inexperience, some never catch the poet's play. "You have to know when someone is hinting," he says (Aug. 16, 1952). . . . "Everything is hinting," Frost reminds us (Aug. 16, 1952).

 

. . . In his doctrine of play poetry is variously defined. It is "the renewal of words" (Aug. 6, 1949); it is also "the triumph of association" (July 6, 1949) by which the poet makes "unexpected connections" (July 30, 1950) in metaphor. And a poem, which he calls "a thought-felt thing" (May 10, 1952),~is something that "can't be retold except in its own words exactly" (June 29,1950).

 

"It's always a kind of miracle. You're in a performing condition, and then you play," remarks Frost (May 10, 1952). Nor are these times to be confused with moments of facility. They are, in his phrase, "moments of majestic instancy." And once you've had this kind of moment "it spoils you for life. You keep waiting around for it to happen. They call it inspiration but I don't know what that means" (May 10,1952).

 

He awaits these moments aware of the danger implied in such a method. "I don't want to grant that spontaneity can be simulated. I've got to have a visitation, a moment. There's always a danger in waiting for the moment. Your pen dries up" (Aug. 19, 1953). But given the mood, what motivates the poem-is it ideas? Love of words? He thinks it is more than a germinative mind and a gift for verbal expression that "motors" the poet. It is nothing acquired but something the poet has as his birthright (July I, 1949).

 

"When I ceased to make connections between the parts of my knowledge, then I would get scared" (July 28,1952).

 

"Always desiring stories, I am," he explains (Aug. 20, 1949). Why the story? Because "the best kind of criticism is not in abstractions but in narrative" (May 10, 1950). He thinks the writer does it better in the story than anywhere else. And what is the art in the story? It's in the objectivity. "I like people who can tell a story without seemingly being for or against somebody" (May 10, 1950). He tends to give his own poems, narrative or otherwise, the quality of teasing suggestibility. Take, for instance, "The Egg and the Machine"; toward which side does he lean-toward the organic or toward the mechanical? Noncommittally he says: "This is for you to choose" (Aug. 19, 1953). Obviously he thinks the reader ought to exercise his moral responsibility in choosing between opposites.

 

Humbly, but with self-awareness, he says, "For what I've missed I've felt regret; for what I've got I've felt a triumph" (May 10, 1950).

----snip---

Robert Frost, I understand, went to Dartmouth and Harvard but walked out on both of them, deciding to learn from "writers who had written before me."

Question for Comment: how do good teachers "conceal the act of disclosure"?

Ari wrote me a poem today. It is about how he started thinking philosophically about right and wrong as a small kid. The central question is about how we know one thing is wrong and another thing is right when the two things seem exactly alike.

 

Birdsnest

 

Running up the hill

Or I would call it running

Laughing to myself

so proudly of my cunning

 

Past the sugar shed

Past the apple tree

Running to the house

Momma had to see

 

Clutched in my hands,

Two blue eggs

In a little robin nest

Jiggled by my legs

 

How was I to know?

 

A nest was just some straw

And an egg was just a shell

That made a sort of blemish

In the gravel where it fell

 

A chicken egg is different

Why I cannot tell

Why I stood and stared

At the blotch where it fell

 

And I wondered what an egg was

What was in the shell

That would make me stand and stare

At the blotch where it fell

Question for Comment: How do we decide that one thing is valuable and another is not? Is there ever anything rational about that determination? how do the people that hire me determine that THEIR kids deserve health care but mine don't? That their kids are Robin's eggs and mine are chickens'? That Palestinian kids are one thing and Israeli or American kids are another?

STORM FEAR

by: Robert Frost (1874-1963)

HEN the wind works against us in the dark,

And pelts with snow

The lower chamber window on the east,

And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,

The beast,

'Come out! Come out!'--

It costs no inward struggle not to go,

Ah, no!

I count our strength,

Two and a child,

Those of us not asleep subdued to mark

How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,--

How drifts are piled,

Dooryard and road ungraded,

Till even the comforting barn grows far away,

And my heart owns a doubt

Whether 'tis in us to arise with day

And save ourselves unaided.

Sometimes my Contemporary World Issues class turns into a "soon-to-be-contemporary' World Issues class and I can feel myself pre-experiencing some of the hardships that lay ahead. The world's fire is running out of fuel. When it does, distances to the places we are used to getting things from and selling things to will get further away (like the barn). How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length. And my heart owns a doubt (or two). One, do we humans have the strength for these challenges and Two, is their help outside of us anywhere?

I could use some help right now. You too?

Tonight's movie was The Real Dirt About Farmer John . It is a biographical look at the life of one farmer, really a biographical look at the history of American farming in some ways. ultimately, this farmer only makes it in farming when he realizes that the farmer cannot make it without outside help. to survive, his farm needs investors. it needs savvy marketers. It needs less expensive labor. It needs a "corporate image". it need capital. Ultimately, it was not within the power of one farmer and his mother to save a farm.

I love the line in frost's poem  when he says "I count our strength".

We all, in each generation need to identify our challenges and count our strengths and then inventory what we might be able to acquire in outside assistance if their is a differential.

Question for Comment; What are your challenges? What are your strengths? What outside assistance do you need?

Give All To Love

Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.

'Tis a brave master,
Let it have scope,
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope;
High and more high,
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent;
But 'tis a god,
Knows its own path,
And the outlets of the sky.
'Tis not for the mean,
It requireth courage stout,
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending;
Such 'twill reward,
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;—
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, for ever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
Vague shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Do not thou detain a hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho' her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

Emerson-

Question for Comment: Do they really? When half gods go, lonliness arrives it seems more like to me.

It is interesting that in Robert Frost's poem, A TUFT OF FLOWERS, Frost talks about two people separated in time and space who work together. While in MENDING WALL, he talks about two people working in the same time and space who are so not together at all.

“Asked once about his intended meaning, Frost recast the question: "In my Mending Wall was my intention fulfilled with the characters portrayed and the atmosphere of the place?" Characteristically, he went on to answer obliquely. "I should be sorry if a single one of my poems stopped with either of those things stopped anywhere in fact," he began. "My poems-I should suppose everybody's poems-are all set to trip the reader head foremost into
the boundless. Ever since infancy," he continued, "I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark. I may leave my toys in the wrong place and so in vain. It is my intention we are speaking of-my innate rnischievou~nes.”

Robert Frost's Linked Analogies
George Monteiro
The New England Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3. (Sep., 1973), pp. 463-468.

Question for Comment: Why does it seem so difficult to find people who can be as physically close as two men fixing a stone wall WHILE being as connected as Frost is to the soul mate who left the tuft of flowers earlier in the day? why am I sitting here at 10:30 at night typing to someone who isn't HERE?

It is interesting to note that the speaker in MENDING WALL, even though he wants the wall removed, does NOT like the way that hunters go about removing it. The speaker is FINE with nature taking the wall down over time. he is FINE with his neighbor taking the wall down ... but when he sees hunters and dogs ripping into it, he goes out and REPAIRS it. Why would he repair the wall that he himself loves to watch nature and time destroy?

And what does this question have to do with American society, Jordanian society, and the relationship between cultures?

All the speaker in the poem can do is say that it "seems" like the neighbor is being a blind traditionalist. The speaker seems to have contempt for his neighbor's reliance on proverbial family wisdom ... but ... maybe there is wisdom in that tribal wisdom?

"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice." Albert Einstein

Is it possible that traditionalists have gifts to offer too?