Month: June 2022

Field Notes, Week of 06-21-22

Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop of June 21, 2022

Super workshop last Tuesday.

Don Zirilli brought a poem called “2 Samuel 3:38” with an epigraph quoting that biblical verse, concerning King David’s mourning the death of Abner, killed by Joab (in verse 28 of the same chapter) in which David, who has cried at the funeral for Abner tells his servants to pay attention to this great loss—and then the body of the poem follows in three free verse quatrains that seemed to branch off in three not-obvious directions from that stem. First there is an acorn rapping at Norma’s window which she mistook for the call of a suitor, and the speaker of the poem is unable to get an explanation from her as to why.  Second the speaker was present at the collapse of a church that went unnoticed by 21 people walking into the bar next door. Third, the speaker speaks of his mule, who is both humble and demanding, and “sometimes… needs a kick.” The theme of not noticing, and of needing to be reminded is strong enough in the second and third stanzas, a little harder to track in the (Norma) first. Tom said “the individual stanzas are tight, but there’s a riddle at the heart of the poem that requires great patience.”

We had a new workshopper this week, Tracy Tong, (Hi, Tracy) whose poem “Helene” seems to follow the speaker’s train of thought as they sit in an apartment, listen to steam hiss and growling motorcycles pass, remember the dementia of an aunt who has passed away, and a conversation with their mom about a French sitcom. The poem suddenly develops a strong emotional thrust five lines before the end, when it asks, somewhat plaintively, “How long can I randomly google how long/ Can a moth-orchid persist/ In mid-winter. Babies cry/ In the womb, why” before ending with the evocative, intriguing, and yet only distantly approachable: “Where to burn five miles/ Off 11218, the red denim roses”. No period, no question mark, maybe the truest broken off thought in poetry. Poems that assemble thoughts this way get the great benefit of multiple turns and shifts and of genuine thought, but also carry the burden of making their own senses. By the way, zip code 11218 includes the Windsor Terrace and North Kensington portions of Brooklyn, where I spent a ton of time working at the Hollywood Car Wash on the corner of Church Avenue and Coney Island Avenue. Surprising, notwithstanding the tv show 90210, how evocative of place a zip code can be.

My poem, “Tiki Torches Very Reasonable at Costco,” presents a series of aggressive confrontations with the social order, recommending lawlessness at times, and asking the reader to recognize that their privilege is built on the suffering of others. Don Z said it “succeeds as a political poem because of attitude, not virtue.” Tom said that the speaker of the poem was an asshole who is saying ‘you think you’re not an asshole, but you are,’ implicating everyone.   Don Kreiger said that ultimately, it’s a list poem, so ordering the list is what matters, and he saw some opportunities for modifying the order to enhance the overall thrust of the satire.

Jennifer Poteet has been working on a book of poems about her mother, recently one about how she was a familiar face on Montclair’s Church Street.  This one, “The Judaism I Knew” talks about her mother as the proponent of a not very observant form of Judaism that left the speaker a little bit at sea, maybe wanting more, maybe wanting more of any explanation.  Don K called it “the start of something” suggesting it could be much more if the shards of memory were connected to a “transformation”.

Howard Prosnitz’ “Fishman” was about a particular Jew or an emblematic Jew named Fishman during WWII.  In a single stanza of short, irregularly rhythmic lines, it had a hint of song to it, some rhymes (shaker/ maker), irregular intriguing half rhymes (taxi/Nazi, speck/kike) and one perfect rhyme (heir/air).  The point, rhetorically, was elusive, but the music was enchanting.

Frank Rubino’s poem, “I flew out to the pine-green woods” is about the speaker’s brother, whom the speaker has come all the way cross country to visit, and yet he regards his brother’s life and home from the outside: “I looked at my brother’s house from the clearing…”  The speaker is ambivalent about his brother at least in part because of the brother’s passion for guns, and hunting (he has a skinning room he calls the “Meating Place).  The speaker could do without the guns but remembers as “fun” shooting at cans of expanding foam insulation.  The poem is in couplets with a couple of monostiches.  The monostiches, such as “& I saw a good house with food and new appliances” are isolated for emphasis; the couplets make the poem easy to read,  but so far lack oppositional completeness, the way that couplets can measure the way forward by opening and swiftly resolving little bits of learning and allowing us as readers to assimilate them before moving on. If all brother poems are versions of the story of Cain and Abel, this poem is written from the perspective of a meditative Abel standing outside Cain’s home and wondering what the heck.

David Bragg brought a poem called “A goose observes a train at dusk” – a goose POV monologue that is also a critique of human activity, in particular the human addiction to light. All the stanzas are seven lines of roughly equal length, but nonmetrical.  The poem has great lines: “Why/ do they not welcome the darkness/ that comes to shelter them from peril?”  and “I would soar the long distance/ to the cold egg moon/ and wander the black lake of night,/ bobbing for sunken stars.”

Elinor Mattern was back (hi Elinor) with a poem about an illegal abortion in 1963 (timely, right?) called “A is for After, 1963.” The poem, in the third person, speaks about a 12-year old, carried, after “the procedure” (which is never explicitly named) “out to the car.” And as the narrative moves towards the rest she needs, a story, not explicitly named, of a possible unpunished rape, possible unpunished incest, emerges of which “she can only remember little bits,” including “a stranger in the living room,/ her mother crying, the lights of the bridge twinkling outside the car window.” The poem’s strategy of speaking in the third person, but adopting the limited knowledge available to the young girl pushes what might be an unbearably horrible story to a distance where it can live, but that strategy also has costs in terms of immediacy.

Finally!  We got to hear a Kellie Nicholaides poem, called “D’s Deli and Liquor in Carlstadt” a poem that, along with its speaker, wanders into the eponymous liquor store and starts recording. It’s a kind of ode, a kind of celebration of the accidental moment, including the customers and counterman she knows and the strangers she only kind of knows. Of course, the liquor store setting conveys a slice of life that carries it’s own complex societal and emotional landscape, but Kellie deals with these lovingly. Welcome back, Kellie!

Yana Kane’s “Peapod” got great reviews from the group; a prose poem (or, as DZ said, “just prose”) it recounts a childhood memory of being introduced  to picking and shucking peas. In the fourth paragraph, the speaker reveals that “this is my earliest memory,” (could we have known the stakes earlier? Is the description of the process joyful enough to sustain us till then?), and the final stanza converts the peas that the speaker plants as an adult into a Garden of Eden without an “angry God.” It’s an excellent start.

Barbara Hall’s poem “The Tulip Tree in Four Parts” is an elegy of sorts about the tree in the neighbor’s yard, a subject beautifully addressed in Zorida Mohammed’s “Two Pines” (See RWB 14). Barbara’s poem, Part I, begins with the phone call informing the speaker that the tree is coming down tomorrow, because it just got too big. Part II delivers the tree to its executioner with a series of onomatopoeic “buzzes” “CRACKS” “Grrrs” and “SPLATS” and ends with a baby opossum falling from the tree. Part III anthropomorphizes the birds into town criers who spread the news of those who have “lost their perch” while Part IV delivers a eulogy for the tree: “Erased: the tulip tree and trunk. —/ Erased the tulip stump from the earth.” Eulogy within elegy is traditional last step.  Here is how Dylan Thomas handled the move in his “Refusal to Mourn the Death By Burning of a Child in London;” “Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter.”

Most of the group loved the onomatopoeia.  With its sound effects and overt emotionality, it would make an excellent illustrated children’s book.

Come back on Tuesday, y’all.  We’ve got plenty more poems—some we didn’t get to on Tuesday, and new ones—to read and love on. Poems about recent SCOTUS decisions are welcome!

—Arthur Russell

Field Notes, Week of 06-14-22

Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop of June 14, 2022

The workshop is here so a poet can present a poem to their peers and get to hear what those peers think (1) what the poem wants to be, (2) how the poem goes about becoming what it wants to be and (3) how the poem is doing on that journey. There’s praise for what’s made an impression and “shakes” (or suggestions) for things that may not be working. 

In this conception, the poet doesn’t participate during the discussion. They’re Tom Sawyer at their own funeral, but at the end we open the discussion to questions from the poet, such as “I was trying to imitate Robert Frost’s The Road Less Travelled; did that come across?” Or, “What did you mean when you said my reference to the War of 1812 ‘took you out of’ the poem?” Or, “I’m a little concerned that the poem is too personal, to self involved; did anyone feel that way? Or, “What about the title? No one said anything about the title.  Does the title work?”

We don’t encourage the poet’s advocacy on behalf of the poem or explanation from the poet because those things don’t benefit the poet; sometimes when the poet talks about the backdrop to the poem, or the circumstances it was meant to address, we just say: “oh, that would be good, put it in the poem” because the poem is the poet’s ambassador to the world, and the poet doesn’t generally get to accompany the poem out into the world providing an introduction or post script (although it was pretty common in Milton’s time to have an “argument” before the poem, and I’ve always been charmed by fiction with ‘in which’ headings as in “Chapter 17, in which Tom eats a snake.”

We had a searingly good workshop on Tuesday, charred on the outside, rare on the inside. 

Brendan McEntee brought “At Sunken Meadow.” Poems that start with a place name are great because they give the reader a little ground to stand on, but they still don’t limit what the poem can do.  They suggest an openness to what the poet noticed, and Brendan’s poem was like that, about the speaker standing on the beach throwing rocks, noticing a gull, noticing the clouds, noticing two boys walking by “carrying a bucket awkwardly between them” and picking up a fragment of their conversation, which may or may not be significant before “the rest of their conversation is lost to the waves.”  Brendan does that very well.

Don Zirilli’s poem was “Fool Me Twice” and it was a difficult formal poem, a sestina, which uses the last word in each line of six, six line stanzas where the last word appears in a different prescribed sequence. The seventh and final 3-line stanza features all six of the end words in medial and line end positions for a saturated burst of whatever the poet was getting at (think last minute of a fireworks display). The form is immensely difficult, primarily because of the challenge of making the repetitions interesting, but also because Don has chosen to present his sestina in the form of iambic pentameter. Don’s poem’s six end words were “twice” “oath” “know” “time” “fool” and “heart.” What struck me about the poem was how the first stanza has an almost metaphor free-statement of the poem’s theme – how we humans fool ourselves, particularly when it comes to marriage, when it comes to knowing ourselves or others. As the poem moves on, it becomes more allusive and more reliant on metaphor, personification of the elements, and becomes less plain spoken.  This can be delightful, but it can also make the poem more elusive.

Howard Prosnitz’s “THE L-SHAPED ROOM” presents as a first person narration, with the eponymous L-shaped room as its topic. But this L-shaped room is a metaphor for the difficulties quotidian and existential of fitting into and being comfortable with living.

Susanna Lee’s “Steel Rains” comes hard after the tragedies of war, first anchored in references to the Ukraine war, and then in relation to gun violence in the US. The poem has a strong iambic bounce, some strong iambic pentameters (e.g. “Upon the baby’s cheek, the mother’s tears,” and “they’d bring to murder him, his kith and kin”) but varies line lengths and moves away from meter entirely with lines like “lips and kisses” or “Never surrender!”  Another noticeable feature of the poem is its irregular use of rhyme, such as “Courage, bravery, all that’s good./ A fighter earns the right to fatherhood.” We talked about how the poem creates expectations with regard to matters like meter and rhyme, and how the savvy reader will notice changes and expect them to be significant. 

My poem “There Are People Who Lack Decent Housing” joined Don’s and Susanna’s this week as poems that used iambic pentameter; mine was a blank verse (non-rhyming iambic pentameter lines) essay on the persistence of class divisions and the limitations of empathy when the world is seen from a partially self-aware position of privilege. 

Tom Benediktsson’s poem “Who You Talkin’ to In There” starts out as a kind of philosophical or possibly epistemological discussion about sources of authority in “our tradition,” a discussion among the speaker, and “Daniel” “Mark” and “Janelle” who may be in a class in which the speaker is the teacher or may not.  Midway through the poem, the discussion becomes a groan-worthy tale about how someone named Harvey boiled a chicken down to its bones which he then reassembled to a chicken skeleton with wire for a science project in the eighth grade.  It was grotesque and funny, but what interested me was (1) how it raised the question of poetic authority: “In our tradition the inner voice is god.” This is a direct invocation of the Romantic norm which replaced the Enlightenment norm of verifiable fact with allegiance to subjectivity.  That’s the artistic world we live in to this day, where identity is a font of authority.  In a way, this was the same subject I tackled in “There Are People Who Lack Decent Housing” which follows this declarative by immediately declining to be a member of the group: “I am not one of them.”  Maybe this is a new “old farts poetics.”

Claudia Serea’s “Veined hands reach into my dream” is a poem that uses the eponymous hands in the eponymous dream to draw together elements of the speaker’s life, attachment to their parents, their overseas past, their gardening present and a sense of  the nearness of death.

John J. Trause’s “Lemon Yellow Limoncello” was a concrete sonnet based on a 14-times repeated four beat iambic line with an internal half rhyme between “lemon yellow” and “limoncello” made concrete or “chromatic” by having all of the lines highlighted in computer yellow. The last line breaks down visually to what might be the stem of an upside down (i.e. empty?) Limoncello bottle or an emblem for fractured sense, or possibly, a visible musical symbol for retard or slowing down, to bring an end to the chant that has gone on for the thirteen previous lines.  Brilliant stuff.

Jen Poteet’s “Church Street” is an ode to the speaker’s mother, a regular fixture on a particular street in Montclair, a woman who knew everyone (and their dog) and was known by everyone (and their dog, for whom she carried treats in her “enormous purse.” 

I have to apologize to Carole Stone. She sent her poem “Au Clair de Lune” by email, and we discussed it, but I can’t find it on my computer, so please forgive me.

Thanks again to everyone: we had more poems than we could get to, and we’ll keep chugging along next week. See you then.

—Arthur Russell

Field Notes, Week of 06-07-22

Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop of June 7, 2022

We had a chockablock workshop on Tuesday, 10 poems in two hours and great conversations. The workshop works best when we spend a lot of our time digging into what the poem “WANTS” to do and “HOW” the poem goes about its work, WHETHER and HOW it is succeeding and failing with considerations of the syntax, metrical features, allusions, rhyme or no rhyme, how metaphors are employed, and only secondarily considering editorial changes to the poem.  Why?  Well too many reasons. When we edit before we know what the poem WANTS, we are more likely to be making the poem into one that “WE” would have written rather than attending to what the POET has written. Also, though we/you/I may take for granted that we know what the poem is doing, and how it is doing it, we really get to talk about POETRY when we talk about what we see going on structurally and sharing that becomes and broadens our understanding of what poems do, where editing elides that process. And on Tuesday, it was all going pretty well! 

Jen Poteet’s poem, “What Comes Back” starts out as an innocuous list poem of things that repeat on you, like boomerangs and black eyed susans  (though she leaves out salami). But about halfway through, it reveals a curious residue of the speaker’s mother, the smell of perfume that resides, abides, and persists in certain inherited linen shirts.  There’s a lot of heat in that recognition, and maybe the poem was always headed towards this particular call-back; at least it felt that way to one or two of the members of the venire.  It’s a curious dilemma: lists have a way of leading to tangents and those tangents can lead to the truest of surprises, but, as Frost said, “no surprise for the poet, no surprise for the reader.” A preordained conclusion can deprive what comes before it of its honest significance.  We want to know more about those linen shirts, more about the mourning molecules of sandalwood and oolong migrating from the interstices of the linen’s warp and weft, into the tuneful nostrils of the lyric speaker!

Claudia Serea’s “When she’s off to college” starts out as an amorous take on the empty nest syndrome: “When she’s off to college … the way you lean against the sink … and we can watch the dusk fall,” but then it gets slightly tangled in a metaphor (who hasn’t had that happen?) of a certain pink and peach light turning on and off as a lighthouse signal. The point seems elusive, but it may be about the couple finding their way back to the source of their love (now that the beloved brat is gone). Anyway, with CS, we’re almost certainly going to see this again, because she takes NOTES! 

, “Love Poem Re Teachers (Part I)” is a first step in a blank verse essay about the way loving teachers is central to character formation. Frank (the intellectual) loved the subject, and the way it divides different kinds of love. He said it was “unassailable” referring to the concrete memories associated with teacher love.  Janet liked the references to “mimeographed” pages and “embossed” birth notices. Jen liked Mrs. Rice’s “iron grip and angry nose.”  Speaking of noses Carole sniffed a bit when she asked if this was anything more than “Sentimental Education,” to which Frank replied that the “material is so sticky” and Brendan thought that “the desire to please and being allowed by teachers to please them was love. My main question for the group was whether this poem could tolerate being extended, and Brenden was quick to say: “bring yourself into the poem more” and it can work.

Frank’s six-pager called “The Clover” ends with “and now you know a little about me,” which felt like a real New York School of poetry ending, though also a bit of a ribbon around a bouquet of diverse flowers, worries about the speaker’s daughter’s mental/emotional health, the comforts of marriage, intergenerational personality formation at the hands of parents, and suburban life; in other words, Frank’s usual jams, but here presented in six separate poems not obviously connected and set in different dictional registers. For instance, the first line of the first poem, “There seems to be less connectivity between the amygdala and the frontal cortex” used medical diction that appeared emotionally distanced to me, though Don found it direct and emotional. There’s a fundamental feature of Frank’s work that I call the Roger Sessions attitude.  Sessions was a modern classical music composer. In an interview I heard long ago, when asked about the inaccessibility of some of his music, he said (and I’m super paraphrasing). I am here. I am accessible. The listener needs to come to me and will be richly rewarded, but I will not come to them. One thing I felt as a subtle but purposeful part of this poem was the title, “The Clover” a reference to the ribbits who jump over the clover outside the speaker’s house, “playing, but also maybe horny,” and is also a reference to “being in clover” or having it good. I think the poem could rely on that title even more.

Don Zirilli’s “Weeding” is a free verse in two balanced stanzas of ten lines each, and it examines the whole notion of ‘weeds’ and our human relation to them, which is why I loved the first line: “I call them weeds. I don’t know what they are.” And these weeds become a powerful agent/metaphor for our human relationship to our companions on this here earth. “Popping them out saddens/ and satisfies me,” he says near the end of Stanza One. Stanza Two continues in much the same way, but connects weeding to the speaker’s personal life “my world/ with work and worry, bouts of attention…” and the wonderment as to whether “what I do is any use.” Carole saw the imagery of the second stanza as turning to a very dark place, employing words like “chaos” and “trail of destruction” but I never saw the turn that way. Rather it seemed an event tempered look at the margins of quotidian suburban life.

Ana Doina’s poem “What was his name?”—a retelling of an oral history story told in sporadic blank verse—about a war, perhaps WWI and “a sailor gone overboard”. The group found the narration lively, aided by the distillation of blank verse. I’d love to see it all rendered as blank verse.

Howard Prosnitz brought a poem called “Three Songs From a Play” which, as Frank pointed out, appearing outside ot the context of their “play,” were difficult to contextualize. 

Brendan McEntee’s “Building 93”, is a touristy kind of poem about a very untouristy place, an abandoned mental institution. The title starkly refers to a building at one such place, and the poem seems knowledgeable about the “great patient release” that took place when New York’s mental institutions were more or less emptied out, leading, far down the line, some would argue, to the homeless population of people in need of some support our city faces now. The poem relies on physical description to underline concepts of abandonment and lack of care.

But by far the most intriguing line is the one that connects back to Brendan’s comment about my Teacher poem. The line says “Like love, the vandals and the weather/ left disfigurement in their wake.”  That line brings the speaker into the poem in an ambiguous but intriguing way, mirroring the comment Brendan made about “Teachers.”

Carole’s “Chamber Music Concert” describes the view of the eponymous musical event from outside a church, and suggests a connection to the music heard while looking in through the window, akin to “a second language” and ends with the vision of the violin’s bow coming down “without pity.” The group appreciated the evocation of “grey-haired women, streaked blondes,/ in long tunics and loose pants” and the “director, slim as a pencil / in her long red evening dress”, but puzzled over this poem, the possible significance of the Schubert Quintet to which it refers, the meaning of “second language” and the  pitiless descent of the bow. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see this one again, too!

The invitations to submit to RWB 15 went out yesterday. Find it and do it. We can’t wait to read your stuff.

—Arthur Russell

Field Notes, Week of 05-31-22

Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop of May 31, 2022

Robert Hass’s famous poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” begins

“All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.”

The poems this week seem to confirm that sentiment. 

Near the start of Brendan McEntee’s elegiac “May 25th, 2022,” we hear the weary recitation of the mortal tally from the familiar horror of the mass shooting of schoolchildren and their teachers in Uvalde, TX: “This time a Texas school.  Nineteen children, two teachers./ Shooter dead at the scene…” Like all good elegy and also like a post-traumatic flashback, the poem veers to remembering other, nearer deaths and their anniversaries—of the speaker’s wife and his dead wife’s sister, and then to the public violence, of George Floyd’s (remembered by his last words) and Sandy Hook before telling us that the speaker surrendered his own gun to his brother to remove the temptation to commit suicide. Death speaks to death in the mind of the speaker, but life speaks to death in the poem; through anniversaries and how they occur on “a beautiful day in late May,” as neighbors wave to one another, and discuss the news, including another recent shooting in which a local girl lost an eye, and another threat of violence closer to home. This sidewalk conversation among neighbors becomes the place where words become the coinage of condolence:  “We talk of Texas,/pass the words between us/ courage, outrage, rampage, harrowing.” And for me, this is the poem’s apex: grief coming to rest in words that cannot contain it, words that also seem to mock the media and the politicians who use them to avoid doing anything about the mass shootings that have become a regular part of our lives.

Like Brendan’s poem, Shane Wagner’s poem “Apocalypse” addresses situation at the heart of the Uvalde murders: a man puts his child on a school bus and “She isn’t coming home.” 

Carole Stone’s “Wedding Band” addresses loss differently. The seashells on a local beach remind the speaker of diamond chips on her mother’s wedding band, which she now wears.

Yana Kane brought a rewrite of “Hive Hymn” her “concrete” poem (in something like the shape of a beehive) that ask us to “sing a hymn” to the industriousness and energy of bees and ends with a prayer that we (or the flowers we love) may be worthy of their attention. With that prayer for worthiness, the poem reveals, without directly acknowledging, an underlying environmental concern.

Like Yana’s “Hymn Hive,” Frank Rubino’s poem, “Woods Outside Chicago” ends with a prayer: “Dear corporations, please refund & erase me from your databases./ Dear church, please acknowledge your lies.” And as Brendan’s poem finds its physical space in a street meeting of neighbor’s, Frank’s poem lives in the context of a group of friends on a day trip of some sort, in the titular “woods” or on a “boat ride.” It’s a poem in which city folk go out into the country and think big thoughts; here, the thoughts revolve around creativity, freedom and “naming”; the friends have archetypical names (“the Master Printer,” “the Poet,” and “a Serious Painter”). Even the campfire has a name: “The Snappy Fire.” And somehow that may not yet be apparent, the bucolic setting the freedom it inspires leads the poem to its prayer to be free of corporate databases and for the world to be freed from the tyranny of church lies.

Susanna Lee’s “Where I’m From, Politically” is a rewrite that tells a family anecdote about kindness to one’s enemies during trench warfare.  

Joanne Santiglia’s poem “Cherry Blossom Lesson” is a short, but remarkable poem about fertility and how fleeting it is. The poem looks at those beautiful blossoms and in those “pink and white explosions of spring” sees a woman yearning to “pour herself over her lover’s body/ and blanket him with her own voluptuous blooms.”  

Howard Prosnitz’s poem “Caption” is an ekphrasis of sorts, describing a surreal picture in which a fish is portrayed holding a creel from which the head of a man protrudes. It has the feeling both of bulldogs playing cards and of a Magritte painting.

Janet K’s poem “Rocky Road of Later Life” (not included in the package) is another rewrite of her lyric turn on the indignities of getting older:

Drugged into a semblance of calm,
flailing in agitation, or awash in tears,
we will all take our place
in the veterans of having been parade,
a line that stretches into light years.

No one captures bemusement as Janet does.

Thanks to everyone who brought their poems. Don’t forget to upload to the Google Drive if you can before this Tuesday. See you there.

—Arthur Russell

Field Notes, Week of 05-24-22

Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop of May 24, 2022

What a great workshop. 10 poems in two hours. The only thing missing from the Zoom-iverse—and sometimes you really miss it—is going out for drinks after the intense conversations, and the sudden aloneness when the meeting ends, and you don’t even get to walk out into the Rutherfordian night and walk one another to one another’s cars.  Yet, we persist.

Yana Kane’s “Hive Hymn” about bees, is a concrete poem; it’s shape on the page was intended to echo the subject matter of the poem, in this case, beehives.  Though none of us saw the hives in these word mounds (or Aztec pyramids), Don saw the shape as a callback to George Herbert, the 17th Century English metaphysical poet’s “Easter Wings”, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44361/easter-wingsand.  I was reminded of some of Dylan Thomas’s “Vision and Prayer.”  https://allpoetry.com/Vision-And-Prayer  But the poem is more than a concrete poem; it’s a poem in praise of the “hive mind” as well as the “honey and wax” that they produce.  The sense that emerges is that the bees have got it right, and we would do well to notice the magic of their lives.  With bee populations all over the world under threat of collapse from environmental degradation and climate change, the poem also serves a political purpose, a purpose that is somewhat obscured by the prayer in the final lines: “May our roses merit visitations by the winged messengers,/ May our strawberry blossoms find favor in their faceted eyes.”.  Actually there was never any doubt that the roses and strawberries were worthy.  The problem, once again, is with the humans.

Howard Prosnitz brought “WASP,” a poem that starts with an epigraph quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost about the exile from Eden, and more specifically, Satan’s exile from Heaven, which preceded it. Howard finds an objective correlative for Milton’s “new created world” in the fate of a wasp trapped between a window screen and window. The poem is arranged in one word lines, and the slender verticality of it appears to be a concrete representation of the narrow strait in which the wasp finds itself. There’s also a lovely pair of near homonyms—“screen” sounds like “scream” and “pane” sounds like “pain”—that really deepen the connection between the wasp and Satan—and so interesting too to hear waspishness and Satan conflated that way. 

Carole Stone (WHO WILL BE THE FEATURED READER AT THE RED WHEELBARROW READING FOR JUNE 1, THIS WEDNESDAY, SO COME – WE’RE GOING BACK TO ZOOM THIS MONTH BUT HOPE TO BE BACK IN THE LITTLE THEATRE AT FELICIAN UNIVERSITY IN JULY) brought a rewrite of a poem called “No Happy Ruins” in which she imagines the pain and suffering of the people trapped in the war in Ukraine.  The poem is in four parts, which come at the war from several angles – the present suffering in Ukraine, the recognition that our lives are not nearly as burdened, a longer view where the long-term cost of the war is contemplated, and a final surprising section that presents the sun as a “Pallbearer, immune to grief.” and, a few lines later, as the bringer of cherry blossoms. Finally, the poem ends on two domestic images, one of NYC seen from the heights of Eagle Rock, and one of daylight falling on the speaker’s arm:

                         The look

of the distant city

seen from Eagle Rock. 

The daylight

pulsing down my arm.

I wonder if these pure images are a distillation of the fluctuating emotions of the poem or an escape from them?

Janet Kolstein’s poem, “We Who Breathe” (not in the package) is about a funeral, or as Don said “it examines the experience of being at a funeral.”  It talks a little about the setting, notices the “rabbi’s cadenced voice”, “the widow’s muffled sobs”  and joins in the metaphysical appreciation of the mystery of death from a not-too-involved point of view.  What I loved about the poem was how easily and comfortably it inhabited the role of relative: “At the gravesite,/ green, with late-spring chirping,/ we took the spade/ and sprinkled mica-flecked earth/ on the lowered casket: your spirit?” The way the metaphysical question lives in the same sentence as the burial, separated only by a semi-colon is emblematic of the way this poem lives, moves, sits and carries on.  In fact, the last line –“The line of cars removes again” is a reference to the way that funerals proceed, with the mourners driving from the chapel to the gravesite and then onward to the shiva.  In other words, life goes on.

David Briggs brought a poem called “Resonance.”  It’s a lyric poem that takes place in a supermarket in which the items for sale and the sounds of the place make the sense, act on the speaker.  There’s a role reversal: “The smell of Columbian roast/ percolates my mask”.  There’s absurdism: “The price of honeycrisps/ seeps under my eyelids.”  There’s animism: the voice of a “big talker” placing bets on a football game “unnerves the beef jerky.” Throughout, the rhetoric of the poem provides the emotional spine: “Doesn’t anyone want to finger the dimples / of Ritz crackers?” has a surefooted sense of loss.  And an alphabet soup can is a surrogate for a time when writing came more easily.  Finally, the speaker tries to reassert hope: “I’ll try to take up the task again,” he says.  “I’ll try to whisper fizz into the sodacans, so you can/ hear my sigh each time you crack one open.”   Great work, David!

Susanna Lee’s poem, “Where I’m From, Politically” tells a family story about an ancestor who acted nobly and humanely to an enemy soldier during WWI (at least the trenches make you think so). Everyone loved the title, which I recognized as a prompt from the Brevitas group, and one that had been fructifying for me too.  Frank noted that the poem had a longish setup, getting the genealogy right.  But even with the orientation set, the story of the ancestor’s decency (comforting the enemy soldier and setting his leg with a rifle for a splint) lacked a real connection to the occasion of its telling.

Don Zirilli’s “Grace, Faith” had a far flung lyricism that required the group to propose theories that would explain it all.  Grace is a state of being that comes from down from god, while faith is a human attribute that travels in the opposite direction.  I personally opted for Grace as the prayer at the start of a meal and saw the contents of the poem as conversations during dinner.  But I really loved the first stanza for its swift acceleration from what appears to be current events — “Dad tells me Notre Dame/ is on file” – directly to a son’s deep knowledge of his father — “his wry smile/ gone forever.”  And just as Janet’s poem was about the experience of being at a funeral, Don’s was about the experience of being at dinner.  His speaker hears, and reports, and waits for his head to be still, and when “Dinner ends” he hasn’t “asked a single question.”   I get the grace; and in a different, patient way, I also get the faith.

Then there was Brendan McEntees poem “Never Save the Drowning Man” which was about the experience of learning to disengage. It posits two test cases for leaving not-so-well-enough alone: the drowning man who returns to the ocean and the burning woman who likes to burn. The central syllogism of the poem conveys the futility of intervention:  “And by save I mean “try to” save./ And by “try to” I mean fail.” Brendan’s poem, like Carole Stone’s end with two sentences that either distill or abandon the project:

Now I watch the horizon – his hand disappears.

Now I watch her embers swirl to the sky.

Raymond Turco’s poem, “I Met a Man Today” engages self-consciously in the oldest story-telling strategy, the one we see in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, where the wedding guest meets the ancient mariner and forwards his strange tale to us; or the one we see it in Shelley’s Ozymandias (“I met a traveler from an antique land”), where the traveler tells of a ruined colossal statue in the desert; the strategy of putting the wondrous tale into the mouth of another:  

I met a man today

who told me

he never learned to be alone…

And what’s the effect of this act of deferral? This act of hearsay?  This act of ‘story laundering?’  — On one level it enhances the credibility of the speaker.  He’s not saying, as in Shelly, that there was a ruined statue of a great king in a desert; he’s only saying he heard of such a thing; he’s only vouching for the truth of the report, not the truth of the underlying tale; and yet this distancing gesture frees the listener to enjoy the story as story, pushes it into the realm of myth or fable, makes an emblem of it.  In Raymond’s poem, the story of that the poet brings to our attention is not a story of a monstrous run of bad luck (Ancient Mariner) or the monkey Time makes of men (Ozymandias), but the simple emotional handicap of never having learned to be alone.  That structural incongruity (big frame/little truth) is reinforced (or strategically undermined) with a set of paradoxes or oxymorons: (1) the “man” who never learned to be alone was “an only child who slept/ in his brother’s bed;” (2) his suffering took place in “vociferous silence”; and (3) he played a game of “see-saw for one.” – And these oxymorons become the “wonders” that the poet/speaker presents through the tale of the man he met. This strategy of successive oxymorons is used to comic effect in Tyler Rager’s  “Two Dead Boys”  https://hellopoetry.com/poem/841116/two-dead-boys-my-favorite-poem-of-all-time/  (“One bright day in the middle of the night/ Two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other,/ Drew their swords and shot each other.”) But Raymond is using this strategy to convey the sorrow, frustration and dread that attend a self-involved existence. The combination of these two strategies (hearsay report and oxymorons) makes me wonder if the “man” that the poet “met” is really a surrogate for speaker, as in all of those “I’m asking for a friend” stories. 

I love all of these poems, and I loved the conversation they prompted. Enjoy the last week or so without mosquitoes!

—Arthur Russell