Tag: Poems

Field Notes, Week of 03-02-21

Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop of March 2, 2021

Hey everyone.

Tom Benediktsson’s poem, Allegory, told an allegorical tale in two free verse stanzas of 8 lines each more or less iambic, more or less 4 beats per line. The tale he tells is of a couple, known only as A and B evidently at a bistro “sharing a small table.” A’s gluttony is the subject of stanza 1. B’s finickiness (to put it mildly) is the subject of stanza 2, which ends with her leaving the bistro, “walking at a calorie-burning speed…” Maybe this poem is an allegory because A and B are universal characters, but I think, too, you can see the allegorical scrim as a distancing device or shock attenuator for the disturbing scene of B “grimacing with revulsion,” after “toying with a single bean/ on the black and white checkered tablecloth.” 

Janet K brought a poem called “Tall Ships” (not attached) that addressed “unrequited romance/ experienced as a kind of exile forever from love itself” and the strategy of acquisition that offsets the unhappiness: tchotchkes. “They turn to objects,” she writes, which are, themselves “meditations on the human touch,” whose effect is “mysterious, like the tall ships.. coming down a fog-shrouded river,”  called “a succor for the heartsick” that keeps them, chilling, “far from that trip to the chemist,/ the rope.” And then, in the conclusion, she imagines the heartsick consoling themselves saying “I own you,/ you’re mine,/ you’re my moon-faced mantel clock,/ my kimono embroidered with a field of jonquils.” And as I think it was JJT, who pointed out, that jonquils was such a powerful last word for the poem, known but unusual. My only quibble with this poem was the verb “spy.” Great work, Janet.

Lan Chi Pham brought a delicious poets-only poem about falling in love with poetry and then trying one’s hand at it, called “Poem a Day”, which envisions the speaker having poetry prescribed as a treatment for the blues. “Better do what the good which doctor says,” the speaker says, then the next two stanzas describe in an evolving poems=food metaphor, how she accelerated from “free verse” for lunch to “the heaver stuff” which she “devour[ed] like a bottomless/ Hurricane of word-hunger.” Finally, she tries her hand at “homemade poem” which is “Yum yum” though the poem ends humbly saying her poem was not as good as “The store-bought stuff.” Zirilli, who wasn’t there last night would say, it’s a poem that sticks to a single metaphor all the way through, and that’s a comfort but more than a comfort, a pleasure to the reader.

Yana Kane brought a poem called “Trees dreaming in winter.” Well, now you know pretty much all you need to. Just kidding. Yana’s trees dream, but their dream is the poet’s imagination of the world in winter embodied in trees that “drink in the stillness that pools/ beneath all layers of the ground,” and whose “crowns bloom with constellations” (someone said this is like looking up through the bare branches on a starry night). In the poem’s last movement, Yana has the trees veer further into fantasy with “winged beings” and “luminous fruit” that “flows far beyond the shores of the known world.” It seems as though Yana reaches for the mystical as confirmation that her poems have done that too.

Shane Wagner brought a rewrite of the piece from last week in which he, Robert Frost and Jen Poteet took a walk in the woods; now it’s called “Turn Home.” (By the way, ignore the last paragraph on the page. Shane says it’s not part of the poem.) This version is prose too, prose poem maybe, and it starts essayisticly noting that the country and world have had a lot of anxiety lately, and he’s feeling relaxed, noting that a cactus rescued from the neighbor’s trash last summer is “feeling comfortable enough to produce lewd fuchsia blossoms” and the “icicles seem more willing to hang.” Cute joke. But then the piece turns to the speaker’s special needs child care duties, and from that to a scene at a “special needs picnic” where another father did what was needed for his special needs child, before landing heavily in the double edged worry about who, in a special needs family, will die first, father or child. Nice prose piece.

Way at the other end of the “is-this-poetry-at-a-poetry-workshop” spectrum, John J. Trause (who will be the featured reader at tonight’s Williams Center Poetry Reading (on Zoom): be there) brought a graphical poem called “Untitled” which consists of the word ‘untitled’ written in big letters down the middle of the page, the word broken up, two letters per line, and presented in a stencil typeface. This is concrete poetry, defined as an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. For more on that topic, you may want to look at Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” and/or Brian McAllister’s critical piece “Narrative in Concrete / Concrete in Narrative.”

Frank Rubino’s poem had a really long title!  “Shift toward helping, shift toward light, and, soon, in four or five breaths, sleep.” Someone called this an internal monologue, which led to a fistfight (just kidding). Whether it’s really internal, or a piece spoken to this audience, it’s a ruminative piece, like many of Frank’s poems, in which he toggles between declarative truth reach (“My words are my mind”) and close attention to his body (“the way my wrist moves”) questions (“Isn’t that such wasted time?), natural observations (“The robin sat in the dogwood trying to see through the window./ I don’t think birds can./ His body is fluffed for the cold.”) and genuinely lyrical moments of love (“My hauntedness is the same hauntedness as yours./ Our hauntedness is the forward movement of time./ I wish there was a time syrup that would end time forever.” So beautiful). And Frank is dedicated to not privileging one vector of his speech over the others, which makes it tough for lovers of his sweet lyricism, but hey.

Raymond Turco, fresh from the completion of his Italian Heroes manuscript brought a song lyric called “New York is” that tried to capture the spirit of NY in some of its well worn cliches: it has 8 million people none of whom would stop if they saw a corpse on the sidewalk, it is dirty and smelly and, its people all “chase Fortune.” As Brendan pointed out, that may well depict Manhattan, but there are four more boroughs and nuance out there.

Barbara Hall brought a poem called “The Birth of Virtual Reality,” about the death that came with covid, which she represents in the death of an uprooted apple tree, compares to the ivy on Snow Whit’s castle, and finally in a “story” he tells that is both made up and “too real.” And then the story:

she died last fall.

I picked up the shovel unceremoniously,

dropped dirt on her pinewood casket,

Never to see her again.

Virtual Reality took her place:

No face, no mouth, no eyes, no smile.

That’s one hell of a story.

Brenden McEntee brought a five-stanza poem in unrhymed tercets called “Before Bedtime”  that Tom B described as having a three stanzas that start “before bedtime” and two stanzas that start in dream (a dream city and a dream desert) all of which share a dank and brutish view of life. If he overstates (or if I misquote him), there’s no doubt it summons up a life in which the family is the insular protected center of a dangerous world, and even in that protected center “You go to disaffected prayer and childhood/living; I double check the locks and night-eclipsing clouds.” And the poem ends chillingly in its last tercet, which still somehow the family at the center:

Every night, before bedtime, you tell me: “come the new day,

We will bless what needs to be blessed and we will kill

Who needs to be killed and therefore, ourselves, stay safe.

My own poem was a re-write and supplement of my unnamed last week poem about mothwing newspapers. Now it’s called “Mothwing Trilogy” and each of the poems in the trilogy (all circling around sonnet length) has its own name: (1) My Grandfather Read a Newspaper for Moths Which, Oddly, Was Printed on Mothwings” (2) “Which Fey Light?”; and (3) “Butcher Paper Tally On the Use Of “Oddly” In the Title of My Mothwing Poem.”  In some sense, poems two and three are midrashim on poem one, but in another sense they are a triptych in whose center panel a scene of comforting domestic scene unfolds, and in whose outer panel, pandemonium. I think I’ll leave it there.

—Arthur Russell

Field Notes, Week of 02-23-21

Arthur Russell‘s recap of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop of February 23, 2021

I’ve mentioned the book What is Poetry (Just Kidding I Know You Know), Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter a few times and I’ll do it again now. These interviews are a look back at the NY poetry scene in the 1990s-early aughts, but I still haven’t gotten past 1997 (and I ran out of renewals from the library, so I returned it and then submitted a request for it, so I should have it back soon). These poets, many of them had their starts in the 1960s, and in these interviews they talk about the older poets who inspired them, going even further back, so the interviews really cover a great swath of time.

I wanted to call out an interview in that book by Lisa Jarnot of John Godfrey, because some of the things he says are priceless; he says “Poetry is like DNA or fingerprints, and that’s what you aspire to. You aspire to realizing your DNA when you write , and that’s not easy to find out and you try to approach it more and more as you go along.” There’s a lot more good stuff in the interview, so I recommend it.

In our workshop, Don Zirilli brought an amazing list poem called “My Symptoms.” It’s a poem of forty one-line stanzas (sometimes called “monostichs” or “onesets”), in which he presents humorous, discordant or terrifying states of affair, such as “The other day was something like three months ago” “Way in the back of my head is a wet ball of oatmeal,” “I think I might come off with my clothes” and “It’s like a headache without the head.”  When you can write lines like that you have a symptom called ‘being a poet.”

Janet Kolstein brought a chilling poem about a suicide death at a high rise apartment house viewed from above called “Snow Angel.” Although the poem doesn’t mention the snow after the title, the silent movie of the removal of the corpse implicitly refers to the snow when it ends “A dark, wet spot remained where/ his body spent the last of its heat.” 

Susanna Lee brought a poem called “Death-Cleaning” and Rob Goldstein brought a poem called “Throwing Out Books,” both addressing the issue of mortality through the agency of books. Susanna considered the vacuum left by never having become an underground comix writer. Rob considered pruning his bookshelves, to which his speaker has a profound attachment. It was interesting how the attachment evidenced itself.  In the first section of the poem, the speaker fetishizes the books by playing word games with the titles.  In the second section, he talks about how a random conversation with “nice lady/ at a call-center” gave him the courage to toss some books, and in the third section, the depth of the charge becomes more personal when he comes across an inscription from a long-ago girlfriend in a book called Philosopher or Dog and once again has to boost his conviction to divest with the hearty exhortation” “Cast off, old man, cast off!” Nice work, Rob.

In an unrelated “casting off” event, Raymond Turco brought us the “Introduction” to the book of short biographical poems about famous Italians that he’s been working on for months, and we learned that the title of the book will be “Italians to Remember.” In this Introduction, the poet calls himself the “god of elegies,/ of paeans,/ of dirges,/ of odes” and promises to sing of Italy’s victories and defeats.  In a tumbled metaphor he announces that he will “blow” the names and the histories of Italy “down the River Po/ so that even the smallest altruist/ among men and among women all,/ may fill their lungs with [his] spirit/ and be gifted a glorious voice/ with which to sing.” 

Tom Benediktsson took a break from his recent sci-fi/fantasy/horror poems to bring one he called “Window, Moon, Window” and described as a “tone poem” Following the script of its title, it starts out inside a room looking at a blizzard through the window, then ventures outside to look at the night sky, then ends “afloat on a ghost boat” where the speaker encounter “a bird,/ an old man,// [who] wants to talk to [him]” one he remembers from another time when the bird/old man “flew against the window.”

John J. Trause brought another segment of his triptych: “My Marilyn: A Triptych.” This panel, “Marilyn Framed” has an incantatory children’s rhyme feel as it addresses the effect celebrity had on the actress. The group was taken by the multiple valences of the word “framed”

Jen Poteet’s poem, “Looking at Edward Hopper’s Paintings with Mark Strand” was just that. The speaker and Strand are at a Hopper exhibit in Truro (Mass?).  Their comments back and worth are interspersed with descriptions of two of Hopper’s famous paintings. 

Shane Wagner brought a list poem called “Does Desire End?” (Spoiler alert: no). The poem used anaphora—the repeating phrase at the beginning of each stanza “My favorite”—about the speaker’s marriage and sexual desire between spices. Sometimes, when the thing described as ‘my favorite’ seemed undesirable, like “I couldn’t get an erection” tension emerged, but for the most part it was a prayer/celebration about the good times.

My own poem, no title, first line “My grandfather read mothwings by the fire,” was fourteen lines long in two stanzas of 8 and 6 lines each, loosely organized as blank verse. It presented a familiar domestic scene, grandfather reading by the fire, grandson taking the old man up to bed then straightening up. It was a bit of a headscratcher for the group.

JOHN J TRAUSE’S READING AT THE WILLIAMS CENTER ON ZOOM WILL BE NEXT WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3, 2021, AND ITS GONNA BE A GOOD ONE, I ALREADY KNOW. So come, and if you don’t have an announcement with the zoom line on it, (1) where have you BEEEN? and (2) write back and I’ll see that you get it.

—Arthur Russell