American History in Verse by Ed Sanders

An active Beat-era "peacenik" with a penchant for poetry and music seems a uniquely talented individual. Ed Sanders wrote the History of America in Verse which starts in 1450 and ends in 2000 with the stolen election. He built his own instruments, and his 1982 performance in Times Square of Henri Matisse inspired many; and he is the founder of The Fugs, a kind of punk rock band avant la lettre. His writing (History of America) is clear, blunt, succinct, witty, off-hand, irreverent, and true, and bears the trace influences of Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Charles Olsen (of the Maximus Poems) & Allen Ginsberg (Howl). His writing, again, is politically savvy and recalls the Civil Rights Era and the happenings of his youth in the early Sixties when he placed flowers in the rifle barrels of National Guardsmen and exorcised the Pentagon. He now makes his Yippie home in Woodstock, New York where he publishes a newspaper.

Jazz Fan Looks Back by Jayne Cortez

Cortez's poem is in the strained syncopated meter of jazz, a kind of stride talk. It reviews the history of Jazz by naming the names of the great Jazz Legends who gave Jazz a name. It is a pure celebration, a paen to Jazz music, an epidictic. The speaker even styles herself after the women in Jazz whom she admired. The past tense is key, for the speaker is "looking back" on an era that no longer sizzles, larger than life, but which persists in memory and tribute. So for all its celebratory tone, Cortez's poem is also elegiac, like a good ol' fashioned New Orleans funeral.

For the young who want to by Marge Piercy

This refreshing poem is nearly thirty years old. I had never read Marge Piercy before. In "For the young who want to," the speaker's conclusion is that "Work is its own cure." After you've done something worthwhile, others praise you; but before the result occurs, all you get is criticism. The speaker seems to be pointing out, among other things, a tendency of human nature. Knowing this should forearm creative people against placing too much stock in what people say. Self-reliance is much more important than paying any mind to the "labels" other like to stick on you, whether they be talented, bum, delusional, sadist, etc.

Harlem by Langston Hughes

Here is a spiky poem, built like a virus, that infected the minds of class-conscious integrationists and militants, alike. It dared to speak in the voice of a "native" and portray Negro life as it was. Hughes enumerates several of the options open to Black Folk in a country that did not make good on its promise of emancipation, but chose rather to ignore the law, or strangle the hope of freedom in a tangle of legalisms. The dream of equal representation, enfranchisement, equal opportunity, and civil rights had been "deferred" after 1877 (the end of the Reconstruction era) by the "separate but equal" provisions of the Jim Crow laws in the South. The question that Hughes asks is how are Black people supposed to live, educate themselves, earn a living, and raise their children in a white racist society? What social "types" are engendered by veiled oppression and freedom in name only? Are Black people expected to just wither and die, or become ill, or turn to crime? Or become buffoons? Or use their strength to merely bear the weight of oppression? Or should Black people follow the revolutionary principles outlined by the framers of the Constitution?

Blackberry Eating by Galway Kinnell

A good poem about eating, and how eating is connected to the art of wordcraft, or speaking. The alliterations--liquids, sibilants, plosives, and bilabials--seem to evoke the lusciousness of the experience of eating blackberries: /l/, /s/, /p/, /b/, and /m/.

The Changing Light by L. Ferlinghetti

The poetic description of the changing light of San Francisco is soft, mellow, airy. One of the poet's late works, it evokes the calm after the storm. Vernacular ("...is none of..") and yet precise ("scrim"), the poem eventually settles on Greece--the cradle of modern western civilization--as having light which is similar to San Francisco's: an island light that creates sharp dark shadows. The poet's gaze cast eastward, he overlooks the east coast of the US and Paris, France to settle on Greece. Oh, the soup we could make with those allusions! But instead, let's consider the gentle motion of the fog, like clockwork, rolling in at night and burned off by late morning. By mid-afternoon, the wind picks up; then, it is soon evening, and the "city lights" begin to twinkle. And the poet is aware of having made history, yet the whole city drifts, as in a dream, "anchorless over the ocean," in search of direction.

Howl by Allen Ginsberg

I've read that it is impossible to underestimate the influence that Ginsberg's Howl has exerted on American poetry over the last 50 years since it was first written. I believe it was Galway Kinnell who said that Howl changed poetry's concern with meter to a preoccupation with breath. Howl marked a watershed moment in American verse. The breath required to read each line is substantial; in the recording on poets.org the effort that Ginsberg makes is audibly discernible, marked by longish pauses, slight coughs, and occasional deep breaths. Of course, Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" provided Ginsberg with a historical model.

A Letter in October by Ted Kooser

Kooser's poem plays lovingly with light, darkness, reflections, time, nature, and art. Four stanzas of 6 lines each, 36 lines. Unrhymed, and rhythmically mostly enjambed tetrameters. We are in October, and the speaker is up at dawn, usually, reflecting on the morning. His image too reflects in the window pane since "dawn comes later and later now." His field of vision dwindles rapidly--he once enjoyed early morning nature scenes, but now can see no more than his own reflection in the window pane beyond which is the darkness of night. Light and dark are not absolutes, but rather form a continuum to which the speaker is witness, and a participant. His face appears "pale and odd, / startled by time." And now that it is fall (the autumn of life), the speaker is forced to look inwards (reflect) instead of look out at nature. The poem uses simple language to describe natural scenes that seem imbued with the sparkle and awe of magical realism; and maps the contours of the speaker's life within the framework of the four ages (seasons) of man. We sense the genuineness of the speaker's discovery, its freshness, while at the same time recognize the signs of his dawning awareness of his own mortality.

Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds

The questioning rather matter-of-fact tone ("How do they do it...") becomes an acid indictment of people's vanity, selfishness and egocentricity. The speaker sees them as motherless orphans who in turn are like religious zealots who solipsistically worship themselves, as the fountainhead of the god of pleasure. The cold sporting metaphors (ice-skating, marathon running) are meant to capture, and contrast with, the athletic performance of strenuous sex, which she represents with tender humor ("come to the come to the God come to the..."). The representation of orgasmic intensity, which should also (and this is the speaker's point) represent the affectionate bonding between two partners, contrasts sharply with the medico-technical language of heart rate and best time. Instead of treating the lover as an end, some people treat her as a means. This slight gives rise to the speaker's indignation and vitriol.

Komunyakaa's "Facing It"

Written in the raw, panting rhythm of Nuyorican style poets, "Facing It" evokes the speaker's challenge of dealing with his memory of the horror of war. Even once the war has been memorialized, in the attempt to put it behaind us, the poet's perception refuses to allow the wall to just be a wall. He enters into it, trades places with it, becomes it -- flesh and granite become interchangeable -- and consequently he relives the memories that the war memorial is supposed to commemorate. Stream of consciousness completes the metamorphosis, "My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite." Instead of putting the war out of mind, the memorial provides a habitat for memory, and actually calls it forth as a tragic historical marker.

Birches & After Apple-Picking

Frost’s poem “Birches” evokes a Vermont winter landscape in a remote corner of a deciduous forest. The ice storm conjures in the speaker’s mind events from his boyhood when he used to climb up into the top branches of birch trees and swing down on them all the way to the ground. His recollection leads the speaker to meditate on the difficulties in life that might cause him to lose heart; to get through those moments he’d like to be a swinger of birches again. He then meditates on love, and finally on his own death.

The blank verse poem is historically well-suited to sustain a meditation, for the iambic pentameter drives the train of thought forward while the absence of any formal rhyme scheme allows the speaker an almost unlimited degree of freedom to pursue associations and the assonances they suggest. The speaker takes as his starting point the image of birch trees bent low under the weight of the ice, an image which he transforms through his musings on childhood, love, and death.

In Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” we see an apple orchard after harvest time and all the paraphernalia necessary to the task: ladder, barrel, cider press. The speaker is exhausted from the effort and all he wants to do is sleep, or perhaps hibernate, or then again maybe just sleep, for his labor has set him apart from the animal kingdom (woodchuck).

One of Michelangelo’s sonnets comes to mind where all the artist wants to do is sleep. He has been up for days, working, completely immersed in the labor of active creation, and now he is dead tired and wishes to be left in peace. Nothing can rouse him. Frost taps into the topos of the artist exhausted after his creative exertions, hoping only to sleep. That sleep is probably not identical to the brute hibernation of the woodchuck, or by synecdoche of the entire animal kingdom, for his creativity has made the poet more human.

The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop

The speaker in the poem seems to alternate between projecting her human world onto the fish and objectively observing a specimen from the natural world. However distinct these worlds at first may appear to the speaker, they intrude upon each other as she continues her meditation. The four hooks and a leader hooked through the fish's lower jaw are likened by the speaker first to medals of honor, and then they suggest to her a vision of the wispy white beard of an Asian sage. The victory that the speaker alludes to is perhaps the dawning of the awareness of the absence to any strict demarcations between subject and object. Oil spread a rainbow on the water and the speaker is also flooded by rainbow colored light--the speaker does not appear able to put a stop to the vision of the interdependence of all things--which signals an illumination of sorts that prevents the speaker from taking another's life, even if it's only a fish, for in the fish she sees part of herself. Letting the fish go is a sign that she has "killed the will to kill," as the Buddha once taught.

Greetings

Looking forward to the course. My blog address is www.distanceavailsnot.blogspot.com.

Richard