Ten

My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn't see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.

So . . . this is taken from Louise Gluck's "Snow," from the collection of poems titled Ararat. There's the obvious connection of references to snow, for Frost's poem (Snowy Woods, etc.), all puns intended. But let's disregard that, perhaps it's too "surfacy". If you want to go deeper, I read both the Frost poem and the Knowles poem as being very simple and pure, conceptually speaking. Aside from the simplicity, I was also struck by their sprawling ambiguity (especially in the Knowles selection). If the excerpt from Gluck that I've chosen isn't simple enough (albeit highly loaded), I think her philosophy of poetics should speak for itself:

"What I share with [poets in my generation] is ambition; what I dispute is its definition. I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum . . . It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power."

Sorry for the excessive quoting, but it's gorgeous. This is the most candid I have been all term . . .

Posted by Danielle Fisher on May 18, 2006 01:19 AM | Categories: current

four

Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home;
'Twas all so pretty a sail it seemed
As if it could not be,
And some folks thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea.

I'll take this down if you two deem it unsuitable, but I rather think it fits - "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod," a children's poem by Eugene Field. It nicely ties up the patterns of repetition in the Frost and Knowles poems, and in the diction of the Glass excerpt; the imagery seemed to mesh as well, what with the sleep, sailing, and journeys.

Full text of the poem can be found here: http://www.amherst.edu/~rjyanco94/literature/eugenefield/poems/poemsofchildhood/wynkenblynkenandnod.html

Posted by Sarah Yost on May 9, 2006 12:47 AM | Categories: current

And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep

Connection: Danielle's quote was taken from a Philip Glass opera. The text is take from a poem by American poet Christoper Knowles. Throughout the rest of the poem, Knowles uses repetition of these lines. Repetition of lines and words is a widely used poetic device. In his poem, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost uses this poetic device. These items are linked by their use of repetition as a poetic device.

Posted by Chad McLain on May 7, 2006 08:33 PM | Categories: current | Comments (0)

Nine

It could get some wind for the sailboat . . .

And it could get for it is. It could get the railroad for these workers. It could get for it is were. It could be a balloon. It could be Franky. It could be very fresh and clean. All these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends. It could be those days.

Posted by Danielle Fisher on May 1, 2006 10:09 AM | Categories: current

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