Poetry Session – Oct 26, 2023

Elizabeth Bishop watercolour, gouche and ink – Tombstone for Sale

Poetry attracts the most diverse practitioners of the art as the selection from this month’s session indicates. From primates to feminists, people of all genders and sexual inclinations adopt poetry as their mode of contemplating the world, and if possible reforming it, according to their vision. Our collection this month is a sprightly representation of the manifold well-springs of poetry.

Coincidentally, all four nations comprising the United Kingdom were represented: Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Their voices could not have been more different, nor their preoccupations more varied. It was uisge beatha (whiskey) in Scotland, farting frogs in Ireland, tadpoles in Wales, and serving tea to friends in England. Even their language was distinct: from joyous singing and revelry in Scotland, to the dull monotone of England; the loving naturalist’s gaze on a precisely observed body of water on an Irish farm, to the textual metaphors of a Welshman obsessed with language.

UK Poets – Burns, Eliot, Heaney, Williams

At this session there were three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature – the second woman ever to win it, Syzmborska; and Heaney whose birthright language was Gaelic; and of course, T.S. Eliot who won it in 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.” Syzmborska was initially allied to the Communist ideology but later renounced her earlier views and defended free speech. Heaney will be remembered for his magnificent translation of Beowulf, a classic of Olde English. Heaney renders into poetry – a throbbing action-packed tale of the hero Beowulf, summoned by Hrothgar, king of the Dames, to defeat the under-sea monster Grendel.  Joe read excerpts from it at a 2006 session of KRG (not on the Web).

Seamus Heaney – Beowulf cover

Five women and five men among the poets selected, speaks to an even gaze on the world of poetry. Our women readers are as likely to choose women poets as they are to incline to poets of the male order. In the past we have had sessions exclusively devoted to women poets, as a theme, but they seem to rise up even without pre-selection. 

Women Poets Collage: Barnes, Bishop, Szymborska, Doshi, Limon

1. ARUNDHATY

She read a poem called Lover by Ada Limón.

Poet Bio

Ada Limón was born March 28, 1976. She is an American poet. On 12 July 2022, she was named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress. This made her the first Latina to be Poet Laureate of the United States.

Limón, who is of Mexican-American descent, grew up in Sonoma, California. She attended the drama school at the University of Washington, where she studied theatre. Upon graduation, Limón received a fellowship to live and write at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In 2003, she received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in the same year won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry.  In 2013, Limón served as a judge for the National Book Award for Poetry. In 2020, she was awarded a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 

Ada Limón, (born March 28, 1976) is an American poet

In July 2022, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden appointed her the 24th United States Poet Laureate for the term of 2022-2023. This made her the first Latina to be poet laureate of the United States. Hayden renewed Limón's term for another two years in April 2023.

In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Commentary

Arundhaty quite liked the poem. The theme is not very complicated. This poem needs to be understood in the context of the recent pandemic of the era of social distancing to be fully appreciated.

Published in 2021, it is about a world in waiting, waiting for everything to be open for business once more, waiting for pleasure to return and waiting even for the word lover to attain its old meaning again.

After Arundhaty read the poem readers in chorus said it was very nice. KumKum chimed in that though she had never read her, she was immediately drawn to the poem.

2. KAVITA

Kavita read a poem by Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska. She was a Polish poet, essayist and translator.

She was born on July 2nd, July 1923 in Prowent in central Poland.

Her parents were Wincenty Szymborski and Anna (née Rottermund) Szymborska. Her father was a steward of a Count Zamoyski, a Polish patriot. After Zamoyski's death, family moved to Kraków. That is where she lived till the end of her life in early 2012.

During the World War II, when World War II broke out in 1939, she continued her education in underground classes. She worked as a railroad employee and managed to avoid being deported to Germany for forced labour. In 1945, she began studying Polish literature and then she switched to sociology in Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

She started writing poetry and her first poem, Szukam Słowa, which means looking for words, was published in 1945 in a daily newspaper. Her poems were frequently published.

Wisława Szymborska, (1923–2012) was Polish poet

She quit university due to financial constraints and married a poet Adam Wodewski in 1948. They divorced in 1954, but remained close.

She became a member of the Communist Party called the Polish United Workers' Party. She worked in literary magazines and wrote book review columns. She wrote many essays. She also translated French literature to Polish.

She won many awards – the most famous one was the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

She died of lung cancer in Kraków in 2012.

Commentary

Kavita chose the poem, Utopia. Szymborska is painting her vision of what Utopia is, a literal place where there is certainty and answers are provided and there is no doubt.

It's the perfect imagined world in the future. Perhaps such a place never existed, nor will exist, but she imagined it and wrote her version.

Kavita then read her poem.

Commentary:

Kavita likes that the faint footprints scattered on the beach turn towards exception. That Utopia is not inhabited is intriguing. Utopia cannot be inhabited. But all these things are there, perfectly balanced, in an imaginary world.

3. DEVIKA

She chose Robert Burn who has been recited a couple of times before. Saras did his poem To a Mouse, last in 2021. Before that Hemjit of hallowed memory in 2018 read Burns on the subject of henpecked husbands. And before that it was Devika’s turn, for in 2018 at her very first poetry session she recited The Soldier’s Return by Burns. 

The other option she had was Amrita Pritam whom also she has done before. Here’s a very short bio.

Bio

Burns had a very short life. He died at the age of 37. But actually he got recognition probably for the last 10 years. In those 10 years, he had done so much that apparently he became popular not only in the West, but in Russia too he's very popular. There are more statues of him than of Shakespeare in the world, they say. There's a Burns supper that they do every year, on his birth anniversary.

He lived to the age of 37 only, but in that short period of his life he did so much. He never went to school. His father didn't believe in sending a farm boy to school – this was in 1759. But the father was a very well-read person. He was a farmer, but he taught the children the three R’s; it was clear that the children needed to know that much.

And first book of poem Burns published was when he was 27 years old. He was thinking of migrating to Jamaica, because an affair with a woman got her pregnant, – her father was not at all pleased. So Burns thought it would be better to push off, scoot from the country, and go to Jamaica and live there.

Robert Burns (1759 – 1796)

But it so happened that just then his book of poems got published, and he became popular. He went to Edinburgh.

And there he created a striking impression with his looks, with his poems, with his charm, and with his ease in conversation. He glowed according to the people who came in contact with him.

But he was a farmer, basically. So he had a lot of difficulties growing up; it affected his health also. To top it all, he had a heart problem, and rheumatic troubles.

He married the woman he had impregnated, and they had many kids.

Because of his illness, he tried a water treatment. Some say he died from the treatment, because he had to immerse himself in the sea. You may read more about his work at a BBC Arts website.

Commentary:

The poem Devika chose is called John Barleycorn. Now John Barleycorn is a fictional humorous personification of alcohol. And it first appeared in 1620.

It's a traditional English harvest legend and a metaphor for the cycle of birth, suffering, death and eventually rebirth. Here’s something more about John Barleycorn.

That many years ago in the 1700s, we had a description of the whole process of making whiskey, which is used even today in whiskey distilleries all across Scotland.

People call it Scotch for short, and the Irish call it, whiskey the water of life.

Devika was just coming to the origin of the word.

The Irish call it Uisce Beatha, a Gaelic word which translates as ‘ water of life.’ It is pronounced as ISH-ca BAA-ha. See

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=MAvYw9wD9ak

Uisce became shortened to whisky in Scotland, and whiskey in Ireland.

Devika listened to the pronunciations available on youtube and mastered it, finding it quite interesting.

There's a music group called Traffic who have performed John Barleycorn.

Devika was sure Thomo would know this; Thomo nodded that he had heard it. Barley is the grain from which whiskey is made. The poem is a bit ‘pagan.’ In some places it can seem quite violent. There are many versions of the poem, but of course Devika read Burns’ version of it.

But there is another one for children, done in a nicer way with less killing and gore.

Commentary

The poem is a bit gruesome. In the last part when he started drinking, he was very happy because obviously the whiskey gave joy to him.

Readers liked John Barleycorn.

Joe said he thinks he knows why Burns is so popular. It's actually for one poem of his. ‘Oh, my love is like a red, red rose.’ Joe proceed to recite it, and said though his mother  was an unsentimental, unpoetic person, she knew this poem well.

O my Luve is like a red, red rose

   That’s newly sprung in June;

O my Luve is like the melody

   That’s sweetly played in tune.

So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

   So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

   Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Geetha asked if Joe recited it to KumKum. No, no, no, replied K2 but Joe told me that Ammachi used to know this.

Joe said in their travels, if they are near any place where there is a poet's memorial location or birthplace, they try to go and visit it. Thus they went to Alloway where Burns was born in 1759, in a cottage that his father built.  They were in Glasgow to visit Maria, mother of their son-in-law, Alex. Alloway is about 40 miles south of Glasgow by road, and a kind friend of Maria, also a devotee of Burns, not only took them there to visit, but enacted and read the dramatic poem Tam o' Shanter  whose action takes place between a quaint little church in Alloway where Cutty Sark, the witch, is first sighted dancing, and she pursues Tom who flees on horseback and singes him with flame! He is saved by crossing the water of the river Doon over a bridge still standing there. It was a magnificent experience to have this wonderful gentleman, John, guide us; knowing of our interest Burns and poetry he read the whole poem Tam o' Shanter  starting at  the churchyard and walking over to the bridge over the river Doon.

Burns – The late medieval bridge over the River Doon, the Brig o’Doon, sits near Alloway

Joe said when they went to Scotland, they found that their son-in-law, though born and educated in Scotland, neither drank whiskey nor knew about Rabbie Burns. They have a very nice museum in Alloway dedicated to Burns. It's been updated. They spent money and it's really very well restored where he lived and the cottage.

‘Cutty Sark’ is an archaic Scottish name for a short nightdress. ‘Cutty’ means short or stumpy, and ‘sark’ means nightdress or shirt. The witch in the poem was clad in one and that’s where the name came from. Later a sailing ship named Cutty Sark was built in 1869 that plied between London and Shanghai brining tea from China, and carrying spirits in the other direction.

4. GEETHA

Geetha presented Seamus Heaney, a poet won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Kavita's poet, the Polish woman Szymborska, won the following year in 1996. 

Seamus Heaney has been read three time before, the first was at one our earliest readings in our inaugural year, 2006. Joe then read from Heaney’s acclaimed 1999 translation in verse of Beowulf, the poem in Old English in which the hero Beowulf comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, against the attack by the undersea monster Grendel.  That translation was the fruit of a long effort and several attempts to reproduce the versification in modern English to mirror the structure of stress in the Old English poem. The result is marvellous. You can read an appreciation of the Beowulf translation here.

Geetha thought she was in very good company then. But perhaps it will take time to fathom the full depth of Heaney.

He was Irish, and his full name was Seamus Justin Heaney. He was a renowned Irish poet, playwright and translator. He was born in in Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland, on 13th April 1939. He died at the age of 74 on 30th August 2013 in Blackrock, Dublin, Ireland.

The Punch magazine said he was described as writing with the authority of a man who has his own vision of the world. He was the eldest son of nine children by a farmer and his wife. He studied in good schools. He went to Queen's College, Dublin. He later attained the coveted position of professor of poetry at Oxford University in 1989 – 94.

Seamus Heaney(1939-2013)

He transferred to Harvard and became Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory there; before that he had gone to Harvard as a visiting professor. He occupied the chair of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence at Harvard University, from 1998 to 2007.

Heaney married Marie Devlin in 1965, and they had two sons and a daughter. After being admitted to hospital for a stroke in Dublin he died there.

Commentary 

His first book of poems, published in 1966, was called Death of a Naturalist. It is the title poem from the collection that Geetha selected.

Death of a Naturalist, can be explained as the nature ramblings of a naturalist, who as a child used to like collecting and observing frog spawn. Later he changes his mind when he learns more about spawn and frogs. Incidentally, Priya read this very poem in 2013.

The poem is in two stanzas. The first is the discovery as a child and finding the joy of nature in the spawn, putting it in a bottle, and seeing the tadpoles emerge from it.

The next stanza, which is shorter, is a disillusionment with the whole scheme as an adult. Death of a Naturalist is written in blank verse (iambic pentameter) with unrhymed lines. It's a highly enjambed poem, where the sense flows over across line boundaries, as they say ‘sentences skittering over the edges of one line and careening into the next.’

Therefore you can read it like prose, rather than rhyming poetry.

After reading the poem Geetha said the second stanza seems to strike terror, but the whole poem flows from one line to the next and is beautifully written. The poet is recollecting what he did as a young boy. One gets scared when he sings the frog theme. It is that the second visit that quite terrifies him.

5. JOE

Poems deserve a word of introduction. Unfamiliar diction and imagery, or the innate compression of poetry, may obscure an understanding of the context before the words are launched.  A poem is text first, and and when reading, it is natural to re-read, if the lines are not clear at first; in the spoken verse the default safety of wandering back is not at hand.

Therefore Joe decided to say a word before reading the first poem. It’s about tadpoles happily proliferating in a pool  and finding they become prey once they are frogs on land. The main conceit in the poem is that of typesetting: the tadpole shapes are commas, the pool in which they are begotten is a paragraph, and as they swim about the space between commas defines the clauses.

Joe read the poem and then commented: the commas Williams is talking of are tadpoles in the pool, and he compares them with their fat heads and long whipping tails to commas placed in text that are lifted from a print compositor’s matrix to indicate pauses:

hundreds
of little fat breathing pauses in the water’s
dull paragraph. 

The pool itself is compared to a long paragraph of text. The opening is very like a haiku, and the famous haiku of Matsuo Bashō (1644 - 1694) comes to mind:

An old silent pond …

A Frog jumps into the pond,

Splash! Silence again

Here the first sound emitted is ‘A twig breaks’ on land and we have to imagine the sound in our mind, but within the pond the only sound is:

one or two new frogs
plop in the water, 

And later in the second stanza adult frogs prepare to face ‘the crack of danger’ on land:

this uncertain
upper world that no-one had predicted


back when it was all wet long soundless


clauses between the wriggle of black breath

The metaphor of text with its commas, paragraphs, and clauses continues to thread the poem. The poem ends on the image of the land being a Purgatory for the frogs, a place of suffering, from which they will find relief by heading back into the pool.

The second poem, Panel on the Arts, is a translation by Rowan Williams of a poem by the Welsh poet Euros Bowen. Euros Bowen (1904—1988) was an Anglican priest in the Church of Wales. Bowen wrote poems which he presented as signs. He won the bardic crown at the National Eisteddfod (Festival) of Wales both in 1948 and again in 1950. His four collections of poetry, were all written in Welsh; in 1974 he produced a bilingual edition of selected poems with his own English translations.

In this poem with calm irony the poet describes a conversation among the illuminati, those refined connoisseurs of poetry. You be the judge of of its wit and what Bowen thought about poetry:

Short Bio of Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams on his new poetry collection  'The Other Mountain' at the 2014 Edinburgh Book Festival

Rowan Douglas Williams, born in Swansea, south Wales on 14 June 1950, into a Welsh-speaking family, was educated at Dynevor School in Swansea and Christ's College Cambridge where he studied theology. He studied for his doctorate in theology at Wadham College Oxford, taking his DPhil in 1975. He was ordained deacon in Ely Cathedral before returning to Cambridge.

He spent nine years in academic and parish work in Cambridge. In 1983 he was appointed Lecturer in Divinity at the university, and the following year became dean and chaplain of Clare College. He became a fellow of the British Academy in 1990. In this time he was also writing poetry and became a fine poet and translator of poetry from several languages – Welsh, Russian, German.

Rowan Williams with students at Magdalene College, Cambridge

In 1991 he was consecrated as bishop of Monmouth, a diocese on the Welsh borders, and in 1999 he was elected Archbishop of Wales. Archbishop Williams was confirmed on 2 December 2002 as the 104th bishop of the See of Canterbury: the first Welsh successor to St Augustine of Canterbury.

Dr Williams is acknowledged internationally as an outstanding theological writer, scholar and teacher. He has written many books and been involved in many theological, ecumenical and educational commissions. 

As Archbishop of Canterbury his principal responsibilities were pastoral – leading the life and witness of the Church of England in general and his own diocese in particular by his teaching and oversight.

His interests include music, fiction and languages.

In 1981 Dr Williams married Jane Paul, a lecturer in theology, whom he met while living and working in Cambridge. They have a daughter and a son. 

Joe did not refer to Rowan Williams as His Grace or the Most Reverend in this writeup; it's because Williams wanted to be considered as a poet and judged as a poet when he was writing poetry. And as a poet, there is no hierarchy – you're not a woman poet or a priest poet or an archbishop poet, you're a poet.

Joe trusted he had done him no disrespect by calling him by his name, Rowan Williams.

6. KUMKUM

KumKum did not want to give a long introduction to  T.S. Eliot, a poet with such comprehensive influence on twentieth century poetry, whom we have recited at KRG on numerous occasions.

She was going to read a poem which is part of what are called the Boston Poems of T.S. Eliot. In 1910 and 1911, he wrote four poems that introduced themes to which, with variation and development, he returned time and again: Portrait of a Lady, Preludes, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 

Priya read the last one in April 2010, and KumKum was reading Portrait of a Lady. When you hear this name you think of two things.

One is the novel by this name which Henry James wrote in 1881. It's a beautiful book. But this is Portrait of a Lady, and that was The Portrait of a Lady.

T.S. Eliot (1868 – 1965)

Eliot inscribes an epigraph with three lines from The Jew of Malta, a play written by Christopher Marlowe:

Thou hast committed—

Fornication: but that was in another country,

And besides, the wench is dead.

A friar is accusing one of the villains, Barabas of fornication, which he readily admits to. Well yes, he says, I did fornicate, but it was in another country, and besides, the woman is dead; showing the callousness of these knaves.

The poem is about a relationship going south between a man – the narrator – and an older woman of upper middle-class background

Barabas is introduced probably to indicate, that here also the speaker of the poem, is rather callous towards the older woman who befriended him, and really didn't care much about her.

It is a long poem, and Joe who keeps the number of lines recited by a reader to a manageable number, cut out portions of it. But  KumKum wanted KRG readers, if they have the time, to read the whole poem here.

It has a really lovely narration.

Commentary

So in the end, the man wonders why the two have not developed a more intimate friendship. Perhaps they should wait and he should write to her. But what if she should die

some afternoon,

Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;

…

Would she not have the advantage, after all?

She‘d be gone and then there’s no need to worry about what he is thinking.

This is the story, inconclusive and dry, all emotion sucked out, a greyness descending. It’s all botched up …

I don’t think there’s more need to explain the poem, you have to read it and all the tangential remarks, and high-sounding words, that document the sad inability of two people to come to grips and tear down the barrier between their souls.

7. PAMELA

Pamela was very happy to read this poem because it's from the book that KRG readers had gifted her on her birthday. She was supposed to read this a long time back, but being busy had to cancel at that poetry session. So she picked it up again and was happy to do it today.

It's A Fable for the 21st Century by Tishani Doshi.

Poet Bio

Tishani Doshi was born in 1975 in Madras to to a Welsh mother and Gujarati father..

Devika said she's from her daughter Smriti’s school but much senior to her. KumKum said she met Tishani Doshi at the Week Hay Festival in Nov 2010 in Trivandrum, which was lovely – there’s a photo of K2 and Ms Doshi.

Tishani Doshi completed a bachelor's degree in the United States from Queen's College in Charlotte, North Carolina, and later graduated with a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. 

Doshi is now 47 years old (born Dec 1975). She still looks young, elegant, and attractive. She started writing very early.

Tishani Doshi’s collection of poems, A God at the Door, showcases the poet's knack of reflecting on hurt, with humour and grace - photo by Carlo Pizzati

She's been writing for a long time. 

She's a very chirpy person, very lovely. She's also a dancer. Well, in Chennai, all young girls learn to dance, just as in Bengal all young girls learn to sing. But she took it up as a vocation. After reading this poem, Pamela could  imagine what kind of person she must be.

A few hours from Chennai, in a little-known village, writers Tishani Doshi and Carlo Pizzati have set up home. Unhurried, unconnected and introspective, it’s the only way they will have it

The Doshis lived in an area of Gujarati and Marwari businessmen and traders. Both paternal and maternal grandfathers were speculators, dabbling in the stock market.

Her grandfather, Ravilal Doshi was aged two, when the family moved to Madras. He would begin his career as an accountant in a tax office, then go on to set up a paint business, which would find a place in her novel, The Pleasure Seekers.

In January 1969, soon after her mother arrived from Wales to marry her father, the family moved to Sylvan Lodge Colony in Kilpauk. It was in the summer of 1976, six months after she was born, that her parents moved from the joint family establishment to a house of their own, which is in the Thousand Lights area of Triplicane.

It was called Shafi Muhammad Road that time, which also plays a part in her book, The Pleasure Seekers. Her family then moved to South Madras in 1989. It was like moving to a completely different city, as they lived five minutes from Besant Nagar Beach.

All this sounded familiar to Pamela for these were all places she frequented because her parents were there too.

The Bay of Bengal would become a permanent feature in Doshi’s life of poetry, whether it was going to the beach after the Dec 2004 tsunami that hit the coast, or in the poems and fiction that followed.

Geographically, it was important because much later, after she had spent five years studying in the US and another year also working in London. She returned to Madras in 2000 with the idea of becoming a scuba diver or poet. And that is when she turned to dancing because she lived on One Elliot's Beach Road. She came across Chandralekha, the well-known dancer at Mandala, her centre at Elliot's Beach, in Chennai. This led Doshi into a career of dancing.

Chandralekha was an exceptional Bharatnatyam dancer who also choreographed fusion dances

Chandralekha’s house too would also find a place in Doshi’s novel The Pleasure Seekers as Ba's house of strings. Until Chandralekha’s death in December 2006, and beyond, it would be an important point of reference for Doshi. Mornings were spent in the dance theatre where they worked together; and later they would return for informal evening talks in the room of swings, where friends would always be passing through – filmmakers, poets, artists, and journalists.

Doshi would listen for the most part, but this was her second education in becoming an artist and developing a sense of politics. For most of the 2000s, that small radius of the Theosophical Society, Chandralekha’s home, Besant Nagar Beach and her parents' home was really her radius of activity. She was tied there, she says.

‘The idea of the body is central to my work’ … Doshi performs her poem ‘Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods ’

Around 2011, she moved out of the city of Madras to live on a beach in a manner of speaking, the same way Chandralekha moved from crowded Mylapore to live on the then isolated Besant Nagar Beach. That's why her house is numbered One. The city still calls to her from time to time, but only at times. She has moved far from her original moorings.

And Chandralekha's house is in a lovely location, and today it's a cafe or restaurant also. It's a performing area now also. They keep having shows there. Our reader Devika saw her dance there actually.

Joe told Pamela that she hadn’t mentioned in her bio that Doshi was has been married for many years to a handsome Italian, name of Pizzati who is a journalist-photographer and a writer of novels too. He has his own web-site. That’s because Pamela did not delve further, reading only from the book she got as a prize at KRG, where of course there is no mention. You can read about their Big Fat Jain Scottish Welsh Venetian Indian Wedding.

Pamela had nostalgic recollections of these lovely places in Madras (now Chennai, of course) because she was there in her childhood. Her parents were in Madras from 1982 to 2007. Pamela had a house there which she finally had to sell off, because she couldn't travel up and down during the pandemic to take care of it.

Commentary

A Fable for the 21st Century. The poet  gives a little quotation, at the top which caught Pamela’s eye.

Existing is plagiarism — EM Cioran

E.M. Cioran is a Romanian philosopher. Pamela couldn’t say how this quotation bears upon or illustrates the poem.

But it does bring out something, for we all are living lives that others have also lived too. So it's a repetition in a way. And in that way existing itself may be termed plagiarism. But is it, really? Aren’t our lives all unique, wondered Joe.

This first line also caught Pamela’s attention:

There is no end to unknowing

Because to know is a verb which cannot be used in the present continuous tense; you don't say ‘I am knowing.’

But she's used ‘unknowing’ as a state of being. Then it becomes different. And unknowing, perhaps it means there is no end to how much you can know. And the more you know, you learn how much more there is that you don't know. So that line also caught Pamela’s attention.

There is a Christian work of mysticism dating from the 14th century (author anonymous) called The Cloud of Unknowing. The word ‘unknowing’ is both adjective and noun. To summarise the book, it states “God is spirit in the purest sense and therefore, no matter how intense one's desire to know Him/Her, the movement toward God will ever be halted by the cloud of unknowing that hides God from our human understanding and prevents the fullest and truest experience of God's being.”

After reading the poem Pamela delivered her Commentary:

You cannot talk about anything when you're dying. That's your end. And the breath stays on till you take the last long exhalation.

Pamela likes the way the lines were constructed, which corresponded with the meaning of the whole. This poem really appealed to her.

The poet refers to Boko Haram, an Islamist militant organisation in Nigeria that has often kidnapped girls from schools. We all remember the Battle of Plassey which took place in Bengal. The battle was at Palashi (Anglicised version: Plassey) on the banks of the Hooghly River, about 150 kilometres north of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and south of Murshidabad. Robert Clive bribed Mir Jafar, the commander-in-chief of the Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah’s army, promising to make him Nawab of Bengal. Thus Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah at Plassey in 1757 and captured Calcutta.

It’s another of the examples of the colonial aggression and shady corruption that Doshi mentions. The Battle of Plassey marked the beginning of the British Empire in India with the formation of the Bengal presidency. Before that it was the East India Company that lorded it over parts of India.

KumKum said she and Joe went right up to the Plassey and there's a monument there. Thomo wrote about it in his book. It's no longer an open field now.

KumKum asked  Thomo if he had gone to the Hazarduari Palace? No, he hadn’t. Thomo went only to a monument.

Pamela went to Paris with with much excitement, after expounding about the French Revolution for so many years as a school teacher. She wanted to see the Bastille because the Storming of the Bastille was the first significant event of the French Revolution. She went around asking how to reach the Bastille and ultimately when she reached, it was an unremarkable spot with nothing going on there. No sign of the prison or anything. She saw one little Cupid on a pillar and wondered is that all that’s left of the Bastille? You can read the Bastille wiki, and learn that after its destruction in 1789, very little remains in the 21st century. There are only two big stones left to mark the original fortress-prison, which have been shifted from here to the middle of a park nearby.

KumKum said that in a similar fashion she went to see Jhansi Rani's kingdom. She was so keen to see the first fight of the freedom struggle. Jhansi is a woeful place now. They drove through Jhansi and said, okay, let’s go on ...

Devika’s favourite lines from the poem by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan are:

खूब लड़ी मर्दानी वह तो झाँसी वाली रानी थी

– which she read in Oct 2018 at KRG.

The poem creates some excitement. Devika said they all had to learn it in school; it was part of the curriculum. These are some lines of poetry you don’t forget, like Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, a poem she read in July 2020 at KRG.

It’s like the Albatross around the neck that you meet in Coleridge’s poem and that famous line

Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

Joe read The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner in June 2018 at KRG.

Wordsworth was the other poet that we learnt in schools in India. Apart from the Daffodils poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, we read that very sad poem The Solitary Reaper. Kavita read that one in May 2012.

Gosh, KRG is a repository of favourites from our school years!

Pamela thought Dishani was not married. Dishani doesn't have to mention it in her bio, but even if she were to, she doesn't have to always mention her husband. It’s not even mentioned directly at her official website:

http://www.tishanidoshi.com/

In a bio, it's nice to know, particularly if the other person is a significant author too, as Carlo Pizzati is. See

http://carlopizzati.com/

When Joe volunteered at the session that Tishani Doshi had step-sons from her marriage to Carlo Pizzati; then somebody remarked, ‘My, my, how well versed Joe is in poetry!’ ... and asked if Joe knew this beautiful young lady. No, he did not. But Joe had erred about step-sons, what the couple has are three dogs.

Kumkum said she often goes to Chennai for a holiday – the last time was in 2020, and she is planning another trip, for she loves Chennai, in spite of the heat and the water shortage.

But many visitors have  never faced  water shortage in Chennai. And some have lived for 36 years and not faced it. Only some ares have the problem.

8. SARAS

Saras read a poem by the poet Mark Strand. She hadn't heard of him earlier; this was the first time. Just by chance she came across a poem of his and it struck a chord, and so she thought she should read it.

Poet Bio

Mark Strand is a Canadian-born American poet. He's an essayist and a translator, born in 1934. He died in 2014. He was the poet laureate consultant in poetry to the US Library of Congress in 1990. He's won many awards. The Wallace Stevens Award in 2004 was one of them. He was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 to 2014

He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is a fixed group of worthies. A vacancy arises only when a member dies. Then the next person is elected. There are very few people who manage to be part of that academy, therefore.

Mark Strand received the Pulitzer in 1999 for ‘Blizzard of One’, a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a National Book award nomination

He was a very talented, multifaceted man. He studied painting at Yale University, where he got his Bachelor in Fine Arts in 1959. He started writing poetry later. His poems date from the 1960s. Strand earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1962 and began teaching at various colleges, including Yale University, Princeton University, and Harvard University. Strand claimed there were advantages of being a poet in the turbulent 1960s. “Groupies were a big part of the scene. Poets were underground pop stars, and when we made the campus circuit, girls would flock around. It wasn’t bad. I rather liked the uncertainties of my life then.”

Strand’s first book was Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), and introduced his distinctive approach to poetry, characterised by a pervasive sense of anxiety and restlessness. In the first stanza of the frequently anthologised poem Keeping Things Whole, he wrote

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

The concern with identity is woven through Strand’s later work, as well. 

Strand’s early collections of poetry, including Reasons for Moving (1968), made his reputation as a dark, brooding poet haunted by death. Harold Bloom, reviewing his third book Darker (1970) found that Strand was “opening himself more to his own vision,” and receding from surreal ideas.  There is a a concern with the apparent meaninglessness of life. Strand seriously considers the place of poetry in the universe, concluding that when 

If a man finishes a poem,

he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion

and be kissed by white paper.

Kirby viewed the poem as an answer to the problem of self. His collections The Story of our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978) also were dark, something between beauty and terror. In the 1980’s Selected Poems, Strand expresses the idea that the self and God are an inescapable frame to living; and both have the feature of unknowing (see above).  He has been criticised for lapsing into solipsism.

After the publication of Selected Poems Strand did not write poetry for a decade, because he didn’t like what he was writing, and no longer believed in his autobiographical poems. He turned to other forms of writing instead, including a foray into children’s literature with The Planet of Lost Things (1982). As with his poetry, Strand focused on questions of loss, using the story to address the common childhood worry about where things go when they are lost. Strand’s other books for children include The Night Book (1985) and Rembrandt Takes a Walk (1986). Strand published a collection of prose narratives in 1985, Mr. and Mrs. Baby (1985). The collection mixes the fantastic with the mundane, narrating odd stories  with surrealistic sketches of alienation and rootlessness. A critic wrote that on practically every page, one can be dazzled by Strand’s language.

Strand also published books of art criticism, including The Art of the Real (1983) and William Bailey (1987). His 1994 volume Hopper was a neat elucidation of the technique and narrative meaning of the American realist painter Edward Hopper’s works. 

Strand published The Continuous Life, his first book of poems in a decade, in 1990. It was one more turn in his development. There were changes in meter, diction and point of view. Strand’s appointment as US poet laureate the same year brought the book even more attention. Strand’s next books received much critical acclaim. Dark Harbor (1993) is a single long poem divided into 55 diverse sections. Reviewers emphasised the poem’s motifs of anticipation and tension, lacking resolution

In 1999 Strand was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Blizzard of One. The collection returns to the same concerns that have preoccupied Strand throughout his career as a poet. The familiar Strand themes of loss and absence reappear. It was an affirmation of Strand’s continued appeal. But he remained a deeply enjoyable poet.

When Strand published a collection of 15 short essays as Weather of Words (2000), he was commended for his insight into the work of other poets. There was commentary on poets, analysis of individual poems, and a discussion of poetic forms. 

Strand’s collection Man and Camel (2006) contains more playful, witty moments than previous books. New Selected Poems (2007) draws on Strand’s work and represents his new empathy for that old absurdity the self. His last book, Collected Poems (2014), was a long-list nominee for the National Book Award. In his later years, Strand stopped writing poetry and began to work again in art, making collages with paper by hand. His work was exhibited at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in Chelsea. 

Mark Strand’s honours include the Bollingen Prize, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, a Rockefeller Foundation award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University. He died in late 2014 at the age of 80.  You can read an Obituary of Mark Strand in The Guardian.

Here is a conversation with Mark Strand; he reads some of his poems.

[The above biography is excerpted from the Poetry Foundation’s account of Mark Strand’s career]

Commentary

The poem that Saras read is called Dreams and it is from his Collected Poems and it explores “the delicate and disorienting world of dreams with unparalleled elegance.”

Strand’s work was chosen by a string quartet, who performed two of his poems. One of the violinists read his poems and was struck by the simplicity of language. Actually that poem, with the quartet playing as he reads, is available on YouTube, but it’s hard to locate.

Saras chose this poem because it reminded her that she never remembers her dreams. On waking she knows she  has dreamt, just as everybody dreams, but she can never ever remember her dream. She finds it so annoying, because everybody says, oh, I dreamt of such-and-such  last night. Her sister-in-law dreams the most exotic stuff and she remembers everything, and Saras gets really ticked off by that. That was what was running through her mind while reading this poem.

She read the poem Dreams by Mark Strand and then offered her commentary.

Saras felt the poem really resonated with what she experienced with her dreams. She can never remember them. Perhaps she does remember, but not like what the poet says. He’s not quite sure he remembers. In the same way Saras can’t remember most of her dreams distinctly. Vaguely, perhaps.

Lucky you, somebody said.

Pamela said she sees her dad, mom and others in her dreams, She’s with them and they’re alive and well. Saras said she dreams of her parents and late husband Rajan and things. But she doesn't remember clearly. Because everybody is fast asleep.

Someone interjected “You're so lucky you can see your parents in your dream. I see so many of my loved ones, long gone, in my dreams.”

Saras said she’s very envious of people who do. When you dream in your deep sleep, you don't remember. Those kind of dreams she doesn’t even recall. It's all a jumble and there's no clear sequence of logic.

But you will remember it if you wake up to a dream. But Saras sleeps through her dreams, all oblivious that she is dreaming, and wakes up very early.

Geetha mentioned that in the Bible dreams have meanings and wise men in the realm are called upon to interpret the dreams of the rulers. Freud too interprets dreams, right? Instead of telling his patients what he thought their dreams meant, he invited them to say whatever came to mind in relation to each element of the dream, following their own trains of thought.

A reader said that she has dreamt of having a baby in her stage of seniority. Jokingly another inquired is that something that’s going to happen?

It’s as if you are going to be a part of something, don’t know what..

Joe said the difference between those who remember their dreams and those who don’t is that only the former are ready to be psychoanalysed by the Viennese Witchdoctor (Nabokov’s term).

9. SHOBA

Shoba read two poems by Elizabeth Bishop. The poet has been read earlier.

Poet Bio

Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8th, 1911 and died at the age of 68 in 1979. She was an only child. Sadly, her father died as soon as she was born. Her mother was institutionalised because she had mental illness.

As a child Bishop went to live with her maternal grandparents in in Nova Scotia. She referred to this place as home. She was shifted two or three times to different homes; one was that of her mother’s sister Aunt Maude. Bishop was introduced to the Romantic poets by Aunt Maude. Her childhood was disrupted, and as a result she was quite unhappy as a child. Her father’s family paid for her education and she went to boarding school at Walnut Hill School. Her first poems were published in the school’s literary magazine,The Blue Pen.

She attended Vassar College, the prestigious women's liberal arts college located in New York’s scenic Hudson Valley. It is now coed. She graduated from Vassar in 1934.

In her lifetime Elizabeth Bishop published just 100 poems. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century. She was a poet laureate of the United States from 1949–50. She won Pulitzer Prize in 1956.

Elizabeth Bishop, photo courtesy of the Elizabeth Bishop Society

She changed her residence many times, and lived in many countries. The pooet Robert Lowell was a close friend.

Bishop's life and work was entwined with Brazil from 1951 to 1979. She lived permanently there from 1951 to 1966, and then continued to return to Brazil for long sojourns until she sold her house in Ouro Prêto in 1974. When she arrived in Brazil in 1951 at the age of forty, it was not with any long-term stay in her mind, but her love affair with the Brazilian aristocrat Carlota (Lota) de Macedo Soares, and with the country itself, set her on another course, and Brazil became her home for nearly two decades.

[

Elizabeth Bishop’s long time companion was Maria Carlota ‘Lota’ Costallat De Macedo Soares (1910-1967)

You can read here about the house in Brazil she shared with her lover Lota, where she spent the happiest years of her turbulent life and wrote many of her best poems. “Lota and Bishop became remarkably close yet, temperamentally, they were opposites. The gregarious and the reclusive; the dynamo and the diffident procrastinator; the engagée and the politically naive; the voluble and the laconic; the hare and the tortoise.”

Another significant facet of Bishop’s life is her relationship to Marianne Moore.  As a student at Vassar College she had devoured Moore’s poems and when she got a chance to meet her, arranged by a mutual friend, she met her at a rendezvous in the New York Public Library. The pair hit it off immediately. The older writer soon placed her protégée’s work in an anthology, writing an insightful preface to the new poems. It was in Moore’s apartment Bishop met the astonishing clique of modernist poets, among them T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. The famous photo below documents a salon held in her apartment

[

Elizabeth Bishop nervously standing beside hatted Marianne Moore with her modernist friends in Moore’s New York apartment

The Elizabeth Bishop Society formed in 1991 perpetuates her memory and encourages further study of her work.

She has written two types of poems. First are the descriptive poems, which have precise and detailed descriptions, to reveal something about the subject that is deeper than the surface detail.

Then there is poetry that borrows from her personal experience. One Art is an example of this. The Fish, and Filling Station belong to the first category.

She had a commitment to exactness and her poems were impeccably calibrated. She was very selective about what she published and did not publish a lot of poems she wrote. Only four books of poems were published in her lifetime. Robert Lowell mentions that Bishop would have several drafts of poems lying around with individual words missing from lines, waiting for the right word to materialise. Some poems like The Moose took years to finish.

The poem, One Art, speaks about all the houses and countries that she's lost in her living. The poem presents her personal experience.

The other poem is The Map.

Shoba thought of Kumkum and Joe, because they too have moved continents and houses many times, perhaps more than any of us. Shoba noticed the map behind Joe in one of his reader photos for the blog, which seemed fascinating.

Shoba thought the poem Map is simple and said something beautiful about her. She really liked it, and readers listened as she read.

Several readers applauded Bishop’s poems. Very nice, they said.

The poem One Art is a lovely one, ‘beautiful’ chimed in the readers. One reader who had read her before promised to read more of her poems again. You will find the volume Elizabeth Bishop – The Complete Poems (1927 – 1979) at archive.org, free for borrowing. Some of her poems are so amazing and speak to the heart.

Joe said it’s worth noticing she has deliberately adopted the French form, the villanelle, in this poem to underline the repetition. A villanelle has 19 lines, consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. These two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain. It’s a bit of a challenge to find lines that can repeat exactly and make sense as the poem moves in its narrative.

Shoba said Bishop was a musician. She wanted to take up music in college, but then changed to literature. Music had a strong influence upon her, and you can see it in this poem. 

KumKum said her husband is meanwhile mastering the art of losing his spectacles.

Devika finds herself telling everybody she's always searching for something (spectacles, phone, earphones, etc) , until somebody points out she’s wearing it or holding it. 

Thomo alluded to the popular Chubby Checker song, Where's My Sombrero? He keeps asking Where's my sombrero? And finally says “It’s on my head!”

Devika said she’s quite capable of searching for things which are right there on me. Pamela says she keeps searching for her car keys. This new product combines tiny plastic tags with a companion smartphone app, and may help people who misplace stuff. This poem of Bishop might have been a casualty of the product. Not really; instead of beginning the poem

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

– Elizabeth Bishop might have had to substitute:

The art of losing seems hard to master;

these modern tools seem so completely bent

on retrieving your things faster and faster.

The other day Geetha was taking a bottle of water under her arm to the car, and was asking: where’s the water, where’s the water? Her children tease her: Mama, this car is like an SUV.

Thomo narrated an incident about his mother being absent-minded. In the early days, she taught at an Institute  and she with one of her colleagues decided to go out somewhere nearby. Everybody carried an umbrella in those days. Amma was waiting outside her door and her colleague came and asked her if she was ready to go?

She said, yes. Then her colleague asked “What are you doing with that broom in your hand?” She was holding a broom like she would have held an umbrella!

Thomo said since Amma told the story, it must be true.

10. THOMO

Thomo chose a woman poet. She was a writer of novels and an illustrator. Her name was Djuna Barnes. Her first name is pronounce ‘Juna.’

Poet Bio

Djuna Barnes was born in a log cabin in New York State in June 1892. She's best known for a novel, Nightwood, which she brought out in 1936. It's a cult classic of lesbian fiction and also a very important work of modernist literature.

Djuna Barnes – wrote the queer, modernist classic ‘Nightwood’

Her career began in 1913. She must have been 20 or 21 at that time,  and worked as a freelance journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She soon became a highly sought after freelance writer.

In 1915, she produced a volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women, from which Thomo took the two poems to recite.

Djuna Barnes illustration from ‘The Book of Repulsive Women’  – 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings

In 1921, she got a lucrative assignment with McCall’s Magazine, the American Women's Monthly. That assignment took her to Paris, where she lived for 10 years. Then she published another collection of poems and short stories, including plays; she called it called imaginatively, A Book. That was in 1923.

During the 1930s, she spent time in England, Paris, New York, and North Africa. In New York, she lived most of the time in Greenwich Village. It was during that period that she wrote Nightwood. Her last major work was the verse, The Antiphon, in 1958. It was a three-act verse tragedy, set in England in 1939 after the beginning of World War Two. The drama presents the Hobbs family reunion in their ancestral home.

Writers as diverse as Truman Capote, Dylan Thomas, and Anais Nin have cited her as being an influence on their work. She figures in the Heroine Collective with a brief biography.

She was featured in two movies, What of the Night, a play based on her life, which was brought out in 1991. She also has a cameo role in Woody Allen's 2011 film, Midnight in Paris. Several readers had seen that lovely movie.

Djuna Barnes died in Greenwich Village in June 1982. She would have been around 90.

There was a lot of sex and revolution packed in the layers of her work, A Book of Repulsive Women which includes her own illustrations. It would be considered progressive feminism today, 97 years after it was written. Djuna Barnes lived that life at white heat, as if she thought that one day, the music would stop.

The writer Bertha Harris described Djuna's work as perhaps the first available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern world since the Greek poet Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BC).

First comes a very short poem called Shadows. The second is Twilight of the Illicit.

Joe asked if it was also from that book, Repulsive Women? Yes, said Thomo.

Joe said Twilight of the Illicit seems a very graphic description of a woman who has obviously gone through the aging process, and yet is trying to retain her passion. It's quite graphic with its reference to the woman with “long blank udders … Slack'ning arms,” and 

And great ghastly loops of gold

Snared in your ears.

It reminded Geetha of the poem Mirror by Sylvia Plath. How the crone wants to retain the beauty of her youth. Geetha didn't understand the first poem Shadows, though.

Saras volunteered the poet narrator in Shadows was sleeping somewhere outside:

A little trellis stood beside my head,

And all the tiny fruitage of its vine

Fashioned a shadowy cover to my bed,

And I was madly drunk on shadow wine!

It's subtle in its expression.

Joe said in her biography, he read that Barnes spent almost a decade in a haze under the influence of alcohol, but she came out of it. Some of the lines in Shadows may have been composed, remembering the kind of hallucinations that she might have had.

Geetha thought it’s not really about people, but she's personifying the wine and the trellis, with its fruitage of vine. And imagining the bell hung sidewise, leaning down and gowned over her. It seems like personification rather than other women or something.

Anyway, it was a nice reverie. Barnes’ variety is beautiful. ‘The high priestess of modernism,’ Joe called her, making up a meme for Djuna Barnes.

Geetha suggested we should have an occasion to celebrate poems written by us.

People gasped: poems written by us? Devika declared: don't even start that, okay? Now, that will be something, said KumKum.

Not at all – we'll enjoy a poem written by you, said another reader. KumKum said she could write a paragraph, but not a poem..

Geetha said she used to write poetry when she was the consumed by anger. She would just rage and write, write – write her anger into poems. Are those poems still with you, asked Arundhaty? Have you saved them? Those poems are about herself, said Thomo.

Geetha narrated that Thomo would take her to a party and then forget about her. And she would go home. Hasn’t that happened to all wives? Geetha was lost in Cochin in the early days, when they moved here with Rahul as a baby.

Arundhaty told Geetha she never used to come home most of the time. “And then can you imagine how lost I used to be,” because she didn't even know the language, being a Bengali among Malayalis. We didn't belong to the kind of community that we were moving around in. But all those people have become such close friends now, over the years, said Arundhaty. Thank God we have all of them still.

Yes here we are, we meet, almost 40 years later.

Cochin has changed so much, it is one of the best places now, said KumKum.

Arundhaty too used to be  very angry those days. For instance, when she became Inner Wheel President, she didn't call anybody from the Round Table. Jayanth said, what is this? Why didn't you invite us? Arundhaty told him that she didn't want to have anything to do with them at all. Geetha remarked that Round Tabl-ing meant a lot of drinking and having fun.

So it was at the Rotary too, but the Rotary club did a lot more serious stuff.

But we were younger. We were dignified and proper and all that. Our guys weren’t just having a blast. We hoped we could join the fun.

Geetha mentioned how difficult it was  to have a baby to breastfeed and you didn't know where to go to sequester and feed the baby.

Thomo told a story. “Once we were all at the Casino Hotel and it was after dinner. All of us were driving back, as we lived in Ernakulam. When we came to the Thevara Junction, we were stopped by the police. Those days there was no checking, but they were on the lookout for somebody.

And Sibi who was a Commissioner of Police was standing there. So we turned and looked and of course they did not check us.

And after some time, Sergeant Pulimood saw all of us there, and he waved his hand and then drove on.

And everybody was nice and high and we were talking. The cops sent a jeep after him, brought him back from Pallimukh, brought him back to Thevara. There must have been about 10 of us couples.”

Do you remember this Arun, asked Thomo.

Yes, yes, I remember all those absolutely crazy days. Anyway, how wonderful.

The Poems

Arundhaty

Lover by Ada Limón (1976 – )

Easy light storms in through the window, soft

            edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s 

            nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone 

to pick with whomever is in charge. All year, 

I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,

            Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh

            in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend

writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely

excited for the word lover to come back. Come back

            lover, come back to the five and dime. I could 

            squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,

what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,

a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky.

            I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape

            of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after

us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt

and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back.

            Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned 

            for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam,

the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.

(Copyright © 2021 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 4, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.)

Devika

John Barleycorn by Robert Burns

There was three kings into the east,

Three kings both great and high,

And they hae sworn a solemn oath

John Barleycorn should die.

They took a plough and plough'd him down,

Put clods upon his head,

And they hae sworn a solemn oath

John Barleycorn was dead.

But the cheerful Spring came kindly on,

And show'rs began to fall;

John Barleycorn got up again,

And sore surpris'd them all.

The sultry suns of Summer came,

And he grew thick and strong;

His head weel arm'd wi' pointed spears,

That no one should him wrong.

The sober Autumn enter'd mild,

When he grew wan and pale;

His bending joints and drooping head

Show'd he began to fail.

His colour sicken'd more and more,

He faded into age;

And then his enemies began

To show their deadly rage.

They've taen a weapon, long and sharp,

And cut him by the knee;

Then tied him fast upon a cart,

Like a rogue for forgerie.

They laid him down upon his back,

And cudgell'd him full sore;

They hung him up before the storm,

And turned him o'er and o'er.

They filled up a darksome pit

With water to the brim;

They heaved in John Barleycorn,

There let him sink or swim.

They laid him out upon the floor,

To work him farther woe;

And still, as signs of life appear'd,

They toss'd him to and fro.

They wasted, o'er a scorching flame,

The marrow of his bones;

But a miller us'd him worst of all,

For he crush'd him between two stones.

And they hae taen his very heart's blood,

And drank it round and round;

And still the more and more they drank,

Their joy did more abound.

John Barleycorn was a hero bold,

Of noble enterprise;

For if you do but taste his blood,

'Twill make your courage rise

'Twill make a man forget his woe;

'Twill heighten all his joy;

'Twill make the widow's heart to sing,

Tho' the tear were in her eye.

Then let us toast John Barleycorn,

Each man a glass in hand;

And may his great posterity

Ne'er fail in old Scotland!

Geetha

Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart

Of the townland; green and heavy headed

Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.

Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.

Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles

Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,

But best of all was the warm thick slobber

Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water

In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring

I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

Specks to range on window sills at home,

On shelves at school, and wait and watch until

The fattening dots burst, into nimble

Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how

The daddy frog was called a bullfrog

And how he croaked and how the mammy frog

Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was

Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too

For they were yellow in the sun and brown

In rain.

    Then one hot day when fields were rank

With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs

Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

To a coarse croaking that I had not heard

Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.

Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked

On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:

The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat

Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings

Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew

That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Joe

2 poems by Rowan Williams

Pool

A twig breaks. Promptly, obligingly
staging the haiku, one or two new frogs
plop in the water, where their younger
kin lie or skitter, hundreds
and hundreds of fat commas swept
from the compositor’s workbench
into the sandy shallows, hundreds
of little fat breathing pauses in the water’s
dull paragraph. When their breath
has pumped up shiny eyes and limbs,
they will wait too, throbbing by the pond’s

Edge, listening for the crack of danger,
for the dry foot of this uncertain
upper world that no-one had predicted
back when it was all wet long soundless
clauses between the wriggle of black breath;
ready to leap from this new Purgatorial
height back into steady dark, away
(for a while at least) from the terrors
of what the sun sucks upwards –
green, limbs, lungs, even words
or wings.

Panel on the Arts

There were four of us busy discussing 

the arts. Poetry shouldn't bother 

with girls or flowers, stuff like that, 

in a world like ours.

That was the critics' considered verdict 

over the pub table:

There's more important things for you 

to focus on in a world like ours - 

the language crisis, 

global tribulations,

the meaning of life, and all the rest of it.

The talk moved on to this,

that and the other, the twists and turns 

of life: it emerges one of us 

is after a girl, another's newly into 

rose-growing, and the third is telling us 

the state of this year's mountain ash 

is prophesying 

a hard winter.

Kavita

Utopia by Wisława Szymborska

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here

with branches disentangled since time immermorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzling straight and simple.

sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:

the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned

and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.

Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.

Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,

and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches

turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave

and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

KumKum

Portrait of a Lady by T.S. Eliot

Thou hast committed—

Fornication: but that was in another country,

And besides, the wench is dead.

               The Jew of Malta

I

Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon

You have the scene arrange itself — as it will seem to do—

With 'I have saved this afternoon for you';

And four wax candles in the darkened room,

Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,

An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb

Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.

We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole

Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips.

'So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul

Should be resurrected only among friends

Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom

That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.'

…

Among the winding of the violins

And the ariettes

Of cracked cornets

Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins

Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,

Capricious monotone

That is at least one definite 'false note.'

…

II

Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

'Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

What life is, you who hold it in your hands';

(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)

'You let it flow from you, you let it flow,

…..

The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune

Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:

'I am always sure that you understand

My feelings, always sure that you feel,

Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

….

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends ....'

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends

For what she has said to me?

You will see me any morning in the park

Reading the comics and the sporting page.

Particularly I remark.

…

III

…

'I have been wondering frequently of late

(But our beginnings never know our ends!)

Why we have not developed into friends.'

…

We must leave it now to fate.

You will write, at any rate.

Perhaps it is not too late.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.'

…

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,

Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;

Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand

…

Would she not have the advantage, after all?

This music is successful with a 'dying fall'

Now that we talk of dying —

And should I have the right to smile?

(from Collected Poems: 1909-1962.  Copyright © 2020 by T. S. Eliot.  Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd..)

Pamela 

A Fable for the 21st Century by Tishani Doshi

Existing is plagiarism — EM Cioran

There is no end to unknowing.

We read papers. Wrap fish in yesterday’s news,

spread squares on the floor so puppy can pee

on Putin’s face. Even the mountains cannot say

what killed the Sumerians all those years ago.

And as such, you should know that blindness

is historical, that nothing in this poem will make

you thinner, richer, or smarter. Myself –

I couldn’t say how a light bulb worked,

but if we threw you headfirst into the past,

what would you say about the secrets

of chlorophyll? How would you expound

on the aggression of sea anemones,

the Battle of Plassey, Boko Haram?

Language is a peculiar destiny.

Once, at the desert’s edge,

a circle of pilgrims spoke of wonder –

their lives dark with mud and hoes.

They didn’t know you could make perfume

from rain, that human blood was more fattening

than beer. But their fears were ripe and lucent,

their clods of children plentiful, and God

walked among them, knitting sweaters

for injured chevaliers. Will you tell them

how everything that’s been said is worth

saying again? How the body is helicoidal,

spiriting on and on

how it is only ever through the will of nose,

bronchiole, trachea, lung,

that breath outpaces

any sadness

of tongue

Saras 

Dreams by Mark Strand

Trying to recall the plot

And characters we dreamed,

     What life was like

Before the morning came,

We are seldom satisfied,

     And even then

There is no way of knowing

If what we know is true.

     Something nameless

Hums us into sleep,

Withdraws, and leaves us in

     A place that seems

Always vaguely familiar.

Perhaps it is because

     We take the props

And fixtures of our days

With us into the dark,

     Assuring ourselves

We are still alive. And yet

Nothing here is certain;

     Landscapes merge

With one another, houses

Are never where they should be,

     Doors and windows

Sometimes open out

To other doors and windows,

     Even the person

Who seems most like ourselves

Cannot be counted on,

     For there have been

Too many times when he,

Like everything else, has done

     The unexpected.

And as the night wears on,

The dim allegory of ourselves

     Unfolds, and we

Feel dreamed by someone else,

A sleeping counterpart,

     Who gathers in

The darkness of his person

Shades of the real world.

     Nothing is clear;

We are not ever sure

If the life we live there

     Belongs to us.

Each night it is the same;

Just when we’re on the verge

     Of catching on,

A sense of our remoteness

Closes in, and the world

     So lately seen

Gradually fades from sight.

We wake to find the sleeper

     Is ourselves

And the dreamt-of is someone who did

Something we can’t quite put

     Our finger on,

But which involved a life

We are always, we feel,

     About to discover.

Shoba

Two poems by Elizabeth Bishop

The Map

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.

Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges

showing the line of long sea- weeded ledges

where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.

Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,

drawing it unperturbed around itself ?

Along the fine tan sandy shelf

is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of Newfoundland lies € at and still.

Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo

has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,

under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,

or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible  sh.

The names of seashore towns run out to sea,

the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains

— the printer here experiencing the same excitement

as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.

These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger

like women feeling for the smoothness of yard- goods.

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,

lending the land their waves’ own conformation:

and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,

profiles investigate the sea, where land is.

Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?

— What suits the character or the native waters best.

Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.

More delicate than the historians’ are the map- makers’ colors.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Thomo 

Two poems by Djuna Barnes

Shadows

A little trellis stood beside my head,

And all the tiny fruitage of its vine

Fashioned a shadowy cover to my bed,

And I was madly drunk on shadow wine!

A lily bell hung sidewise, leaning down,

And gowned me in a robe so light and long;

And so I dreamed, and drank, and slept, and heard 

The lily's song.

Lo, for a house, the shadow of the moon;

For golden money, all the daisy rings;

And for my love, the meadow at my side –

Thus tramps are kings!

Twilight of the Illicit

You, with your long blank udders

And your calms,

Your spotted linen and your

Slack'ning arms.

With satiated fingers dragging

At your palms.

Your knees set far apart like

Heavy spheres;

With discs upon your eyes like

Husks of tears,

And great ghastly loops of gold

Snared in your ears.

Your dying hair hand-beaten

'Round your head.

Lips, long lengthened by wise words

Unsaid.

And in your living all grimaces

Of the dead.

One sees you sitting in the sun

Asleep;

With the sweeter gifts you had

And didn't keep,

One grieves that the altars of

Your vice lie deep.

You, the twilight powder of

A fire-wet dawn;

You, the massive mother of

Illicit spawn;

While the others shrink in virtue

You have borne.

We'll see you staring in the sun

A few more years,

With discs upon your eyes like

Husks of tears;

And great ghastly loops of gold

Snared in your ears.