Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

Are there any folks here interested in reading and discussing each month's issue of "Poetry" magazine (founded by Harriet Monroe, published by the Poetry Foundation) ?

You don't even have to pay for a subscription - they post the entire contents online each month.

I am. It helps to single out one poem and suggest why it may have been chosen. I like to find out what's good about it.

Sure - the first one that caught my eye in the current September issue was "One Canoe" by Maureen McLane.

( for others interested, you can see it here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr... )

I keep reading it, always thinking that I *almost* grasp it, but never quite. I loved the description of the Earth:

"All that desire
sliming a space rock"

The poem seems to me about the approaching apocalypse, end of the world. If we could all get on one canoe, we might be able to prevent it. But no such luck. We have too much baggage to fit on that one boat.

All that desire sliming a space rock refers to the quote by Stephen Hawkins who called life on earth something like a narrow coating of green slime. But it is filled with our desires. Again, too much to fit on one boat, the earth.

The elephant image may refer to how when young elephants are transplanted without adults, they tend to behave badly. Like we do without adult models to follow.

The Martians would be any future aliens coming to earth after the end and trying to figure it all out.

I had trouble reading the two stanzas without punctuation. I would have recommended periods.

Like the poem a lot.

Aah, your elephant explanation helps - that reference had mystified me.

Yes, definitely a poem about our impending social disintegration. While the subject matter is horrifying, McClane's poem is surprisingly beautiful, which makes for a compelling and uneasy reading experience.

What other poems, if any, did you like in the Sept issue?

I like how she used a more tippy boat like a canoe rather that the usual lifeboat.

Will have to check the issue again.

How about we work on the next issue. It should be by the new editor.

Yep sure, I saw they've posted it online, but I haven't got my print copy yet. (I usually read the physical copy on weekends drinking morning coffee at my local Manhattan diner...)

Here is one:

Vessels
By Paisley Rekdal

Shouldn’t it ache, this slit
into the sweet
and salt mix of  waters

comprising the mussel,
its labial meats
winged open: yellow-

fleshed, black and gray
around the tough
adductor? It hurts

to imagine it, regardless
of the harvester’s
denials, swiveling

his knife to make
the incision: one
dull cyst nicked

from the oyster’s
mantle — its thread of red
gland no bigger

than a seed
of  trout roe — pressed
inside the tendered

flesh. Both hosts eased
open with a knife
(as if anything

could be said to be eased
with a knife):
so that one pearl

after another can be
harvested, polished,
added to others

until a single rope is strung
on silk. Linked
by what you think

is pain. Nothing
could be so roughly
handled and yet feel

so little, your pity
turned into part of this
production: you

with your small,
four-chambered heart,
shyness, hungers, envy: what

could be so precious
you’d cleave
another to keep it

close? Imagine
the weeks it takes to wind
nacre over the red

seed placed at the other
heart’s mantle.
The mussel

become what no one
wants to:
vessel, caisson, wounded

into making us
the thing we want
to call beautiful.

Source: Poetry (October 2013).

Had to read this a few times. The language is exquisite, and yet she makes the process of opening the oyster seem like a sexual violation.

Two technical issues. Are they important?

1. She seems to use mussel and oyster synonymously.

2. The line "The mussel become . . . " Shouldn't it be "mussels become" or "mussel becomes"?

That's a great idea! I pay for the subscription. Just to support it. I also like writing my admiring (or snarky) comments on the pages.

That's a great idea! I pay for the subscription. Just to support it. I also like writing my admiring (or snarky) comments on the pages.

Hi Jimmy -

1 - yes I was confused by the oyster/mussel terms, but thought it was just due to my own ignorance of sea-creatures!

2 - yep, looks like a typo.

Hi Ujjval! Join in ! Just pick a poem from the Sept or Oct issues that you'd like us to discuss.

Thanks Patrick.

In the October issue I was also moved by Paisley Rekdal's poem, although now the mussel/oyster confusion lessens ts impact for me. It seems to be a metaphor of the pregnant woman as a vessel. The last 4 lines are powerful, don't you think?

Yes, although also rather sad: the baby is the valuable pearl, while the mother is reduced to being a mere "vessel."

How about this one:


Growing a Bear
By Hannah Gamble

Growing a bear — a midnight occupation,
the need for which you perhaps first realized
when you saw the wrong kind of shadow

under your chin — a convex when you expected
concave, so now it’s clear
you’re getting older. Your wife was in the shower

and you wanted to step inside
and soap her up like you did in college when she said

“I’ll shower with you, but I’m leaving
my underwear on,” and you enjoyed her
in every way you could enjoy a person with soap.

You didn’t join your wife in the shower.
She’s gotten funny about letting you see her
shave her legs or wash herself anywhere.

You think she read it somewhere — 
that letting your husband see you pluck anything,
trim anything, apply medicine to anything,
will make him feel like he’s furniture.

It’s exactly on cold nights like these that the basement
is not as forbidding as it should be, despite the fact
that you have to put gloves on
in what is part of  your own home.

Downstairs, a large bathtub, kept, for some reason,
after remodeling. It is there that your bear will be grown,
by you, though you have no idea how. Probably wishing

is most of it; fertilizer, chunks of raw stew meat,
handfuls of  blackberries, two metal rakes, and a thick rug
make up the rest. Then water.

You get an e-mail from a friend late at night
saying he can’t sleep. You write back
“I hope you feel sleepy soon” and think how childish
the word “sleepy” is. And you’re a man,
older than most of  the people you see on television.

You haven’t even considered how your wife will feel
when you have finished growing your bear. You could
write a letter to her tonight, explaining how your life
was just so lacking in bear:

“Janet, it’s nothing you’ve done — 
clearly you have no possible way of supplying me with a bear
or any of the activities I might be able to enjoy
after acquiring the bear.”

It might just be best
to keep the two worlds separate.
Janet clearly prefers things to be comfortable
and unchallenging. Janet soaps herself up. Janet puts herself
to bed, and you just happen to be next to her.

You go on your weekly bike ride with Mark and tell him
that you’ve been growing a bear. An eighteen-wheeler
flies by and he doesn’t seem to hear you — 
plus he’s focused on the hill.

You think about how not all friends know
what each other sounds like when struggling and
breathing heavy. Past the age of college athletics,
most friends don’t even know what each others’ bodies
look like, flushed, tired, showering, cold.

Source: Poetry (October 2013).

What an interesting poem.

Yes, a fun poem about the male mid-life crisis.

In this month's issue I was most impressed by the essay "Reading the Difficult" by Peter Quatermain, where he basically contrasts the "high" complicated poetry praised by TS Eliot, with "low" simpler poetry. Here's an excerpt that begins with a poem by William Carlos Williams:

"Between Walls"
the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

"The language is close to journalism: flat and plain, in blunt facticity. 
It is, if we add punctuation and ignore the line breaks, indistinguishable from prose. Any attempt to explore the connotations of “green” or the contrast between its suggestiveness and the sterility of the cinders on which the glass lies, leads only to the banal — the poem registers a syntax of attention, of perception. It is a noticing. To read the syntax as “the hospital where nothing will grow” leads us away from the poem into fruitless and irrelevant speculation, since there is a straightforward and easily sorted syntax available, even if the sentence itself seems pointless and the poem seems to “lead nowhere.” In this, “Between Walls” is like “The Red Wheelbarrow” even if  that poem might be said in its opening words at least to gesture toward a point. For both poems, it is difficult to imagine a social context or setting for the apparently inconsequential utterance: Under what circumstances might somebody say this? And when? Yet both poems, like so many of Williams’s short poems, seem to exist simply “just to say.” There is implacability in the language that resists both paraphrase and explication. The language is so spare, the details so sparse, the statement so stubbornly there before the reader, uncompromising, that the reader’s knowledge cannot intervene, cannot interfere with the poem; indeed it renders that knowledge irrelevant, the poem open. The poem doesn’t care whether you are puzzled or not; it’s an event, and you can join it, take part in, or not.

The central issue that distinguishes Eliot from Williams — each representative of different critical and poetic conventions — is the question of authority and where it is to be found: in the social group or in the individual; in the values of high culture or the values of the street; in calculation or in spontaneity; in the canon or in poems,
one at a time."

The full article is here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr...

I didn't really care for the essay that much. I mean can anyone even sum up his main point? Such arguments about what a poem SHOULD be are a waste of time in my view. They never get anywhere.

Each poem has to be judged on its own merits. I will say that for me, I do prefer Ezra Pound's dictum, "Make it new." I think about that with every poem I write if it is at all possible.

I've been a Poetry Magazine subscriber for years now, but the last few issues have left me cold, and I'm considering not renewing my subscription. The only thing I think I'll truly miss is Poetry's yearly translation issue, which is consistently strong (I'll always be grateful to Poetry for introducing me to the works of Gottfried Benn and Vera Pavlova, for example).

Can anyone suggest a poetry journal that they'd recommend I subscribe to in Poetry's stead? I was thinking maybe Measure or 32 Poems... (I currently already subscribe to Ploughshares.) Ideas welcome!

I absolutely love Rattle. I am entertained every month.

Jimmy wrote: "I absolutely love Rattle. I am entertained every month."

Me, too. But the poems are not at all like those in
Poetry.