Comments for ModPo

Comment on The Mysteries of Emily by Mark Herron

Mark Herron — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:47:14 +0000

I fixed line 5 a bit on the blog and worked in some delight and space, plus throw instead of another go (in keeping with the little rhyme scheme…).

Comment on The Mysteries of Emily by Susan Scheid

Susan Scheid — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 21:22:03 +0000

Mark, this is beautiful. I particularly loved your play on the juggler.

Comment on The Mysteries of Emily by Mark Herron

Mark Herron — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:10:34 +0000

Good stuff! I overwintered in Rochester once (spent a year at the U of R). Learned how to play soccer and frisbee, and how to paint (and did well in calculus along the way). Really nice discussions. Here’s where it carried me…

Emily in Winter

She handles them and weighs them, considering
For all things yes, a brief caress, never no
Before up again she flings all the things
Falling, yet they float as if they have wings

Here briefly by feel but filled with need to go
The juggler, like snow, is always working
To hold things here, to make things go
Like words and approaches, ways to know

She juggles reason; she juggles ideas over time
She juggles versions and meaning; she juggles mine

Not hierarchies, nor clergy, nor desire for kings
Not fixed social norms, nor faith; no need to cling
When all things are equal and right, she lets go
The suspended landscape, the wind and snow

-Mark F. Herron
http://theouterringblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/emily-in-winter.html

Comment on Easter Morning by A.R. Ammons by Susan Scheid

Susan Scheid — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:04:34 +0000

I’m having trouble with it. When I read it, I get side-tracked by the line breaks, which seem arbitrary. I’m not clear why it wasn’t written as prose.

Comment on Easter Morning by A.R. Ammons by Deanna Larson

Deanna Larson — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:56:35 +0000

I had to find a version I could copy and paste, so if you see any errors or incorrect line breaks, tell me! This poem moved me so deeply, especially

the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,

I immediately burst into tears. Then I got to the 6th stanza, and I am that child standing on the stump and

yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for
for me it is the dearest and the worst,

To me, this poem explores the real effort of a “rebirth” or renewal, the contradictory nature of change. What do you all feel when you read it?

Comment on My Susan Howe by Susan Scheid

Susan Scheid — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 01:26:56 +0000

Deanna: It’s a good question, and I’m still puzzling over it. I would have not expected to find Howe as entrancing as I do. I’ve now read Articulation four times, with increasing interest and pleasure, each time asking myself why I find it so engaging to live inside the poem’s words. The best I can say at this point is that somehow, she brings the past alive in its pre-narrative state, by which I mean as it was lived, rather than as others have told or written about it. The line “chaos cast cold intellect back” resonates particularly in this regard. I’d love to sit together with others and go through this poem bit by bit, to excavate its words and see what we discover.

Comment on My Susan Howe by Deanna Larson

Deanna Larson — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 20:22:57 +0000

I work at a library, and spent my childhood in them, and her thoughts about them are so familiar and comforting to me. “In the dim light of narrowly spaced overshadowing shelves I felt the spiritual and solitary freedom of an inexorable order only chance creates. Quiet articulates poetry…” In 20 years, who knows if wandering the stacks will be the same experience? I often feel that same chance while surfing the Internet, though, so perhaps the how is different but the what is the same. The poem is more challenging and alienating for me, however; I don’t see the “chance” or order that she references. How do you see it, Susan?

Comment on The Mysteries of Emily by Susan Scheid

Susan Scheid — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 04:29:31 +0000

Nadia: it’s hard to believe, upon reading this, that you’re not a thorough-going Dickinson scholar. I’m so glad I asked the question and you took up the challenge of responding. Your contemplation of snow in Rochester and association/question, “but does this deserve the forcefulness of denial” is a beautiful piece of poetic logic, and where you go with that is remarkable. I know all I’m doing here is exclaiming, but it’s all that’s left to me in light of all that’s gone before. I do sense in the conversation we’re having here a marvelous congruence among the readings. All the big issues are there in these few lines, aren’t they?

Comment on The Mysteries of Emily by Nadia Ghent

Nadia Ghent — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 04:48:18 +0000

I am tiptoeing on extremely thin ice here since I have read so little of Dickinson, and I hope my brittle veneer of understanding doesn’t lead me too far astray when my enthusiasm makes broader claims than my ability can make good.
The force of the word “denying” really caught me by surprise. Spending my first winter here in Rochester, NY, I sometimes see snow that falls in the morning dissipating by afternoon, all traces gone (except for the days that we get 18 inches all at once–what a change from my sunny years in California!), but does this deserve the forcefulness of denial? Dickinson must be alluding to the aspect of denying something you know or believe in, or in something’s existence, but it is not quite that simple, since the snow (or nature or God) can still exist in a non-corporeal way, evaporating its traces, but remaining in echo or shadow or in the winter constellations.

I think the aspect of Calvinism that denial brings into the question is the terror of possibly having no faith in anything to guide you–a hell beyond imagining–and Dickinson, in her increasing solitude, still needed to believe in the ability of her poetry to communicate with someone, something. Redemption is in the following the path of hidden meaning in life, and Dickinson’s own denial is of the denial of no imagination: she must create the realm of her own poetics, as Juggler, as creator, existing, yet not usurping God, at least directly, since her world exists on the page, dissipating like the snow when the poem is over or the reader turns the page. Howe writes, “I say that Emily Dickinson took both(Jonathan Edwards’) legend and his learning, tore them free from his own humorlessness and dead weight of doctrinaire Calvinism, then applied the freshness of his perception to the dead weight of American poetry as she knew it” (p. 51).

Comment on The Mysteries of Emily by Susan Scheid

Susan Scheid — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 03:45:20 +0000

Susan: important points you add here about thinking of the personal historical context. Also interesting to think the first version was written during the Civil War. Vendler’s reading of Juggler/Figures would make so much sense in that context, yet those words came in later versions (though as to Jugglers, we don’t yet know when). Your observation about the nephew rings true as significant, given the timing of his death vis-vis the final version of the poem (if I understood you correctly), though there is probably much more to know here–and, as you also note, it would be illuminating to have all five versions in hand. (Interesting how knowing of the existence of these different versions and having access to at least some of them affects the reading of the poem.) I’m struck by your comment “don’t think she’s coming to him in this last version,” particularly when thinking about it in light of your observation on Capricorn as the sign of the introvert. Lowell’s thought of the final lines as a hiding “in the denials of existence” seem at play here, too, and then I think again of the Howe quote on Calvinism Nadia pointed out and the one with which you close your comment. Is it by hiding, by denying, that the poet/Juggler remains imaginatively free?