More poems
Dec. 23rd, 2023 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeFor Christmas, my grandmother gave me a book of Aotearoa New Zealand poems called Remember Me, chosen to be memorised. Since my Christmas is feeling distributed this year, I opened it early, which is good, because not only have I been really enjoying reading it these last few days, it was in time for me to mention it to a friend who said he'd enjoy getting it for his Christmas gift.
I often come to poetry with partial attention and/or a sense that I don't know enough poetry to think about it well. Ages back, my potter employer was judging a ceramics award. While I took my lunch break, she was ordering photos of wildly diverse art on her floor: smooth and rough, ugly and pretty, functional and abstract, winnowing her short list into being. She is not a potter who's equally good at explaining pottery to non-potters. We had a long talk about her ordering, at the end of which I still had no sense of her aesthetic criteria, only that they were vivid and formed through long experience.
I have felt that way sometimes about poetry, too: looking at a swathe of aesthetic objects I don't understand.
When reading this book, fresh from a masters course in which you write opinions all over everything, I began making little golden dots in the top corner by poems I especially liked, and little exes in pencil next to poems I didn't (because I can always change my mind about not liking a poem, but it seems worth keeping the memory of having once liked a poem). Part of why I seldom go back to poetry collections is the need to sort them anew each time and remember which ones I thought were good, so this helps.
I may make a few posts with poems I did and didn't like in them, but here's one post like that, anyway! Poems above the cut, thoughts under the cut.
This is a poem I'd read before. I don't especially like it, but it becomes easy to second-guess myself, because it is clearly doing something and because I have a sense of it as a classic. I didn't like how the particular cirrus is over an article-less and therefore general mountain. I did not like the near-rhyme of stranger and anger. I can adapt to those as interesting choices the poem made, but at first, I disliked them. And though it is true in one sense that we are born alone and we die alone, it's often true in another sense that we are born and die with others around us. I don't like solitude and natural beauty being our only consolations. I do not necessarily want to be positioned as an angry man on a horse. [edit: though I guess I'm importing the 'man': I expect angry people on horses being addressed by male poets to be men.] I can definitely imagine having the moment or moments this poem is about.
This one has a golden dot. It's not one of the ones where I thought 'Yes, I am absolutely learning this poem!' but it was still very pleasing to me in its rhythm. I like the three kind of pause it seems to mandate: a light pause where there's a gap inside the line, a staccato pause on the dead, town, road, and then I have to pause a little after 'incandescent', because it's its own rhythmic unit, before getting to snow on the hills.
These effects are clearer to me than the poem's actual images. Don't ask me where the four objects are. It puts me more in a voice than in a place, although certainly the dead town road is much more dead for having those pauses.
I often come to poetry with partial attention and/or a sense that I don't know enough poetry to think about it well. Ages back, my potter employer was judging a ceramics award. While I took my lunch break, she was ordering photos of wildly diverse art on her floor: smooth and rough, ugly and pretty, functional and abstract, winnowing her short list into being. She is not a potter who's equally good at explaining pottery to non-potters. We had a long talk about her ordering, at the end of which I still had no sense of her aesthetic criteria, only that they were vivid and formed through long experience.
I have felt that way sometimes about poetry, too: looking at a swathe of aesthetic objects I don't understand.
When reading this book, fresh from a masters course in which you write opinions all over everything, I began making little golden dots in the top corner by poems I especially liked, and little exes in pencil next to poems I didn't (because I can always change my mind about not liking a poem, but it seems worth keeping the memory of having once liked a poem). Part of why I seldom go back to poetry collections is the need to sort them anew each time and remember which ones I thought were good, so this helps.
I may make a few posts with poems I did and didn't like in them, but here's one post like that, anyway! Poems above the cut, thoughts under the cut.
High Country Weather
by James K. Baxter
Alone we are born
And die alone;
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
Over snow-mountain shine
Upon the upland road
Ride easy, stranger:
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.
This is a poem I'd read before. I don't especially like it, but it becomes easy to second-guess myself, because it is clearly doing something and because I have a sense of it as a classic. I didn't like how the particular cirrus is over an article-less and therefore general mountain. I did not like the near-rhyme of stranger and anger. I can adapt to those as interesting choices the poem made, but at first, I disliked them. And though it is true in one sense that we are born alone and we die alone, it's often true in another sense that we are born and die with others around us. I don't like solitude and natural beauty being our only consolations. I do not necessarily want to be positioned as an angry man on a horse. [edit: though I guess I'm importing the 'man': I expect angry people on horses being addressed by male poets to be men.] I can definitely imagine having the moment or moments this poem is about.
Charm for the Winter Solstice
by Airini Beautrais
A feather a leaf
a stone a bone
a dead
town
road.
Incandescent
snow on the hills.
The forest dark below.
This one has a golden dot. It's not one of the ones where I thought 'Yes, I am absolutely learning this poem!' but it was still very pleasing to me in its rhythm. I like the three kind of pause it seems to mandate: a light pause where there's a gap inside the line, a staccato pause on the dead, town, road, and then I have to pause a little after 'incandescent', because it's its own rhythmic unit, before getting to snow on the hills.
These effects are clearer to me than the poem's actual images. Don't ask me where the four objects are. It puts me more in a voice than in a place, although certainly the dead town road is much more dead for having those pauses.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-23 03:23 pm (UTC)I am totally meh about the first 2 lines in the first poem, as we see that finger shaking in our faces in soooooo many media, But I really like the rest for the images. Interesting that you see a man on a horse; I see a human figure, gazing up at that sky at just that moment the sun touches the cirrus to gold, but my favorite bit is the sense of the stranger throwing anger right up to that sky and watching it vanish.
The second one does less for me because the images are so disconnected and generic I don't get an immersive picture as I do with the first. But caveat, I've been a tin-eared clodhopper vis a vis poetry my entire life.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-23 10:11 pm (UTC)Tin-eared I'd feel rude arguing with, but I feel I should add eagle-eyed!