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Common Threads PAGES.Pages 2015 COMMON THREADS Volume 5 | 2015 Edition Common Threads is an annual publication and outreach program produced by Mass Poetry, with a goal to facilitate ~350 poetry discussion groups throughout the state each year in an effort to broaden the audience for poetry and support poets and poetry in Massachusetts. Mass Poetry is a 501(c)(3) organization. A $10 hardcopy of this publication is available to order from Harvard Book Store. $5 from each sale Goes directly back into our proGramminG, while the other half supports Harvard Book Store. A listinG of public Common Threads events is available here. Video production for the poems of John Hodgen, Fred Marchant, Rhina P. Espaillat, and Mary Oliver by Riley Fearon Productions Cover Art: Summer Light Gouache on paper 11 1/2 x 17 1/4 inches 2009 | © Denise Manseau 2014 Summer Light recalls a moment on a walk in Maine looking up through a stand of towering oaks to see glimpses of cobalt through translucent greens swaying in the summer wind. Denise Manseau investigates the nature of transitory relationships in the environment and how they influence and define the layered complexity of place. Her work navigates the inevitable changeability of the landscape in personal cosmographies that interweave space and place, environment and perception. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. Manseau received her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and her BFA from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She maintains a studio at the Arts Research Collaborative, an art space in Lowell dedicated to arts dialogue and education. More at denisemanseau.com and artsresearchcollaborative.com. COMMON THREADS Volume 5 | 2015 Edition GUEST EDITOR Alice Kociemba MANAGING EDITOR Laurin Macios PARTNERING POET COORDINATOR Gabrielle Tyson VIDEOGRAPHER Riley Fearon Table of Contents Introduction Alice Kociemba 4 How to Read a Poem Robert Pinsky 6 Suggestions for Facilitating Discussion Groups 8 Poems Love Calls Us to the Things of This World Richard Wilbur 9 The Birthing Deborah Digges 10 For the Man Who Spun Plates John Hodgen 11 Prospective Immigrants Please Note Adrienne Rich 12 On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, for Once Rhina P. Espaillat 13 The Salt Stronger Fred Marchant 14 Sea Grapes Derek Walcott 16 The Osprey Mary Oliver 17 Discussion Questions 19 Writing Prompts 20 About the Poets 21 Media Package 23 Resources for Poetry Exploration 24 About Mass Poetry 25 About the Common Threads Team 26 Acknowledgments 27 Copyright Information 28 Introduction: What Calls You to the “ThinGs of This World”? Alice Kociemba, Guest Editor The overarching theme of this fifth edition of Common Threads is love—a reverence for life and a zest for living that is intensified at moments of birth and death, the cherishing of one’s birthplace and the longing for what has been left behind, a passion for peace and respect for poetry itself as its witness, and finally, the precious and precarious beauty of nature. Each of these eight poems reveals love’s common threads. In his introductory essay to The Best American Poetry, 2008, Charles Wright, our current US Poet Laureate, writes: “Still poetry comes, for lack of better words, from the heart […] It’s the only time that two plus one makes two—language is half; technique is half, and emotion is half…It is not a question of paper, of typewriters, of white space or of dark space—it is a question of what’s in your life, and where you want your life to lead you…But if it is poetry that you want, then don’t look for language games, intellectual rip-offs, or rhetorical sing-alongs. It’s too often been a matter of life and death to those who really cared. Art is supposed, they say, to make sense out of the senseless, coherence out of the incoherent, and connections out of the unconnectible. And poetry, of course, is an art.” In this year’s eight Common Threads poems, notice how words repeat throughout— words like soul, tongue, angels, halos, war, exile, journey, responsibility, obsession. These poems weave a tapestry of meaning that deeply engages the reader, indeed changes the reader, maybe even on a molecular level, when the poems are read aloud. • In Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” the speaker, a city apartment dweller, is rudely awakened. The poem moves with both whimsy and delight to acceptance of the inevitable surrender of oblivion. With this return to consciousness, the speaker appreciates the joys in the ordinary. This poem created the theme for this year’s Common Threads. • In Deborah DiGGes’ poem, “The Birthing,” the reader is pulled into a powerful narrative of what love requires of us in unexpected moments, when a bystander is moved to become involved in a life or death experience. • John HodGen’s “For the Man Who Spun Plates” begins with the memory of watching the Ed Sullivan Show, and through its use of metaphor, the near comical is transformed into the almost ungraspable reality of grief. • Although Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Prospective Immigrants Please Note” was written in 1962, it remains a timely and succinct portrait of the wrenching either/or dilemma of leaving or staying in one’s homeland. • Rhina P. Espaillat’s sonnet, “On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, for Once” makes personal the larger issues described in Rich’s poem. The smaller losses and shifts in identity become writ large. r4 • Fred Marchant’s epistolary poem “The Salt Stronger” is a tribute to language and to the power of poetry to bear witness in, and bring solace to, a world continually searching for peace. • In Derek Walcott’s “Sea Grapes,” the timeless image of Homer’s war-weary wanderer, Odysseus, mirrors the concerns in Marchant’s poem, Why are we still and always at war? • Mary Oliver’s “The Osprey,” picks up the thread of predator and prey and explores the obsessions and responsibilities of a thoughtful, conscious “imaginer” with a lot on her mind. In selecting these eight poems, I drew on my experience facilitating eight Common Threads discussion groups in local libraries and churches. What makes a poem discussable? First and foremost, hearing the poems read aloud. Some readers tend to prefer “heart” or emotional poems; some prefer “head” or philosophical ones. Some readers gravitate toward formal verse, some toward the narrative, and others esteem the lyric. These poems reflect a true diversity of voice, and of region within Massachusetts. All the poems are both accessible and excellent, as the aim of Common Threads is to broaden the audience for poetry by engaging the general public in the pleasures of reading and discussing captivating poems. Why eight? To have Common Threads fit easily into a standard 90-minute discussion format. I asked thirteen poets (many of whom had participated in a previous years’ Common Threads group, or had led workshops in their local libraries) from across the Commonwealth to recommend to me up to eight “discussable” poets and their poems. These poets recommended more than 50 poets and more than 150 poems. What I had assumed proved to be true: I would have overlooked some spectacular poems if I had let my personal preferences drive the selection process. In his essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Robert Frost says of a poem, “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom…For me the initial delight is the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” Common Threads is full of delights and surprises! r5 How to Read a Poem Robert Pinsky A crucial, defining moment, at the mysterious frontier between the mind and the body, takes place when a feeling or thought takes form in the voice—possibly as speech, but maybe as less than that, as the exhalation of a barely vocalized oh or ah. I mean the moment between the twinge of an aching back muscle and a muttered “ouch” or at another extreme the moment when a mix of passion, determination and purpose leads to “I disagree” in a meeting or “I love you” in an embrace. We cross that threshold between concept and breath in two directions, I think: outward of course, but inward as well. In an intense conversation, my effort to understand your words—to “take them in,” as we say—may include my imagining what it feels like to say those words—physically, actually, to say them. That sympathetic, bodily imagining may go back to the infant gazing up at a parental speaking face: so far back that we are mostly unaware of it. Sometimes, feeling eager or pressed to understand, I might silently “mouth” your words —technical instructions, say, or the best route to my destination, or just a name or a phone number—form them with my lips, maybe with a whisper of breath through them. (C.K. Williams’ great poem “My Mother’s Lips” describes this form of attention.) That basic, intuitive process, involves the first principle of reading poetry—the most purely vocal of all the arts. (In song, the voice enlarges and transforms to become an instrument, as well as itself.) So, the three-word advice I might be tempted to give, about “How to Read a Poem”— “read it aloud”—is kind of inaccurate, though usefully compact. “Read it aloud” might lead toward the art of the actor, or the technique of a poet who gives good poetry readings. With all due respect, performance is not what I mean. I mean something more intimate, more immediate, more physiological, at that mind- body frontier: to feel the poem in your mind’s voice, hearing it in your mind’s ear as you hear the things you say.
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