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.