2016 COMMON THREADS Volume 6 | 2016 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 Alan Feldman, Susan Donnelly, Robert Francis, and Danielle Legros Georges by Riley Fearon Productions Cover Art: "in the midst of” by Molly Sidell Winner of Mass Poetry’s cover art contest The artist says of this piece, “When a house falls down, the threshold is often left standing amongst the rubble. Life has a way of dealing blows that mercifully strip us of ancient walls which hinder true connection. Destruction opens a door to something new and beautiful. Though things without boundaries are terrifying—even possibilities—this threshold prophesies in the midst of pain, whispering, ‘hope.’ Nothing is separated in our experience/dreams; not people, person, thing, or spirit, mind or body. Life is less about the differences on each side of the threshold, but rather the act, the courage, of stepping through.” Born and raised in Gloucester MA, Molly Sidell draws most of her inspiration from the island's coast and culture. She is currently a student of theatre and visual arts at Gordon college. Visit mollysidell.com. COMMON THREADS Volume 6 | 2016 Edition GUEST EDITOR Alice Kociemba MANAGING EDITOR Laurin Macios VIDEOGRAPHER Riley Fearon Table of Contents Introduction by Alice Kociemba 4 How to Read a Poem by Robert Pinsky 6 Suggestions for Facilitating Discussion Groups 8 Poems “O Taste and See” by Denise Levertov 9 “Chanson on the Red Line” by Susan Donnelly 10 “The Terrible Memory” by Alan Feldman 11 “Incident” by Natasha Trethewey 12 “The List Grows” by Danielle Legros Georges 13 “The House Remembers” by Robert Francis 14 “St. Kevin and the Blackbird” by Seamus Heaney 15 Discussion Questions 16 Writing Prompts 17 About the Poets 18 Media Package 19 Resources for Poetry Exploration 20 About Mass Poetry 21 About the Common Threads Team 22 Acknowledgements 23 Copyright Information 24 Introduction: Threshold Moments Alice Kociemba, Guest Editor Threshold is “the point or level at which something begins or changes,” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The 2016 edition of Common Threads shows how, through memory, we can cross thresholds—from past to present, self to other, real to imagined— and enter a single changed, riveting moment of insight that expands our empathy with and understanding of ourselves and our world. Jane Hirshfield put this experience beautifully in an interview she gave to Claire Patton in the Huffington Post. Talking about her latest collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, Hirshfield said, “Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for more is in us—more range, more depth, more feeling, more associative freedom, more beauty. More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstinted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our own existence and as also the existence of others.” The seven poems in this volume offer thresholds to such “altered” states. Each reader will bring to them his or her own particular experience. Yet in small group settings discussing these seven excellent, accessible, poems, participants will have their “hunger for more” satisfied in nourishing ways. Denise Levertov’s poem “O Taste and See,” a found poem, captures the delight of a momentary sighting of a biblical verse on a subway, then leaps to myriad associations that allow the narrator to re-experience the pleasures of the body as a form of spiritual satiation. Upon entering this poem, the reader also tastes and sees life in altered ways. Susan Donnelly’s “Chanson on the Red Line” describes a passage triggered by an unexpected encounter with a street musician (again on the subway), which enchants the speaker in the poem. Listening to the musician, she becomes transformed from “a middle-aged woman carrying two bags” into an ageless woman who then appreciates the importance of a deeper longing and love for “anyone.” Alan Feldman’s “The Terrible Memory” is a meditation on the inability to forget, but the poem becomes a universal experience. It never mentions the specific trauma that creates this dark foreboding, but by repeating the word terrible it evokes a haunted and surreal awareness that the past is always in the present, lest we forget. Natasha Trethewey’s “Incident” continues this theme of traumatic memory, riveting our attention to the threat of recurrent danger. The form she chose, a pantoum, with its four "4 line stanzas (quatrains) that repeat in a certain pattern, hypnotizes the reader into a surreal state where even when danger is absent, its threat is always present. Danielle Legros Georges’ poem “The List Grows” addresses the catastrophic distress of political torture. The poet takes the reader on a terrifying journey to an almost unimaginable place of personal horror that, when it happens to one human being, happens to us all. Though the reader is first abducted to a place of the deepest darkness, the poem concludes with an awareness of transcendent beauty. In sharp contrast, Robert Francis’ poem “The House Remembers” creates the experience of the quiet nostalgia of home as sanctuary. Through the poet’s use of personification (the attribution of human qualities to inanimate objects), the tender tone of this poem moves us to feel how ordinary objects (a threadbare sock, cold feet) convey the warmth of remembrance. A tribute to the imagination, Seamus Heaney’s poem “St. Kevin and the Blackbird” invites the reader into a state of reverie. It is a meditation on the physical reality of the body and the occasional agony it must endure, and how by focusing on something larger than one’s self, it can transcend the pain, become “self-forgetful,” and cross the ultimate threshold, into the “network of eternal life.” Notice how the common threads of these seven poems weave a tapestry of meaning— sometimes with echoes of tone, sometimes with words: imagination, longing, hunger, terror, beauty, faces, safety, story, darkness, disappeared, forgotten, memory. Often the threads are tied together by the quotidian—the commonplace, the ordinary that belongs to each day: tangerine, cloak, shoe, socks, fairy tale, story, flames, tongue, knees, river, name. You, the reader, complete this selection of poems. You are necessary. Your reactions are important. You bring this collection to life, by reading them aloud, whether to yourself or to others. By speaking your thoughts, expressing your feelings, revealing your memories, you will then discover and rediscover the power of poetry to connect to others and transcend our isolation. Poetry satisfies our hunger and longing, it liberates us with the freedom of the imagination, thereby transforming the darkness of a troubled world into the light on the other side of the threshold. Writing about the necessity of poetry, Edward Hirsch writes in How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry: “Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder… ” This is the purpose of Common Threads. Come, taste and see poetry in all its enchanting flavors, in all its bodily pleasures of reading these poems aloud. "5 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.