All Souls Book Group
Dear All Souls Book Group,
Thanks for a good sestina meeting last night. We had a larger group than usual, and I think we did an admirable job of trying to accommodate multiple perspectives on single poems – while still hewing pretty close to the poems.
This morning I find myself wondering how the meeting would have gone had my lead-in questions focused more on the music of those poems than on the meaning, if you will. While, as I say, I think we got pretty close to the poems, there is a sense conveyed by the sestina structure which, A) happens musically – which happens in the body, B) which all three of the poems we talked about last night share, and, C) which I think we didn’t really get to, focusing as much as we were on the “story behind the story” of each poem (i.e. what is going on between the child and the grandmother in Bishop’s sestina?; what is happening when the “moons fall down like tears?”; is the lady in Rossetti’s poem dead, or so cold emotionally she may as well be dead? etc.) It’s my fault we didn’t approach this more musical “sense.” For our next meeting, then, about pantoums, I will try and arrive at lead-in questions that will sharpen our ears to the poems’ music, and to how that music is essentially “pantoum.”
How YOU can help in preparation for the meeting is to read carefully the description of the form that begins the pantoum chapter in The Making of a Poem, and to read out loud, a couple of times, each of the assigned poems. In my experience it is invariable that the most valuable contributions to discussion are made by those participants who have read the literature carefully before coming to the meeting. Those who have hovered over the poem and asked questions of it, coming to group already intuiting the poem’s pattern and the ways in which its “knowledge” is intrinsic to that pattern, make our discussions focused, and, because focused, revelatory. These poems are too complex – which is to say, they are too good – to be absorbed meaningfully in a single reading. The great reader, says Vladimir Nabokov, is the RE-reader: and in a way, that’s all there is to it.
The pantoums we will focus on on Monday (March 28) are: Austin Dobson’s “In Town,” Carolyn Kizer’s “Parents’ Pantoum,” and J. D. McClatchy,’s “The Method.” The meeting will take place at 7 p.m., in the first floor conference room of the Warner Building.
Lastly, for those of you still puzzling over last night's poems, I urge you to go back and re-read them, and to read them out loud. When you do, listen for repetitions that don't rhyme; and listen, too, for repetitions that come at predictable intervals. Eventually you will begin to hear that predictability, and, following from this, for what that predictability has to "say." The other thing you might watch for is one's tendency -- certainly I see the tendency in myself -- to VALUE a musical element of a poem in such a way that it ends up expressing a truth that you want it to express--in other words, a truth you brought to the poem, rather than a truth native to its obdurate life. Years ago I had a mathematician friend at Berkeley, a brilliant young man who liked to listen to Bach, and who once said to me that what a lot of Bach's music is about is monotony. To which I replied, something like, "Oh, how sad," or, "How terrible." To which my friend replied --his name was Ruvain -- "No, monotony is not sad, and it's not terrible. It just IS."
Thanks again. I’m really enjoying talking about poetry with you.
Emilie