Tag Denise Levertov

* glimpsing fireflies with Denise Levertov

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

There’s something about poetry – writing and reading it – that develops your ability to deal with the ephemeral, the fleeting, your ability to deal with almost’s.

You can work on a poem for years and still only almost say it.  Or you can read The Wasteland a few times and still only almost get it.  Yet, if it’s good, that almost is worth it.

It’s akin to pointing out fireflies: those little buggers will spark for a second in the grass – but by the time you elbow the person next to you to point them out, the light’s gone and you are left looking out into dark grass until another one lights up.

That glimpse of light – and how it passes onto another – is what I believe the poem below by Denise Levertov to be about.  There is what you see and what you would like others to see – both in writing and in life.

* no, quick, look *

* no, quick, look *

The Secret – Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line.  They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was.  No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem.  I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, til death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings.  And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

***

Happy almosting!

Jose

* bert meyers, poems in pockets, and update

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Evening on the Farm – Bert Meyers

 

Time for a jacket now,

and to put my hands away.

 

I must learn from the stars

how a field should look.

 

But one by one, bright children,

the stars rush downstairs

 

to meet my horses and hay

with an astonished eye.

 

***

Tomorrow is Poem in Your Pocket Day and I have taken it upon myself to pass out poems to my co-workers.  I have selected who gets what in terms of their respective astrological signs (told you I was a geek).  Seeing as I don’t work with any Pisces, and I simply marvel at the poem, I am choosing the above as my selection.

The late Bert Meyers was a master of images.  His collected poems, In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat, is essential for anyone who enjoys not only great images but solid lyric poetry.  As Denise Levertov points out in her introduction:

“It is a mark of the most profound poetic instinct to comprehend, in the act of making poems, the degrees of analogy: and so to avoid muffling the perception of coalescence, which demands metaphor, with the word ‘like’; or, on the other hand, failing to note resemblance with the appropriate figure of speech, simile…Meyers’ intuition in this…seems to have been faultless.”

You see this mastery in the lines above: how easily “bright children” is followed by “stars” tumbling downstairs, all of it leading up to that “astonished eye” at the end, the words evoking an image through sheer magnetism it seems.

***

In other news, the open mic was a bust.  Nuff said.

I have, instead, taken to reading aloud the Rimbaud I’m in the middle of.  It’s colorful, to say the least.  We’ll see if it helps.  Here are some choice lines of his that took me back to dark times in Texas:

I made up rhymes in dark and scary places,

And like a lyre I plucked the tired laces

Of my worn-out shoes, one foot beneath my heart.     (from “Wandering”)

***

What will be in your pocket?

J