Each issue we will list poems and add a little preface or commentary.

 

The prime thing is simply to get into a quiet and experience the poem—it is always good to read it twice and aloud if possible.  And if you have other daring souls, a conversation about the poem can be a surprising and fulfilling endeavor—especially if there is enough trust in the group which allows for wrong reads, challenges of sentimental reads, space to wrestle with intuitive insights, and simply the ability to ramble through and end up with a richer experience and understanding of the poem.

 

As far as how to begin a conversation, there is no one way, but I usually start with a focus on the concrete—who the narrator is and the experience being related and let it go from there—but, again, with the effort to support ideas with close readings of the text.

 

This first is from a current master, Wendell Berry.  Few writers have his grasp, his sight of leisure, quiet, contemplation, and the meaning of the Sabbath and a Feast.  And, few can wrestle so beautifully with the profound questions of human existence in such a deep down-to-earth way and bring that experience, through art, to felt life.

 

This is from his collection of Sabbath poems, entitled A Timbered Choir (one of our “books of the month” for this month).  Particularly, this is from the year 1980.

 

Enjoy!

 

JP

 

 

III (1980)

 

Great deathly powers have passed:

The black and bitter cold, the wind

That broke and felled strong trees, the rind

Of ice that held at last

 

Even the fleshly heart

In cold that made it seem a stone.

And now there comes again the one

First Sabbath light, the Art

 

That unruled, uninvoked,

Unknown, makes new again and heals,

Restores heart’s flesh so that it feels

Anew the old deadlocked

 

Goodness of its true home

That it will lose again and mourn,

Remembering the year reborn

In almost perfect bloom

 

In almost shadeless wood,

Sweet air that neither burned nor chilled

In which the tenderest flowers prevailed,

The light made flesh and blood.