Daley Images

Why I Write

By George Orwell.

Bodeen Broadside

Kimberly Harvey
Jim Bodeen - Broadside
Eng. 132


World News

The picture that I picked was from the internet: http://www.vietnampix.com/intro3.htm I thought it represented Jim’s poem World News perfectly. It has all the faces of the Vietnam War: the soldiers, the wounded, the enemy, and the children. They all have voices. The poem mentions voices 6 different times. This picture visualizes the voices of the poem.

Lesson Plan Week 3

Some website information

Some class information--No Cliff Notes Due for any author. If you have done your part, turn it in for "Study Question" portion of weekly grade.

Small world, big need for poetry

Lucinda Roy

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/opinion/17roy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

then this

http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=lucinda+roy&srchst=nyt


Jim Bodeen:

Creative responses

On the ride home

Study Questions

Study questions

Pick one poem from each section of the book. Rearrange them in your own order. Build a book within a book. Explain your choices for poems and explain why you put them in that order. How do they “talk” to each other in this new order? Is this a different story? The idea is to get you thinking about the sequence of the poems.
2. Find three examples of Bodeen’s sense of humor. How does he use humor in his poems? Does it have a purpose, make a statement? How do they fit in the chapters?

3. Explain the connection to Viet Nam for the last poems in the book starting with “Rexroth” poem.

4. Show how the first section: Nothing is Hid, is also structured as an initiation ritual, in miniature.

5. Tolstoy said you must be wounded into writing, but you musn’t write until the wound has healed. Toni Morrison says, language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. language alone is meditation."

For the sake of argument, I loosely paraphrase Morrison as: Write to heal the wound.

And Tolstoy tells us to button our lip until we have something to say.

Which impulse better descrbes Bodeen’s book? Whose advice does he seem to follow?

6. This book is a book about recovery and discovery. What does Bodeen recover? What does he discover? How does he do it?


Break

Blue Begonia Press Slide Show

Introduction to Michael Daley and Me

Read some of each chapter

Reading for Daley

For the One Among Us Who Will Be the First To Die 11-22
At Amy Moment 41-48
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace 77-90
Running on Empty 141-156
Wild Art 197-220

1. (about 90 pages)
   
   Study questions for Michael Daley:
   
   1. What’s a Lyrical Essay?
   
   They leap around, slip images together and are interested in the rhythms and sounds of words and sentences, and even lines–those elements most readily associated with poetry. I believe they are essays, though, and that they think in essayistic ways. I hope [for] a sense of the "lyrical"–a state of song and movement in my work. I think of the "lyric" essay not so much as a sub-genre, but more as a quality that others might apply to the work.
   
   The "lyric essay" has been described beautifully by the editors of the Seneca Review: "Loyal to that original sense of essay as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense, the lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of ideas, circumstance, language–a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning. While it is ruminative, it leaves pieces of experience undigested and tacit, inviting the reader's participatory interpretation. Its voice, spoken from a privacy that we overhear and enter, has the intimacy we have come to expect in the personal essay. Yet in the lyric essay the voice is often more reticent, almost coy, aware of the compliment it pays the reader by dint of understatement."
   
   (from Lia Purpura)
   
   Find two examples from Daley’s essays—a few lines or whole passages—that seem to fit this definition of “lyrical essay” and explain what makes them essays, not poems.
2. Make a timeline of the events in the chapters we are reading, by year or decade? The lyrical part of the essay wants to mix them up. What does it look like untangled?
   How do the ideas and event of the first section carry into the other essays? That is, how do his childhood experiences (in school, in the church, at home) influence his adult life?
3. Empty Bowl Press ran from 1976-1998. That’s a long time for a press. As
   Daley notes, there were a lot of them around at one time. Not many lasted. What accounts for Empty Bowl’s longevity? And, more riskily, what accounts for it’s stopping?
4. (MANDATORY) Find an historical or literary allusion in the chapters. Write a footnote so a student unfamiliar with the time period will be able to follow his ideas. Give some brief background. Please, no plagiarism.
5. Combining what you’ve been able to see of Blue Begonia Press and “Running on Empty” from Daley, what picture forms of the Northwest independent press community? What have you learned about small presses from Blue Begonia and from Empty Bowl?

Bodeen's Reading Up--Sound still needs work

Impulse to Love Discussion

Optional, but encouraged. This is a post to discuss Bodeen's poetry, the study questions, ideas.
Ask your own questions, too.

Requires quick google registration to post (keeps out the spammers)

Lesson Plan Week 3

Lesson Plan Week 3

Some website information

Terry Martin:

On the ride home

Creative Responses

Study Questions

This book is #20 on a national best seller list for poetry.

Point to specific reasons why you think this book has found such a wide audience.

Part of this question is to get you thinking about why people buy any book, but a poetry book in particular.

1. For section one—explain “what repeats itself”
2. For section two—explain what “edges blur”
3. Does TM reveal what the secret is? What is it?
4. Find three poems—one from each section of the book—that exemplify TM’s style/voice and explain why you’ve chosen them.
5. TM makes frequent use of the natural world as a metaphor. Find 2-3 examples of this and explain how the metaphor works. That is, what is being compared to what? How are they similar?
6. Richard Hugo says, if you are not risking sentimentality, you’re not in the ballpark.

Using examples from TSLOW, explain the difference between sentimentality and sentiment.

Sentimentality is on one hand a literary device that is used to induce an emotional response disproportionate to the situation, and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments, and on the other it is a heightened reader response that is willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation. (from wikipedia)

Sentiment: The expression of delicate and sensitive feeling, especially in art and literature

What the notebook holds.

Break

Introduction to Jim Bodeen

Duende; The Muse; Notebooks

What he’s written.

What he’s writing about now: peace activism; human rights; his mom; travel to Alaska, Honduras, El Salvador, the South West;

Brief Bio:

Bowbells

Seattle

LSU NO

Army

Panama

Viet Nam

Yakima

The Place

Davis High

Latino Literature

Blue Begonia Press

Retirement

Read:

Thinking About Buckshot Kneaded in the Plastic

After the Healing

Bowbells, North Dakota

Alone with the Trombones

Cleaning up the Yard

Structure of ITL:
Dante’s Divine Comedy: Journey into Hell, Purgatory, Paradise

Repeated in section 1, 2, 3.

Study questions:(These are still rough. For all of them remember, "even the middle is an extreme")

1. Pick one poem from each section of the book. Rearrange them in your own order. Build a book within a book. Explain your choices for poems and explain why you put them in that order. How do they “talk” to each other in this new order? Is this a different story? The idea is to get you thinking about the sequence of the poems.

2. Find three examples of Bodeen’s sense of humor. How does he use humor in his poems? Does it have a purpose, make a statement? How do they fit in the chapters?

3. Explain the connection to Viet Nam for the last poems in the book starting with “Rexroth” poem.

4. Show how the first section: Nothing is Hid, is also structured as an initiation ritual, in miniature.

5. Tolstoy said you must be wounded into writing, but you musn’t write until the wound has healed. Toni Morrison says, language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. language alone is meditation."

For the sake of argument, I loosely paraphrase Morrison as: Write to heal the wound.

And Tolstoy tells us to button our lip until we have something to say.

Which impulse better descrbes Bodeen’s book? Whose advice does he seem to follow?

6. This book is a book about recovery and discovery. What does Bodeen recover? What does he discover? How does he do it?

Imitation suggestions: What I Learned from My Mother; A poem written in your mother's voice (how about a combination of the first two: How would your mother answer this question "What I Learned From My Mother"; A poem written in the voice of a forgotten person, avoid the homeless; A political poem; a journey poem; a dialog between two characters who are really two parts of your personality--I like this last one;

Notes on Impulse to Love

Notes on Impulse to Love

Jim Bodeen’s Impulse to Love--Rough Draft of notes for the class,

If you don’t read anything else:

In the Mari Sandoz CrazyHorse

Thinking About Buckshot

The Babe the Dude and the Speedboat

Hawks of the Midnight Sun and After the Healing

Sentries

The Song is a 20 Year Chain

Bowbells, ND: Getting There

Ear Ache

Alone with the Trombones

Cleaning the Yard

To My Children

Canyonlands and All Souls Day

Blackberry Syrup

Overview

I think that understanding the structure of this book is the best way to understand the poems.

The book is structured like an initiation ritual. Separation, Initiation, Return. Like the Divine Comedy and the monomyth. Neruda's Heights of Macchu Picchu is one of the guides.

• The first section is the overture
• The second and third chapters are more complete journeys
• The final section is the re-integration of the traveler.

Separation (Ex: Thinking About the Buckshot/Reading Neruda)

The traveler is called to the journey—first poem, c-4 in the brain

Separated:

From his childhood—the war in the living room (boy/man)

From the memories of the war in Viet Nam (first and last sections)

From health (seizure)

From his culture (Chile)

From his own story (Boy/Man)

Initiation (Hawks; Boy/Man dialogue)

Mystical traditions explored (Chile)

Biblical traditions explored

Other forgotten voices/stories explored (Chile)

Neruda as spirit guide (Chile)

Work-repeated use of that word to describe it--of self analysis

Return: (Ex: After the Healing; Leaving; Blackberry Syrup)

With poems for others (for example, the number of poems dedicated to others in the last section)

Restored health (last section)

Integrated into the community (last section and after the climatic poems in sections 2 and 3.

Attempt to pay back, return the favor by telling his story.

Here’s a more detailed look at each section

In The Mari Sandoz Crazy Horse Camp:

Voice of the poet as shaman figure, speaking for the community

Voice of the oppressed, but not beaten.

Drum beat of the repetitions

Confident declarations

Overture/Exposition: Nothing is Hid from The Heat

Establishes setting—time and place

1991, Persian Gulf War

Introduces the voice/persona

Main themes, including war, Latin America, childhood, biblical archetypes, sense of humor

This short section replicates the overall structure of the book from

separation (C-4), initiation (Bible, Townspeople Speak) to the return (Leaving)

Separation-Initiation-Return: Chile

The Price of Things

Chile trip.

Classic epic journey

Theme of politics, human rights, Neruda/Latino literature, lost stories

Begins with plane flight.

Climaxes in Hawks

But best poem is the one that comes after it

Ends with “afterward” that helps with the whole section

Reunion-Initiation-Return: Bowbells

Echoes

Same epic archetype as The Price of Things, but a coming back home rather than a going away. In the tradition of the indigenous journey.

Much different style

Two voices/ dialogue style

Boy/Man

Return, not a separation that leads to the understanding.

Goes back to Bowbells—incredible first poem.

The Man and the Boy On the Last Day of the Year and the Man and the Boy seem to represent the depths (go up to go down)—the work on your own insides, writing and thinking—required to come to grips with what started in Chile and exploded during Gulf War One. The work goes back to the earliest separations, back to prebirth.

Interrupts the seriousness AGAIN with the poem that follows it and it is also the best poem in the section. Read In the Womb, too.

Return and Integration

Impulse to Love:

Viet Nam shapes us today (96)

So does our childhood. (Trombones)

The traveler brings back of the wisdom. Brings lessons for the present. Tries to help others.

It feels like this is the section of the book that we’ve been building to

Alone with the trombones—a sense of humor, revealing.

Cleaning up the yard is the big poem in this section. Refers back to the beginning section. Like it picks the story back up after going down into the history of his quest. But this is THE STORY, one feels of his time in Viet Nam. Nobody fucks with the Bo. We wrapped them in gauze until they disappeared—this is repeated earlier as an image, the gauze—and the sense that THIS is what is being uncovered now is clear. Title of the poem is clearly about this, too. Garden as metaphor for health/arrival/stories.

To My Children: A War Story is an incredible poem. This is crucial to understanding why the poet is speaking, and on this journey.

Much of the section deals with Viet Nam experience 20 years later. And those that don’t directly, seem to deal with it indirectly.

After you read the section, it feels like every poem is about viet nam. But many aren’t. So, the question is, starting about “Letter to Rexroth” how are they connected? You could ask this about the opening poems in the chapter. They seem to be preparing us for Cleaning the Yard. There’s a sense, generally of abundance—like with the story revealed, the gifts are everywhere—silk, feasting, old roses.

I see these as part of the formal structure of the book as a whole. The last section is a blessing, a benediction. This structure is made explicit in his next manuscript, which he models on an order of worship in the southern gospel tradition, set to Wynton Marsalis’ In this House on this Morning.

The last poems are about re-integration in the community. Ars Poetica calls the garden solace. The poem/poet is sewn back into the fabric, new friends are made, rivers are given new names and a dessert, Blackberry syrup with ice cream, is served the end.

Terry Martin's Lecture and Reading

This is raw footage. Edited version out later in the quarter. Reading is first. It starts at 7min 45 seconds. The lecture has sound problems for the first 10 minutes or so, skip ahead if you can. And the camera started shooting everything in green, so we converted it to Black and White.

Discussion of Terry Martin Lecture and Reading

Share your reactions. Ask about the study questions. Ask your own questions.

Registration to a "google account" is required. Very quick to do (five minutes?) and you get access to blogger and other things (photo storage, video uploads etc).

I'm working on getting the video online. It's a process. And it will probably be in b/w because the white balance on the camera went sideways during the reading and everything looked like it was underwater. Or maybe it was all that cough syrup? Anyway.

I'll try to put up a link the day of the reading so this can happen when you're fresher. We've never tried this, so we'll experiment and see what happens.

Study Questions for Terry Martin

Here are the Study Questions for The Secret Language of Women

Everyone must answer this question:

This book is #20 on a national best seller list for poetry.

Point to specific reasons why you think this book has found such a wide audience.

Part of this question is to get you thinking about why people buy any book, but a poetry book in particular.

Then, answer one question from the list below:

1. For section one—explain “what repeats itself”
2. For section two—explain what “edges blur”
3. Does TM reveal what the secret is? What is it?
4. Find three poems—one from each section of the book—that exemplify TM’s style/voice and explain why you’ve chosen them.
5. TM makes frequent use of the natural world as a metaphor. Find 2-3 examples of this and explain how the metaphor works. That is, what is being compared to what? How are they similar?
6. Richard Hugo says, if you are not risking sentimentality, you’re not in the ballpark.

Using examples from TSLOW, explain the difference between sentimentality and sentiment.

Sentimentality is on one hand a literary device that is used to induce an emotional response disproportionate to the situation, and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments, and on the other it is a heightened reader response that is willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation. (from wikipedia)

Sentiment: The expression of delicate and sensitive feeling, especially in art and literature.

Syllabus

English 132: Blue Begonia Poets

Spring 2007

Instructor: Dan Peters

dpeters@yvcc.edu

574.6800.3194

Office hour: 930-1030 M-F A208C

Class Website: http://www.writersandideas.blogspot.com/

Other website of interest: http://www.bluebegoniapress.blogspot.com/

Required Texts in order and materials

The Secret Language of Women

Terry Martin

Blue Begonia Press

ISBN: 0911287574

Impulse to Love

Jim Bodeen

Blue Begonia Press

ISBN: 0911287272

Way Out There

By: Michael Daley

Publisher: Aequitas Books

ISBN: 1929355327

Seeking Light in Each Dark Room

ed. Jim Bodeen

Blue Begonia Press

ISBN: 0911287485

One Hundred Steps from Shore

Jenifer Browne Lawrence

Blue Begonia Press

ISBN: 0911287566

Suggested: IBM formatted disk, notebook, 3 ring binder, highlighter pens, blue & black ink pens, email, dictionary.

Required Work

Readings as assigned.

One page of notes the week following a lecture/reading.

An answer to two of the study guide questions—I pick one, you pick one.

4 reading responses, approx. every two weeks. Due dates will vary.

Responses may include

Answering “questions to ask of any poem.”

Letter to the poet, no less than one page

Memorize and recite a poem.

An imitation poem/story based on a theme, style, motif or line(s) from your reading. Must include a paragraph explanation of connection

A redesigned cover, Must include new blurb(s), image(s), fonts etc. using Microsoft publisher or Adobe Pagemaker programs. Must include paragraph(s) explaining your choices.

A broadside based on one of the poems, designed using Microsoft publisher, to be printed on 11x17 paper (either horizontal or vertical). Must include paragraph(s) explaining your choices.

Other options as assigned.

• One group project

Each group will be responsible for one of our visiting poets.

Your responsibilities include:

Contacting the poet one week prior to their lecture/reading with directions to the venue and confirmation of times, format.

Hotel/Dinner reservations, if requested.

Room set up if requested, including chairs/tables, technology etc.

See me about contacting facilities people.

A “cliff notes” study guide for the book we are studying. Email to me, please. Should include:

Summary and Analysis of the text as a whole

Study questions to help the reader better understand the poems.

List of themes, motifs, symbols, styles and examples

Short biography?

A set of questions to ask the poet during their visit to our class. One copy to me prior to the reading.

An introduction to be read before the poet’s public reading.

Operation of video equipment during the reading.

A gift for our guest

Flowers? Food? Book? YVCC memento?

Attendance Policy

If you miss 2 classes for any reason, you will lose one letter grade.

If you miss 4 classes you will lose two letter grades

If you miss 6 classes, you will be withdrawn from the course.

Please, come on time. Turn off the electronics. Lean in.

Requirements for essays and homework

All essays and homework are due on the date assigned.

Late papers will be not be accepted. Use Email if needed.

All assignments must be typed or printed on a computer printer.

Keep a HARD COPY of everything

Grading

All work will be graded on a 0-4 scale.

4= A

3.7= A-

3.3= B+

3.0= B

2.7= B-

2.3= C+

2.0= C

1.7= C-

1.3= D +

1.0= D

.9= F

Course Adaptation: If you need course adaptations or accommodations because of a disability, if you have emergency medical information to share, or if you need special arrangements in case the building must be evacuated, please talk with me as soon as possible.

Class schedule:

3.26:

First class.

Syllabus.

Introductions.

How to Read a Poem

Powerpoint about the press.

Terry Martin book preview.

4.2:

Terry Martin on “Why Poetry Matters”

Questions.

Break

Public Reading

4.11:

Terry Martin debrief

First reading response due on Terry Martin

Study Questions Due

Jim Bodeen Cliff Notes due.

Bodeen group leads discussion/preview

4.16:

Jim Bodeen lecture on “The Muse, Duende, and the Notebooks”

Questions

Break

Public Reading

4.23

Bodeen debrief

Second reading response due on Bodeen

Study Questions Due

Michael Daley Cliff Notes due.

Michael Daley group leads discussion/preview

4.30:

Michael Daley lecture on “Why I Write”

Questions

Break

Public Reading

5.7

Daley debrief

Third reading response due on Daley

Study Questions Due

Seeking Light Cliff Notes due.

Seeking Light group leads discussion/preview

Field Trip?

5.14

Seeking Light Documentary + lecture

Questions

Break

Public Reading

5.21

Seeking Light debrief

Fourth reading response due on Seeking Light

Study Questions Due

Jenifer Lawerence Cliff Notes due.

Jenifer Lawrence group leads discussion/preview

5.29 Special Tuesday Class

Jenifer Lawrence lecture

Questions

Break

Public Reading

6.4

Jenifer Lawrence debrief

Fifth reading response due on Jenifer Lawrence

Study Questions Due

Picnic?

Lesson Plan First Class

Lesson Plan: First Week Blue Begonia

1. Video Preview
   
2. Introductions
1. Why are you here?
2. An imitation poem

The Place I Dream of When I Dream of Home

Van Morrison’s On Hynford Street

Why I’m here—

“Poetry is a necessity as simple as the need to be touched and similarly a need that is hard to enunciate….The meaning of poetry is to give courage.”

“Rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It’s there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn’t matter—poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart….all that matters to me now is directness and clarity and truthfulness.”

“Poetry is church.” --Garrison Keillor “Good Poems for Hard Times” Introduction.

Plus this—Perhaps

Half is writing it. Half is reading others work.

2. Syllabus
3. How to Read a Poem
4. Blue Begonia Press Powerpoint
5. Imitation Poem Reading

How to read a poem:

Find a place that’s quiet.

Read it through once to the end without worrying about the complexity.

Read it aloud.

Read it again with a pencil/pen.

Read the SENTENCES not the LINES.

Go back and look at the title.

What’s going on in the poem? Try to explain the poem like a story: Who is speaking? Where are they? What are they trying to say? What’s the situation? Try to paraphrase it.

Assume there’s a reason for everything.

Take the poem on its on terms. Adjust to the poem.

Is there a moment when the poem changes? A but or yet?

Now, if you think you’ve got most of it, try to find places that don’t fit or that you can’t see why the poet chose that word or image. Or where the pattern of the poem changes—maybe it’s a line break or a missing word, or a weird comparison.

Those are doors to bigger rooms.

Cracks and toe holds in the rock wall.

Let’s try one:

Sample Cliff Notes

Blue Bowl Cliffnotes

Study Guide for Lynn Martin’s Blue Bowl

Biography

Lynn Martin was born in Phoenix Arizona. Her parents both passed away in 1975 and was followed by the deaths of many people who were close to her, including a miscarriage and the most recent death of her husband. These personal blows are the influence and reason for her style of poetry.
She attended Arizona State University where she obtained her BA in English and MA in Humanities. She also attended the University of Washington where she got her MA in Advanced Writing.

She has two major influences that she draws from. One is Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) who was a German poet and writer. He wrote the Duino Elegies which have a lot in common with Lynn’s style of writing about death. The second influence is Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). He was an Italian poet and writer who’s most famous piece was titled “La Divina Commedia”, which was later translated to English and titled “The Inferno”. Lynn Martin traveled later in life to Italy to study Dante and in 1988 was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her studies in Italy.

She has had two books published. The first was called “Where the Yellow Field Widened: Elegies for a Lost Child” in 1994 following her miscarriage, and “The Blue Bowl” in 2000.
Lynn Martin is now a retired teacher of Gig Harbor high school where she taught literature and writing.

In the words of Jim Bodeen: Lynn Martin is like the Blue Bowl because only a person who has lost so much can have such great compassion and understanding for others who are going through loss.

Analysis

Writing for the New Yorker magazine, Noelle Oxenhandler wrote, “Lynn Martin’s poems walk straight into the deepest sorrow. There, face to face with the most terrifying state of unknowing, they expand outward to the farthest rim of affirmation—where the blue bowl holds everything.” Between 1975 and 1990, Lynn Martin experienced a series of devastating personal losses, and her book, Blue Bowl, not only memorializes each of the persons vanished from her life, but it is also a testament to the human need to reach outward in times of grief and sorrow, and to resist the isolation which threatens to overcome us. In the book’s title poem, she imagines her “blue bowl” as the sky, the great vessel in which all of creation is held. “I love . . . things able to hold,” she writes, “[able to] be held by other things.” Lynn Martin’s blue bowl is nothing less than the bonds of blood and faith which urge, even compel, us to companionship. If human beings are social creatures, then the blue bowl is the place we congregate. And pain itself can bind. As tragedy comes, we are met with the compassion of others who have weathered the same, and this bond of mutual suffering becomes a deeper bond of mutual hope, as we lead each other outward from the darkness and uncertainty of tragedy. ”When the new pain comes,” she writes in her poem “Cosmos,” the old pains/ do not walk out the door, but stand along beside them.” The searing pain of loss works, in the forges of the heart, a miracle.


Motifs and Symbols

Some of the recurring elements in Blue Bowl include water (rivers, rain, ocean, swimming, fish, waves, boats, lakes), colors (many colors, but blue and white seemed the most significant), flowers and trees, especially in blossom stage, though also throughout the seasons, light and/or dark, and wings and winged creatures, like birds and butterflies. These elements occur in nearly every poem and often are combined (i.e. flowers, trees, birds, and light or water).
A few of the poems that reference water include the following: “The Talk of Dying” (p. 21),“A Guest of Fishes” (p. 22), “Elegy for Stephen Tudor” (p. 29), “Third Elegy” (p. 41), “Entering Rain” (p. 75), “Intimacy,” (p. 79), “Where Everything is Red” (p. 85). Water symbolizes a number of things in these poems. Rain is often equated with tears and mourning. Swimming can be a journey or struggle (like flight, but more difficult and dangerous because of the water’s resistance, unpredictability, and power). Rivers also seem to symbolize a journey, always running to the sea. The sea itself seems to be a sort of wholeness or completeness and an expanse, which touches everything but is much larger and older than humans and is out of the realm of human control, almost like afterlife, a physical representation of the infinite (like space).

Colors and light and/or dark can be seen in these poems, among others: “The Blue Bowl” (p. 20), “Four Snows” (p. 33 - 36), “The Blue Hyacinth” (p. 67), “A Guest of Fishes” (p. 22), “It is Sunny” (p. 26), “Elegy for Stephen Tudor” (p. 29), “Four Snows” (p. 33 - 36), “Ecstatic Elegy” (p. 86), “The Wisteria” (p. 103). Blue is the most commonly referenced color in this book of poetry, often in association with the sky or water, which is what blue often symbolizes. Blue is sometimes associated with sadness. Blue is often associated with faith (even heaven), healing, calmness/serenity, wisdom, and seriousness, all of which seem appropriate for one who is grappling with great loss and the meaning of life. White is another commonly referenced color, a color associated with innocence, purity, light, and goodness. In her grief, we see the author exploring both darkness and light—grief, loss, and lack of understanding and hope, faith, and enlightenment—often grappling with both at the same time.

Martin’s references to flowers and trees, often in blossom stage (but also throughout the seasons)—apple trees, particularly, but also cherry blossoms, magnolia, poppies, dogwood, etc.—seem to tie the losses she’s experiencing into the greater “cycle of life” that can be seen in nature. Her particular reliance on springtime images at times suggest a sense of hope and understanding, but also at times simply serve to magnify her loss by showing death in contrast to new life. Most poems include references to the natural world, but a few examples include the following: “It is Sunny” (p. 26), “Prayer” (p. 27), “Four Snows” (p. 33), “Third Elegy” (p. 41), “Eighth Elegy” (p. 46), “Ninth Elegy” (p. 47), “Fasting” (p. 61), “High Sierra Trail, July” (p. 94), “Lace Curtains” (p. 98), “The Apple Tree Opens Its Fists” (p. 100), “The Ancient Plum” (p. 101). Martin’s discussion of the trees and flowers around her also contrast the desert (Phoenix) from where she herself originated; she is a “transplant.” These references also compliment references to water and other natural life, such as birds.

Imagery of wings or winged creatures seems to at times also highlight her struggle to find enlightenment during a time when it feels like her wings (her freedom and hope and future) are being broken by the weight of loss. A few examples: “ . . . my weakness dragging along, like broken wings . . .” (“Elegy for My Parents,” p. 25); “Butterflies land on the scarlet poppies. /Will I even again—have wings? . . . Cover me with your huge wings, summer night” (“Seventh Elegy,” p. 45); “With the given wind, birds coast, wings open” (“Twelfth Elegy,” p. 50), “oh, let my wings lower me into a nest of light” (“That Other Life,” p. 102). A few other poems that reference wings or winged creatures include “Solitude” (p. 62), “Two Butterflies” (p. 63), and “Cosmos,” (p. 84)

Other motifs:

opening
“ . . . if we’d open our arms” (“Come June,” p. 24), “ . . . I feel the darkness/rush towards me, and I open my arms” (“Under the Walnut Tree,” p. 88)
holding/being held (find poems)
empty/full

Literary Devices

Lynn Martin makes use of literary devices, such as personification, imagery, allusion, and metaphor, throughout her poetry.

In her poems, Martin often gives human-like qualities to natural life; for example, “The air proclaimed/its own buoyancy . . .” (“A Guest of Fishes,” p. 22) and “The whiteness of the plum blossoms cracks a smile” (“Fasting,” p. 61) and “ . . . Rain invites you . . . Rain’s gesture is ample and/innocent. It sings for itself . . .” (“Entering Rain,” p. 75). Martin creates mental images using concrete sensory details in poems, like “Four Snows, I. December Elegy” (p. 33): “Birds assemble to ornament/the trees, replacing apples. And I suddenly realize/something—feminine—about the sweep of nut trees/over the crest of a hill, their arc of ecstacy. It’s/Christmas Eve. I learn again who I am, alter of heart/to be left empty, which simply is, the stubble-yellow,/then, hundreds of white geese illuminate a green field.” The poem, “The Blue Hyacinth” (pp. 67 – 71), particularly, makes use of allusions, including modern painter, Matisse (and his bold blues), Odysseus and Penelope (The Odyssey—the heroic journey), Amma Syncletica (a “desert mother” of the Eastern Orthadox Church), and Thoreau (and civil disobedience). Another examples of the use of allusion can be seen in the poem, “Tuscany” (p. 87) , which includes references to Dionysius (Neoplatonic Christian Philosopher) and Van Gogh’s sunflower and iris paintings.Much of Martin’s metaphor use actually comes in the form of similes; for example, “ . . . to leave everything grey—like flattened hubcabs . . .” (“Early Elegy,” p. 39) and “ . . . my weaknesses dragging along, like broken wings,/my future like a mouth, unable to speak to the dead . . .” (“Elegy for My Parents,” p. 25) and “Cold hangs like stars do . . .” (“I. December Elegy,” p. 33). However, she also makes use of metaphor; for example, the last stanza in the poem, “Intimacy” (p. 79): “I am the pitcher which pours you . . . I am the window . . . I am the branch . . . I am the wood . . .”


Study Questions
1. What role does color play in Martin's poetry?

2. Martin is known as the poet of the elegy. What do elegies have to teach us? Do they do more than express sorrow?

3. What's the significance of the title/title poem? How does that guide our understanding of the book as a whole?

4. How do (or do) the original elegies ("Where the Yellow Field Widened: Elegies for a Lost Child") fit with the book as a whole?

5. Consider the line in "Tenth Elegy": "I understand the crimson leaf and plum swing on the same tree." How does this reveal the poem's (and book's?) theme?

6. In the “Ash Wednesday” section of the poem “Lenten Sequence,” Martin uses the refrain, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,” a line from Genesis 3:19. What other significance does this line have, within the poem and beyond it?

7. In “Prayer,” Martin writes, “I wish you doubt enough to keep you/ human, doubt enough to keep you clear.” How does she relate doubt and uncertainty to faith?

8. “Cosmos” compares the flight of a bird to the migration of souls. In describing life and death, how does the book’s use of natural images enhance our understanding?

9. “Lace Curtains,” like many of the book’s poems, uses some breathtaking metaphors. How is lace used in this particular poem?

10. The book’s last poem, “The Wisteria,” includes the poet’s wish for the style of her own death in its final stanza. What does this wish have to say about a collection of often dark poems?

11. “Eleventh Elegy” asks “Is it possible/ to love a love not from need?” In other words, can we do so both willingly and selflessly?

Poster for Readings

The Last Waltz

Friends,

This is the third and final year of the collaboration between YVCC and Blue Begonia Press.

And what a note to go out on.

Scroll down or click here for a video preview of this year's readers.

The class meets each Monday in the Parker Room of the Deccio Building, beginning March 26^th from 635-845. Sign-up for the course is on-going at http://www.yvcc.edu/. Look for English 132, Writers and Ideas, item #5122. Let me know if you need an “access code”.

As in the past, students will read and study the work of the poet one week, then hear a lecture on a topic of the poet’s choosing the next week. The lecture are followed by a public reading that you are encouraged to attend whether you can take the class or not.

Here's the lineup--

April 2nd: Central Washington University Professor Terry Martin will present her first collection of poems, The Secret Language of Women. This book is flying off shelves in Yakima and across the state, and has been selected as the book of the month by several area book clubs.

April 16th: Jim Bodeen, founder of Blue Begonia Press, retired Davis High School teacher, mentor to many writers around the state and author of numerous books, including Impulse to Love will present a lecture on: “The Muse, Duende, and the Notebooks” This will be Bodeen's first solo reading in Yakima in nearly ten years.

April 30th: From Mount Vernon, Michael Daley, one of the oldest friends of the press, brings us news from Way Out There, a recently released collection of his prose from Pleasure Boat Studios.

May 21st: A very special event. We will catch up with students from Jim Bodeen's legendary Latino Literature course and the authors Seeking Light in Each Dark Room, an anthology. For students enrolled in the class, there will also be a world premiere of Seeking Light, a digital documentary by Amy Peters.

June 4th Another first—Jenifer Browne Lawrence, from Poulsbo, will conclude the series with a reading from her debut collection of poems, One Hundred Steps from Shore. She will speak on loss and grief in poetry.

For more information on the class, contact Dan Peters at dpeters@yvcc.edu.

Video Preview of 2007 Writers and Ideas

Weathered Pages Reading