From: sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov (Sharon Hopkins)
Subject: Re: The Business of Poetry
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA)
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 18:48:30 GMT

In article <1992Apr14.111012.15933@hemlock.cray.com> n2412@cray.com (Joe Green) writes:
>In article <1992Apr13.224607.15440@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov> sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov (Sharon Hopkins) writes:
>
>>No:  I don't buy the "transformation".  The "great machine" transformed
>>real bodies into real fertilizer, and longs lists of names on church walls.
>
>Yes.  But to reproduce itself it then transformed them into metaphors
>of the usual sort -- it used them to insure a fresh supply of bodies.

You speak of war as a living being, with goals, actions, etc.:  "it then
transformed" "it used" -- war seemed a machine, even perhaps a living
organism, seen from the trenches.  But that was perception.  War, too, is
an event organized by people.  Not independent.  No more than poetry is.

>The pun on lie not accidental.  The nursery rhyme recalled.
>Never anything but whatchamacallums -- symbolic markers and
>not real bodies to the "machine."  A last beer and forgotten
>forever by the "machine" because never anything but that which
>exists to be forgotten. 

Never real enough to most of the people forgetting, to be remembered.

>Perhaps these were the sentiments of some -- the old glory, the loss
>of self in something greater but the war was nothing but
>tedious exchange -- our thousnads in front of the trenches, their
>thousands in front of the trenches.  Wilfred Owen -- but what
>did his poetry prevent?  maybe saved a few.  Yes.

Yes, but more.  Provided remembrance -- so that even I can see the faces,
remember bodies had names.  Sometimes the appropriation makes the dead
immortal, not the poet (or not just).  Without the metaphor, how do we
hold the memory?

>>Crud, I left the Millay book at home.  The last line of the
>>poem I'm wanting:  "this tall, oblivious gaoler eyed with stars."
>
>No -- not the universe as gaoler -- that is a familiar projection.
>The gaoler is within, I think and hope.

I'll post a copy later.  Voluntary servitude the point, and why.

>>I don't attempt it often, with poetry, unless to suggest that people live,
>>and love, and hope, and hurt, and eventually die (one way or another).
>>Even icky people.  A very conservative, measured, quiet sort of politics.  
>
>Yes -- and maybe the gift you intend is really a gift.  This is what I
>mean and this is what happens in a gift economy.  The everydayness
>of it all, the smallness are part of what I admire.

Then why, with such then vehemence, "Now everyone shall concentrate on
producing a nice sestina about the ambiguity of their little lives" ?

The everyday is a kind of power, inertia is power.  These are of the type
of the power women have had, women with a voice in small things, in home,
children, husband, even when without the larger power of Politics, of
wealth, of political action, of Independence.  Many people have little
lives, ambiguity, dullness.  Joyce's "A Little Cloud".  Shall we not speak
to the dullness, to the drab, to the human life and fire even in banality?

I would not trade away my larger voice, more recently gained, but the
small voice of the ordinary was not silent, was not nothing.  Ask a
grandmother if *her* grandmother was powerless, voiceless, silent.

--

Since I bitched about poem content, another repost:  the only sestina I've
written thus far.  Ambiguous, but not as little as it might be, nor as
ordinary, nor as much about my life.

I really wanted to post an excellent poem by a friend of mine, about children
and writing and telephones, but I haven't a copy handy and it isn't mine to
give away just now.  This will have to do.


	Sestina:  For Brendan

	It still surprises me there are no scars
	to ridge the muscled smoothness of your back
	with maps of blows received, of battles won
	by fighting on, ignoring body's pain.
	Your mother might still recognize her son
	in form and feature, in unchanging face.

	Does inner sight make aging hard to face?
	I cannot see, but still may guess what scars
	lie buried deep within.  The circling sun
	will never change its course or fling me back
	to learn first-hand the causes of your pain--
	in this Time's daughter, Loneliness, has won.

	But worlds are misalligned, so sometimes one
	small scrap of life, the truth behind a face,
	can slip across that space and speak of pain
	to fools and poets, etching others' scars
	on sighted minds and hearts; though somewhere back
	across the gap there shines a different sun.

	It mocked you on the day you lost your son;
	no battles fought, no bitter victories won
	can serve you now, or bring lost sweetness back.
	And you, alone, each passing day must face
	an empty house, cold hearth, your inner scars
	stretched tight across the ache of hidden pain.

	But what went first?  Whence came that older pain
	that some days lets you live as if no son
	had ever crossed your doorstep?  Whence those scars
	that hid your heart from how to love the one
	whose need for love was greatest?  I would face
	your demons with you, help to draw you back

	from that abyss of loss.  But you are back
	across the gulf of worlds, and all your pain
	won't bring me more than dreams--to touch your face
	still lies beyond my power.  I'll bear no son
	to share with you; my wishing has not won
	a way for me to cross our bridge of scars.

	I cannot touch your scars, nor see your face,
	for you are back, beneath that distant sun:
	and I have won just this, to share your pain.


					    Claremont, CA
					    Spring, 1989

--Sharon Hopkins
  sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov