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Squirrel Season
| Open Poetry #46 |
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Squirrel Season |
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Huan Yi Member Ascendant
since 2004-10-12
Posts 6688Waukegan 
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. It is just dawn The night’s mist Drips from Autumn leaves You hear The first bird’s call A dove’s mournful tune A blue jay’s cry Flights of sparrows Going out on patrol And yet it is silence That still pervades The chilled colored air As if clinging to a dream Before it fades away And there Is your father Calm and strong A few yards off In the somber trees He looks at you Nods his head Then points up With a single finger Toward the Growing sky And acorn shells That fell so Many years ago Echo in your ear . |
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| © Copyright 2010 John Pawlik - All Rights Reserved | |||
Cpat Hair
since 2001-06-05
Posts 11793 |
very nicely done sir... your ending a wonderful close to the imagery and tale.. truly enjoyed. |
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katahdin Senior Member
since 2010-07-01
Posts 1196ME. In the Shadow of the Mt. |
Nice picture you presented here. Enjoyed! Kat >^..^< |
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Huan Yi Member Ascendant
since 2004-10-12
Posts 6688Waukegan |
. Thank you both for reading John . |
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Marchmadness Member Rara Avis
since 2007-09-16
Posts 9271So. El Monte, California |
Deep and haunting, love it. Ida |
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Earl Brinkman Senior Member
since 2010-03-03
Posts 1183Osaka, Japan |
I like the mood of this piece, especially with the introduction of the father midway through the poem. This is more than simply a nature piece. |
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Mysteria
since 2001-03-07
Posts 18328British Columbia, Canada |
I loved the fact that I could perceive this two ways, and loved the bonding aspect I actually came up with. This was wonderful, will read again to see what other images you hide within your words. |
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Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
It's a good poem, John, but needs some tightening. I don't know how welcome specific suggestions from me would be, but if you read it out loud you might hear places where it establishes a clean and solid rhythmic push, and places where it falls out of that push. Or perhaps your ear is simply different than mine. But I like the way it moves in at the end for a solid feeling of conclusion, and I think you've got the basic moves down better than right; it just needs some tuning. Best, Bob Kaven |
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Marchmadness Member Rara Avis
since 2007-09-16
Posts 9271So. El Monte, California |
I don't see any way to improve on this poem. Ida |
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Huan Yi Member Ascendant
since 2004-10-12
Posts 6688Waukegan |
. Thanks all again Bob, I never thought of reading this out loud. Brodsky wrote that poetry is essentially the soul’s search for its release in language and for me that is best done using words to create images, impressions, moods in silence. Even if I listen to this or any other poem in my head it’s not in the author’s voice, (including my own ), but in one I wouldn’t even try in replicate. Think of my things as found on some scrap of paper, or a wall or stone fragment, left by someone long beyond speaking. Thanks yet again John . |
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rwood Member Elite
since 2000-02-29
Posts 3793Tennessee |
I loved the way this spoke to me. And your response: "Think of my things as found on some scrap of paper, or a wall or stone fragment, left by someone long beyond speaking." Wonderful verse for another find. |
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Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
John, as you say, "You will what you will." If what you do works for you, you should keep on doing it. You even have a good audience who loves and admires your work, and that's as much and more than a poet might wish for. The reason I find that reading stuff out loud is helpful is that, for me and for some other writers, it tends to show those places where the energy lags and where words are extraneous better than any other method I've seen. It's very difficult for us shy writers, which is why I suggested the tape recorder. Even so, I sometimes find it excruciating, and I've found public readings difficult as well because of that shyness factor. Robert Frost used to suck down a raw egg before readings because that was all his stomach could handle, and he frequently lost his lunch. I've known a lot of others who haven't been able to read sober for some of the same reasons. It's simply that you're able to hear your work differently when you read it out loud than any other way; and you can learn a lot, even if it's only reading out loud to yourself. And you shouldn't have to do it at all if you see no use for it. |
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jwesley Member Rara Avis
since 2000-04-30
Posts 7563Spring, Texas |
I read it out loud ... even saw the squirrel laying flat on the limb way up there . . . watching, listening... and only heard another acorn fall. But that's me. jimmy |
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Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
Dear Jimmy, Your response was clever, but given the fact that you were actually listening to words, it's likely that you really did hear them. Silence is unlikely as more than a valuable counterpoint to the words, and it is the component that John rightfully focused upon in his response. You can see that silence is an important component in his writing. You can see that John has read some good chinese and japanese writers and that he's read some of the American writers influenced by them, and that he's put the lessons to good use. Perhaps you've read them as well. If I'm writing, I want to know what can come out of the text and still increase the clarity. I don't know if you want that, I don't know if John wants that, and everybody has some level of protectiveness about their text, so how much of that a person will want will vary from person to person. Nobody will want any of it put savagely, of course. It it hard to improve without some of it. Hearing yourself read your own text is one way of allowing yourself to hear your poem the way other people will hear it. That doesn't mean that your flaws must leap out at you in a reading; indeed, they can hide from you despite your best efforts for years and, in my case, sometimes for decades. There is a matter of bearability involved here, and everybody has an amount they can tolerate. Some have more and some have less. I would like to have more than I do. If I had more, then I'd be able to hear my mistakes earlier, and I wouldn't need others to tell me. It gets complicated. And others are built differently than I am and seem to run by different rules. William Stafford is someone like that. Anyway, I thought your comment deserved a thoughtful and vulnerable response. I hope this fits the bill, Jimmy. Sincerely, Bob Kaven |
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Huan Yi Member Ascendant
since 2004-10-12
Posts 6688Waukegan |
. "Hearing yourself read your own text is one way of allowing yourself to hear your poem the way other people will hear it." This for me is so wrong. Mark Strand is probably my favorite poet; I have read him for decades. yet when I actually heard him recite his poetry I couldn’t and still can’t relate his voice with the one I heard and still hear in my head. The same is true of my own voice. The man reciting the poem in either case I think is not the man who wrote or,(at least in my case), you hear if you are in fact even listening when reading, ( think about “the Buried Life” by Mathew Arnold, " I am not I" by Juan Ramon Jimenez and Brodsky’s comment above ). As far as Jim listening to the poem, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. A word on a page can act almost as a symbol leading to an image A sound a mood without needing to hear inside the word itself. Think about how you read a good book; there’s almost no time Between the marks on the page and the scenes in your head. . |
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Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
quote: John, you raise excellent points, and I must say that you are right. You haven't said anything that I would want to quarrel with or that I would want to condemn or discount or suggest was false in any way at all. It is an entirely legitimate way of looking at reading and writing. I say that, and I mean it. What I say next is something that I believe is also true. It is something that is probably more traditional than the points that you are making. That doesn't make it better or worse from my point of view, though the Confucian cultures would say that the tradition makes it better, and the Western cultures would often take the reverse tack, that newer is better. Reading began as being told stories by story tellers before there were written languages. People, being people, wanted the stories as close to word-perfect as possible — remember kids correcting the parents when the parent tried to skip over a page or two? or even a word or two? The actual words and the actual order mattered. It's not simply the pictures that we have in our heads, it's the sounds they make in the throat and the ear which are repeated over and over, with variations, that make the story memorable. It's only within the last hundred or so years that books began to be read in utter silence, and certainly books in families, where books would often be read by a head of household to the whole family as an evening's entertainment. This is the sort of thing that made long poems popular and let them be best sellers through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pope's translations of Homer, Dryden and Milton were actually read out loud because they were interesting to hear, though they may be deadly boring to the modern reader, who simply sees them sitting dead on the page. Read out loud, they become something else entirely. In the same way, Shakespeare is very difficult if you simply attack him as a printed text, but when you see a good production of one of the plays, then the appear becomes much more understandable. For one thing, you actually understand what's happening. It's not a continual puzzle. These are magnificent stories that aren't at all understandable to the modern ear. You need more, or at least most of us do. This is why as long as 200 years ago people were publishing the stories of the Shakespeare plays, so that people would know what was supposed to be happening in them. Even two hundred years ago, when Charles Lamb presented some of Shakespearean stories, folks needed that sort of supplement in order to follow. The text of the play simply wasn't enough. Sometimes people write prose or poetry which is so abstracted from the stuff of life that I suppose that the actual words used don't matter. Perhaps you can think of an example. When I was a kid, I learned to speed read, and got my reading speed up to something ridiculous, maybe 3000 words a minute. I remember knowing somebody who got their reading speed up to 10,000 words per minute and the newspaper writing an article about her. She'd managed to speed-read Moby-Dick in something like an hour. She had all those pictures in her head that you were talking about, John. Or at least I had them at 3,000 words a minute. But it was a terrible loss because what I didn't have was the words and the sounds and the sense of the reading voice and the person-to-person connection that makes the process of reading such an intimate experience. You don't have to read your work out loud, of course, to hear it. You don't have to have it sound the same to others as you do to yourself. You don't have to anything. Mark Strand is one of my favorite poets as well as yours, and he was trained to read a poem out loud to himself when he was revising it, and when he was presenting it at a workshop for exactly the reasons I mentioned to you earlier. Nothing shows up flaws in a poem like being read out loud to their writer and to the people who are hearing the poem. The fact that when Strand read the poem differently than you expected suggests that you made the poem your own, and that it was a different poem for you than it was for him. His version high have been weaker or stronger or simply different. Once you publish the poem, your authority of the silly thing diminishes a great deal, and you no longer have that paternal Roman authority of life and death over the thing. You, in fact, have as much right to your reading as Mark Strand has to his; after all, the poem is in your shared world right now, and not simply in Mark Strand's head. If he was offering the poem for feedback, however, the way you heard it might make a difference to him, and he might want to amend the text to take into account the way you heard him read it, to emphasize or deemphasize that reading. Maybe you heard something that suggested that there were words that didn't need to be there, and that the energy of the poem began later. On more than one memorable occasion I heard people tell me that the energy in my poem began in the last line, and that I should scrap the rest and begin there. Sometimes, I'm afraid they were right; and, I think, if the same people were reading, they'd probably say the same thing sometimes, and still be right, on occasion. So what? I don't want to read your poems at 3,000 words per minute and get a high degree of comprehension and the imagery and miss the actual words and the sounds and the sense of lineation and the breathing and the various other things about the poem, including my sense of the energy of the poem, that connect it to the physical and sonic world of the spoken word. That doesn't mean that I don't need feedback on my ideas, and how my ideas connect as well. I am fully capable of making mistakes there as well. And I don't mean to suggest that you have said anything that isn't true. I simply suggest that there may be truths that you haven't taken into consideration. Even though you may not need to do so, I believe they are still there. |
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