To help prepare for 2015 discussion groups. Please do not distribute.
www.masspoetry.org/commonthreads
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Overview
Common Threads is annual publication of 7-10 poems by Massachusetts poets chosen
by a Massachusetts poet, with a guide to reading and discussing the poems, videos of
the poems being read (by the poets themselves when possible), corresponding readings
at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and elsewhere, and outreach to libraries, senior
centers, book clubs, and more, to facilitate ~350 poetry discussion groups throughout
the state, both in April for National Poetry Month, and throughout the year, in an effort
to broaden the audience for poetry. Sign up to receive Common Threads 2015 at
www.masspoetry.org/commonthreadssignup.
Release Date
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Guest Editor
Alice Kociemba, Director of Calliope Poetry Series, West Falmouth Library
Poems
1) “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” by Richard Wilbur
2) “The Birthing” by Deborah Digges
3) “For the Man Who Spun Plates” by John Hodgen
4) “Prospective Immigrants Please Note” by Adrienne Rich
5) “On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, for Once” by Rhina P.
Espaillat
6) “The Salt Stronger” by Fred Marchant
7) “Sea Grapes” by Derek Walcott
8) “The Osprey” by Mary Oliver
Supplementary Materials
• Discussion Questions: Insightful and engaging questions to inspire discussion
• Writing Prompts: Prompts for writers of all levels that relate to the “common thread” of
the issue
• How to Read a Poem: An essay by Robert Pinsky
• Media package: Videos of each poem being read and discussed (by the actual poet whenever
possible)
Available Support
• Partners: Request a poet to partner with you to facilitate a discussion group.
• Webinar: An interactive webinar with Alice Kociemba to learn and practice methods for
running a successful poetry discussion group with Common Threads
More information
For more info, check out www.masspoetry.org/commonthreads.
Questions? Contact Laurin Macios at [email protected]
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Richard Wilbur
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”
3
Deborah Digges
The Birthing
Call out the names in the procession of the loved.
Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness
to the day he stopped the car,
we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.
In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,
what he called front leg presentation,
the calf came out nose first, one front leg dangling from his
mother.
A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves
of his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.
I watched him thrust his arm entire
into the yet-to-be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering
in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.
With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother
and grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing
against the new one's shoulder.
And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out
into the world together.
Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,
until a bull calf, in a whoosh of blood and water,
came falling whole and still onto the meadow.
We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.
The mother licked the newborn, of us oblivious,
until it moved a little, struggled.
I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,
and his tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry
while he set out to find the farmer.
When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,
the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,
leaving our coats just where they lay
we huddled in the car.
And then made love toward eternity,
without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.
4
John Hodgen
For the Man Who Spun Plates
On the old Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights,
before Top Gigio, the dancing mouse,
before the Beatles and the Mersey Beat,
before we all knew all we needed was love,
someone to kiss us goodnight,
there was a man who spun plates on long slender poles,
keeping them spinning with the tips of his fingers,
running from one side of the stage to the other,
the crowd calling out to him when a plate started wobbling,
the man so intently spinning plates in the air,
a little like Jesus before the Last Supper,
keeping his disciples’ haloes from falling,
the crowd like the masses with the bread and the fishes,
crying, Judas, watch Judas, his halo is falling,
Jesus too busy holding up the whole world.
And sometimes he’d miss one and we’d all see it fall,
shatter like crystal all over the stage,
and we loved him even more then because he was real,
working as hard as the devil for us.
But we didn’t know then that our lives would break too,
my good friend whose daughter just drowned in Brazil,
his plates all come down like a crockery sea.
He tries to lift her up again, get her life spinning,
as if he could raise her from under the waves,
the waves that keep falling, one after another,
like shimmering plates on the sea.
5
Adrienne Rich
Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
6
Rhina P. Espaillat
On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, for Once
The voice over the wire trills my R,
snares me with soft diminutives, and waits
for me, in our shared language, to allow
my words to trace, like fingers down a scar,
stories we’ve known since childhood, places, dates
in brackets on worn stones. He tells me how
our old ones slip away, forgetting, now,
faces and names. My cousin hesitates;
I take this name again and say goodnight.
Odd how the gringo tongue that shifts, translates
you into something it can say, but far
from what you were, that never gets you right,
rolling you round too long, too smooth, too light,
loves you at last to who it says you are.
7
Fred Marchant
The Salt Stronger
I have seen the legislators
on their way,
the jacketless men
in mid-winter who will cast
their votes like stones for this war.
Men who have to cross the street
through slush
and over gutter, their cuffs
now vaguely blued with a salt
that dries in dots where it splashes,
and mingles with the finely
woven cloth
of the chalk-stripe suits,
the soi-disant practical men,
you can see them now tiptoeing,
now leaping, balletic, windsor-knotted,
fragrant
and shaved,
they pass, they pass
the window of the Capitol Deli
wherein I am writing to my friend
in Baghdad,
he a “witness for peace,”
a poet who for years has wondered
what good poetry is or has been or does.
I compose today’s answer from here,
saying,
I think of poetry
as a salt dug from a foreign mine
that arrives like a miracle in Boston
as pellets to break underfoot
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and melt
the dangerous plated ice
and cling to the acknowledged lawmakers,
to stay with them in their dreams,
to eat at the cloth and reach down
to the skin
and beyond the calf
into the shin. I think the soul
is equivalent to bone, and that conscience
must hide in the marrow,
float in the rich fluids
and wander the honeycomb at the center.
There, and not in the brain,
or even the heart is where
the words attach, where they land
and settle,
take root after the long
passage through the body’s by-ways.
Just think, I write, of how some poetry rolls
off the tongue, then try to see the tongue
in the case
that faces me, a curious,
thick extension of cow-flesh
fresh from a butcher’s block, grainy and flush.
I think that if my tongue alone could talk
it would swear
in any court that poetry
tastes like the iodine in blood,
or the copper in spit, and makes a salt stronger than tears.
9
Derek Walcott
Sea Grapes
That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean
for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband's
longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is
like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name
in every gull's outcry.
This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility
will never finish and has been the same
for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore
now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,
since Troy sighed its last flame,
and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough
from whose groundswell the great hexameters come
to the conclusions of exhausted surf.
The classics can console. But not enough.
10
Mary Oliver
The Osprey
This morning
an osprey
with its narrow
black-and-white face
and its cupidinous eyes
leaned down
from a leafy tree
to look into the lake—it looked
a long time, then its powerful
shoulders punched out a little
and it fell,
it rippled down
into the water—
then it rose, carrying,
in the clips of its feet,
a slim and limber
silver fish, a scrim
of red rubies
on its flashing sides.
All of this
was wonderful
to look at,
so I simply stood there,
in the blue morning,
looking.
Then I walked away.
Beauty is my work,
but not my only work—
later,
when the fish was gone forever
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and the bird was miles away,
I came back
and stood on the shore, thinking—
and if you think
thinking is a mild exercise,
beware!
I mean, I was swimming for my life—
and I was thundering this way and that way
in my shirt of feathers—
and I could not resolve anything long enough
to become one thing
except this: the imaginer.
It was inescapable
as over and over it flung me,
without pause or mercy it flung me
to both sides of the beautiful water—
to both sides
of the knife.
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Copyright Info
In order of appearance
“Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World” from THINGS OF THIS WORLD by
Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 1956 and renewed 1984 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by
permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
“The Birthing” from THE WIND BLOWS THROUGH THE DOORS OF MY
HEART: POEMS by Deborah Digges, copyright © 2010 by The Estate of Deborah
Digges. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“For the Man Who Spun Plates” from GRACE, by John Hodgen, © 2006. Reprinted
and used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
“Prospective Immigrants Please Note” Copyright © 2002, 1967, 1963 by Adrienne Rich
from THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME: SELECTED POEMS 1950-2001 by Adrienne
Rich. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, for Once,” from HER
PLACE IN THESE DESIGNS (2008) by Rhina Espaillat. Reprinted by permission of
Truman State University Press.
Fred Marchant, "The Salt Stronger," from THE LOOKING HOUSE. Copyright ©
2009 by Fred Marchant. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis,
Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
“Sea Grapes” from COLLECTED POEMS 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott. Copyright ©
1986 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
“The Osprey” from WEST WIND by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1997 by Mary Oliver.
Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights
reserved.