Response to Arthur Sze's "The Ginkgo Light": Chrysanthemum Reach

As a response to reading Arthur Sze's "The Ginkgo Light," my professor recommended thus: "think about what the poems show that he values and avoids in his poems. These can be formal things, methods, kinds of diction, values, ideas about Beauty (or beauty), subject matter--whatever you notice. What do you suppose he would say a poet should and should not do?" My response is the following poem:

Chrysanthemum Reach

Envision. Enrapture.

Recall, remember, recite in fragments.

Introspect on observation.

Ignore nature, not.

The natural permeates all.

Acknowledge a duality of life.

Everything holds weight-

Nature, the manmade

Experience, interpretation, pain

Beauty, suffering, healing.

Experiences envelope, envelope experiences.

Do not fail to acknowledge, notice

Parallelisms

Succession of life

Momentary deliberateness

You say, “I am happiest here, now.”

"The Memory-Keeper" by Sharod Santos

The Memory-Keeper
by Sharod Santos

The smell of pine and bacon grease,
a house in a piney tract of land, a kitchen
in the house, a stove in the kitchen,
a skillet beneath which lowly burns
a bluish flame the jets discharge when a match
is held against their sound, a sound
that travels outside in from a metered box
where a boy sits watching the radium dials
record the backward passage of time,
and time itself, the beginning
of time, and beyond the beginning
the mind in the act of calling to mind.

"At the Playground, Singing for Psychiatric Outpatients" by Peter Enterwine

At the Playground, Singing for Psychiatric Outpatients
by Peter Everwine

The bright-faced children have gone home,
trailing the sun to supper.
Tonight,
these others have come,
almost sweetly shy, starched
for their monthly party.
Nurse herds them into metal chairs.

I've come to sing, Nurse tells them,
and they fold their hands
--these lately mad who failed behind a door
or slipped under in a jammed street,
whose eyes blossomed like silver
fists in mirrors, in plate-glass windows.
Nurse is waiting for me.

So I sing for them,
for the boy
in the front row, groping
the stiff corners of his pockets;
for the ugly one in pink anklets
--her legs have never felt a razor,
though her wrist has; for him
whose fingers are eaten by ants; for her
whose face sags like a torn sack.
They do not like my songs,
but infinitely polite, they turn
their smiles up into the dark
as if a smile should fall softly,
obliquely, like rain.

"Home on the Range," Nurse calls out,
her sure fingers on the pulse of America.
I start in faltering voice,
half-forgetting those dead words
sung at campfires in the past.
One joins, and then another:
Home, home on the range. . .
Where the deer. . .
And the skies are. . .
The voices crack and lurch, we
are singing--the boy, the ugly one--
singing like crows in the empty
prairie of a children's playground
where if there are distances that shine
they shine like the eyes of pain.