Is  changes a noun or a verb in this phrase?

I know that Richard Wilbur was using it as a verb in his poem:

The Beautiful Changes

BY RICHARD WILBUR

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides   

The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you   

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

 

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed   

By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;   

As a mantis, arranged

On a green leaf, grows

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves   

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   

In such kind ways,   

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

 

Richard Wilbur, “The Beautiful Changes” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Inc. This material may not be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Collected Poems 1943-2004 (2004)

I am thinking about how the beautiful - or - the faces or images or objects that I called beautiful have changed over my seven decades.

Not ready to answer that right now.

The genius of Andrea Kowch

 

Andrea Kowch      Wind of November

I love this woman's work!  I hope to write some poems in response to some of her paintings!

I'm copying this from the website Escape into Life:

 https://www.escapeintolife.com/artist-watch/andrea-kowch/ :

Artist Bio

Andrea Kowch (b. 1986) was born in Detroit, Michigan, where she earned her BFA at the College for Creative Studies. Throughout the past few years, Andrea has won numerous regional, national, and international honors for her art, placing her on the stages of Washington D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center and New York City’s Carnegie Hall. As a result, she has had work exhibited in places such as Washington D.C.’s Capitol Hill and Corcoran Gallery of Art, New York City’s Diane von Furstenberg Gallery, and Miami’s Margulies Collection, to name a few. As a 2005 award winner and alumnus of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, Andrea ranks in America’s top 2% of young American talent.

Largely self-taught and influenced by the work of American Masters and the Old Masters of the Renaissance, Kowch’s paintings and illustrations are best known for their rich symbolism, mood, and control of medium, leading her art to be described as a “powerful voice emerging, demonstrating a highly sensitive consciousness that informs a culturally laced symbolism.”

To date, she has illustrated two books, and has had work featured in CMYK Magazine and Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art international art annual, volumes 15 and 16. Many of her works hang in collections across the United States and Canada. She credits life as her muse, where experiences old and new, give her the power to speak visually.

Artist Statement

The stories and inspiration behind my paintings stem from life’s emotions and experiences, resulting in narrative, allegorical imagery that illustrates the parallels between human experience and the mysteries of the natural world. The lonely, desolate American landscape encompassing the paintings’ subjects serves as an exploration of nature’s sacredness and a reflection of the human soul, symbolizing all things powerful, fragile, and eternal. The real yet dreamlike scenarios I create serve as metaphors for the human condition, all retaining a sense of vagueness because I wish to encourage viewers to form their own conclusions, despite the fact that my main idea will always be present.

As a people, we share a common thread, and as active participants in an ever-changing modern world, the purpose of my work is to remind viewers of these places that we feel no longer exist, and to recognize and honor them as a part of our history that is worth preserving. Symbolic explorations of the soul and current events concerning our environment are expressed through the incorporation of animals and other elements of the natural world to transform personal ideas into universal metaphors.

Andrea Kowch    Myth and Moor

Andrea Kowch       In the Hollow

A Slow-Motion Apocalypse

 

science fiction novelist William Gibson

I was reading an old ( 2019) New Yorker and came across an article about William Gibson.  Since I had tried to read his novel Neuromancer many years ago, unsuccessfully, I was curious.

The interview was long and at times so technical sci-fi that I skipped parts of it, but his remarks about our future and present problems did catch my attention.  I am going to cut and paste a few paragraphs here,  being careful to bleep out his many f-bombs and other profanities.

…Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it’s familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson’s strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. “The future is already here,” he has said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.”

…Two years ago, in December of 2017, I e-mailed Gibson to ask if he’d consent to being profiled, since his new novel was to be published that spring. He replied, explaining that the election of Donald Trump had forced him to delay the book. “I’ve had to get an extension,” he wrote. Extrapolating from current events, he had already written into his novel “a nuclear crisis involving Syria, Russia, nato, and Turkey”:But then Trump started bleeping with N Korea, here, so how scary can my scenario be? He keeps topping me, but I think I can handle it in rewrite. And if there’s a nuclear war, at least I won’t have to turn in the manuscript! . . .

…“With each set of three books, I’ve commenced with a sort of deep reading of the bleepedness quotient of the day,” he explained. “I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how bleeped and how far out the present actually is.” He squinted through his glasses at the ceiling. “It isn’t an intellectual process, and it’s not prescient—it’s about what I can bring myself to believe.”

…In writing “The Peripheral,” he’d been able to bring himself to believe in the reality of an ongoing slow-motion apocalypse called “the jackpot.” A character describes the jackpot as “multicausal”—“more a climate than an event.” The world eases into it gradually, as all the bad things we worry about—rising oceans, crop failures, drug-resistant diseases, resource wars, and so on—happen, here and there, to varying degrees, over the better part of the twenty-first century, adding up to “androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad bleep” that eventually kills eighty per cent of the human race. It’s a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed. One character reacts to the jackpot equivocally: “Either depressing and scared the bleep out of me or sort of how I’d always figured things are?”

…After “The Peripheral,” he wasn’t expecting to have to revise the world’s F.Q. “Then I saw Trump coming down that escalator to announce his candidacy,” he said. “All of my scenario modules went ‘beep-beep-beep—super-bleeped, super-bleeped,’ like that. I told myself, Nah, it can’t happen. But then, when Britain voted yes on the Brexit referendum, I thought, Holy bleep—if that could happen in the U.K., the U.S. could elect Trump. Then it happened, and I was basically paralyzed in the composition of the book. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block—that’s, like, a naturally occurring thing. This was something else.”

...Gibson is not a dystopian writer; he aims to see change in a flat, even light. “Every so often—and I bet a lot of people do this but don’t mention it—I have an experience unique in my life, of going, ‘This is so bad—could this possibly be real?’ ” he said, laughing. “Because it really looks very dire. If we were merely looking at the possible collapse of democracy in the United States of America—that’s pretty bleeped. But if we’re looking at the collapse of democracy in the United States of America within the context of our failure to do anything that means bleep about global warming over the next decade . . . I don’t know.” Perched, eagle-like, on his barstool, he swept his hand across the bar. “I’m, like, off the edge of the table.”

Enough!  I'm not sure why I'm posting about this, except that it resonates with my own worries about the future of the world.  

 

 

Halfway through November

 

This month is crawling along.

Here are some poems  to make it move more sweetly.

When You Are Old

William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

 

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

 

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

When the Year Grows Old
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old—
October—November—
How she disliked the cold!

She used to watch the swallows
Go down across the sky,
And turn from the window
With a little sharp sigh.

And often when the brown leaves
Were brittle on the ground,
And the wind in the chimney
Made a melancholy sound,

She had a look about her
That I wish I could forget—
The look of a scared thing
Sitting in a net!

Oh, beautiful at nightfall
The soft spitting snow!
And beautiful the bare boughs
Rubbing to and fro!

But the roaring of the fire,
And the warmth of fur,
And the boiling of the kettle
Were beautiful to her!

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old —
October — November —
How she disliked the cold!

Revived bitterness

 

Marianne Moore in 1935

Today is the birthday of Marianne Moore.  I've never liked her poetry very much; too "prosaic" and wordy for me.  But here's one I do like:

The Past is the Present

Revived bitterness
is unnecessary unless
   One is ignorant.

To-morrow will be
Yesterday unless you say the
    Days of the week back-

   Ward. Last weeks’ circus
Overflow frames an old grudge. Thus:
    When you attempt to

Force the doors and come
At the cause of the shouts, you thumb
   A brass nailed echo.

Marianne Moore in her later years

Protracted Uncertainty

 

I was listening to the podcast "On Being with Krista Tippett" yesterday. She was interviewing the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score.  Among other things, he was talking about the way we humans store trauma in our bodies.  This is nothing new to humanity, but what struck me was his observations of the USA  in the wake of this ongoing pandemic. 

Among other things, he said:

"So we have these two different parts of our brain, and they’re really quite separate. So we have our animal brain that makes you go to sleep and makes us hungry and makes us turned on to other human beings in a sexual way, stuff like that. And then we have our rational brain that makes you get along with other people in a civilized way. These two are not all that connected to each other. And so, the more upset you are, you shut down your rational part of your brain.

When you look at the political discourse, everybody can rationalize what they believe in and talk endlessly about why what they believe is the right thing to do, while your emotional responses are totally at variance with seemingly rational behaviors. We can talk till we’re blue in the face, but if our primitive part of our brain perceives something in a particular way, it’s almost impossible to talk ourselves out of it, which, of course, makes verbal psychotherapy also extremely difficult, because that part of the brain is so very hard to access."

I kept thinking of the major damage Donald Trump and his cohorts in the media have done to the ability to accept truth - empirical truth-  to at least half of the people in our country.

Dr. van der Kolk remarked: 

", we’re still sort of flabbergasted by these recent developments, and the world is a completely different place now and no longer a place that is trustworthy, in a way. The world is much more unsafe and unclear, and we don’t know who’s on our side, who’s not on our side, who’s telling the truth, who’s not telling the truth — it’s a very radical disintegration of something."

Krista Tippett responds:

"And we’ve pretty much, to a person, been really upset now for a long time, right? [laughs] I mean, some of us, some of us have had firmer, steadier ground beneath our feet, but, you know, I’ve thought about this protracted uncertainty, which our bodies do not do well with. And our animal brains do not — it wreaks havoc with our animal brains, right? I’ve almost felt like that is, again, maybe perhaps not trauma, but traumatizing. I don’t know."

Dr. Van der Kolk replies:

"so I think that people with prior history of trauma have a much harder time right now. There’s a tremendous increase in domestic violence and in child abuse, of people not feeling safe with each other anymore and not being able to do the sort of things that makes your body feel safe, like going to the movies, [laughs] — very simple stuff, you know, standing on line to get an ice cream — just that sort of — how we move rhythmically, with other people."

but he also notes that our present technology has been a help to us in this time:

"We all say negative things about Zooming and stuff, but you know, my family was very deeply affected by the pandemic in 1918, 1919. It was devastating. And I think about them all the time. They didn’t have Zooms. They didn’t have telephones. They couldn’t stay in touch with people. And I think about how much worse it must have been for people back there — and I know, because my parents were very, very hurt people, as a consequence — and how great it is that I speak to my friends in Australia once a week, and I speak to my friends in San Francisco every other week. And there’s still that capacity to see each other’s faces and to still have your heart open to people around you. So let’s not say all negative things about Zoom, because it has made a tremendous difference for the better, also."

anyway , this conversation on this podcast has given me much to think about.

In these trees there is no ambition

 More November poems

 

"The body is like a November birch facing the full moon
And reaching into the cold heavens.
In these trees there is no ambition, no sodden body, no leaves,
Nothing but bare trunks climbing like cold fire!

My last walk in the trees has come. At dawn
I must return to the trapped fields,
To the obedient earth.
The trees shall be reaching all the winter.

It is a joy to walk in the bare woods.
The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves.
The leaves are down, and touching the soaked earth,
Giving off the odors that partridges love."

-   Robert Bly, Solitude Late at Night in the Woods 

 

"Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows,

And all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone.

I already hear the dead thuds of logs below

Falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.

 

All of winter will return to me:

derision, Hate, shuddering, horror, drudgery and vice,

And exiled, like the sun, to a polar prison,

My soul will harden into a block of red ice."

-   Charles Baudelaire, Autumn Song

 

 

 

"It's mornings like this;
The stingy sun trying to hold back
Even the warmth of its reflection
Flashing coldly In the lake.
When November leaves drop in sudden gusts,
Like a red and yellow flock of birds
Swooping at once to ground.
Or even nights:
When winds reach wet hands
To take you spinning with random paper
Down back street gutters, under straining bridges
To clogged rivers.
It's this:
The time of year, along with spring,
When poets must take care
Not to sing the same old songs
Stolen from tribal memory."

-   Thomas R. Drinkard

the brown leaves fall from November's tragic trees

 

November Song

 

He is training his colt,

The man in the Moon.

I can see where the hooves have beaten down

A clear round ring.

Can it be this thing

Forbodes rainfall soon?

 

Now I must hurry away for the brown

Leaves fall from November's tragic trees,

And love that once shouted goes whispering

Of fearful mysteries.

 

There shall be rain

Soon on the naked fields.

Yet shall the Spartans fight again,

Here be their shields.

 

And Love shall come shouting in

The meadows once more.

But to morrow - a mortal sin!

The rain will pour.

 

 

-Patrick Kavanagh

Copyright © Estate of Katherine Kavanagh

 

On Veteran's Day in the US, here is a wonderful poem by a veteran of World War I

Everyone Sang

BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away ... O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

and this more famous poem:

Tidings

 I have lots to say, but my thoughts are jumbled and distracted this morning.

One of our sisters fell in the kitchen and hit the side of her head.  No telling yet of any head injury,

but that certainly distracts me.   

In our local community of eight, we are four in our seventies and four in our eighties. This is one of the eighty-five year olds, so the danger of falling is very real.

We 'll see what happens.

In the meantime, 

image by Lars Van der moor

"My tidings for you: the stag bells,

Winter snows, Summer is gone.

 

Wind high and cold, low the sun,

Short his course, sea running high.

 

Deep-red the bracken, its shape all gone,

The wild goose has raised his wonted cry.

 

Cold has caught the wings of birds.

Season of ice – these are my tidings."

-  Irish Poem, Translated by Caitlin Matthews 

Merlin      photo by Bob Reiter

Anne Sexton's birthday today

 I didn't realize it was her birthday until this afternoon.

I heard her read at Goucher College in October of 1974.  She committed suicide the next morning.

This is my favorite poem of hers:

Riding the Elevator Into the Sky by Anne Sexton (1975)

As the fireman said:
Don't book a room over the fifth floor
in any hotel in New York.
They have ladders that will reach further
but no one will climb them.
As the New York Times said:
The elevator always seeks out
the floor of the fire
and automatically opens
and won't shut.
These are the warnings
that you must forget
if you're climbing out of yourself.
If you're going to smash into the sky.


Many times I've gone past
the fifth floor,
cranking upward,
but only once
have I gone all the way up.
Sixtieth floor:
small plants and swans bending
into their grave.
Floor two hundred:
mountains with the patience of a cat,
silence wearing its sneakers.
Floor five hundred:
messages and letters centuries old,
birds to drink,
a kitchen of clouds.
Floor six thousand:
the stars,
skeletons on fire,
their arms singing.
And a key,
a very large key,
that opens something —
some useful door —
somewhere —
up there.

Sunlight has taken over the room

 More November poems.

photo from Mount Saint Mary's University

In November

BY LISEL MUELLER

Outside the house the wind is howling

and the trees are creaking horribly.

This is an old story

with its old beginning,

as I lay me down to sleep.

But when I wake up, sunlight

has taken over the room.

You have already made the coffee

and the radio brings us music

from a confident age. In the paper

bad news is set in distant places.

Whatever was bound to happen

in my story did not happen.

But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.

Perhaps a name was changed.

A small mistake. Perhaps

a woman I do not know

is facing the day with the heavy heart

that, by all rights, should have been mine.

 

Reprinted from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 1996, by permission of the author. Poem copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller.

 

photo on the campus at Mount Saint Mary's University

 

"Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!

One mellow smile through the soft vapory air,

Ere, o'er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,

Or snows are sifted o'er the meadows bare.

One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,

And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,

And the blue gentian-flower, that, in the breeze,

Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.

Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee

Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,

The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,

And man delight to linger in thy ray.

Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear

The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air."

-   William Cullen Bryant, Autumn  

November sunset    photo by Madeleine Proof

Sonnet 73 (‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’)

William Shakespeare 

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d by that which it was nourished by.
   This thou perceiv’st which makes thy love more strong,
   To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

_{From The Picador Book of Love Poems}

November on the mountain.. by Mount Saint Mary's University