Gateway To Wonder

Let us share the power of language to refresh the soul. Perhaps some long-forgotten essence of your own was rekindled through a passage in a speech, a ballad, or a poem.

When it comes to poetry, look beyond those that may have been assigned in your English classes. Has something moved you to a time before the “real” world intervened to extinguish the very mystery and magic of being alive?

Consider “The Two-Headed Calf”:

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this

freak of nature, they will wrap his body

in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north

field with his mother. It is a perfect

summer evening: the moon rising over

the orchard, the wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky, there

are twice as many stars as usual.

That poem (1977) by Laura Gilpin is sublime in the true sense, joining the terrible (yes, such “freaks of nature” do exist though often stillborn or live only days) and the beautiful (perfect evening, with his mother, twice the stars) with astonishing economy. How better to express the ephemeral nature of life as the essence of meaning, indeed the transitory nature of beauty itself. Laura Gilpin died of glioblastoma in 2007, at age 57.

Our discussion piece (click: Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?) focuses on another poet known to grapple with fundamental questions but without the literary pretense. Spoiler alert: Mary Oliver is not embarrassing, at least to this non-poet. And this goes to the essence of our discussion i.e. is poetry to be dismissed as “middlebrow, accessible, placatory" when it charms the masses but is repelled by the cognoscenti, the academics? Yes, who made professor eat-your-peas the final arbiter of what is good?

It was so heartening to discover how the reviewer, herself the product of a “fancy college,” overcame all her hard-won “hermeneutic” tools to again discover a poem so disarming and alive that she could feel it in her gut as she goes on to acknowledge the humility in Oliver’s “Praying” in the way it conjures a silence where the ego dissolves and gives way to pure wonder.

In the end, it is Oliver’s “lack of guile” that drew the reviewer back to her work just the way it did when she first encountered it as a child, leading the reviewer to cite the closing lines of Oliver’s “The Summer Day”:

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

So, again, let us share any snippets of language that may have dissolved the ego, taken you back to pure wonder, and reminded you what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.

Please note the following RSVP Policy for Member Monday: RSVP sign-up opens up at 11:00am on Fridays via the City Club weekly Newsletter. Seats are first-come, first-served: the first 14 secure a spot at the table, the last 3 on the couch. Cancellations must be made 24 hours in advance or the standard Social Lunch rate applies.