SEEDING THE BUTTONS BOX
THE BOOK
..........................-
TENDER
BUTTONS
THE SUBBOOK
...................-
OBJECTS
THE SUBPOEM
...................-
WATER RAINING: NUMBER 31
WORD
COUNT......................-
11
THE SUBPOEM
...................-
COLD CLIMATE: NUMBER 32
WORD
COUNT......................-
10
STANZAS..............................-
1 each
THE
LEADER........................-
THE STEINY ROAD POET
CO-LLABORATORS..............-
MODPO
STUDENTS/THE BUTTONS
GENRE..................................-
VIRTUAL OPERA
LOCATION............................-USA,
UK, Australia, Philippines, S. Africa, Canada.
TIME......................................-
ALL HOURS OF EARTH’S CLOCK
TONE.....................................-
EFFUSIVE
“Rain
can make a meadow or it can make a flood. The meadow is passive. The stroke is
violent.” Randy Parker
WATER RAINING.
Water astonishing and difficult
altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.
COLD CLIMATE.
A season in yellow sold extra strings
makes lying places.
The Steiny Road Poet saw the
key words for this study session as water,
raining, meadow, stroke, yellow, strings, lying. A great
deal of the comments focused on objects in the natural world but veered
languorously into painting, writing, the Stein love relationships, saffron, the
yellow fever epidemic of 1793, string theory, and kabbalah.
WADING IN
Here are some samples:
From Randy Parker:
“Making
a meadow is life-giving.
“Making a
stroke--well that could be the painting reference that we talked about in ModPo—standing
water in the meadow like a stroke of white or grey paint. But a stroke is a
kind of statement. A striking, perhaps. Like lightning. A stroke of
genius. A stroke of bad luck. A debilitating physical stroke. Stroke can also
refer to swimming.”
THE FLUIDITY
OF LOVE
From Peter
Treanor:
“I wonder if water raining
could be tears, is she or Alice crying? Raining seems like a very active description
of what is happening to the water. Its astonishing and difficult, maybe
they have argued. And the flow of tears makes you wipe/stoke them away.
“And
stretching it too far probably, could meadow be "me adieu", me ( GS)
saying goodbye. Maybe that’s why there are tears, one of them is leaving?
I
like Randy's reading of this too and like the idea of the meadow as a meadow,
and a meadow is such a good place to make hay..
And "altogether" seems so "all to get
her" every time I see it now that I wonder if the meadow is Alice and the
stroke is GS stroking her, her meadow, and if the water is GS raining/ reigning
down her love and (wet) passion, making hay and making the meadow's wild
flowers grow.
“I was
[also] thinking of the ways that water is seemingly like love. How it flows,
how we get swept away in it, flooded by it, lost in a sea of it, have
oceans of it, float in it, swim in it, drown in it, set sail away on an
ocean of it. Are buoyed up by it. Love and water go together like a cup
and saucer.
from Claudia
Schumann:
“Water
raining is like water passing by (or may mean people passing by). Maybe GS is
thinking of May Bookstaver [Stein’s college lover] and trying to forget.”
BRUSH
STROKES
From Allan
Keeton:
“This
makes me think of the strokes of paint in daoist watercolor paintings.
“I am struck
by the graceful (astonishing & difficult to achieve)
harmony
between humans & nature.”
STRING &
PARTICLE THEORY
from Mary
Armour:
“This
[“Water Raining.”] brought back a memory of walking in a wet spring through
water meadows near Richmond, London, grasses undulating and surfing my calves,
and later watching some androgynous swimmer doing breast stroke in an
Olympic-sized pool, the swift parting of waters and cleaving, not as
dramatic as swimming the butterfly
stroke and heaving up shoulders but scooping water
horizontally, parting of ways like the Red Sea, like tall grasses in
Africa.
“The crawl
stroke was what we were taught at school, the swift clean slicing forward
motion taught after we graduated from doggy paddle. We had to practise it at
the side of the pool before we got into the water, moving our arms through
the air as if air was lighter helium-filled water.
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