We Are Family

In Pittsburgh, we are truly family. When members of a family lose one of their own, they grieve. When they lose several, they hurt, more deeply than can be imagined.

For the moment, let’s put aside money and politics and contention and think about loss and what it means in our lives. Let us feel loss. The loss for our neighbors. The loss for our friends. The loss for our colleagues.

The loss for our community.

Hazelwood, Beechview, West End, Lawrenceville, and Carrick and Knoxville.

As it stands now, the first four of these branches of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh will close and the next two will combine into a new, yet to-be-built facility.

Many of us associated with the library, customers, staff and friends, are going through the various stages of loss that are so well known to all. Right now, we are in the very early stages.

Among poets, Emily Dickinson is, perhaps, the master of loss. Here is her evocative rendition of what we, as a community of neighbors, friends, and colleagues, are experiencing right now:

After great pain a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions–was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

– Don

Emily Dickinson: 3 Poems Discussion Group

 

As mentioned in a previous post,  Main Library will be hosting a brand new discussion group beginning Thursday evening, October 9th, entitled 3 Poems By ….  Each session of the 3 Poems By … Poetry Discussion Group will concentrate on three representative works of a particular poet.  There will be a brief intro by one of the two moderators (Renée or Don), followed by a guided discussion of the 3 poems under consideration.  

Think of it as a book discussion group without the (whole) book, just 3 poems.

Up first is Emily Dickinson who, along with Walt Whitman, revolutionized American poetry by making it frankly personal and, again along with “Father” Walt, is one of the two most important American poets of the 19th century.  Dickinson herself was as enigmatic as her work; in that very real sense, her poetry reflects who she was.  However, the reader must be wary.  Dickinson herself famously cautioned, in a letter from July 1862, that the “I” or persona in her poems was “a supposed person.”   The critic Harold Bloom observed that when reading Dickinson “One’s mind had better be at its rare best” because there is much to be ferreted from the seemingly simplistic language and rhythmic meters of her considerable body of work. 

So, all things considered, three small dollops may be just enough.

The three poems we’ll be reading and discussing by Dickinson are:

• There’s a certain Slant of light
• After great pain a formal feeling comes
• Because I could not stop for Death

Whether its subject is going out on a formal date with a very persuasive suitor, a near clinical description of the sheer weight and power of grief, or an early lyrical accounting of what might be taken for the very modern syndrome known as seasonal affective disorder, any of these three poems will not fail to astonish in either theme or execution.

Join us at Main Library on Thursday, October 9th from 7:30 to 8:30 in Classroom A in the Center for Museum Education, which is in the hallway of the rear entrance to the library.  Registration is requested, not required (it helps us to figure out how many chairs we need), so to register or further information please contact Renée (412 622-3151) or Don (412 622-3175) or drop us an email at newandfeatured@carnegielibrary.org.

 

– Don