Dianne Ackerman Class Questions

Questions:

1. In We Are Listening you break the previous pattern of the first 2, 6 line stanzas and make 2 lines its own stanza.
We are listening for a sound
beyond us, beyond sound, 

This shows that these two lines are important to the poem. Why choose to put insert this powerful stanza in the middle of the poem?
2. What do you believe is the biggest obstacle that we face in order to be able to see things clearer than what we do now? What limits our narrow inprepretation on the world around us?

WE ARE LISTENING

I.

As our metal eyes wake
to absolute night,
where whispers fly
from the beginning of time,
we cup our ears to the heavens.
We are listening

on the volcanic lips of Flagstaff
and in the fields beyond Boston
in a great array that blooms
like coral from the desert floor,
on highwire webs patrolled
by computer spiders in Puerto Rico.

We are listening for a sound
beyond us, beyond sound,

searching for a lighthouse
in the breakwaters of our uncertainty,
an electronic murmur
a bright, fragile I am.

Small as tree frogs
staking out one end
of an endless swamp,
we are listening
through the longest night
we imagine, which dawns
between the life and time of stars.

• Powerful language that creates strong mental picture of the scenery
• We are small compared to the world we life in, We are always listening for answers 
• Very abstract with lots of references nature 
• Intentional split of stanzas

II.

Our voice trembles
with its own electric,
we who mood like iguanas
we who breathe sleep
for a third of our lives,
we who heat food
to the steaminess of fresh prey,
then feast with such baroque
good manners it grows cold.

In mind gardens
and on real verandas
we are listening,   (Allusion???)
rapt among the Persian lilacs
and the crickets,
while radio telescopes
roll their heads, as if in anguish.

With our scurrying minds
and our lidless will
and our lank, floppy bodies
and our galloping yens
and our deep, cosmic loneliness
and our starboard hearts
where love careens,
we are listening,
the small bipeds
with the giant dreams.

• Space references 
• Nothing is clear in this life 
• It is our nature to be curious and we want to see new things and get new answers
• Getting the sense of something other than this world created life 
• Unworldly things?

LIKE YOUR FACE

After Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Like your face,
a thousand-leafed day,
and I who rejoice
in what’s measureless
measure the onset of evening
and the imagined scent
of your eyelashes
shivering like flowers in the wind.
What fate threw us together?
The same chance
that drew airlanes for the bats
swooping like neuroses
from the sky, fluttering
over frail autumn leaves
which cannot harm or save
or be anyone’s victim.

• Start of the poem is bright with optimism 
• One question is asked in poem 
• then the mood changes completely 
• What brought us together 
• Not escaping the inevitable 
• Ending on a hard note, very bleak