December 15, 2016

"...and a merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!"

Clement Clarke Moore

A good meeting. I urge you to check out the link to Billy Collins and read the article and listen to the clips of him speaking and reading. I’m still looking for the Neruda film. The impetus for the assignment for January 5 comes from my readings about writers’ block. Someone suggested that when you are having difficulty getting started that you write as if speaking to someone to whom you feel close or who you admire. Talk about anything so long as you are writing. I added the part about explaining why you write. I know that I tell different people different things about what I write and why I write. I cannot tell the mailman what I tell my mentors nor can I tell my mentors what I tell my dog but I talk to all of them. And good luck with the pangrams!

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

News and Jabber

I begin with something dear to my heart-- the false start, the failed beginnings and even writers’ block:

“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’” — Maya Angelou

Billy Collins on poems he rejected:

http://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/504716937/billy-collins-on-how-to-become-a-poet-and-why-poetry-can-be-a-game This link includes several clips of Billy Collins reading and speaking about poetry.

"Usually I know enough not to finish those," he said. "They announce themselves as failures early on, four or five or six lines in. They're just not cooperating with me – they're not showing any signs of wanting to go anywhere, or it was just a bad idea to start with, you know, like you just invited the wrong person to the party but it's too late. But in the case of writing a poem the waste basket ... the writer's best friend ... is full of false starts.

"When I was a younger poet I would do what Frost said you can't do, which is fret a poem into being ... and I gave up on that a long time ago. If a poem isn't working, if it doesn't feel right, I just let it go and get on with the next thing, which could be writing another poem or making more toast."

But time spent on poems destined for the trash heap isn't always time wasted.

Billy Collins: When Does Creativity Start And End?

When Does Creativity Start And End?

"If I'm writing for a while and I'm writing maybe a failure and another failure ... a poem will come, often a little poem," he said. "It has nothing to do with what I've written but it would not have occurred had I not been failing."

COSMOLOGY

By Billy Collins

AUDIO: Read by the author.

I never put much stock in that image of the earth

resting on the backs of four elephants

who are standing on the back of a sea turtle,

who is in turn supported by an infinite regression

of turtles disappearing into a bottomless forever.

I mean how could you get them all to stay still?

Now that we are on the subject,

my substitute picture would have the earth

with its entire population of people and things

resting on the head of Keith Richards,

who is holding a Marlboro in one hand

and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other.

As long as Keith keeps talking about

the influence of the blues on the Rolling Stones,

the earth will continue to spin merrily

and revolve in a timely manner around the sun.

But if he changes the subject or even pauses

too long, it’s pretty much curtains for us all.

Unless, of course, one person somehow survives

being hurtled into the frigidity of outer space;

then we would have a movie on our hands—

but wait, there wouldn’t be any hands

to write the script or make the movie,

and no theatres, either, no buttered popcorn, no giant Pepsi.

Putting that aside, let’s imagine Keith

standing on the other Rolling Stones,

who are standing on the shoulders of Muddy Waters,

and, were it not for that endless stack of turtles,

one on top of the other all the way down,

Muddy Waters would be standing on nothing at all.

Billy Collins, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, will publish “The Rain in Portugal,” his twelfth book of poems, in October.

If you have a regular schedule your subconcious will prepare itself to be ready to be productive at that time. You will find that you can write more and write more efficiently.

Pablo Neruda

“Neruda” is a new movie that traces the year 1948 in his life. It is reaping terrific reviews and is directed by the same director, Pablo Larrain, as “Jackie”, an astoundingly good film about Jackie Kennedy. If you can find “Neruda” (or “Jackie”) anywhere, let me know. Here’s a link to a review: http://www.thewrap.com/neruda-review-gael-garcia-bernal/ and another:http://www.thewrap.com/neruda-cannes-review-pablo-larrains-anti-biopic-stumbles-then-soars/

The Current Assignment

Kind of a non-directional thing that somewhat reflected my own writing the time. I then went through several days of false starts (which is why I began with what I began with above). I genuinely thought I would not write anything decent this season. I was wrong, delightfully wrong.

The Next Assignment

Write a poem to someone who is important to you telling why you write.

The Next Meeting

Other Jabber

Try writing sentences using all the letters of the alphabet.

Post-truth politics and the poet. How necessary is truth? Is this Orwellian reality? Consider the Yahoo hacking.

December 1, 2016

Poets’ Roundtable

Another sterling meeting although we still wish a few more were able to join us. The quality of poetry, conversation, repartee and regard for one another continues to amaze.

I urge you to follow the links below and take a thoughtful perusal of the stories. And while you are at it, check out Paul Muldoon’s work. He’s a Pulitzer Prize winner and a future nobelist whose profile remains surprisingly low.

Welcome

News and Jabber

Follow this link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/05/emily-dickinsons-singular-scrap-poetry to a New Yorker article about Emily Dickinson’s “Gorgeous Nothings” a title that refers to the scraps of paper found and recently made available that she left. They are interesting as much for their visual artistry as for their poetic features. Among other things they show corrections, changes, choices of words and phrasing both used and rejected.

Here is an image from the collection:

It is only coincidental that this poem may be considered winter-oriented.

Here is the published version of the poem beginning “Glass was the street”

Glass was the Street - in Tinsel Peril (1518) Related Poem Content Details

BY EMILY DICKINSON

Glass was the Street - in Tinsel Peril

Tree and Traveller stood.

Filled was the Air with merry venture

Hearty with Boys the Road.

Shot the lithe Sleds like Shod vibrations

Emphacized and gone

It is the Past’s supreme italic

Makes the Present mean -

Emily Dickinson, “[Glass was the Street - in Tinsel Peril]” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. Copyright © 1998 by Emily Dickinson. Reprinted by permission of The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

And here is the published version of the other poem appearing on the same envelope. I can only imagine the gratitude of the envelope that bore the two poems. (Not unlike my own for being next to Allen Ginsberg in the index of a book I am in.)

It came his turn to beg—

1500

It came his turn to beg—

The begging for the life

Is different from another Alms

’Tis Penury in Chief—

I scanned his narrow realm

I gave him leave to live

Lest Gratitude revive the snake

Though smuggled his reprieve

Book: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

This link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/books/johnny-cash-the-poet-in-black.html is to another collection of scraps and other things from a newly released book about Johnny Cash. It resembles Emily Dickinson’s book but, being about someone I didn’t consider a poet per se, I would have skipped it except for it having been edited by Paul Muldoon, one of the great living poets.  I include this quotation:

In an interview, Mr. Muldoon put Cash alongside Leonard Cohen, who died on Monday, and Paul Simon as examples of songwriters whose words hold up on their own. Even so, he added, the “pressure per square inch” on lyrics “can be a wee bit lower than in a conventional poem.”

“But that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” he continued. There are occasions when the simple, direct phrase is the one that works.”

Taken together, Mr. Muldoon said, Cash’s poems have a broad sweep.

“You still see the same scenes — love, death, loss, joy, sadness,” Mr. Muldoon said. “The great themes of popular songs, and, indeed, poetry, which we welcome hearing about and making sense of as we go through our lives.”

Go to the links and enjoy the trip.

The Current Assignment

Did anyone find this confusing? My fault. Actually, I wrote a poem but didn’t like it enough and so my own contribution today is one from a few years ago that I resurrected. Not only that but I can’t tell whether it favors Christmas and so I don’t know how to approach the next assignment which is to write a poem expressing toward Christmas the opposite sentiment of the one in the assignment for today.

The Next Assignment

The next assignment is to write a poem about the worst Christmas present you ever received or simply to write another Christmas poem.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday, December 15, 2016.

Other Jabber

Poets’ Roundtable  November 17, 2016

Welcome

News and Jabber

I actually came across this name some months ago but didn’t follow up on it. Here we have a wonderful, young poet of great talent writing poems for and about today’s world. I often speak of poetry of witness. This is excellent, fluid, fluent poetry of witness. Solmaz Sharif’s book, Look is now on my Christmas list. The excerpt below is from "Reaching Guantanamo".

Dear Salim,

said I need to

my tongue. It’s getting sharp.

I told him to _________his own

business, to _____his own

wife. He didn’t .

If he wasn’t my

I would never

again. Sometimes, I write you

letters I don’t send. I don’t mean

to cause alarm. I just want the ones

you open to

like a hill of poppies.

Yours,

Born in Istanbul, Turkey, to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People; and New York University. She is the author of the poetry collection Look (Graywolf Press, 2016). Her first published poem, included in A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans (George Braziller, 1999), was written at the age of 13. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness and other publications. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Sharif has had her work recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, scholarships from NYU and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. Most recently, she was awarded an NEA fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship.

In 2014, Sharif was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.

From this Newsweek online article:

http://www.newsweek.com/weirdly-beautiful-war-poetry-solmaz-sharif-517342 I urge you to go there to view the video that accompanies the article.

One poem lists American military operations: Beastmaster, Hickory View, Riverwalk, etc. Another lingers with dark, dry humor on “WARHEAD MATING” and “HEIGHT HOLES.” A third injects missile-technology lingo into the Book of Ecclesiastes: “For what is your life? It is even a THERMAL SHADOW.”

The poet responsible for these verses is Solmaz Sharif, and when I meet her at a fashionable Oakland, California, café, she looks like one of its fashionable denizens, not someone who, by next week, could be the winner of the National Book Award for Look, her first book of poetry, which is political and confessional—and which relies heavily on terminology from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.

Not even the title of the volume is exempt from this intriguing confluence of the personal and the martial. Look is an invitation to the reader, but this most quotidian of words also describes, according to the military dictionary, “a period which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence.”

For Emily Dickinson, life was “a Loaded Gun.” For Sharif, it is a mine primed to blow. The title poem (which contains the Ecclesiastes reference) moves from a moment of intimacy, to a Hellfire missile being fired on Iraq, to a kind of unease about the American project, as befitting a poet born in Turkey to Iranian parents who settled in Los Angeles. As far as poetry goes, this is closer to Apocalypse Now than John Ashbery.

Which is how Sharif wants it. The job of a poet, she says, is to be “a bane to the republic. Because the republic is built on a destruction of language. A kind of obliteration of language that will enable and excuse violence against bodies. My job is to interrogate and agitate that as often as I can.”

Moving between the personal and political, her poetry is always in a state of tumult—a state of war. Every one of the words from Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms are rendered, as above, in all caps. The effect is a muraled wall riddled by gunfire, photographed and turned into art. Sharif tells me that she wanted the military terms to act as “these little disruptive markers of violence” that would remind readers that war is a constant presence in our lives, as much here as it is over there.

The poet Solmaz Sharif.ARASH SAEDINIA

She points to the varnished table where we sat, to her crumbled scone and my avocado toast. War was happening here too, she says. Only we need the courage to see it. Perhaps because of her ethnicity, or her convictions, Sharif sees it everywhere:

My father is not afraid of

SEDITION. He can

SEIZE a wild pigeon off a Santa Monica street or watch

SEIZURES unfold in his sister’s bedroom — the FBI storming through.

Although the first-person voice throughout Look is not always Sharif’s, the poems do follow her family’s journey. Some of the poems are about her uncle, who was killed in the Iran-Iraq War. Sharif never knew him, yet she evokes him with the kind of battle-worn sorrow that the ancient Greeks lavished on their war dead:

Just, DESTROYED.

DIED OF WOUNDS RECEIVED IN ACTION.

Yes, there was EARLY WARNING.

You said you were especially scared

of mortar rounds.

Sharif is a child of conflict, born in 1983 in Istanbul because her parents had fled Iran after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. They then moved to the United States, her mother going to the University of Alabama, her father working odd jobs in the Northeast. She imagines his experience—the classic immigrant tale—in a poem that has her father “driving a can in Poughkeepsie, lifting lumber in Rochester...my baba downing Bud Light by the Hudson.” The image, like so many in Look, is precise and evocative, the poetic equivalent of a drone strike.

Sharif’s parents eventually settled down in Los Angeles, where Sharif spent most of her childhood. She went to college at the University of California at Berkeley and graduate school at New York University. Back in Los Angeles, when she was helping a photographer friend with a project, she became enthralled with the military dictionary.

The early curiosity became a book that took Sharif eight years to write and publish. Recent Man Booker Prize winner Paul Beatty had his novel The Sellout rejected 18 times by publishers; Sharif estimates she got as many rejections for Look, maybe more. “And I want to send thank-you notes to all of them,” she says, laughing. Her manuscript was finally acquired by Graywolf Press, the revered independent Minneapolis-based press that has published the essayists Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson and Eula Biss, as well as the poets Tracy K. Smith, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, Elizabeth Alexander, who read at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and Claudia Rankine, whose Citizen has been lauded for its take on intractable racial issues.

“Sharif disrupts our assumptions about what constitutes poetry—and simultaneously makes a poetry of protest and of lyric devastation,”  says Graywolf Executive Editor Jeff Shotts. “There is nothing like this work.”

Critics have agreed, with The New York Timescalling the book “excellent.” Bookforum noted that “there’s something automatically evocative about the bureaucratic language of war, in the particular mismatch between the casualness of some words, the technological specificity of others, and the death hiding behind them all.” Tellingly, that review was written by a national security reporter for The Intercept, where Glenn Greenwald, who wrote about the Edward Snowden documents, is an editor.

To be on the National Book Award short list has been “bizarre” for Sharif, given how many rejections Look received along the way. Even more bizarre: “Trump might be president during the ceremony.” We are fretting over the polls in North Carolina and New Hampshire when Sharif considers an aspect of the Trump presidency that I had not contemplated before: “Who’s that inaugural poet going to be?”

We sit there, at a loss, wondering who might to do for Trump what Robert Frost did for John F. Kennedy in 1961, endowing his first moments as president with moral authority. Then, suddenly, the answer occurs to me. He is not a poet, exactly, but he does work in verse, whiskey bottle in hand: Kid Rock.

The Current Assignment

Who did it? I found this, as usual, an assignment that worked out for me differently from the way I expected it. A good exercise. For some reason I have been thinking a lot about people I went to school with. From kindergarten through high school Robert Sperry was a friend, at times a close friend. The assignment brought me to ponder his untimely death (almost fifty years ago) in a way I hadn’t earlier even though my mother told me about  it when it happened.

The Next Assignment

The next two assignments are:
Write a poem celebrating Christmas.
Write a poem lamenting Christmas.
It doesn't matter which you write for the Dec 1 meeting and which for the Dec 15 meeting.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on December 1, 2016.

Other Jabber

Gerard at the last meeting suggested putting together a mini-chapbook to help draft new members. Here I cite an article about that very topic and how some people have monetized their poetry. Distribution relies on e-copies which are requested and sent to anyone who asks and who are in turn are offered the opportunity to make a donation directly to the author. Read about it here:

http://lithub.com/getting-paid-for-poetry-in-the-digital-age/.

Agent Ransack

https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack

ALSO, try this for size:

In eternal blackness, in the midst of the darkest night
Proteins and minerals, exist within specks of light
Solids liquids and gases, and sparks of light within
Infinite lengths and widths and depths and heights
No beginning or ending, the seven dimensions
Enough space for more than a million words and inventions
To travel through time within enough room to be the womb
Of the most high’s great mind which he will soon make shine
With intelligent elements in sight that he will gather
In the realms of relativity electricity struck matter
Energies explode he below to keep releasin
Atoms by the millions, til the numbers increasin
Til it was burnin he kept returnin itself to the source
The hotter his thoughts it gave the center more force
He gave birth to the sun which would follow his laws
All caused by his mental intercourse

It is from  http://genius.com/Rakim-mystery-who-is-god-lyrics where we find rapper Rakim with the rest of the verses and an audio file so you can hear the rap.

November 3, 2016

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Ed and Trish will not be here today.

News and Jabber

I found an article about Campbell McGrath in the news this week, part of which I have here. You can find the complete article at http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2016/10/035.html.

Poet Campbell McGrath to present 40th annual Silverman Reading

By Bert Gambini

Release Date: October 24, 2016

Campbell McGrath

“I chose McGrath because I see him as a poet with Whitman’s ambition to get America into his poems, to turn outward now inward in an effort to do justice to its variety, its possibilities and its failures.”

Carl Dennis, SUNY Professor Emeritus of English

University at Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. – MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant recipient and former Guggenheim fellow Campbell McGrath will present the 2016 University at Buffalo Oscar Silverman Reading at 8 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 11, at the Jacobs Executive Development Center, 672 Delaware Ave. in Buffalo.

Strongly influenced by Walt Whitman, McGrath writes mostly documentary, free-verse poems that probe American culture and commerce. McGrath’s collection “Spring Comes to Chicago” (1996), a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner, turns on the axis of one of his best known and representative works, “The Bob Hope Poem,” a 70-page piece whose shape, he told Poetry Magazine, “is not a narrative, but a symphonic structure.”

McGrath lives in Miami Beach, Florida, and teaches creative writing at Florida International University. His former students include award-winning poet Emma Trelles and Richard Blanco, who in 2013 became only the fifth poet to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration.

---

I have been a fan of McGrath’s for years and find it fortuitous that he should come to mind as the Cubs win the World Series since much of McGrath’s world is in fact in Chicago. Spring Comes to Chicago is one of his books. It opens with The Golden Angel Pancake House:

THE GOLDEN ANGEL PANCAKE HOUSE

Campbell McGrath

Or coming out of Bento on a wild midwinter

midnight, or later, closing time Ron says, the last

rack of pool balls ratcheted down until dawn,

bottles corked and watered, lights out, going out

the door beneath the El tracks over Clark and Sheffield,

always a train showing up just then, loud, sure

as hell showering sparks upon the snowfall,

shaking slightly the lights and trestles, us

in our fellowship shouting and scurrying

like the more sprightly selves we once inhabited

behind parked cars and street signs, thinking,

hey, should we toss some snowballs? Bull's eye,

the beauty of fresh snow in the hands, like rubbing

tree-bark to catch that contact high direct

from the inexplicable source, unique however

often repeated, carried along on woolen thumbs

to the next absolutely necessary thing,

sloe gin fizzes to Green Mill jazz or the horror

of J�germeister at the Ginger Man or

one of those German bars up around Irving Park

where a sup of the Weiss beer on tap is enough

to convince me to foreswear my stake in any vision

of the afterlife you might care to construct, say

the one with the photo of the owner in his Nazi

uniform beside a pristine fjord, could be Norway,

1940? Whichever, we're hungry now, cast out

into the false dawn of snow-coiffed streetlights

embowed like bowl-cut adolescents or

Roman emperors sated on frost, thumbs up

or down to hash & eggs at Manny's

or the locally infamous Alps, then there's one

at which I never ate though it looked absolutely

irreplaceable, the Golden Angel Pancake House,

which is a poem by Rilke I've never read

though I've used its restroom, seen its dim

celestial figures like alien life-forms

in a goldfish bowl, tasted its lonely nectar

in every stack of silver dollar buttermilk flapjacks,

though the food, for all I know, is unutterably

awful, the way it resonates is what carries me

down the swirled chords of memory

toward the bottom of the frosted glass

aquarium of dreams, whatever that means, it's

what it meant to me coming home those nights

from the Lutheran college after teaching

the Duino Elegies to the daughters and sons

of Minnesota farmers, the footbridge over

the North Branch of the Chicago River, frozen

solid, eddies of whirling ionized powder

around my boots in the bone-cold subzero

that makes the lights in the windows of houses

so painfully beautiful�is it the longing

to get the hell inside or the tears the wind

inevitably summons forth? Homeward,

all the way down Lincoln Avenue's amazing

arabesques and ethnic configurations

of Korean babushkas and Croatian karaoke

that feeling set upon me like the overture to god

knows what dread disease, that cathartic, lustral,

yes, idiot laughter, threat of tears in the gullet,

adam's apple stringing its yoyo to follow

the bouncing ball, as if boulevards of such purity

could countenance no science but eudaemonics,

hardly likely, as if this promethean eruption

were merely one of the more colorful dog-

and-pony acts of simple happiness, acrobatic

dromedaries or narcoleptic dancing bears,

but which I've come to see with perfect hindsight

was no less than the mighty strongman

joy himself bending bars of steel upon a tattooed

skull, so much nobler and more rapacious

than his country cousins, bliss, elation, glee,

a troupe of toothless, dipsomaniacal clowns,

multiform and variable as flurries from blizzards,

while joy is singular, present tense, predatory, priapic,

paradoxically composed of sorrow and terror

as ice is made of water, dense and pure,

darkly bejewelled, music rather than poetry,

preliterate, lapidary, dumb as an ox, cruel as youth,

magnificent and remorseless as Chicago in winter.

������������������ from Spring Comes to Chicago

The Current Assignment

Who did it? I found it more challenging than I expected largely because it comes as I am engaged in a conversation with a friend from VA about the availability of truth in our daily lives and the kinds of truth we hope to know before we die.

The Next Assignment

The next assignment is to write a poem in which you tell somebody off. Let it all out. It could be the president, the next president, a teacher, someone you have hated for years, someone you love, your dog, Smokey the Bear, etc.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on November 17, 2016 from 1PM to 2:30PM

Other Jabber