March 17, 2016

March 17, 2016

• Welcome
  • Saint Patrick's Day is a good day to remember William Butler Yeats.
    The Wild Swans at Coole BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS                    The trees are in their autumn beauty,    The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water    Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones    Are nine-and-fifty swans. The nineteenth autumn has come upon me    Since I first made my count; I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings    Upon their clamorous wings. I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,    And now my heart is sore. All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,    The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head,    Trod with a lighter tread. Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air;    Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will,    Attend upon them still. But now they drift on the still water,    Mysterious, beautiful;    Among what rushes will they build, By what lake's edge or pool Delight men's eyes when I awake some day    To find they have flown away? Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
• News and Jabber
  • National Poetry Month
    1. http://www.trumbulltimes.com/2016/02/12/poetry-in-us-reading-fest-returns-to-trumbull-library-feb-27/ TCTV is calling all poets to get in front of the camera Saturday, Feb. 27 for its annual Poetry in Us Reading Fest.  TCTV is having its fourth annual Poetry in Us Reading Fest at the Trumbull Library’s main branch from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 27. Everyone far and near is invited to to come read a poem before the TCTV camera. Then TCTV airs them as interstitials — short segments between shows — during the month of April, to honor the creative community during National Poetry Month. According to TCTV’s Donna Girot, the event will have dozens of poetry books available to peruse for inspiration, and refreshments, too. “Drop in to watch or if you are feeling inspired, to read us a poem,” Girot said. “Sonnet, rap, haiku — any poem will do.” This event is open to people of all ages. 2. http://fairfieldpubliclibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/FPL-Spring-2016-program-WEB.compressed.pdf Poem in Your Pocket Week Thursday, April 21–Thursday, April 28 April is National Poetry Month and April 21 is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Started in New York City in 2002, and taken national in 2008 by the American Academy of Poets, Poem in Your Pocket Day celebrates poetry by having people tuck a poem in their pocket to share wherever they go that day. Here at the Fairfield Public Library we will have Poem in Your Pocket Week, because one day just isn’t enough. You will see denim pockets filled with poems hanging in various places in the Library. Take one (or more!) from our pockets and put in yours to share with family, friends, and work mates. You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. —Joseph Joubert
  • At the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/nyregion/poets-give-voice-to-art-in-sound-and-sense-at-wadsworth-museum.html?_r=0 Go ahead and recite the verses that accompany the artwork in “Sound and Sense: Poetic Musings in American Art,” at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Feel the pulsing rhythms, like soldiers marching or the relentless ticking of a clock. Listen to the passion: the exuberance of love, the wonderment of nature, the sorrow of loss. Delight in the play of words: “Goosey goosey gander / Whither shall I wander? / Upstairs and downstairs / And in my lady’s chamber.” “Sound and Sense” pairs poetry with about 50 works of visual, sculptural and decorative arts from the museum’s collection. In some instances, the text of the poem is incorporated directly into the artwork. In others, the art illustrates the poem, or the poem illuminates the art. With eclectic selections spanning the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and with objects as diverse as formal portraits, ceramic tableware, scrimshaw carvings and bits of molten revolvers, the pairings are sometimes lighthearted, sometimes provocative, sometimes heartbreaking. “So often in shows, the stories behind the artwork are narrated by the curatorial voice,” Alyce Perry Englund, who conceived and curated the exhibition, said in a telephone interview. “I was looking for different voices to speak for the artwork, to offer new interpretations.” (Ms. Englund was, through last May, the Wadsworth’s curator of American decorative arts; she is currently assistant curator of American decorative arts at theMetropolitan Museum of Art.) Examples: Nearby, a drawing by Rockwell Kent, one of a series illustrating “Moby Dick,” hangs alongside a passage from the novel, a hymn that begins, “The ribs and terrors in the whale … .” One of the doomed crew members about to be tossed from Kent’s upended whaleboat might have proclaimed a line from Herman Melville’s verse: “I saw the opening maw of hell … .” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Part of Walt Whitman’s elegy to Abraham Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!,” is next to Daniel Chester French’s sculpture of a somber Lincoln at Gettysburg. “It’s fascinating to have Whitman’s words mourning Lincoln, while Lincoln’s head is bowed mourning the dead lost in the Civil War,” Robin Jaffee Frank, the Wadsworth’s chief curator, said during a walk through the exhibition. “The mood of the two pieces is achingly similar.”
• Current Assignment
  • Bio poem
    • At first I thought this was a weak assignment. Then, after pondering it and after one false start I got into it, prompted in part by a scene from the movie "The Intern" in which Robert DeNiro said he could give his status to a prospective date in ten seconds. I took this abreviated form and wrote my bio poem and thus changed my attitude about the assignment. I hope you did not go to Google for guidance.
    • So who did the assignment?
• Next Assignment
  • It's spring. Write a poem of renewal but write it without the seasons and their typical meanings. None of the I'm growing because the daffodils are growing stuff. I want atypical renewals. One of my poems in the Leesburg book is about the joy of small deaths when compared with the large deaths we see in the world. Find a sense of renewal that is unusual, interesting in a new way.
    Dream Song 77: Seedy Henry rose up shy Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world  & shaved & swung his barbells, duded Henry up  and p.a.'d poor thousands of persons on topics of grand  moment to Henry, ah to those less & none.  Wif a book of his in either hand  he is stript down to move on.  —Come away, Mr. Bones.  —Henry is tired of the winter,  & haircuts, & a squeamish comfy     ruin-prone proud national     mind,     & Spring (in the city so called).  Henry likes Fall.  Hé would be prepared to líve in a world of Fáll  for ever, impenitent Henry.  But the snows and summers grieve & dream;  thése fierce & airy occupations, and love,  raved away so many of Henry's years  it is a wonder that, with in each hand  one of his own mad books and all,  ancient fires for eyes, his head full  & his heart full, he's making ready to move on. © by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
• Other Notes

March 3, 2016

Poets’ Roundtable

1. Welcome
2. News and Jabber
1. Reading on March 31, 2016
1. Who will attend
2. I want to focus some on the process of writing
3. Regarding how to write a poem

Interview with Howard Levy

Note especially the following:

HL

That is hard because I don’t really have one. I usually begin writing by reading poetry, I find I need that to begin to shift how I am thinking about language. And some days, a line or a series of lines will come to me. I write them down, and in writing them, I seem to see whether or not they have any real life to them. Mostly, they don’t, but if they do, I just keep going. I try not to censor anything until I have maybe half a page and then I start to see if I can make a poem. Most of the early stuff goes and new directions start to sprout. It takes, normally, for a rather short poem, about 3 or 4 months for me to have something that might survive.

HL

The biggest challenge is silence, the willingness of the self, myself, to hide in the tundra. What I love and hate most is the same thing – the unbelievably hard work of doing this. I am jealous of friends that are painters and dancers, whose work makes them move. I sit in front of the white paper or the white screen of the computer (when revising), I sit in absolute silence since I am concentrating so much on the music of the line, and I try to pull stuff out of me. That is hard and hateful, but when I do get something, particularly an image that is utterly new, I am so at the top of the world.

HL

Nope, no rituals. When I am really caught in a poem, I work on it almost continuously. On the subway on the way to work is one of my favorite times. I think the rhythm of the train helps me and you are never more in your own box when you are on a crowded subway.

The Steam of Tea

a pot of tea

that usual restaurant white ceramic

with the single restrained dark green equator

in the spread yellow sunlight

of the February morning

centers the table with its heat

as she remembers and tells him

of her father, a pilot,

taking her at twelve to Paris

how up on the Trocadero

in the plaza of the Musee De L’Homme

looking down on the Eiffel Tower

he suddenly took her wrists

twirled her so fast

that she became a straight line out

and she learned

what he wanted her to learn:

her complete freedom in the air

and how that brought her

to a sumptuous freedom on the ground.

Across the table, he listens to her

and looks behind her

out the window at the rusted

railroad bridge over the river

that drains, just here, into the bay.

This is the ramshackle part of town

old pilings, dilapidated docks,

the broken hulk of a ferry

that gives weight

to his falling in love in February.

4. Poems and the movies

Hollywood has used a lot of poems and I’ll leave it to  you to figure out what they are since there are many online references to such. In looking for poems by movie stars I found at oprah.com an item in which various stars cited poems that they found personally arresting and the selections and comments were most interesting. Click this link. Here is Steven Spielberg’s selection:

For the Artist at the Start of Day

May morning be astir with the harvest of night;

Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,

Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse

That cut right through the surface to a source.

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,

When the gift within you slips clear

Of the sticky web of the personal

With its hurt and its hauntings,

And fixed fortress corners,

A Morning when you become a pure vessel

For what wants to ascend from silence,

May your imagination know

The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,

And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all

The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields

And something original begins

To stir toward your senses

And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth

In a clean line of form,

That claims from time

A rhythm not yet heard,

That calls space to

A different shape.

May it be its own force field

And dwell uniquely

Between the heart and the light

To surprise the hungry eye

By how deftly it fits

About its secret loss.

–John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

Check out this one too: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Study-of-the-Object-by-Zbigniew-Herbert

I also found this wonderful poem by Auden, but not at the above site.

Funeral Blues

W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

© by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes

5. The Current Assignment
1. Did you write something funny?

A sample from Robert Frost

Canis Major

by Robert Frost

The great Overdog

That heavenly beast

With a star in one eye

Gives a leap in the east.

He dances upright

All the way to the west

And never once drops

On his forefeet to rest.

I'm a poor underdog,

But to-night I will bark

With the great Overdog

That romps through the dark.

2. The Next Assignment
1. The exercise will be a bio-poem. Now, I hate the term because the googlers will find some really watered-down information about such poems. The key for me in this process is to use the bio-poem lens to get into the writing process itself rather than any interest I have in bio-poems per se. Particularly at our respective positions in life, self-evaluation (and self-valuation), contextualizing our existence grows in importance and it is this depth of concern I want to encourage in our  poems.

A biopoem typically includes the following information:

Adjectives that you would use to describe yourself.

Relationships in your life (e.g. friend, brother, daughter)

Things you love.

Important memories

Fears

Accomplishments.

Hopes or wishes.

Home (location)

Begin with taking a sheet or two or three of paper and thinking about all the items listed above  that may be included. Censor nothing. Just jot down everything that comes to mind as it comes to mind. After 20-30 minutes of this look at your notes and see what patterns seem to emerge, what elements look like they could come together to make a decent poem. Only then begin writing.

2. Next Meeting
1. March 17, 2016
1. This will be our rehearsal for the reading, about 30 minutes, no more
3. Other Notes