Poets’ Roundtable
- Welcome
- Our Reading
- What a good event it turned out to be
Any comments?
- It’s spring and baseball has just about begun. B.H. Fairchild poet
- "Body and Soul"
Several things going on in this poem which I will point out and certainly many others you will see. I will talk less today so that I may take the time to read this somewhat lengthy poem.
Check out the points at which the poet could have ended and still have had a decent poem. He keeps going until he has reached a profoundly good, surprising and yet inevitable statement that moves us into a perfectly acceptable world as ambiguous as life.
- The Current Assignment
- Who did the assignment?
- When I did it the third time I realized that not only had I used some traditional language, references, etc but I had also written some pretty bleak stuff. Thus, on the third try, I made an effort to write something more upbeat. In doing so, although I used some traditional terms the result was less traditional than the garden-variety spring nature poem.
- The Next Assignment
- How many of you keep a journal?
- Keep one
- Writing in another voice
- I find that writing in another’s voice gives you an opportunity to say things you wouldn’t otherwise say. Things are different for me when I say he, or oftentimes Will, rather than I. Sometimes I will write the poem in the third person and then change it to first person. This is a good exercise to try although the assignment is to write in another voice. It can be someone specific although that tends then to turn into mime, a sort of written ventriloquism. I don’t want you copying someone else. Rather, write as an observer writing about someone else.
FRIDAY, 25 APRIL 2003
Poem: "I Love You Sweatheart," by Thomas Lux from New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995 (Houghton Mifflin Co.).
I Love You Sweatheart
A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway. And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work…?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognize his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before
of "something special, darling, tomorrow"?
And did he call her at work
expecting her to faint with delight
at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?
She will know I love her now,
the world will know my love for her!
A man risked his life to write the words.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweetheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed - always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.
One of my own:
The Job Hunter's Dare
He is sick of writing poems about himself,
wants to write Washington and tell
the President what a lousy job
he's up to and how his God can't be
the same one the Job Hunter talks to.
He fears his grandchildren
will not have the chance to die,
that the cowboy in the White House
has started range wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan-- you name it--
that gallop out of control and Hell's
fell hand seems to grip more throats.
The job hunter wonders where
the people have gone, the ones
who rattled the streets forty years ago
when the Viet Cong rewrote
an American history the President
obviously hasn't read.
The job hunter refuses to put
his name under these new wars,
instead writes to the papers that print
his derisive letters,
joins the opposition party
knowing it may cost him his next job.
Unpublished Work Copyright 2016 Emerson Gilmore
- Next Meeting
- The next meeting will be on Thursday, April 21, 2016.
Were there notes on he April 21 meeting? G
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