Poets’ Roundtable
I WAS REMISS IN NOT GETTING EMAIL ADDRESSES FOR THE TWO NEW ATTENDEES AT TODAY'S MEETING. HELEN AND EILEEN-- IF YOU READ THIS PLEASE POST A COMMENT SO THAT I MAY GET YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS AND INCLUDE YOU ON MY DISTRIBUTION LIST. FAILING THAT, IF SOMEONE ELSE KNOWS THEIR EMAILS, THEN LET ME KNOW.
THANKS!
It was a well-attended meeting given the time of year. The dream-based poems proved very interesting. The next assignment is posted below.
I WAS REMISS IN NOT GETTING EMAIL ADDRESSES FOR THE TWO NEW ATTENDEES AT TODAY'S MEETING. HELEN AND EILEEN-- IF YOU READ THIS PLEASE POST A COMMENT SO THAT I MAY GET YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS AND INCLUDE YOU ON MY DISTRIBUTION LIST. FAILING THAT, IF SOMEONE ELSE KNOWS THEIR EMAILS, THEN LET ME KNOW.
THANKS!
It was a well-attended meeting given the time of year. The dream-based poems proved very interesting. The next assignment is posted below.
Welcome
Summer attendance continues at a high rate
News and Jabber
The last assignment wasn’t meant to be prescient but we’ve certainly had our share of tragedies. Did anyone write about them? Anything new?
From the L.A. Times this story about our American Poet Laureate.
@ the Crossroads—A Sudden American Poem
Juan Felipe Herrera, 1948
RIP Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Dallas police
officers Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith,
Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zamarripa—and all
their families. And to all those injured.
Let us celebrate the lives of all
As we reflect & pray & meditate on their brutal deaths
Let us celebrate those who marched at night who spoke of peace
& chanted Black Lives Matter
Let us celebrate the officers dressed in Blues ready to protect
Let us know the departed as we did not know them before—their faces,
Bodies, names—what they loved, their words, the stories they often spoke
Before we return to the usual business of our days, let us know their lives intimately
Let us take this moment & impossible as this may sound—let us find
The beauty in their lives in the midst of their sudden & never imagined vanishing
Let us consider the Dallas shooter—what made him
what happened in Afghanistan
what
flames burned inside
(Who was that man in Baton Rouge with a red shirt selling CDs in the parking lot
Who was that man in Minnesota toppled on the car seat with a perforated arm
& a continent-shaped flood of blood on his white T who was
That man prone & gone by the night pillar of El Centro College in Dallas)
This could be the first step
in the new evaluation of our society This could be
the first step of all of our lives
Copyright © 2016 by Juan Felipe Herrera. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 10, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
Here is another link to a poet who feels a special connection to Nice, France where he lived after leaving Northern Ireland where he was familiar with violence.
Another link, this one to a video of a Las Vegas police officer reciting a poem he wrote in response to the Dallas killings.
The Current Assignment
Attendant to this let me urge you to join Gerard and myself in commenting on the blog. At the bottom of each entry is a link to a comment field. When you comment I am notified and when someone comments on your comments you are notified. It’s not a bad place to exchange somme of those things I get emailed to me that should/could be shared.
The Next Assignment
The next assignment is to select an object and describe acting on it with each one of the five senses.
For example, the following poem engages all the senses at some point in the poem. They all pertain to God. If you read Alan Ginsberg you'll find that often four or more senses are employed with great specificity. Kaddish is a wonderful read (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49313). I'm also fond of
He Is There
© Yasemin Raymondo
Published on December 2008
God comes to us in quiet and simple ways.
He is there when the breeze rustles the palm fronds on a quiet, lazy, sunny afternoon.
When the raindrops softly patter on the thirsty tin roofs of the poor, he is there.
Look for him behind the laughing eyes of a child,
or smell him in blossoming jasmine flowers
on a clear and starry moonlit night.
Hold his hand when you take your love by the hand,
and feel the warmth of his tears
as you console a grieving friend in your arms.
He is there in a baby's first cry
and in the dying man's last sigh.
When the waves break on the golden sands
and the seagulls fly into the white clouds,
when the church bells ring on an Easter Sunday
inviting you to receive the sacred brad, he is there.
Taste him when you bite into the yellow ripeness of a mango
or when you quench your thirst with sweet water of a coconut.
God comes to us only in quiet and simple ways.
Never his presence in violence will you find;
never look for him in words of anger or cowardly actions.
His love and his peace surround us, above and beyond.
And only in those simple, everyday things
when we look with our eyes filled with his love
can we find him.
Source: http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/he-is-there
The next assignment is to select an object and describe acting on it with each one of the five senses.
For example, the following poem engages all the senses at some point in the poem. They all pertain to God. If you read Alan Ginsberg you'll find that often four or more senses are employed with great specificity. Kaddish is a wonderful read (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49313). I'm also fond of
A Supermarket in California (http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/onlinepoems.htm)
In any event, choose something to write about and then bring all five senses into creating your experience of it.
He Is There
© Yasemin Raymondo
Published on December 2008
God comes to us in quiet and simple ways.
He is there when the breeze rustles the palm fronds on a quiet, lazy, sunny afternoon.
When the raindrops softly patter on the thirsty tin roofs of the poor, he is there.
Look for him behind the laughing eyes of a child,
or smell him in blossoming jasmine flowers
on a clear and starry moonlit night.
Hold his hand when you take your love by the hand,
and feel the warmth of his tears
as you console a grieving friend in your arms.
He is there in a baby's first cry
and in the dying man's last sigh.
When the waves break on the golden sands
and the seagulls fly into the white clouds,
when the church bells ring on an Easter Sunday
inviting you to receive the sacred brad, he is there.
Taste him when you bite into the yellow ripeness of a mango
or when you quench your thirst with sweet water of a coconut.
God comes to us only in quiet and simple ways.
Never his presence in violence will you find;
never look for him in words of anger or cowardly actions.
His love and his peace surround us, above and beyond.
And only in those simple, everyday things
when we look with our eyes filled with his love
can we find him.
Source: http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/he-is-there
Next Meeting
August 4, 2016
Other Notes
Fast out the gate. G
ReplyDeleteI have been working on my poem. Opened to closure. I had missed the five senses part of the assignment. I will check tomorrow to find out how many I have included. Nice to see new faces. To those of you who came in today, good for you. G
Spent the morning revising. Spent time over lunch telling a hard of hearing friend about the class and my writing. He is 94, a playwright, and wants to know what we do in class. The telling takes the whole of the lunch hour at
ReplyDeleteFairfield Pizza. It takes both a lot of listening, getting it right, and more telling for us to understand each other. We are both hard of hearing. So we sit where
the traffic is, by the door, so that people coming and going are still into themselves and in what they will order to bother listening to our shouting- match of a conversation.
There is no such thing, as I read it, in the CWP {Connecticut Writers Project}
ReplyDeletefor senior writing projects, is there?
Finished my poem assignment. Now, to let it sit [percolate]. G
ReplyDeleteSALMONIER@aol.com
ReplyDelete8:55 PM (15 hours ago)
to xemgil3, dwol07, me, hlucas505, andersonrich8, rhreed1919, tg49at
Couldn't log in to google to pass this along as a blog comment, so here's the e mail.
Trick challenge for the next poem. According to the article provided below, there are either nine or eleven senses.
ed
http://thewritersaurus.com/2015/07/10/writing-with-the-9-senses/
Gerard Coulombe
11:11 AM (1 hour ago)
to Edward
Well, reading the piece on the senses, sends me back to my poem to see what senses, other than the primary ones, I've left out.
I think that I have discovered a problem of mine and that is a difficulty of letting my text carry the load of reminding me that at some point I, as the writer, must consider the inclusion of one and all the senses, at least, those for the ones that subject and construction permit in a poem using all 5 or more or the senses. G
Gerard Coulombe
11:15 AM (1 hour ago)
to Edward
In other words, I don't want the tail to wag the dog.m G
How can we know that at least one other member reads this blog? If there is someone, please share with us. G
ReplyDelete