Poets’ Roundtable

We’ll attribute the slight turnout to the timing and the success of the meeting to the quality work of the slight turnout. We look forward to bigger numbers once we’re out of the summer season.  We covered everything from bikinis to gold shoes. I mentioned The Triggering Town as favorite help in thinking about writing. It is by Richard Hugo. Check it out.

Welcome

Thank you for coming on this, the entrance to Labor Day weekend and a meeting so early in the month that it may not seem time yet.

News and Jabber

Since it is summer, although ending soon if football be any guide, I offer this note about bikini. I didn’t know how the bikini got its name. I always thought it was linked to the famous atoll but I didn’t know how. Now I do.  Pikinni, [pʲi͡ɯɡɯ͡inʲːii̯], meaning coconut place)[2]

A Brief History of the Bikini

The 1946 U.S atomic test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific inspired a French designer to underscore the explosive effect of his new line of shockingly revealing women’s swimsuits by calling them ‘bikinis.’”

– The Oxford Companion to American Military History

Observe the chasm made when the atom split:

a gap between the breasts and pelvis, the mid-

riff’s cover blown. Where did the fabric that fused

the top and bottom go? So whole it hid

the stomach without a seam. But the belly-button

waited behind it like a bull’s-eye. The bomb

was never far enough away. Chain reaction –

the two-piece multiplying (by division) the sum

of energy in small amounts of matter.

So many summers the body wasn’t there,

invisible and free to show itself

to nobody. Then boom.

Observe our middles: bare

by subtraction. Our skin remembers only air.

---

Caitlin Doyle’s poems, reviews and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, The Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review and others. Her poetry has also been published in several anthologies, including The Best Emerging Poets of 2013, The Southern Poetry Anthology and Best New Poets 2009. She has held Writer-In-Residence teaching positions at Penn State, St. Albans School, and Interlochen Arts Academy. Doyle earned her MFA from Boston University, where she was the George Starbuck Fellow in Poetry, and she is currently pursuing her PhD as an Elliston Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where she teaches in the department of English and Comparative Literature.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/poetry/poet-explores-how-bikini-became-explosive-topic/

Also check out this story about a Punjabi poet from Toronto. I site it since she is one who first self-published.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/26/rupi-kaur-poetry-canada-instagram-banned-photo

The Current Assignment

The gold shoe poem-- who did it?

This assignment has a history. I used it once about eleven years ago with the Manchester Chapter of the Connecticut Poetry Society. The results were so good that we published a chapbook with them.

The Next Assignment

Write an autumn poem but with the following provisos:

Make it an acrostic poem. That is begin each line with the letters that spell “autumn” down the page. You can also use “fall” or both words and can repeat them. Secondly, write about the season as if the weather gods decided to skip it this year; a poem about there being no autumn. I suggest reading several poems about autumn as preparation for this. Here is a link to some quality poems about Autumn: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68561.
And two of my favorites:

To Autumn

John Keats, 1795 - 1821

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
 Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
 With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
 And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
   To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
 With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
   For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
 Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
 Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
 Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
   Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
 Steady thy laden head across a brook;
 Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
   Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
 Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
 And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
 Among the river sallows, borne aloft
   Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
 Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
 The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
   And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Written September 19, 1819; first published in 1820. This poem is in the public domain.

End of Summer Related Poem Content Details

BY STANLEY KUNITZ

An agitation of the air,

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north

Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows

Order their populations forth,

And a cruel wind blows.

The Next Meeting.

The next meeting will be on September 15, 2016.

BTW the next meeting of the Writers’ Roundtable will be on Thursday, September 8, 2016 from 1-2:30PM and will continue on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month.

Other Jabber

Continuing my look at sites and software for writers I suggest that whatever software you use that you become proficient in using styles. I use WPS for writers. I  find more user-friendly than MSWord and you should be able to get it free online. I have an aversion to paying for quality software, especially from Microsoft. Not that MS isn’t good, I just like freeware. At any rate, by learning to use Styles you will make it much easier to put together manuscripts for printing, especially e-printing and on-demand printing. Styles is an invaluable tool whatever publishing mode you choose. It enables quick changes in TOCs, formatting and other pain-in-the-ass tasks that take you away from your writing when you try to publish,

Here is a link to learning about styles. There is both text and video. http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-simplify-word-document-formatting-with-styles--cms-21069