October 6, 2016

 

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Hopefully we’ll have a full house today

News and Jabber

Our book:  To be or not to be?

If we haven’t enough participation then we cannot do much. We can consider a chapbook, length 20-40 pages.

Discussion?

Speaking of “Invictus”

 

At the this link you can find Odell Beckham’s story. The mercurial receiver for the NY Giants quoted the poem in response to criticism of his on-field performance this year. Noteworthy, as pointed out in the article, is that Timothy McVeigh used the same  poem as his final words before being executed for the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. Notwithstanding that, Ed Ahern’s re-write of the poem, read at our evening reading at Bigelow Center, remains a favorite. However, poetry does have a certain power, doesn’t it?

And this article about Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, interesting too. Billy Collins story. I like his reminders about simplicity and clarity in poetry:

Speaking of clarity, the language of your poems remains very accessible. It’s not full of line breaks, for example.

I went to graduate school and got a Ph.D. in literature and I had a taste for difficult text. Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens. I don’t know if I’ve outgrown it or lost it, but I kind of banged my head against “Ulysses” and Ezra Pound, and I came out the other end following people like Robert Frost and Philip Larkin and poets who dare to be clear. I think it comes from writing a number of reader courtesies. Having a helpful title. Writing in sentences, not fancy enjambments or crazy line breaks. The line breaks follow the grammar of the sentence and help you through the poem. A lot of students think, “I’m writing poetry so I can break my lines in crazy ways.” You don’t want to say, “the wine dark — line break — sea.” It’s not worth waiting for that word. “The black — wait for it — cat.” Why do we need to wait for it?

The whole interview is worth a gander.

 

For reasons unexplained I drifted back to August Kleinzahler this morning. He has long been a poet I like to revisit and this morning I was reminded why. Here is a link to his reading of Before Dawn on Bluff Road . The text appears below

Before Dawn on Bluff Road

The crow’s raw hectoring cry  
scoops clean an oval divot
of sky, its fading echo
among the oaks and poplars swallowed
first by a jet banking west
then the Erie-Lackawanna
sounding its horn as it comes through the tunnel
through the cliffs to the river
and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff,
full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt.

You can hear it in the dark
from beyond what was once the amusement park.
And the wind carries along as well,
from down by the river,
when the tide’s just so,
the drainage just so,
the chemical ghost of old factories,
the rotted piers and warehouses:
lye, pigfat, copra from Lever Bros.,
formaldehyde from the coffee plant,
dyes, unimaginable solvents—
a soup of polymers, oxides,
tailings fifty years old
seeping through the mud, the aroma
almost comforting by now, like food,
wafting into my childhood room
with its fevers and dreams.
My old parents asleep,
only a few yards across the hall,
door open—lest I cry?
                                 I remember
almost nothing of my life.

“Before Dawn on Bluff Road” from Green Sees Things in Waves by August Kleinzahler. © 1998 by August Kleinzahler. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. www.fsgbooks.com
Source: Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008)

And lastly I urge you to checkout this review from the New York Times about two films being released about poets. I’ll check out anything regarding Pablo Neruda, who is the subject of one of these films. The other, Paterson, I no nothing of.

 

The Current Assignment

Who did it? How was it? Any comments about the ease or difficulty of doing it?

The Next Assignment

Write a one-sentence poem. Minimum length 6 lines, preferably 12

The Snow Man

Related Poem Content Details

BY WALLACE STEVENS

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One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 

Source: Poetry magazine (1921)

Linda Pastan

THE CORTLAND REVIEW

INTERVIEW
Philip Levine

POETRY
Steven Ford Brown
David Citino
Billy Collins
Robert Collins
Alan Devenish
Gray Jacobik
John Kinsella
David Lehman
Thomas Lux
W.S. Merwin
Fred Muratori
Linda Pastan
Pattiann Rogers
David Shevin
David R. Slavitt
R.T. Smith
Thomas Swiss

FICTION
Gilbert Allen
Kelly Cherry
Rosa Shand
Stephen Sossaman

BOOK REVIEW
David Kennedy

Linda Pastan's books include Heroes in Disguise (Norton, 1991) and An Early Afterlife (Norton, 1995). PM/AM was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1982, and The Imperfect Paradise was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.   Her most recent collection: Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 was a finalist for the National Book Award.

The New Dog   

Into the gravity of my life,
the serious ceremonies
of polish and paper
and pen, has come

this manic animal
whose innocent disruptions
make nonsense
of my old simplicities—

as if I needed him
to prove again that after
all the careful planning,
anything can happen.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on October 20, 2016, same time same place

Other Jabber

A hot tip regarding formatting. I find that I often find things I copy to paste are formatted in a way that doesn’t fit with what I’m writing and that this sometimes screws up the text that follows. To resolve this and other formatting issues it is often good to start from scratch. To do this simply open Notepad or whatever substitute program you use (I use docpad). All formatting is stripped and you are free to re-format any way you want.