November 3, 2016

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Ed and Trish will not be here today.

News and Jabber

I found an article about Campbell McGrath in the news this week, part of which I have here. You can find the complete article at http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2016/10/035.html.

Poet Campbell McGrath to present 40th annual Silverman Reading

By Bert Gambini

Release Date: October 24, 2016

Campbell McGrath

“I chose McGrath because I see him as a poet with Whitman’s ambition to get America into his poems, to turn outward now inward in an effort to do justice to its variety, its possibilities and its failures.”

Carl Dennis, SUNY Professor Emeritus of English

University at Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. – MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant recipient and former Guggenheim fellow Campbell McGrath will present the 2016 University at Buffalo Oscar Silverman Reading at 8 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 11, at the Jacobs Executive Development Center, 672 Delaware Ave. in Buffalo.

Strongly influenced by Walt Whitman, McGrath writes mostly documentary, free-verse poems that probe American culture and commerce. McGrath’s collection “Spring Comes to Chicago” (1996), a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner, turns on the axis of one of his best known and representative works, “The Bob Hope Poem,” a 70-page piece whose shape, he told Poetry Magazine, “is not a narrative, but a symphonic structure.”

McGrath lives in Miami Beach, Florida, and teaches creative writing at Florida International University. His former students include award-winning poet Emma Trelles and Richard Blanco, who in 2013 became only the fifth poet to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration.

---

I have been a fan of McGrath’s for years and find it fortuitous that he should come to mind as the Cubs win the World Series since much of McGrath’s world is in fact in Chicago. Spring Comes to Chicago is one of his books. It opens with The Golden Angel Pancake House:

THE GOLDEN ANGEL PANCAKE HOUSE

Campbell McGrath

Or coming out of Bento on a wild midwinter

midnight, or later, closing time Ron says, the last

rack of pool balls ratcheted down until dawn,

bottles corked and watered, lights out, going out

the door beneath the El tracks over Clark and Sheffield,

always a train showing up just then, loud, sure

as hell showering sparks upon the snowfall,

shaking slightly the lights and trestles, us

in our fellowship shouting and scurrying

like the more sprightly selves we once inhabited

behind parked cars and street signs, thinking,

hey, should we toss some snowballs? Bull's eye,

the beauty of fresh snow in the hands, like rubbing

tree-bark to catch that contact high direct

from the inexplicable source, unique however

often repeated, carried along on woolen thumbs

to the next absolutely necessary thing,

sloe gin fizzes to Green Mill jazz or the horror

of J�germeister at the Ginger Man or

one of those German bars up around Irving Park

where a sup of the Weiss beer on tap is enough

to convince me to foreswear my stake in any vision

of the afterlife you might care to construct, say

the one with the photo of the owner in his Nazi

uniform beside a pristine fjord, could be Norway,

1940? Whichever, we're hungry now, cast out

into the false dawn of snow-coiffed streetlights

embowed like bowl-cut adolescents or

Roman emperors sated on frost, thumbs up

or down to hash & eggs at Manny's

or the locally infamous Alps, then there's one

at which I never ate though it looked absolutely

irreplaceable, the Golden Angel Pancake House,

which is a poem by Rilke I've never read

though I've used its restroom, seen its dim

celestial figures like alien life-forms

in a goldfish bowl, tasted its lonely nectar

in every stack of silver dollar buttermilk flapjacks,

though the food, for all I know, is unutterably

awful, the way it resonates is what carries me

down the swirled chords of memory

toward the bottom of the frosted glass

aquarium of dreams, whatever that means, it's

what it meant to me coming home those nights

from the Lutheran college after teaching

the Duino Elegies to the daughters and sons

of Minnesota farmers, the footbridge over

the North Branch of the Chicago River, frozen

solid, eddies of whirling ionized powder

around my boots in the bone-cold subzero

that makes the lights in the windows of houses

so painfully beautiful�is it the longing

to get the hell inside or the tears the wind

inevitably summons forth? Homeward,

all the way down Lincoln Avenue's amazing

arabesques and ethnic configurations

of Korean babushkas and Croatian karaoke

that feeling set upon me like the overture to god

knows what dread disease, that cathartic, lustral,

yes, idiot laughter, threat of tears in the gullet,

adam's apple stringing its yoyo to follow

the bouncing ball, as if boulevards of such purity

could countenance no science but eudaemonics,

hardly likely, as if this promethean eruption

were merely one of the more colorful dog-

and-pony acts of simple happiness, acrobatic

dromedaries or narcoleptic dancing bears,

but which I've come to see with perfect hindsight

was no less than the mighty strongman

joy himself bending bars of steel upon a tattooed

skull, so much nobler and more rapacious

than his country cousins, bliss, elation, glee,

a troupe of toothless, dipsomaniacal clowns,

multiform and variable as flurries from blizzards,

while joy is singular, present tense, predatory, priapic,

paradoxically composed of sorrow and terror

as ice is made of water, dense and pure,

darkly bejewelled, music rather than poetry,

preliterate, lapidary, dumb as an ox, cruel as youth,

magnificent and remorseless as Chicago in winter.

������������������ from Spring Comes to Chicago

The Current Assignment

Who did it? I found it more challenging than I expected largely because it comes as I am engaged in a conversation with a friend from VA about the availability of truth in our daily lives and the kinds of truth we hope to know before we die.

The Next Assignment

The next assignment is to write a poem in which you tell somebody off. Let it all out. It could be the president, the next president, a teacher, someone you have hated for years, someone you love, your dog, Smokey the Bear, etc.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on November 17, 2016 from 1PM to 2:30PM

Other Jabber