Friday, December 16, 2016

December 15, 2016

"...and a merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!"
Clement Clarke Moore

A good meeting. I urge you to check out the link to Billy Collins and read the article and listen to the clips of him speaking and reading. I’m still looking for the Neruda film. The impetus for the assignment for January 5 comes from my readings about writers’ block. Someone suggested that when you are having difficulty getting started that you write as if speaking to someone to whom you feel close or who you admire. Talk about anything so long as you are writing. I added the part about explaining why you write. I know that I tell different people different things about what I write and why I write. I cannot tell the mailman what I tell my mentors nor can I tell my mentors what I tell my dog but I talk to all of them. And good luck with the pangrams!

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome


News and Jabber

I begin with something dear to my heart-- the false start, the failed beginnings and even writers’ block:

“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’” — Maya Angelou

Billy Collins on poems he rejected:
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/504716937/billy-collins-on-how-to-become-a-poet-and-why-poetry-can-be-a-game This link includes several clips of Billy Collins reading and speaking about poetry.

"Usually I know enough not to finish those," he said. "They announce themselves as failures early on, four or five or six lines in. They're just not cooperating with me – they're not showing any signs of wanting to go anywhere, or it was just a bad idea to start with, you know, like you just invited the wrong person to the party but it's too late. But in the case of writing a poem the waste basket ... the writer's best friend ... is full of false starts.

"When I was a younger poet I would do what Frost said you can't do, which is fret a poem into being ... and I gave up on that a long time ago. If a poem isn't working, if it doesn't feel right, I just let it go and get on with the next thing, which could be writing another poem or making more toast."

But time spent on poems destined for the trash heap isn't always time wasted.

Billy Collins: When Does Creativity Start And End?

When Does Creativity Start And End?
"If I'm writing for a while and I'm writing maybe a failure and another failure ... a poem will come, often a little poem," he said. "It has nothing to do with what I've written but it would not have occurred had I not been failing."

COSMOLOGY
By Billy Collins

AUDIO: Read by the author.
I never put much stock in that image of the earth
resting on the backs of four elephants
who are standing on the back of a sea turtle,
who is in turn supported by an infinite regression
of turtles disappearing into a bottomless forever.
I mean how could you get them all to stay still?

Now that we are on the subject,
my substitute picture would have the earth
with its entire population of people and things
resting on the head of Keith Richards,
who is holding a Marlboro in one hand
and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other.

As long as Keith keeps talking about
the influence of the blues on the Rolling Stones,
the earth will continue to spin merrily
and revolve in a timely manner around the sun.
But if he changes the subject or even pauses
too long, it’s pretty much curtains for us all.

Unless, of course, one person somehow survives
being hurtled into the frigidity of outer space;
then we would have a movie on our hands—
but wait, there wouldn’t be any hands
to write the script or make the movie,
and no theatres, either, no buttered popcorn, no giant Pepsi.

Putting that aside, let’s imagine Keith
standing on the other Rolling Stones,
who are standing on the shoulders of Muddy Waters,
and, were it not for that endless stack of turtles,
one on top of the other all the way down,
Muddy Waters would be standing on nothing at all.

Billy Collins, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, will publish “The Rain in Portugal,” his twelfth book of poems, in October.

If you have a regular schedule your subconcious will prepare itself to be ready to be productive at that time. You will find that you can write more and write more efficiently.

Pablo Neruda
“Neruda” is a new movie that traces the year 1948 in his life. It is reaping terrific reviews and is directed by the same director, Pablo Larrain, as “Jackie”, an astoundingly good film about Jackie Kennedy. If you can find “Neruda” (or “Jackie”) anywhere, let me know. Here’s a link to a review: http://www.thewrap.com/neruda-review-gael-garcia-bernal/ and another:http://www.thewrap.com/neruda-cannes-review-pablo-larrains-anti-biopic-stumbles-then-soars/

The Current Assignment

Kind of a non-directional thing that somewhat reflected my own writing the time. I then went through several days of false starts (which is why I began with what I began with above). I genuinely thought I would not write anything decent this season. I was wrong, delightfully wrong.

The Next Assignment

Write a poem to someone who is important to you telling why you write.

The Next Meeting

Other Jabber


Try writing sentences using all the letters of the alphabet.

Post-truth politics and the poet. How necessary is truth? Is this Orwellian reality? Consider the Yahoo hacking.

Saturday, December 3, 2016

December 1, 2016

Poets’ Roundtable

Another sterling meeting although we still wish a few more were able to join us. The quality of poetry, conversation, repartee and regard for one another continues to amaze.

I urge you to follow the links below and take a thoughtful perusal of the stories. And while you are at it, check out Paul Muldoon’s work. He’s a Pulitzer Prize winner and a future nobelist whose profile remains surprisingly low.

Welcome


News and Jabber

Follow this link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/05/emily-dickinsons-singular-scrap-poetry to a New Yorker article about Emily Dickinson’s “Gorgeous Nothings” a title that refers to the scraps of paper found and recently made available that she left. They are interesting as much for their visual artistry as for their poetic features. Among other things they show corrections, changes, choices of words and phrasing both used and rejected.

Here is an image from the collection:
It is only coincidental that this poem may be considered winter-oriented.




Here is the published version of the poem beginning “Glass was the street”
Glass was the Street - in Tinsel Peril (1518) Related Poem Content Details
BY EMILY DICKINSON
Glass was the Street - in Tinsel Peril
Tree and Traveller stood.
Filled was the Air with merry venture
Hearty with Boys the Road.

Shot the lithe Sleds like Shod vibrations
Emphacized and gone
It is the Past’s supreme italic
Makes the Present mean -

Emily Dickinson, “[Glass was the Street - in Tinsel Peril]” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. Copyright © 1998 by Emily Dickinson. Reprinted by permission of The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

And here is the published version of the other poem appearing on the same envelope. I can only imagine the gratitude of the envelope that bore the two poems. (Not unlike my own for being next to Allen Ginsberg in the index of a book I am in.)

It came his turn to beg—
1500

It came his turn to beg—
The begging for the life
Is different from another Alms
’Tis Penury in Chief—

I scanned his narrow realm
I gave him leave to live
Lest Gratitude revive the snake
Though smuggled his reprieve

Book: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

This link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/books/johnny-cash-the-poet-in-black.html is to another collection of scraps and other things from a newly released book about Johnny Cash. It resembles Emily Dickinson’s book but, being about someone I didn’t consider a poet per se, I would have skipped it except for it having been edited by Paul Muldoon, one of the great living poets.  I include this quotation:
In an interview, Mr. Muldoon put Cash alongside Leonard Cohen, who died on Monday, and Paul Simon as examples of songwriters whose words hold up on their own. Even so, he added, the “pressure per square inch” on lyrics “can be a wee bit lower than in a conventional poem.”



“But that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” he continued. There are occasions when the simple, direct phrase is the one that works.”

Taken together, Mr. Muldoon said, Cash’s poems have a broad sweep.

“You still see the same scenes — love, death, loss, joy, sadness,” Mr. Muldoon said. “The great themes of popular songs, and, indeed, poetry, which we welcome hearing about and making sense of as we go through our lives.”

Go to the links and enjoy the trip.



The Current Assignment

Did anyone find this confusing? My fault. Actually, I wrote a poem but didn’t like it enough and so my own contribution today is one from a few years ago that I resurrected. Not only that but I can’t tell whether it favors Christmas and so I don’t know how to approach the next assignment which is to write a poem expressing toward Christmas the opposite sentiment of the one in the assignment for today.

The Next Assignment

The next assignment is to write a poem about the worst Christmas present you ever received or simply to write another Christmas poem.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday, December 15, 2016.

Other Jabber