Poets’ Roundtable
Welcome
News and Jabber
Henry Morgenthau III was in his 90s when he started to write poetry.
Morgenthau has had an extraordinarily full life. He's produced award-winning television documentaries, raised children, written a memoir — and yes, his father was the Henry Morgenthau Jr. who was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary.
Now, at age 100, he's promoting his first book of poetry, called A Sunday in Purgatory. He tells NPR's Scott Simon that he started writing poetry first because he wanted to establish his own identity, not simply to be a member of a distinguished family. "At the same time, I wanted to recall some of the events that I was privileged to observe ... like my poem 'A Terrific Headache,' which has to do with my father having dinner with Roosevelt the night before he died."
We can look forward to many productive years. Yes, the man was privileged, still, here he is at 100 publishing his first book of poetry. The link on the blog will lead you to a video of a reading he gave. The book is currently out of stock at Amazon.com
THE BEST BOOKS OF POETRY IN 2016
By Dan Chiasson December 19, 2016
Most of 2016 was merely sickening, before the year ended up as painful as a boot kick to the exposed duodenum. Nor am I in the mood to affirm the permanence or enduring power of much of anything: I’m too busy gaining weight, erupting at my children, and losing touch with my friends. These days, it’s a morning highlight when I find a sweater on the floor that already has a shirt inside it. But when we reëmerge someday from our underground silos, nurtured by Tang and protein capsules and married to our first cousins, the following books may also have survived:
Robyn Schiff, “A Woman of Property.” Schiff’s poems are raids upon the jittery, troubled mindscape of a person whose good fortune hides incipient terror. Keyed-up is the new dejected, and Schiff is a kind of Coleridge, embowered by her anxieties.
Rosmarie Waldrop, “Gap Gardening.” Waldrop, who is in her eighties, writes experimental poems whose paradoxes and thought-forms bristle on the page.
Adrienne Rich, “Collected Poems.” Rich’s great work from the nineteen-seventies, eighties, and nineties—the period when she had supposedly ditched beautiful writing for strident politics—is due for a thorough reassessment. Rich retrofitted the American lyric idiom to the exploration of trauma.
Jana Prikryl, “The After Party.” A first book often ends childhood: Prikryl’s gorgeous, elegiac work borrows from folklore its bright aesthetic and swift, severe logic of causation.
close dialog
Ocean Vuong, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds.” Vuong’s gorgeous work elevates accident and coincidence to their proper place in the narratives we construct about why we are who we are. Vuong and his family were Vietnamese refugees who settled, eventually, in Hartford, Connecticut. A first book with lasting power.
Alice Oswald, “Falling Awake.” The English poet, a classicist and serious gardener, writes a poetry of the natural world saturated with myth. A long poem about the dawn, “Tithonus,” may be the most beautiful work I read all year.
Ishion Hutchinson, “House of Lords and Commons.” The Jamaican-born poet writes a learned, lofty, rhetorical kind of poetry, a little like Tennyson. It works because he’s amazing at it. This is a book about the imagination’s small reclamations of linguistic property seized by colonial power.
Finally, Emily Dickinson, “Envelope Poems.” Dickinson’s “scraps” written on scavenged paper cannot be represented by the printed page. Dickinson decided to opt-out of print culture entirely. In 2016, she found her home in this small book of facsimiles, where her brilliant graphic imagination can be tracked in its natural environment.
Dan Chiasson has been contributing poems to the magazine since 2000 and reviews since 2007. He teaches at Wellesley College. His poetry collections include “Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon” and, most recently, “Bicentennial.” More
MORE: POETRY 2016 YEAR IN REVIEW EMILY DICKINSON
I note here that we have one poet in her 80s and another poet, Vietnamese, who lived or lives still in Hartford, CT.
Ocean Vuong
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Poetry
The TV said the planes have hit the buildings.
& I said Yes because you asked me to stay.
Maybe we pray on our knees because the lord
only listens when we're this close
to the devil.There is so much I want to tell you.
How my greatest accolade was to walk
across the Brooklyn Bridge & not think
of flight. How we live like water: touching
a new tongue with no telling
what we've been through. They say the is sky is blue
but I know it's black seen through too much air.
You will always remember what you were doing
when it hurts the most. There is so much
I want to tell you—but I only earned
one life. & I took nothing. Nothing. Like a pair of teeth
at the end. The TV kept saying The planes...
The planes...& I stood waiting in the room
made from broken mocking birds. Their wings throbbing
into four blurred walls. Only you were there.
You were the window.
The Current Assignment
Who did it? I found it more difficult than I expected; ended up retro-fitting an old poem (2016) with five new words. It actually worked pretty well. The process was one of looking for synonyms for words I already had in the poem. Word led to word and not only did I find words I didn’t know (well enough to use even if I had heard them before) but I learned a couple of things, perhaps about androgogy, a new word that I didn’t use.
The Next Assignment
It has been a long time since we had an assignment that was craft-based as opposed to something to make us think and ponder. The next assgignment, while it will cause you to ponder has more to do with conforming to form and craft than anything else. It is not easy. It will be remarkably rewarding for those who do it.
Write a sestina. What is a sestina?
a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, and with all six words appearing in the closing three-line envoi
Ezra Pound called a sestina “a form like a thin sheet of flame, folding and infolding upon itself.”
Sestina
A complex French verse form, usually unrhymed, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoy. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoy contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. The patterns of word repetition are as follows, with each number representing the final word of a line, and each row of numbers representing a stanza:
1 2 3 4 5 6
6 1 5 2 4 3
3 6 4 1 2 5
5 3 2 6 1 4
4 5 1 3 6 2
2 4 6 5 3 1
(6 2) (1 4) (5 3)
Here is a link to a wikihow discussion of how to write a sestina. This with the information here should get you on your way.
Here is a graph for end-words in a sestina:
Here is a way to go about it: List the end words you want to use (or, write a six-line stanza and select the six end words). Now, list the end words for all 7 stanzas according to the chart above. Here is an example:
Stanza 1
1. cows
2. spit
3. tails
4. mug
5. hammer
6. run
Stanza 2
run
cows
hammer
spit
mug
tails
Stanza 3
tails
run
mug
cows
spit
hammer
Stanza 4
hammer
tails
spit
run
cows
mug
Stanza 5
mug
hammer
cows
tails
run
spit
Stanza 6
spit
mug
run
hammer
tails
cows
Stanza 7 (3 lines)
Follows the pattern 2–5, 4–3, 6–1
(includes) spit, (ends with) hammer
(includes) mug, (ends with) tails
(includes) run, (ends with) cows
Now, each stanza has its end words. Write the poem
An example, one of my favorites:
Sestina For Lost Horses
By William Fox Conner
Three stray horses pace by the fence,
halting now and then to listen.
Breaths pluming in cold air, eyes alert,
they've wandered from someone's herd.
Each autumn fences snap: restraints
fall, grass dies in fettered light, limits
seem ambiguous for a time. But limits
are real for domestic horses; the fence
defines them. Crossing the hill against restraints,
they pause near a low mound to listen,
anxious for sounds from a distant herd.
Three neglected horses, wandering, alert
for broken strands of wire, alert,
though they've been conditioned by limits.
In them an instinct lives; another herd
has etched a path from travel by the fence;
it cuts the hill below the mound. I listen;
hooves heartbeat packed earth. Restraints
are recent in these hills. Restraints
like fences appeared when settlers, alert
for dangers in an untried place and listen-
ing with civilized ears, imposed limits,
grids, and signatures of ownership: a fence
distinguished man from the amorphous herd.
Here, Indians once hunted buffalo; a herd
could sustain them, and no restraints
like deeds, plats, or a barbed wire fence
held them. They lived in rhythms, alert
to loss or gains in seasons. Their limits
now are fragile graves in hills. I listen;
the horses whinny by the gate and listen,
too. I feel their plight; a scattered herd
is vulnerable with winter near. Not limits,
but touching with their kind, not restraints
but warmth might ease their longing. Alert,
they climb by the mound, pause at the fence,
and call again, seeking a herd beyond limits
and restraints. Alert, breasts hard against
the steel spurs on the fence, they listen.
W. H. Auden
PAYSAGE MORALISE
Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,
Seeing at end of street the barren mountains,
Round corners coming suddenly on water,
Knowing them shipwrecked who were launched for islands,
We honour founders of these starving cities
Whose honour is the image of our sorrow,
Which cannot see its likeness in their sorrow
That brought them desperate to the brink of valleys;
Dreaming of evening walks through learned cities
They reined their violent horses on the mountains,
Those fields like ships to castaways on islands,
Visions of green to them who craved for water.
They built by rivers and at night the water
Running past windows comforted their sorrow;
Each in his little bed conceived of islands
Where every day was dancing in the valleys
And all the green trees blossomed on the mountains,
Where love was innocent, being far from cities.
But dawn came back and they were still in cities;
No marvellous creature rose up from the water;
There was still gold and silver in the mountains
But hunger was a more immediate sorrow,
Although to moping villagers in valleys
Some waving pilgrims were describing islands …
‘The gods,’ they promised, ‘visit us from islands,
Are stalking, head-up, lovely, through our cities;
Now is the time to leave your wretched valleys
And sail with them across the lime-green water,
Sitting at their white sides, forget your sorrow,
The shadow cast across your lives by mountains.’
So many, doubtful, perished in the mountains,
Climbing up crags to get a view of islands,
So many, fearful, took with them their sorrow
Which stayed them when they reached unhappy cities,
So many, careless, dived and drowned in water,
So many, wretched, would not leave their valleys.
It is our sorrow. Shall it melt? Then water
Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys,
And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.
From Paola Marchetti 'Auden landscapes'
The assignment is difficult but the reward is in the creativity we discover when forced into rigid formal poetic structures. I urge you all to try it.
The Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on February 2, 2017 from 1-2:30PM.
