January 18, 2017

Poets’ Roundtable

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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."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxo8o2uJ85s

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.

http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Sestina.

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.

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