Poets’ Roundtable
Welcome
News and Jabber
From a New Yorker article about the poet Larry Fagin.
“Fagin transmitted lessons he’d learned from Jack Spicer, Ginsberg, and others, mixed with his own: use ego as a “cutting tool”; create simple ideas in complex relationships; use ellipses; beware of airplane poems and writing about dreams; beauty gets in the way; keep the reader off balance; kill modifiers and metaphors (unless they’re really good); strive for “strangeness.” He told us to write every day, but only a little bit; to “be more in the world”; to look up when we walk down the street; to avoid distraction; to never talk about real estate. Most professors I’d had until then left class the moment the bell rang, offered perfunctory critiques of my work, were unfamiliar with their own reading assignments, and generally regarded the act of teaching as an annoyance. To Fagin, students were his life.”
Dana Gioia is an accomplished contemporary poet now residing in California, currently that state’s Poet Laureate. This quote is from an interview found at the above link:
His book Can Poetry Matter? Was published some time ago and was quite special then and remains a worthy read.
Here is a link to a short review of the book: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/can-poetry-matter-by-dana-gioia/
And here is a link to an article written by him for “The Atlantic Monthly”.
I point these out for their information, their importance to us as poets and as a way of looking at what has and hasn’t changed since he wrote the book.
I cite all this stuff because I like him and his trajectory into and out of business and into poetry and music. But I especially like him because his poetry is so extraordinarily well-crafted.
“Q: How has the conversation shifted in the years since “Can Poetry Matter?” was published?
A: Most of the trends that I talked about 25 years ago are still present. Poetry is even more isolated in the university. It’s even more absent in the mass media. Poetry criticism is even more remote from the needs of ordinary readers. The one significant change has been that outside the university and the mass media, there’s been an enormous amount of local organizing to create poetry events, presses, instruction and a kind of participatory culture.
It comes down to something really simple. People don’t necessarily like to read poetry, but most people love to hear a good poem well-recited. So the major trend that’s happened is that the energy of poetry now happens when it’s taken off the page and spoken. This trend originated and continues almost entirely outside English departments. So it’s a kind of populist energy in poetry versus an elitist trend. The whole culture is moving from the book to the screen or the speaker.”
Here is the title poem from Pity the Beautiful:
Pity the Beautiful
Pity the beautiful,
the dolls, and the dishes,
the babes with big daddies
granting their wishes.
Pity the pretty boys,
the hunks, and Apollos,
the golden lads whom
success always follows.
The hotties, the knock-outs,
the tens out of ten,
the drop-dead gorgeous,
the great leading men.
Pity the faded,
the bloated, the blowsy,
the paunchy Adonis
whose luck’s gone lousy.
Pity the gods,
no longer divine.
Pity the night
the stars lose their shine.
Money
Money is a kind of poetry.– Wallace Stevens
Money, the long green,
cash, stash, rhino, jack
or just plain dough.
Chock it up, fork it over,
shell it out. Watch it
burn holes through pockets.
To be made of it! To have it
to burn! Greenbacks, double eagles,
megabucks and Ginnie Maes.
It greases the palm, feathers a nest,
holds heads above water,
makes both ends meet.
Money breeds money.
Gathering interest, compounding daily.
Always in circulation.
Money. You don’t know where it’s been,
but you put it where your mouth is.
And it talks.
The Current Assignment
I had some difficulty with this assignment and I don’t know why. I’ve been writing a lot and finished several poems and asked where I could put the designated line (“Tell me again how…”) and consistently came up empty. I tried to write to the line. Nix on that. How did the rest of you do?
The Next Assignment
Write a poem about or to an old love(r).The Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on August 10, 2017 from 1-2:30PM.
Other Jabber
I was about to decide I had included enough stuff I like to talk about but then tripped upon this poem by 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner Tyehimba Jess.
Blind Boone's Vision
BY TYEHIMBA JESS
When I got old enough
I asked my mother,
to her surprise,
to tell me what she did
with my eyes. She balked
and stalled, sounding
unsure for the first time
I could remember.
It was the tender way
she held my face
and kissed where tears
should have rolled
that told me I’d asked
of her the almost impossible—
to recount my blinding
tale, to tell what became
of the rest of me.
She took me by the hand
and led me to a small
sapling that stood not
much taller than me.
I could smell the green
marrow of its promise
reaching free of the soil
like a song from Earth’s
royal, dirty mouth.
Then Mother told me
how she, newly freed,
had prayed like a slave
through the night when
the surgeon took my eyes
to save my fevered life,
then got off her knees
come morning to take
the severed parts of me
for burial—right there
beneath that small tree.
They fed the roots,
climbed through its leaves
to soak in sunlight . . .
and so, she told me,
I can see.
When the wind rustles
up and cools me down,
when the earth shakes
with footsteps and when
the sound of birdcalls
stirs forests like the black
and white bustling
’neath my fingertips
I am of the light and shade
of my tree. Now,
ask me how tall
that tree of mine
has grown to be
after all this time—
it touches a place
between heaven and here.
And I shudder when I hear
the earth’s wind
in my bones
through the bones
of that boxed-up
swarm of wood,
bird and bee:
I let it loose . . .
and beyond
me.
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