December 7, 2017
Poets’ Roundtable
Welcome
News and Jabber
Mark Doty has just been chosen the first holder of a fellowship in the Seamus Heany Legacy Project. I haven't been a long-time fan of Doty but find him growing on me.
And here's a poem by Mark Doty:
Golden Retrievals
BY MARK DOTY
Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh
joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then
I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,
or else you’re off in some fog concerning
—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:
to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,
a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.
Mark Doty, “Golden Retrievals” from Sweet Machine: Poems. Copyright © 1998 by Mark Doty. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: Sweet Machine: Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1998)
The Current Assignment
Who did it? I found it challenging and actually more interesting than I expected it to be. The result is lengthy since it doubles the length of the original. Nonetheless, a worthy exercise, at least for me.
The Next Assignment
As the song says, "Watch out, Sally!"
The assignment is to write a Christmas poem but without any verbs.
The assignment is to write a Christmas poem but without any verbs.
It can be done.:
“In a Station of the Metro”
By Ezra Pound, 1885 - 1972
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
“memoir without verbs”
a challenge
Snow
a crystal touch on a baby’s face
four feet of white across a frozen land
purple moon shadows under pines
diamonds on tree limbs in the morning sun
weapons for school boys
walls in the school yard
my tracks across a field and those of a hare
a hundred telephone poles along my way to school
After deep winter’s darkness
spring lake
and summer field
acres of riches
the black earth
dust
dust
and yellow harvest
combines
tiny harvest mice
The table full:
potatoes, pumpkin, corn, beans , cabbage, strawberries, saskatoons, blue berries,
raspberries, choke cherries, pincherries, cranberries, carrots, turnips six inches across, bitter horseradish, beets.
Time for the fall supper
November snow
Don’t overlook haiku as verbless verse.
The Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on December 21, 2017. Same time, same place.
Other Jabber
An article from the NYTimes about how we became interested in poetry caught my attention. It's worth pondering as we find ourselves getting more and more into free verse, that is, the un-rhymed, and why we love to hear those poems that retain the charm of good, old-fashioned verse like that GraceMary writes.
An excerpt from the article:
"The most remarkable thing about poetry’s unpopularity isn’t that it exists, but that it exists in the wake of a period in which poems were not merely popular, but embraced with a fierce and unembarrassed joy. That period, of course, is childhood. For children, the questions often asked about poetry’s status are so beside the point as to seem almost absurd. Can poetry matter? Obviously, say more than 850,000 copies of “Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site,” among many, many other rhyming best sellers. Can poetry be widely recited and remembered? Indubitably, say half a million nightly tours of a great green room containing mittens, kittens, a bowl full of mush, and a quiet old lady who is whispering “hush.” Can a poem be overtly instructive while still being worthwhile as poetry? Well, “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” says a determined elephant named Horton. If adult poetry sometimes seems to exist in the shadow of fiction and music, children’s poetry more than holds its place in the sun."
and this:
"Because we are returned to the peculiar fact that, for all its allure to children, poetry is a game most adults left behind long ago. And it is fascinatingly alone among the arts in this respect: If children love fiction, music and drama, their parents frequently do as well. There are many reasons for this situation, as there are for all complex cultural phenomena. But it’s interesting to think about the handful of poets who do have adult readers outside the academy — Frost, Eliot, Bishop, Dickinson — and to observe how easy it is to imagine them writing children’s poems (as Eliot in fact did in “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”). Is there a lesson for poets in that? Here is Eliot in “Little Gidding”:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree …
Do we read this for its intellectual complexity? Or because it sounds mesmerizing? “We read it for both,” most people would answer, and this is perhaps true. But it can be easy to forget the ungovernable, un-footnoteable attraction of sound. It can be easy to forget that this, more than anything else, is what first draws us to poetry, before we become wise enough to think less of it, before we put away childish things."
