April 19, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Write a poem, everybody adding a line

News and Jabber

I came across an article about Joan Murray, a poet I'd never heard of, and found another one of those gems that exist terribly far below the radar.  Here is a link to the article, definitely worth a read, not only for the discussion of Joan Murray but also for the links to the poets who influenced her. You can spend a lot of time tracking down all the references. The short of it is that she wrote for only 18 months or so and died just before her 25th birthday.

From the article (located at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/146261/minor-notes:

"To appreciate Murray’s significance, one must first understand the unusual circumstances of her short life and the even more unusual circumstances of her work’s convoluted afterlife. She was born in 1917, during an air raid in England, and spent a peripatetic early childhood in London, Paris, and Ontario before settling in the United States, first in Detroit and then in New York. Her father was an illustrator and a portraitist, and her mother was a diseuse, a female entertainer who performs monologues. The couple separated when Murray was quite young. Bouts of severe rheumatic fever at the ages of 11 and 13 left Murray with a chronic heart condition—a permanently damaged valve, prone to infections—that led to her premature death on January 4, 1942, one month shy of her 25th birthday.

Murray was determined to pack as much life as she could into her limited years. Temperamentally unsuited to conventional school, her formal secondary education ended after ninth grade, at which point she threw herself into her own self-directed studies. A.E. Housman and W.B. Yeats were early favorites and both influenced Murray’s exhilarating rhymes and imagery, as well as her work’s prophetic scope. She studied dance and theater at the School of Dramatic Arts in New York and poetry at the New School, under the mentorship of W.H. Auden. She was also an avid hiker despite her illness."

What Was Expected - Poem by Joan Murray

It wasn't his ugliness that startled me. It was mostly

that he hadn't been expected, and when I flipped on the porch light,

he was eating from the cats' bowl, and when I tapped

the frost-edged glass, he looked up, the way the cats do,

and then he waited through that moment

of not knowing what was next—

as if I were Peter at the Gate, and it could go either way.

I tried to squeeze his opossum shape, his oversized

head and pointed snout, his dull black eyes and wormy tail

into the tidy image of a cat that I'd brought to the door with me.

But even though we gave it our best,

we realized, almost right away, that it was impossible,

and we had to pool our efforts and do what was

expected: I had to pull the door open—even though

the threat it made at that point was less than a child's bluff—

and once it had been done, he had to back away from the bowl,

giving up the incomprehensible gift he'd just come upon,

and slink down the steps—not quickly, mind you,

because he guessed, dumb beggar, I wouldn't pursue him,

only leave him to his hunger and the dicey scraps of winter

as the stars did in December when he came.

But it wasn't as if I could lift the kitchen window and throw

a nickel or a dime to him and watch him go away happy—

the way we did back in the City,

when the beggars—that's what my mother

called them—would come in winter

to sing in the backyards below our apartment windows

with their clear bright faces and beautiful voices

and the mystery of the coins ringing down from above,

rolling and skipping, and them bending and scraping

and tipping their hats and going away,

even though we weren't rich either.

No, he was more like the ones we'd come upon

in the places where we were forbidden to go,

the ones our mothers called bums—the wild-eyed

grizzled ones, lying on their slit cardboard boxes

under the bridge ramps even in winter,

or raving along the tracks with their hands down their pants

because of the lice, or pissing in an alley as we ran through

and slowly turning midstream to call after us—

Have you got a nickel or a dime?—the ugly

ones, the ones who had no songs, the ones

with nothing to give us. 

Eternity - Poem by Joan Murray

Because Lena's not yet three,

she doesn't know the reason for this place.

'I like this little house. And this little house,'

she says as she loops around them

-the play-size 'houses' of the dead.

Here in Key West, as in New Orleans,

where the land and sea are nearly level,

some are set just above the surface,

and Lena leans on their 'big stone beds.'

But since Lena's not yet three,

she doesn't know what any of it means:

She doesn't know where the earth rolls away to

every night while she's asleep-

or who rolls with it-some above it, some below.

And because she doesn't know,

she moves in waves of joy

like the spirit on the surface of the waters

-before it ever thought of light.

She squeezes between two 'beds'

that are stretched out side by side-

one's bigger than the other-

and pats them, left then right,

and reunites what slipped apart a hundred years ago:

a mother-and her child of a day.

We learn this from their surnames and the dates

-but Lena doesn't read,

and there's no reason to explain.

We watch her bolt through the gate

where the men of the Maine

sail on in shipshape rows

as she splashes among their stones.

'God Was Good to Me,' one epitaph proclaims,

but Lena has no knowledge of God.

Or his goodness. Or the opposite implied

by what's said on every side

in the silent houses of the dead.

When we say it's time to go, she runs ahead again,

drops down before an upright stone,

and moves her finger across its surface.

She runs to another, repeats her motions-

as she reads its lines out loud:

The name. The date. And the other.

-And though she's still too young to read,

she reads them anyhow:

'I love you. I love you. I love you.'

-But how could she know?-How could she know

what would trump all the mansions of gold?

How about an exercise?

Take a sheet of paper and write an opening line. Pass it to the person next to you. Write the second line. Pass it along and keep adding a line until your own opener comes back to you.

The Current Assignment

Who did it? How did it go? Any research about form, etc.?

The Next Assignment

The Vessel: Write about a ship or other vehicle that can take you somewhere different from where you are now including where it takes you to/from. It cannot be a car. It can be anything else, including animals.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday, May 3, 2018

Other Jabber

What happens to poets when they die, and before?

Below is from an article in The Smithsonian at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/poet-samuel-taylor-coleridges-casket-rediscovered-former-wine-cellar-180968811/

SMARTNEWS Keeping you current

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Casket Rediscovered in Former Wine Cellar

Parishioners at St. Michael’s Church in Highgate hope to refurbish the crypt after identifying where exactly Coleridge’s final resting place was

(Wikimedia Commons)

By Jason Daley

SMITHSONIAN.COM 

APRIL 17, 2018

1211241

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known for the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a doozy of a poem that includes spirits, zombies and, of course, a rotting albatross. As it turns out, since the English poet’s death in 1834, Coleridge’s remains have taken their own circuitous journey through the underworld. Maev Kennedy at The Guardian reports that the location of Coleridge’s coffin as well as the resting place of his wife, daughter, son-in-law and grandson, has finally been pinpointed—in a debris-strewn former wine cellar, no less. Plan are now in place to make it a crypt fit for a major poet.

According to a press release, the poet was originally buried in the crypt of the Highgate School Chapel in north London. However, weathering and a rebuild of the chapel ultimately made the crypt and, in turn, the five coffins it stored, unsafe. So in 1961, the lead coffins of Coleridge and his family were transferred from the chapel to St. Michael’s church’s nearby crypt. There was a major ceremony involving the Bishop of London, Coleridge family members, and even the poet laureate of England.

But over the course of the last 50-odd years, however, where exactly the bodies had been placed became hazy. Some people said they were below a plaque honoring Coleridge. Some said they rested in the far corner of the church. Finally, church steward Drew Clode and warden Alan West decided to investigate. “Memories dimmed and there was uncertainty about where the entombment occurred. Some thought it was under the font inside the church,” as Clode tells the local paper Ham & High. “We looked around the rubble in a huge area and it was only using the stone above in the aisle as a clue that we finally picked our way through and found what we were looking for.”

The five lead coffins could be seen through ventilation vents bricked up in what was once the wine cellar of a 1696 Ashhurst house, which sat on the site before the church was built in the early 1830s. “They were covered in dust and barely distinguishable from the rubble. They were barely visible through a grille of an air vent,” Clode says. “I have always been a fan of Coleridge and neither the wine cellar, the tomb-area itself nor the crypt are fit for the remains of this great poet and his family.”

Though Coleridge was known to have problems with alcohol and was addicted to opium, Coleridge’s great-great-great-grandson Richard Coleridge, a police officer, tells Kennedy that he agrees that a rubble-filled wine cellar is not the right spot for his kin. “It has been said that you could see it as appropriate, but it is not in a very fitting state for him, and the family would support the plans to improve it,” he says.

Now, the church hopes to restore the crypt and give the Coleridge family a more fitting final burial place. Vicar Kunle Ayodeji tells Kennedy the parish hopes to clean up its crypt and create a meeting space under the church. While the public would not be able to view the actual coffins, they would like to place an inscription on the wall of the crypt that literary pilgrims could visit.

To that end, reports Ham & High, the parish is launching a fundraising event on June 2, Coleridge Day. The church will perform a special service for the Coleridge family including a performance of the Highgate School Choir along with recitations of some of the poets work. Two Coleridge scholars will also lecture on the poet’s spiritual beliefs and his time in Highgate.

Coleridge’s stay there was not particularly happy. His opium addiction and depression had taken a heavy toll on him, leading to a separation from his wife, the loss of motivation to keep writing and a poor reputation among his friends. In 1816, he moved in wih a doctor in Highgate whose home overlooked St. Michael’s church, in hopes of curing his addiction. But instead of staying for a few weeks, as expected, Coleridge lived there for 18 years, eventually dying of heart and lung ailments.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/poet-samuel-taylor-coleridges-casket-rediscovered-former-wine-cellar-180968811/#gpJwUUp8jCU5RCx0.99

Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv

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April 5, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

It seems a long time but I only missed one meeting. Anyway, it's great to be back and thank you for all your well wishes.

News and Jabber

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/obituaries/elizabeth-ebert-grand-dame-of-cowboy-poetry-dies-at-93.html

Elizabeth Ebert, ‘Grand Dame of Cowboy Poetry,’ Dies at 93

Ms. Ebert wrote in secret for most of her life, often feeding her lines to the fire, and was already well into her 60s when her husband, Selmer Johannes Ebert, who went by S.J., persuaded her to perform at a cowboy poetry gathering in Bismarck. There she caught the eye — or rather, the ear — of Baxter Black, the genre’s most celebrated poet.

Continue reading the main story

“I knew from the very first poem that she started at the top; she just had it,” Mr. Black told American Cowboy magazine. “It’s like you’re having a parade, and everyone is driving a Honda, and she comes in a Cadillac, sitting on the top.”

Ode to Tofu

The gentle cows upon our plains
    Who feed upon the grass,
And then, in turn, expel methane
    In manner somewhat crass,
Are being blamed for making
    Our atmosphere less dense.
They say someday we'll die because
    Of bovine flatulence.

Does the answer lie in planting
    Our range lands all to soy?
If we abstain from eating beef
    Will life be filled with joy?
Let's not accept this premise
    'Til we check behind the scenes,
Just how much gas will people pass
    When they're only eating beans?

© 1997, Elizabeth Ebert, and included in Crazy Quilt
This poem may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.

Spring Thaw

I noticed just this morning
     There's a difference in the air.
Can't quite put my finger on it
     But I know that it is there.

Wind is blowing, brisk, as usual,
     Weatherman's predicting snow,
Yet I sense a subtle changing,
     Soft, unspoken, and I know

Snowbanks soon will be retreating
     Bare spots spreading in between,
And the southern slopes will shimmer
     With that first faint hint of green.

The fuzzy little crocus buds
     Will then come bursting forth,
And the wind will cease its bluster,
     Cold and constant, from the north.

The creeks will start their singing,
     Making music through the night,
And the clear blue sky will echo
     With the honk of geese in flight.

The cows are growing heavy,
     Calving soon will be begun,
But today they're standing lazy
     Soaking up the noonday sun.

Tomorrow it may snow again
     And the sun may disappear
But I feel a thawing deep within
     And I know that spring is near.

© 1997, Elizabeth Ebert, and included in Crazy Quilt
This poem may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.

I also recommend checking out this link to CowboyPoetry.com for an article about Elizabeth Ebert:
https://blog.cowboypoetry.com/category/poems/true-grit-by-elizabeth-ebert/

Remarkably, she doesn't have a Wikipedia entry.
Many of her poems, written in secret, she tossed into the fire.

The Current Assignment

I actually tried the assignment, sort of, half-heartedly. I found the rhyming too difficult, as if my name were "orange." 

The Next Assignment

I want to return to honoring the art, the poem. Hence, the assignment for next time will be to write an ode. Here is a link to a decent guide: https://www.thoughtco.com/how-to-write-an-ode-4146960. Follow the links within the article to examples of odes. Here is an excerpt from that site:

"What is an Ode? 

An ode is a lyric poem that is written to praise a person, event, or object. You may have heard of or read the famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats. (Some students mistakenly believe that this poem was written on the physical urn, when it fact the poem is written about an urn — it is an ode to the urn.)

The ode is a classical style of poetry, once used by the ancient Greeks and Romans, who sang their odes rather than writing them on paper. Today's odes are usually rhyming poems with irregular meter. They are broken into stanzas (the "paragraphs" of poetry) with ten lines each, sometimes following a rhyming pattern, although rhyme is not required for a poem to be classified as an ode. Usually, odes have three to five stanzas. 

There are three types of odes:  pindaric, horatian, and irregular. ​Pindaric odes have three stanzas, two of which have the same structure. An example is ​“The Progress of Poesy” by Thomas Gray. Horatian odes have more than one stanza, all of which follow the same rhyme structure and meter. An example is “Ode to the Confederate Dead” by Allen Tate.​ Irregular odes follow no set pattern or rhyme. An example is “Ode to an Earthquake” by Ram Mehta. Read a few examples of odes to get a feeling for what they are like before you write your own."

However, we'll steal from Pablo Neruda who wrote a series called "Odes to Common Things" and write an ode to something common. Here is  his "Ode to a Yellow Bird":

12 Ode to the Yellow Bird
Oda al pajaro sofre

translated by Stephen Mitchell

I buried you in the garden:
a grave
tiny
as an open hand,
southern
earth,
cold earth
fell covering
your plumage,
the yellow rays,
the black lightnings
of your snuffed-out body.
From Mato Grosso,
from fertile Goiania
they sent you,
locked up.
You couldn’t bear it.
You left.
In the cage
with your small
feet stiff,
as though clutching
an invisbile branch,
dead,
a poor clump
of extinguished
feathers,
far away
from your native fires
from the maternal
thicket
in cold earth,
far away.
Bird
most pure
I knew you alive,
electric,
excited,
murmurous,
your body was
a fragrant
arrow,
on my arm and shoulders
you walked
independent, untamed,
black as black stone
and pollen-yellow.
O wild
beauty,
the proud determination
of your steps,
in your eyes
the spark
of defiance, but
as
a flower is defiant,
with the wholeness
of an earthly integrity, filled up
like a bunch of grapes, restless
as a discoverer,
safe
in your frail arrogance.

I did wrong: to the autumn
that is beginning
in my country,
to the eaves
that fade now
and fall,
to the galvanic wind of the south,
to the hard trees, to the leaves
that you didn’t know,
I brought you,
I made your pride travel
to a different, ashen sun
far from your own
that burns
like a scarlet zither,
and when
at the metallic hangar
your cage
landed,
already you lost
the majesty of the wind,
already you had been stripped
of the zenith’s light that had covered you,
already you were a feather of death,
and then,
in my house
your final look was
into my face, the reproach
of your untamable gaze.
Later,
with wings closed,
you went back
to your sky,
to the spacious heart
to the green fire,
to the ignited earth,
to the slopes,
to the trailing vines,
to the fruits,
to the air, to the stars,
to the secret sound
of unknown springs,
to the moisture
of fecundations in the jungle,
you went back
to your origin,
to the yellow brilliance,
to the dark breast,
to the earth and sky of your home.

Odes needn't be long although they often are. Here are several short odes:

Ode | Short Famous Poems and Poets

by Confucius  Sadness The sun is ever full and bright, The pale moon waneth night by night. Why should this be? My heart that once was full of light Is but a dying moon to-night. But when I dream of thee apart, I would the dawn might lift my heart, O sun, to thee.
by Robert Southey  Birth-Day Ode 01 O my faithful Friend! O early chosen, ever found the same, And trusted and beloved! once more the verse Long destin'd, always obvious to thine ear, Attend indulgent.
by Robert Herrick  AN ODE FOR BEN JONSON Ah Ben! Say how or when Shall we, thy guests, Meet at those lyric feasts, Made at the Sun, The Dog, the Triple Tun; Where we such clusters had, As made us nobly wild, not mad? And yet each verse of thine Out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine. My Ben! Or come again, Or send to us Thy wit's great overplus; But teach us yet Wisely to husband it, Lest we that talent spend; And having once brought to an end That precious stock,--the store Of such a wit the world should have no more.
by Robert Creeley  America America, you ode for reality! Give back the people you took. Let the sun shine again on the four corners of the world you thought of first but do not own, or keep like a convenience. People are your own word, you invented that locus and term. Here, you said and say, is where we are. Give back what we are, these people you made, us, and nowhere but you to be.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on April 19th.

Other Jabber

April is not only the saddest month but also National Poetry Month. What are you doing to celebrate it? 

Where poems come from:

The Tyger 

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

In what distant deeps or skies. 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 

On what wings dare he aspire? 

What the hand, dare seize the fire? 

And what shoulder, & what art, 

Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 

And when thy heart began to beat, 

What dread hand? & what dread feet? 

What the hammer? what the chain, 

In what furnace was thy brain? 

What the anvil? what dread grasp, 

Dare its deadly terrors clasp! 

When the stars threw down their spears 

And water'd heaven with their tears: 

Did he smile his work to see? 

Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 

Tyger Tyger burning bright, 

In the forests of the night: 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The Panther

               In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris 

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted

that it no longer holds anything anymore.

To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand 

bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride

which circles down to the tiniest hub

is like a dance of energy around a point

in which a great will stands stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise

without a sound . . . then a shape enters,

slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,

reaches the heart, and dies.

                                     Robert Bly

from Fearful Symmetry

BY BASIL BUNTING

Muzzle and jowl and beastly brow,

bilious glaring eyes, tufted ears,

recidivous criminality in the slouch,

—This is not the latest absconding bankrupt

but a ‘beautiful’ tiger imported at great expense from   

Kuala Lumpur.

7 photographers, 4 black-and-white artists and an R.A.   

are taking his profitable likeness;   

28 reporters and an essayist

are writing him up.

Sundry ladies think he is a darling   

especially at mealtimes, observing

that a firm near the docks advertises replicas

fullgrown on approval for easy cash payments.

♂Felis Tigris (Straits Settlements) (Bobo) takes exercise   

up and down his cage before feeding

in a stench of excrements of great cats

indifferent to beauty or brutality.

He is said to have eaten several persons

but of course you can never be quite sure of these things.

Basil Bunting, “13. Fearful Symmetry” from Complete Poems, edited by Richard Caddel. Reprinted with the permission of Bloodaxe Books Ltd., www.bloodaxebooks.com.

Source: Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1968)

Blake, Rilke and Bunting present

the tiger

invisible still

lofty silent

the roar distant

unimaginable

at least one God away

a full-grown replica

imagined to be pacing

he tells me I am

replicated too

full grown too

which I am and

neither he nor I knows

quite what we are

replicas of or

how much we sell for

in the shop near the docks

the memory of how to run

of sky and country

the startle of yellow birds

in the forest of the night

haunts us

when it can

Unpublished work Copyright 2018 Emerson Gilmore

Notes:

Panthers don't roar: this  presented me with a challenge when I mentioned the roar of the tiger

They and tigers are from the same family, ie feline

Words appearing in the other poems: fullgrown and replicas, in the forest of the night, sky and country and yellow birds came from Neruda's "Ode to a Yellow Bird"; shop near the docks was lifted from Bunting's poem above; 

At first I thought Rilke's poem was about a tiger, not a  panther; btw, he saw his panther in Paris

Bunting's poem refers to "Straits Settlements" which was a group of British territories in Southeast Asia and were for a time used as a penal colony.

From an article in "The New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/01/10/study-panther/)

BTW The entire article is worth reading.

"When Rilke came to Paris he was still a High Romantic, brother-in-art to the likes of Novalis, Klopstock, and the Goethe of Young Werther. Rodin, almost offhandedly, pulled the young dreamer’s head out of the clouds and knocked some common sense into him. For the sculptor, work was everything: Il faut travailler—toujours travaillerwas his motto. As for inspiration, Rilke wrote, the mere possibility of it he “shakes off indulgently and with an ironic smile, suggesting that there is no such thing….” These assertions must have struck Rilke like thunderbolts. Suddenly it was not the emotion or the idea that mattered, but the thing.6 Rodin was, above all, a maker of things:

And this way of looking and of living is ingrained so firmly in him because he attained it as a craftman; as he was achieving in his art that element of infinite simplicity, of total indifference to subject matter, he was achieving in himself that great justice, that equilibrium in the face of the world that no name can shake. Since he had been granted the gift of seeing things in everything, he had also acquired the ability to construct things; and therein lies the greatness of his art.

For Rilke, too, the Ding now became paramount. For him, “the history of endless generations of things could be sensed beneath the history of mankind,” and his ambition was “to be a real person among real things” and thus cure himself of what he wonderfully called his “breathing difficulties of the soul.” It was Rodin, so the story goes, who urged Rilke to take himself to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and pick one of the animals in the zoo there and study it in all its movements and moods until he knew it as thoroughly as a creature or thing could be known, and then write about it."

This advice I believe appears in Rilke's "Advice to a Young Poet."