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

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