May 17, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

News and Jabber

I just discovered the poet Elizabeth Jennings. How about a poet who sold 50,000 copies of her collected poems? Or who has received nearly every award available in England? A formalist. A Catholic. Late 20th century. I had never heard of her. Meanwhile, she remains one of the greats in England. Check out this article: 

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/05/clarify-me-please-god-of-the-galaxies.

And this poem:

Notice, especially, the form, the line breaks, the sentence breaks, the stanza breaks. How do they coincide? What else can you say about this poem? I think it lends itself to discussion. Read the article although it is lenghthy. It was written by Dana Gioia, an author worth checking out too. Not surprisingly he is often a formalist.

Now another excerpt:

I was caused for some reason to return to Alan Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework,” a reading list.

"Argh, you're all amateurs in a professional universe!" roared Allen Ginsberg to a young class of aspiring poets in 1977 at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Their offense? Most of the students had failed to register for meditation instruction. The story comes to us from Steve Silberman, who was then a 19-year-old student in that classroom and a recipient of Ginsberg’s genius that summer.

Only three years earlier, in 1974, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman launched the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), in Boulder, Colorado. The Institute—founded by Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche—was modeled on ancient Buddhist learning centers in India and described by Waldman and poet Andrew Schelling as “part monastery, part college, part convention hall or alchemist’s lab.”

Here is his list:

The Current Assignment

Who did it? Any difficulties, comments, etc.?

Here is Dru Martin’s contribution:

• Boy howdy 

• Hope all is well with you and yours. 

• This might not fit the assignment to a T, but I feel like it fits in there ok. 

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• hes got all the time in the world

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• he walks aimlessly into tomorrow

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• with fresh tread

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• palatial whims

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• and wind in his hair

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• his curiosity drives him

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• there is no free time

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• he captures fireflies in his hands

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• the future continues

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• unplanned

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• the fireflies die

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• his instinct lies

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• time is money

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• these breaths shall not go wasted

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• he pleads to an empty audience

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• he sits under the fig
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• smiling at strangers with his eyes closed

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• despite the writhing pain

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• time is not linear

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• it is merely our marker in the sand

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• he has put away childish things

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• like heroes and pleasure

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• and the endless anxiety

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• now there is only now

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• time to stop thinking about time

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• Sorry about the huge text. It happens to be a bi-product of copying and pasting on my phone. Hope you all have a good meeting. Please give my best to the group. 

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The Next Assignment

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on June 7, 2018.

Other Jabber

Another discovery is the poet Isaac Rosenberg, someone I have never heard of. Here is a short article about him:

How a Great English Poet Found His Artistic and Jewish Identity in the Trenches

Last month saw the 100th anniversary of the death of Isaac Rosenberg, considered by many to be the greatest English poet of World War I. Robert Philpot describes the career of this child of impoverished Russian Jewish immigrants, whose formal education was interrupted when he was fourteen years old so that he could begin an apprenticeship as an engraver:

Soon after his apprenticeship ended in 1911, Rosenberg got a lucky break: a chance meeting while he was sketching at the [British] National Gallery led to his introduction to three wealthy Jewish women, who were sufficiently impressed with the young man to offer to pay his fees at the Slade School of Fine Art. Over the next three years, Rosenberg studied at the prestigious art school alongside later renowned artists Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, David Bomberg, and Stanley Spencer. With Gertler and Bomberg, Rosenberg became part of a loosely knit group of young Jewish artists and writers who were to become known as the Whitechapel boys [after the London immigrant neighborhood of the same name]. . . . It was, however, poetry that he was increasingly drawn toward, and for which he is now primarily remembered. . . .

In October 1915, [when the war was already in its second year], Rosenberg made the fateful decision to join the army. Poverty, not patriotism, motivated his decision—in particular, the knowledge that his mother would receive a separation allowance. . . .

It was therefore the cruelest of ironies that Rosenberg—“an anti-hero in soldier’s uniform,” in the words of the Irish poet Gerald Dawe—discovered his true voice in the poems which he wrote in the trenches. . . . Rosenberg labored in extreme conditions. He wrote on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on, composing endless drafts and sending them home for his sister to type up. At times, the frustrated army censors barred him from dispatching any more. . . .

The experience [in the war], wrote [the literary scholar Jon] Stallworthy, “made him more conscious of the Jewishness that had not been particularly important to him before,” and perhaps accounts for works such as “Moses” and “The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Hordes.” Shortly before his death [while on patrol in April 1918], Rosenberg put in for a transfer to join the Jewish Battalion fighting in Mesopotamia.

And here is a poem:

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is. 

And though we have our lives, we know 

What sinister threat lies there. 

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know 

This poison-blasted track opens on our camp - 

On a little safe sleep. 

But hark! joy - joy - strange joy. 

Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks. 

Music showering our upturned list’ning faces. 

Death could drop from the dark 

As easily as song - 

But song only dropped, 

Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand 

By dangerous tides, 

Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there, 

Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 

Isaac Rosenberg

Here is a link to more of his work:

https://www.poemhunter.com/isaac-rosenberg/

I urge you to read “Dead Man’s Dump.”