September 20, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Rich Anderson will not be here today.

News and Jabber

I opened with a quiz regarding lyrics ostensibly of a poem but in reality was a song written by Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCnx2kjk8T4. Turn it up and drift away….

The Current Assignment

Who did it? I told you in an email that I was having a great time of it. Here is Dru Martin’s offering:

The Next Assignment

The next assignment is to write a poem about something abandoned.

I take this from an article I read about ancient Middle-Eastern poetry.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180820-the-6th-century-poems-making-a-comeback

The article discusses the poetry of ruins, losses as it existed in sixth-century and how it is being revived today in a variety of arts, but especially poetry. The introductory paragraph, inserted below, gives an idea of the kind of impetus I see behind the assignment. Still, the assignment is open to any interpretation you find appropriate. The two images below give an old and a new look at abandoned places, each prompting its own reflections.

By Paul Cooper

21 August 2018

“A bleak landscape stretches out in all directions, broken only by wind-hewed formations of sandstone. A lone traveller wanders this hostile, waterless place, looking for shelter. And then on the horizon, a line of ruined walls appears to him like an apparition. In the heat haze, they seem to hover above the ground. As he gets closer, memories of this place come back to him. Broken tents and pegs, abandoned fire pits, the signs of a camp long-since abandoned: this is the place where he once met the love of his life, now lost forever. As he wanders the ruins, he sees deer and goats grazing where he once walked with his beloved. He sees the plants of the desert bursting up through the tent where they once lay together. As the memories of this place rush back to him, the horizon flashes with thunder and the rain finally comes to the land.”

Standing Before the Ruins of Al-Birweh

Like birds, I tread lightly on the earth’s skin

so as not to wake the dead

I shut the door to my emotions to become my other

I don’t feel that I am a stone sighing

as it longs for a cloud

Thus I tread as if I am a tourist

and a correspondent for a foreign newspaper

Of this place I choose the wind

I choose absence to describe it

Absence sat, neutral, around me

The crow saw it

Halt, my two companions!

Let us experience this place our own way:

Here, a sky fell on a stone and bled it

so that anemones would bloom in the spring

(Where is my song now?)

Here, the gazelle broke the glass of my window

so that I would follow it

(So where is my song now?)

Here, the magical morning butterflies carried the path to my school

(So where is my song now?)

Here I saddled a horse to fly to my stars

(So where is my song now?)

I say to my two companions:

Stop so that I may weigh the place

and its emptiness with Jahili odes

full of horses and departure

For every rhyme we will pitch a tent

For every home to be stormed by the wind,

there is a rhyme

But I am the son of my first tale

My milk is warm in my mother’s breast

The bed is swung by two tiny birds

My father is building my tomorrow with his two hands

I didn’t grow up and so did not go to exile

The tourist says: Wait for the dove to finish its cooing!

I say: It knows me and I know it, but the letter has not arrived

The journalist interrupts my secret song:

Do you see that dairy factory behind that strong pine tree?

I say: No, I only see the gazelle at the window

He says: What about the modern roads on the rubble of houses?

I say: No, I don’t see them

I only see the garden under them

and I see the cobweb

He says: Dry your two tears with a handful of fresh grass

I say: That is my other crying over my past

The tourist says: The visit is over

I haven’t found anything to photograph except a ghost

I say: I see absence with all its instruments

I touch it and hear it. It lifts me high

I see the ends of the distant skies

Whenever I die I notice

I am born again and I return

from absence to absence

(Translated by Sinan Antoon, from Darwish`s posthumous collection, La Uridu Li-Hadhihi al-Qasidati an Tantahi (I Don`t Want This Poem to End) (Beirut: Riyad al-Rayyis, 2009).

* Al-Birweh is the village in which Darwish was born on March 13, 1941. It was occupied and depopulated in 1948 by Israeli forces. Its inhabitants became refugees, some in Lebanon, some internally displaced and designated present-absentees. In 1949, a Kibbutz was established. A year later a settlement was built on the lands of al-Birweh. )

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday, October 4, 2018

Other Jabber

September 6, 2018

 

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

I haven’t any word of pending absences, despite the alarming heat.

News and Jabber

I quoted from a Brain Pickin’s email and promised the link and here it is:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/15/louise-bourgeois-solitude/?mc_cid=7bb379bf57&mc_eid=6c170ebd12. It is always interesting to follow the links to other expressions on the theme of the post.

I commend to you this article from the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/sep/02/kate-tempest-observer-new-review-seven-questions-for-seven-poets

It’s always interesting to get other poets’ takes on things. Also, these poets, in their answers cite poems worth looking up. Like this one by Major Jackson

Selling Out

Off from a double at McDonald’s,

no autumnal pinata, no dying leaves

crumbling to bits of colored paper

on the sidewalks only yesterday,

just each breath bursting to explosive fog

in a dead-end alley near Fifth,

where on my knees with my fingers

laced behind my head and a square

barrel 9MM prodding my left temple,

I thought of me in the afterlife.

Only moments before Chris Wilder and I

jogged down Girard to warmth

and the promise of two girls who winked

past an army of food reps, across the ice-bin

and pitched lanes of burgers and square

chips of fish, at us reigning over grills and vats,

lost in a barrage of beepers and timers.

Moments before, we stood in a check

cashing line for our first pay, evidence

of hours spent flipping baskets under

a heat-lamp, during break, with

a motley bunch of mothers on relief,

college students on bad credit, hard-hatted,

day-workers coated in white dust,

the minimum-waged poor from the many

fast-food joints lining Broad,

all of us anxious to enact the power

of our riches – me in the afterlife.

What did it matter that Chris and I

were still in our polyester uniforms

caked with day-old batter, setting out

for an evening of passion marks?

Or that an archipelago of grease-stains

smeared the length of our chests?

Or that we wore GAZELLES, matching

sheepskins and the ushanka although

miles from Leningrad. Truth is I lacked

direction, so that when Chris said,

Let’s first cop some blow, I trailed.

A loose spread of dealers guarded

corners. Runners returned from boarded,

three-floor walk-ups, told us to come back

later, troubled by my schoolboy jitters

and lack of hip. Then a kid, large for the chrome

HUFFY he pedaled, said he had the white stuff,

and came to an alley fronted by an iron

gate on a gentrified street edging

Northern Liberties. So dark, I could

barely make out his shape up front

digging pocket deep. I turned to tell Chris

how the night air glowed dark as soil,

how jangling keys made my neck itch,

how maybe this wasn’t so good an idea,

just when the cold opening of gun-barrel

steel poked my head and Chris’s eyes

widened like two water spills before

he bound away into a future of headphones

and release parties. Me? the afterlife?

Had I ever welcomed back the old neighborhood?

You wonder if a yearning persistent

as the seedcorn maggot tunnels through me?

All I know is that a single dog barked his own

vapor and an emptiness echoed through blasted

shells of rowhomes rising above,

and I could not forget the bare,

fingered-branches lacing a series

of powerlines in silhouette to the moon’s

hushed excursion across the battered

fields of our lives that endless night

of ricocheting fear and shame. No one

survives, no one unclasps his few strands

of gold chains or hums AMAZING GRACE

or pours all his measly bills and coins

into the trembling, free hand of his brother

and survives. No one is forced face down

and waits forty minutes to rise and begin

again his march past the ice-crusted dirt,

without friendship or love, who barely knows

why the cry of the earth sets him in motion,

running even from the season’s string of lights

flashing its pathetic shot at cheer — to arrive

here where the page is blank, an afterlife.

And this one;

A Cedary Fragrance

Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water –

Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,

but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.


by Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2001

The Current Assignment

Who did it? Any comments on the ease/difficulty of the assignment? I tried making prose poems of poems I had already written. It didn’t work very well. I did manage a couple of decent things. I learned that the language still makes the difference, that the prose poem for all its prosiness still needs the elevated language we associate with poetry.

The Next Assignment

Any suggestions for the next assignment? I was thinking of a store poem, written as if you were a store. Here is a quotation from the online article I took the idea from:

The Assignment:  Create the store of your life.  What does this mean?  Consider this!  If your life and your personality could be represented by a store, what would it look like?  What would you sell in your store?  Who would be your customers?  Where would your store be located, and what would it be called?  What would the inside and outside of your store look like?  What would you do in your store?  Use the "store" as a metaphor for your character and personality.

And here is the link to the article: https://www.bespokeclassroom.com/blog/2017/7/23/beginning-the-year-with-creative-writing

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on September 20, 2018. Bring a friend.

Other Jabber