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