October 18, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Rich Anderson will not be here today. I have no other word on absentees. Today is National Chocolate Cupcake Day and National No Beard Day. Celebrate accordingly.

News and Jabber

We're going to do a "blackout exercise" called such because it usually asks you to black out the words you are not going to use. Today we'll just circle the words that will go into our poems. So, take the  page I gave you and circle (or crossout) the words to use or not use in the  poem that you are going to make from the words in the article.

WHO WAS THE FIRST RAPPER? RUSSIA CLAIMS SOVIET POET INVENTED RAP MUSIC

BY TOM O'CONNOR ON 10/16/18 AT 1:56 PM

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WORLD

Russia's minister of culture has claimed that one of his country's most famous poets invented rap music and that the genre may become a Russian form of art in the future.

Vladimir Mayakovsky was an early 20th-century artist who became famous for his futurist style, satirical attacks on the bourgeoisie and eager support for the Bolshevik Revolution that swept his country in 1917. He grew critical of communist rule under Joseph Stalin and later took his own life in 1930 at the young age of 36, but his deeply influential works have lived on in Russian society.

Addressing the Valdai Discussion Club on Tuesday, Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky said that he grew frustrated with his son's fascination with rap and, after studying it himself, proclaimed that "Mayakovsky was the first rapper," according to the Interfax news agency.

Medinsky said that because "Russian culture is exceptionally open, tolerant, responsive, receptive to everything foreign," future generations may "soon be saying that rap is a Russian form of art. It may have originated in America, but it developed further here."

After explaining his origin of rap theory to his son, Medinsky said his son went to school and "recounted everything to the class, then they read Mayakovsky and agreed."

Mayakovsky's repertoire crossed not only genres but also platforms. A renowned poet, artist, playwright and actor, his work was embraced by the Soviet Union in spite of his disillusionment under Stalin and long after his suicide. In a 1993 Newsweek article, Mayakovsky's works were described as "a precursor to performance art, punk and even rap" and it was said that Stalin outlawed failing to appreciate the artist.

As far as rap and hip hop goes, most trace the music form's roots back to the Bronx, New York City in the early 1970s and its commercial popularity the following decade to the 1979 hit "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang. A 1999 publication entitled Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists, gave DJ Kool Herc the title of first hip hop DJ, with his first party taking place at the now-famous 1520 Sedgwick Avenue apartment building in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx in 1973.

Starting out as a largely underground movement pioneered by the African-American community, rap and its sister genres hip-hop and R&B officially became the most popular music forms of music in the United States last year, according to a Nielsen Music report.

Medinsky is not the first to propose an alternative birthplace for rap, however. University of New Mexico professor Ferenc Szasz has argued that the true inventors of the award-winning genre were the medieval Scots practicing the art of "flyting," a poetic exchange of insults. The academic claimed the African-American community was first exposed to this ritual by Scottish slave owners in the United States, as he recounted to The Telegraph in 2008.

To His Beloved Self, The Author Dedicates These Lines

Some words.
Heavy as a blow.
'Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's- to God what is God's.'
And one
such as I,
where shall I squeeze in?
Where is my den?

If only I were
small
as the great Pacific -
I'd stand up on the waves' tiptoes
and caress the moon with my tides.
Where am I to find a beloved
equal to myself?
Such a woman has no place in the tiny heavens!

If only I were poor!
As a billionaire!
What's money to the soul?
There's an insatiable thief in mine.
All the gold in California couldn't feed
the unbridled horde of my desires.

If I could only be as tongue-tied
as Dante
or Petrarch!
Turn my soul's fire on one woman!
Make it smolder out in verse!
My words
and my love-
are a triumphal arch:
the beloveds of all ages
would pass through it gloriously,
without a trace.

If only I were
quiet
as thunder-
I would whimper
and, trembling, embrace earth's decrepit cloister.
If I outroar in an enormous voice
with all the power of thunder-
comets will wring their burning hands,
and fling themselves down in despair.

I would crack open nights with my eye's ray,
if only I were
dim as the sun!
I so need
to slake with my shining
the sunken bosom of the earth!

I will pass by,
dragging my giant-love.
In what
delirious
feverish night,
by what Goliaths was I conceived-
so big
and so useless? 

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

The Current Assignment

I found this interesting in that the lies I could reveal weren't very interesting. Also, as I wrote, I discovered that lies, the good ones, came in layers if not bunches. Apparently lying is not only easy but can get exceedingly complex. As Veronica Roth says, "Lies require commitment."    At any rate, I wrote a lot about truth and lies and learned the difficulty of correcting a lie so that it reveals the right truth.

Dru's poem:

Hi all. 

Hope everyone is doing well. 

Here is my entry for the assignment...

it’ll be ok

i knew it wasn’t right

but it was all i had

sitting by his side

we all knew it wouldn’t be ok

but the mask it what we’re used to

its a new normal on the other side

hypnotized, we do anything we can to avoid a world without

but its inevitable

maybe it’ll be ok

but it’ll never be the same

The Next Assignment

Write a poem re what your body would tell you if it could talk. 

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday, November 1, 2018

Other Jabber

For the blackout exercise, I used the following excerpt

An excerpt from

Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

   

"A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living. . . . Norman Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic."—from New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992

"An astonishing book. In compelling language, both homely and elegant, Young Men and Fire miraculously combines a fascinating primer on fires and firefighting, a powerful, breathtakingly real reconstruction of a tragedy, and a meditation on writing, grief and human character.... Maclean's last book will stir your heart and haunt your memory."—Timothy Foote, USA Today

"Young Men and Fire is a somber and poetic retelling of a tragic event. It is the pinnacle of smokejumping literature and a classic work of 20th-century nonfiction."—John Holkeboer, The Wall Street Journal

"Beautiful.... A dark American idyll of which the language can be proud."—Robert M. Adams, The New York Review of Books

Copyright

 

Then Dodge saw it. Rumsey and Sallee didn't, and probably none of the rest of the crew did either. Dodge was thirty-three and foreman and was supposed to see; he was in front where he could see. Besides, he hadn't liked what he had seen when he looked down the canyon after he and Harrison had returned to the landing area to get something to eat, so his seeing powers were doubly on the alert. Rumsey and Sallee were young and they were crew and were carrying tools and rubbernecking at the fire across the gulch. Dodge takes only a few words to say what the "it" was he saw next: "We continued down the canyon for approximately five minutes before I could see that the fire had crossed Mann Gulch and was coming up the ridge toward us."

Neither Rumsey nor Sallee could see the fire that was now on their side of the gulch, but both could see smoke coming toward them over a hogback directly in front. As for the main fire across the gulch, it still looked about the same to them, "confined to the upper third of the slope."

At the Review, Dodge estimated they had a 150- to 200-yard head start on the fire coming at them on the north side of the gulch. He immediately reversed direction and started back up the canyon, angling toward the top of the ridge on a steep grade. When asked why he didn't go straight for the top there and then, he answered that the ground was too rocky and steep and the fire was coming too fast to dare to go at right angles to it.

You may ask yourself how it was that of the crew only Rumsey and Sallee survived. If you had known ahead of time that only two would survive, you probably never would have picked these two—they were first-year jumpers, this was the first fire they had ever jumped on, Sallee was one year younger than the minimum age, and around the base they were known as roommates who had a pretty good time for themselves. They both became big operators in the world of the woods and prairies, and part of this story will be to find them and ask them why they think they alone survived, but even if ultimately your answer or theirs seems incomplete, this seems a good place to start asking the question. In their statements soon after the fire, both say that the moment Dodge reversed the route of the crew they became alarmed, for, even if they couldn't see the fire, Dodge's order was to run from one. They reacted in seconds or less. They had been traveling at the end of the line because they were carrying unsheathed saws. When the head of the line started its switchback, Rumsey and Sallee left their positions at the end of the line, put on extra speed, and headed straight uphill, connecting with the front of the line to drop into it right behind Dodge.

They were all traveling at top speed, all except Navon. He was stopping to take snapshots.

The world was getting faster, smaller, and louder, so much faster that for the first time there are random differences among the survivors about how far apart things were. Dodge says it wasn't until one thousand to fifteen hundred feet after the crew had changed directions that he gave the order for the heavy tools to be dropped. Sallee says it was only two hundred yards, and Rumsey can remember. Whether they had traveled five hundred yards or two hundred yards, the new fire coming up the gulch toward them was coming faster than they had been going. Sallee says, "By the time we dropped our packs and tools the fire was probably not much over a hundred yards behind us, and it seemed to me that it was getting ahead of us both above and below." If the fire was only a hundred yards behind now it had gained a lot of ground on them since they had reversed directions, and Rumsey says he could never remember going faster in his life than he had for the last five hundred yards.

October 4, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

October 4, 2018

Welcome

What day is today? National Poetry Day in England and Ireland. Here it is National Vodka Day, celebrated at least since 2009. (It is also National Taco Day and National Golf Lovers Day.)

We've heard that Ed will not be in today. 

I had an interesting time since our last meeting, the best part of which was in Cape Cod for eight days, ending Tuesday. That is why I have communicated so little running up to this meeting. One of the high points was my annual/semi-annual trip to Tims's Used Books in Provincetown. I gave up buying books several years ago when I realized my reading list is lengthier than my life is likely to be. Nonetheless, I was on the hunt of a cheap copy of DAnte's Inferno, which I found. Better than that was the discovery of Making Certain It Goes On, the collected poems of Richard Hugo. You'll remember him as the author of The Triggering Town, a book of essays on writing, one of my favorite guides. It turns out that Hugo was not only a wonderful poet but he knew lots of significant poets and dedicated many poems to them. He also studied under Theodor Roethke, among others. So, I bought both books and have been entranced since, using phrases from Hugo to begin riffs of my own.

Read "Graves" by Richard Hugo, p.355. The poem fits both the season and the theme of today's assignment.

Before vacationing, I wrote extensively about ruins of sorts, a process enhanced by my renewing contact with a childhood friend who is an accomplished amateur astronomer and who sent me a photograph he took of a collapsed star (read ruined) called, unpretentiously, M97. He and it show up in a few stanzas.

News and Jabber

National Poetry Day is a British campaign to promote poetry, including public performances. National Poetry Day was founded in 1994 by William Sieghart. It takes place annually in the UK and Ireland on a Thursday in late September/early October.

In a run-up to an article about National Poetry Day I found a recommendation of an anthology of American poets, a review of which I provide here:

The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

Stephen Burt. Belknap, $27.95 (410p) ISBN 978-0-674-73787-7

Poet and critic Burt’s (Belmont) ambitious anthology of recent poems by American authors, from 1981 to 2015, creates a coherent body of work out of the vast landscape of recent American poetry. Burt’s 60 selections are eclectic, mingling instantly recognizable names (John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich) with newer talents (Lucia Perillo, Claudia Rankine.) His short reflections don’t offer close reading so much as thorough contextual grounding, lingering more on biography, traditions, influences, criticism, and social critique than on form, scansion, and imagery. Burt’s many ways of looking at a poem will inspire new students and accomplished poets, especially as many of his meditations circle the question of what poetry does, or should do: making readers pay attention, ask questions, and experience new things. Burt’s formidable breadth of knowledge about the practice of poetry, from Virgil up to 2015, allows him to make nimble connections among authors and establish an ars poetica for current American lyric poetry, an impressive feat given the diverse selection just within this book, in which “the recondite and the demotic, the accessible and the challenging, mingle.” (Sept.)

The Current Assignment

As indicated, I had quite a time with this assignment. Life conspires that way sometimes. I've been writing quite a lot for someone who usually writes quite a lot and have even found success writing while on vacation, something I used to fail at and urged others not to try. The poems I wrote range in length from eight lines to several pages and are all somewhat intertwined. It seems my ruins know no bounds.

The Next Assignment

Write a poem about the biggest lie you ever told.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on October 18, 2018.

Other Jabber

Annually, I read Keats's "Ode to Autumn"

To Autumn 

BY JOHN KEATS

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? 

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find 

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, 

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; 

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, 

   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: 

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep 

   Steady thy laden head across a brook; 

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, 

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? 

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— 

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, 

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; 

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft 

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; 

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; 

   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft 

   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; 

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.