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.