For item about ars poetica assignment
Poets’ Roundtable
Welcome
Great to be here.
News and Jabber
The above link will take you to an NPR interview with Robert Pinsky and Brian Turner, both poets, Turner a veteran. Robert Pinsky has been around a long time and is worth looking up. Check out the 22 minute segment.
This link will take you to the Wikipedia page of Ursula Le Guin. She worked in a lot of fantasy and fiction but at the end of her life turned out a book of poems titled So Far So Good. Here are three of her poems from that book. I especially like the opening lines of the second.
Three New Poems by Ursula Le Guin
From her posthumous book, So Far So Good, the literary icon on time, aging, and memory
Welcome to Recommended Reading’s new Monday Commuter, our home for poetry, flash, graphic, and experimental narrative.
Flying Fox (Fruit Bat), James Reed
Issue №32
Bats
i
When I used to see bats flying
in the California twilight
their intricate zigzag voices
went flickering with them
but they fell silent with the years
and without that tiny sonar static
to see them flicker
in and out of being
is a kind of blindness
ii
In the twilight in my dream
a little bat was flying
and awakening I wondered
if the bat that I remembered
flying in the twilight
of the dream of California
was in California or the dream.
Ancestry
I am such a long way from my ancestors now
in my extreme old age that I feel more one of them
than their descendant. Time comes round
in a bodily way I do not understand. Age undoes itself
and plays the Ouroboros. I the only daughter
have always been one of the tiny grandmothers,
laughing at everything, uncomprehending,
incomprehensible.
Looking Back
Remember me before I was a heap of salt,
the laughing child who seldom did
as she was told or came when she was called,
the merry girl who became Lot’s bride,
the happy woman who loved her wicked city.
Do not remember me with pity.
I saw you plodding on ahead
into the desert of your pitiless faith.
Those springs are dry, that earth is dead.
I looked back, not forward, into death.
Forgiving rains dissolve me, and I come
still disobedient, still happy, home.
About the Author
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929–2018) was a celebrated and beloved author of 21 novels, 11 volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, 12 children’s books, six volumes of poetry and four of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebulas, seven Hugos, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.
The Current Assignment
Wh did it? Any comments regarding the process?
The Next Assignment
The above link will take you to a list of poems reagarding ars poetica, which means "the art of poetry." The poems vary in title and style. Here is a segment from Walt Whitman:
The Indications [excerpt]
Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892
The words of the true poems give you more than poems,
They give you to form for yourself, poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, romances, and everything else,
They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes,
They do not seek beauty—they are sought,
Forever touching them, or close upon them, follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick.
They prepare for death—yet are they not the finish, but rather the outset,
They bring none to his or her terminus, or to be content and full;
Whom they take, they take into space, to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings,
To launch off with absolute faith—to sweep through the ceaseless rings, and never be quiet again.
So the assignment is to write your own ars poetica.
The Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday, December 6, 2018.
