December 19, 2019

Welcome

News and Jabber

Here's a link to Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales." 

enjoy it!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv4-sgFw3Go. And here's a link to the text:

http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/xmas.html

While looking for something to chat about today, I decided to see what August Kleinzahler was up to. I've been a fan of his for years despite rarely reading whatever is available online, came across him quite by accident some thirty years ago. His language is always enchanting, full of good stuff. A quotation from wikipedia:

Kleinzahler is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Strange Hours Travelers Keep and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. He has also published a non-fiction work, Cutty, One Rock (Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained). Allen Ginsberg commented: "August Kleinzahler's verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent and rare - that quality of 'chiseled' verse memorable in Basil Bunting's and Ezra Pound's work. A loner, a genius."[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kleinzahler

And so, I come to this poem, one of those I wish I were good enough to write myself:

Watching Dogwood Blossoms Fall In A Parking Lot Off Route 46

Dogwood blossoms drift down at evening

            as semis pound past Phoenix Seafood

and the Savarin plant, west to the Turnpike,

            Paterson or hills beyond.

The adulterated, pearly light and bleak perfume

            of benzene and exhaust

make this solitary tree and the last of its bloom

             as stirring somehow after another day

at the hospital with Mother and the ashen old ladies

             lost to TV reruns flickering overhead

as that shower of peach blossoms Tu Fu watched

              fall on the riverbank

from the shadows of the Jade Pavilion,

              while ghosts and the music

of yellow orioles found out the seam of him

              and slowly cut along it. 

by August Kleinzahler, from Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, 2008

Who knows about Basil Bunting? He's more than worth a look.

Today's Assignment

I said in my last email that I had written several poems, none of them useful as the assignment. I made another effort that wasn't quite as bad as the others. Anyone else have a comment about it?

Next Assignment

The next assignment is to write a poem about something you would never, never, ever do. Or, about something you would never, never, ever do again. Or both.

Next Meeting

The next meeting is on Thursday, January 2, 2020.

December 5, 2019

Welcome

I have no information regarding absentees today

News and Jabber

I incude this entire article about Clive James because you may not be able to access it in The Guardian online:

Telegraph  Culture  Books  Authors

Clive James’s true gift to us was his magnificent poetry

JAKE KERRIDGE

Follow 1 DECEMBER 2019 • 8:00AM

Save

2

The critic Clive James, who has died at the age of 80, pictured in 2011

The critic Clive James, who has died at the age of 80, pictured in 2011 CREDIT: ANDREW CROWLEY FOR DT ARTS

For most of his dazzling career, Clive James’s besotted audience thought of him as, in The New Yorker’s phrase, “a brilliant bunch of guys”: chat show host, documentary maker, television critic, literary essayist, novelist and author of hilarious, not entirely truthful volumes of autobiography. Only in his last decade (he died last Sunday having been diagnosed with leukaemia in 2010) could we come to focus on him in one role, the one that came to mean the most to him: poet.

In 2014 he wrote a poem, “Japanese Maple”, in which he vowed to live long enough to see the new maple tree in his garden “turn to flame” in the autumn. Happily, he defied his doctors’ prognosis for several years; so long, indeed, that to his embarrassment the tree predeceased him.

But “Japanese Maple” went viral, cementing his late reputation as a brilliant poet of mortality. Even those of us who loved him in his earlier incarnations could apply Shakespeare’s words to him: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

My first encounter with James’s poetry was reading his collection Other Passports as a teenager: not the sort of poetry book that impresses girls, but I plucked it off the school library shelf because I thought he was brilliant on the telly and I needed a laugh. It has its serious moments but it mostly comprises parodies, squibs, lampoons and witty Auden-esque verse letters; most of the lines that have stayed with me are too rude to quote in a family newspaper. Back then, his most famous poem was that gleeful expression of writerly schadenfreude, The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered. (“His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one/ With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs.”)

When he published his collected poems in 2003, the volume was entitled The Book of My Enemy: not just in reference to his biggest poetic hit, but also because, as he put it, “The urge to write in verse has always been my financial enemy, and I have always done my best to resist it… I had a family to feed, and prose paid.” But having made his pile and retired from television at the turn of the millennium, he started to spend more time on verse, and to go deeper.

Like his poetic masters Auden and Larkin, James’s favoured method was to deploy a vigorously demotic vocabulary in a strict, old-fashioned verse form. (You could say of him what he said of Larkin: that he had “a romantic sensibility classically disciplined”.) Although his poems were formally structured, his aim was to make them sound like somebody talking – like Clive James talking. He developed a distinctive, accessible voice, the verse equivalent of the robust no-nonsense Aussie voice of his journalism.

This was honed on blokeish poems such as “Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini”, but was flexible enough to work well when he began to embark on such pieces of poetic self-examination as “Son of a Soldier”, in which he wrote about the damaging effect of his father’s death when he was a child, lamenting: “First for the hurt I had done to those I loved,/ Then for myself, for what had been done to me/ In the beginning, to make my heart so cold.”

In his last illness-plagued decade he published a book-length poem called The River in the Sky, four new collections of poetry and a 500-page verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (as well as several non-poetic books). His earlier, pyrotechnic satires already need to be peppered with footnotes to explain the references, but a late poem like “Sentenced to Life”, in which he thinks about his native Australia and the fact he is too sick ever to return there (“The sky is overcast/ Here in the English autumn, but my mind/ Basks in the light I never left behind”) will chime with anybody too far from home.

The obituaries focused on his work in television and journalism, but that will fade from the collective memory. It is in these universal late poems that he will live on.

Japanese Maple

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that.That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

© Clive James, 2014

“ The poet is a lifer. Anyone who gets into the game will soon start wishing that there was a version of it with lower stakes, but there isn't. - Clive James ”

The current assignment

Who did it? Any difficulties, comments, etc.

Dru's poem:

Dru Martin	Wed, Dec 4, 9:43 PM (10 hours ago)
to Lisa, MARLOU, Mary, Rich, Rochelle, Salmonier@aol.com, Trish, Barbara, me, Gerard

Hi all.

Hope everyone is doing well.

absence

i was there in the moment

so much i was lost

in the magnetic molton center

of the middle of the night

in the darkest of forests

with no moon but the path

was still traversable 

by the faint wanderings

of the dead stars

millions of miles away

i was there when i needed to be

holding on to the tail

of the ether that once

told me it loved me

i was in the drivers seat

of the bus when all 

the passengers would not be still

as we slid and danced

across the danger to 

land in a pile of rock

so many of these moments

and i was there for them

so much so that everything else faded

and now

all these years on

that magnification somehow

feels like an absence

an absence of everything else outside that moment

just like the inverse flash on your eyes

when you quickly turn out the light

there for a branded moment

upon the eyes

but slowly fading

Hope you have a great meeting!

Dru

salmonier@aol.com	8:15 AM (23 minutes ago)
to me, gcoulombe92, lhharris96, marlounewkirk, marymary3, andersonrich8, rwbernold, tg49at, drudmartin, faylene747

Got a contagious cold, so will have to miss. Here's what I'd written:

Remainders

 

I am refigured by the missing-

hard scarred by their death,

wounded by their departure,

blotched by my disregard.

 

Grafted relatives and friends,

often greatly loved,

grow over burns

visible through new skin.

 

My changing self-appearance

Comes with aging realization

That I too will be numbered

Among the missing.

From Gerard:

From my father’s mouth

A poem about what I missed out on when I was absent

 

I was nearly always  absent when my father spoke

In mystical ways; he was an introvert who never 

Spoke unless someone pressed his “belly-button.” 

Father was  the toy child one held on one’s knee,

The one played like a boy-doll whose belly button,

of a sudden, pressed, was heard the noise of a click.

And,  out  came  the magical lilt of a remembrance.

 

But, all the while, from birth to death, my father 

Worked second shift as a warp tier in a textile mill

For nearly all of his life, excepting all of the parts

He had had on  City Hall’s  Stage as a young man. 

 

On those occasions, when in the unique company 

Of his three living brothers, father entertained 

The company with stories  from his  bygone days.

He gesticulated as an autocrat, and pronounced 

Things both magical and heretical, as a prophet.

He spoke in elevated tones and with impressive

Elan, until, concluding, he tumbled into his chair,

 

Perhaps drunk with the memories he had imbibed,

Or, more likely, exhausted from his performance.

(C)Coulombe.11-22-19

What did others miss out on? Was it good or bad?

 

Had I missed out on something 

That was neither good nor bad,

There had to have been a reason,

One that would make neither 

Those who went or stayed away

Any happier or sadder, today.

I know, to my personal dismay,

I never had any thought to allay.

 

Over time there have been  absences

That went unexplained or unexcused;

Much of the time, who gave a damn?

 

Others, no less, hadn’t given a care,

All the while, when I wasn’t there.

Well, maybe someone did miss me.

A woman I had met once over coffee.

She had invited me to a film soiree,

And I had said to her, “I will see.”

 

Once, I met a very pretty divorcee

Who invited me over for cake and tea .

The cake was chocolate, my favorite, 

Unfortunately, I was the one to grab it. 

And it flew up in the air, topsy-turvy.

As recompense for how she had tried

To get me to bed her, I stiffed my pride 

Into her, and quickly found a lock box

On her crotch, messaged, “out-foxed.”

The next assignment

Write a poem about the sound of snow.

The next meeting

Will be on Thursday, December 19, 2019.

November 21, 2019

1. News

I often mention poetry of witness. Nelson Mandela said of, Carolyn Forche's book Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness,  “Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality—thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting is itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice. It bears witness to the evil we would prefer to forget, but never can—and never should.” (The sjambok or litupa is a heavy leather whip. It is traditionally made from an adult hippopotamus or rhinoceros hide, but is also commonly made out of plastic. A strip of the animal's hide is cut and carved into a strip 0.9 to 1.5 metres long, tapering from about 25 mm thick at the handle to about 10 mm at the tip. Wikipedia)

I came across an article about Martin Espada appearing at Providence College. The quotation below, from the article, I found worth pondering:

"After reading “Letter to My Father,” a student in the audience asked how one tackles such tough subjects in regards to losing a love one. Espada told her, “Don’t write, type. Trust those instincts. Trust those hands.” He continued, “Your writing will console others. It may not console you but others and that’s extraordinary.”

I've long been a fan of Martin Espada; we've met and he even answers my emails, most recently earlier this year when I sent him a poem I wrote after reading a poem of his about his son. He is a wonderful poet of witness, poet of any sort, reader, and advocate. He remains worth tracking down. In the link below, you can listen to him read "Letter to My Father." his website also offers a series of clips and some poems: http://www.martinespada.net. 

Espada also read a poem titled "Floaters":

Floaters

BY MARTÍN ESPADA

Ok, I’m gonna go ahead and ask ... have ya’ll ever seen floaters this clean. I’m

not trying to be an a$$ but I HAVE NEVER SEEN FLOATERS LIKE THIS,

could this be another edited photo. We’ve all seen the dems and liberal parties

do some pretty sick things.

—Anonymous post, “I’m 10-15” Border Patrol Facebook group

Like a beer bottle thrown into the river by a boy too drunk to cry,

like the shard of a Styrofoam cup drained of coffee brown as the river,

like the plank of a fishing boat broken in half by the river, the dead float.

And the dead have a name: floaters, say the men of the Border Patrol,

keeping watch all night by the river, hearts pumping coffee as they say

the word floaters, soft as a bubble, hard as a shoe as it nudges the body,

to see if it breathes, to see if it moans, to see if it sits up and speaks.

And the dead have names, a feast day parade of names, names that

dress all in red, names that twirl skirts, names that blow whistles,

names that shake rattles, names that sing in praise of the saints:

Say Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez. Say Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos.

See how they rise off the tongue, the calling of bird to bird somewhere

in the trees above our heads, trilling in the dark heart of the leaves.

Say what we know of them now they are dead: Óscar slapped dough

for pizza with oven-blistered fingers. Daughter Valeria sang, banging

a toy guitar. He slipped free of the apron he wore in the blast of the oven,

sold the motorcycle he would kick till it sputtered to life, counted off

pesos for the journey across the river, and the last of his twenty-five

years, and the last of her twenty-three months. There is another name

that beats its wings in the heart of the trees: Say Tania Vanessa Ávalos,

Óscar’s wife and Valeria’s mother, the witness stumbling along the river.

Now their names rise off her tongue: Say Óscar y Valeria. He swam

from Matamoros across to Brownsville, the girl slung around his neck,

stood her in the weeds on the Texas side of the river, swore to return

with her mother in hand, turning his back as fathers do who later say:

I turned around and she was gone. In the time it takes for a bird to hop

from branch to branch, Valeria jumped in the river after her father.

Maybe he called out her name as he swept her up from the river;

maybe the river drowned out his voice as the water swept them away.

Tania called out the names of the saints, but the saints drowsed

in the stupor of birds in the dark, their cages covered with blankets.

The men on patrol would never hear their pleas for asylum, watching

for floaters, hearts pumping coffee all night on the Texas side of the river.

No one, they say, had ever seen floaters so clean: Óscar’s black shirt

yanked up to the armpits, Valeria’s arm slung around her father’s

neck even after the light left her eyes, both face down in the weeds,

back on the Mexican side of the river. Another edited photo: See how

her head disappears in his shirt, the waterlogged diaper bunched

in her pants, the blue of the blue cans. The radio warned us about

the crisis actors we see at one school shooting after another; the man

called Óscar will breathe, sit up, speak, tug the black shirt over

his head, shower off the mud and shake hands with the photographer.

Yet, the floaters did not float down the Río Grande like Olympians

showing off the backstroke, nor did their souls float up to Dallas,

land of rumored jobs and a president shot in the head as he waved

from his motorcade. No bubbles rose from their breath in the mud,

light as the iridescent circles of soap that would fascinate a two-year-old.

And the dead still have names, names that sing in praise of the saints,

names that flower in blossoms of white, a cortege of names dressed

all in black, trailing the coffins to the cemetery. Carve their names

in headlines and gravestones they would never know in the kitchens

of this cacophonous world. Enter their names in the book of names.

Say Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez; say Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos.

Bury them in a corner of the cemetery named for the sainted archbishop

of the poor, shot in the heart saying mass, bullets bought by the taxes

I paid when I worked as a bouncer and fractured my hand forty years

ago, and bumper stickers read: El Salvador Is Spanish for Vietnam.

When the last bubble of breath escapes the body, may the men

who speak of floaters, who have never seen floaters this clean,

float through the clouds to the heavens, where they paddle the air

as they wait for the saint who flips through the keys on his ring

like a drowsy janitor, till he fingers the key that turns the lock and shuts

the gate on their babble-tongued faces, and they plunge back to earth,

a shower of hailstones pelting the river, the Mexican side of the river.

Source: Poetry (November 2019)

1. BTW

You can read "Letter to My Father" and hear Espada read it here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/146049/letter-to-my-father.

2. This is

a wonderful example of  poetry of witness, something Espada has favored in many of his books and  poems.

I have long been a fan of Espada, have met, talked, emailed on occasion. He is worth seeking out and does readings in the region.

2. Today's Assignment

Who did it? Any comments? Hard? Easy? Fun?

3. The next assignment

The next assignment is to write a poem about a place, event, time when you were absent for some reason. What did you miss out on? What did others miss out on? Was it good, bad?

4. The next meeting

December 5, 2019

5. Other?