Poets’ Roundtable
Welcome
Ardeth is down with a cold and will not be here today. She did send a poem which most of you have probably seen and which we will read as we will Dru's submission as well. Welcome to an honored guest today.
News and Jabber
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/14/a-star-is-born-ts-eliot-prize-goes-to-hannah-sullivans-debut This link will take you to the Guardian article about this year's winner of the TS Eliot prize, Hannah Sullivan. Her details are in the article along with names of four other contenders for the prize. I urge you to check out all the poets mentioned. We should always be reading other poets, known and unknown.
Here is an excerpt ferom the winning book:
The following is extracted from Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection, Three Poems, which was announced the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.
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All summer the Park smelled of cloves and it was dying.
Now it is Labor Day and you have been sleeping through a rainstorm,
Half aware of the sewage and frying peanut oil and the ozone
Rising in the morning heat, and the sound of your roommate hooking the chain,
Flipping ice cubes into a brandy balloon, pouring juice over them,
Ruby Sanguinello, till they giggle, popping their skins. The freezer throbs.
He has been beating a man he met on Craigslist, he has been dreaming:
Old New York, a James novel, a Greenwich Village Christmas,
A certain kind of frost in the Meatpacking District, and the smell of the carcasses
Dull with the tang of freezing blood beside the skip of the Hudson wind.
You have been thinking of the building opposite at night, the lights
Going off one by one, a diminished Mondrian, one ochre square
Where a woman undresses for the city, stroking her puffy thighs.
You hear him talking on the phone about you, his ‘petite innocente’.
All summer you have been eating peaches from the greenmarket.
Overripe in September they need to rest in the icebox, sitting with their bruises.
All summer you have been dreaming of Fall and its brittle confection of branches.
Now it is Labor Day and you have been sleeping through a rainstorm,
Half aware of the sewage and frying peanut oil and the ozone
Rising in the morning heat, and the sound of your roommate hooking the chain,
Flipping ice cubes into a brandy balloon, pouring juice over them,
Ruby Sanguinello, till they giggle, popping their skins. The freezer throbs.
He has been beating a man he met on Craigslist, he has been dreaming:
Old New York, a James novel, a Greenwich Village Christmas,
A certain kind of frost in the Meatpacking District, and the smell of the carcasses
Dull with the tang of freezing blood beside the skip of the Hudson wind.
You have been thinking of the building opposite at night, the lights
Going off one by one, a diminished Mondrian, one ochre square
Where a woman undresses for the city, stroking her puffy thighs.
You hear him talking on the phone about you, his ‘petite innocente’.
All summer you have been eating peaches from the greenmarket.
Overripe in September they need to rest in the icebox, sitting with their bruises.
All summer you have been dreaming of Fall and its brittle confection of branches.
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From Three Poems. Used with permission of Faber & Faber. Copyright © 2019 by Hannah Sullivan.
Look at the language, the unusual, the penetrating. I'll bet she knows her words: cloves, for example:
clove (countable and uncountable, plural cloves)
(uncountable, countable) A very pungent aromatic spice, the unexpanded flower bud of the clove tree.
(countable) A clove tree, of the species Syzygium aromaticum (syn. Caryophyllus aromaticus), native to the Moluccas (Indonesian islands), which produces the spice.
(countable) An old English measure of weight, containing 7 pounds (3.2 kg), i.e. half a stone.
From Middle English clove, an alteration of earlier clowe, borrowed from the first component of Old French clou de girofle, from Latin clāvus (“nail”) for its shape. Also see clāva (“knotty branch, club”).
Check out, too, this link from Harper's Bazaar: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/culture/culture-news/a25891884/hannah-sullivan-wins-the-ts-eliot-prize-for-poetry/
The Current Assignment
This assignment took me to places unexpectedly and I finished with about 20 pages, much of it not so good, and a couple of decent lines. It also brought me to the best chat I've had with one of my sisters in many years. Not that we're not friendly but rather it got her to pause and reflect when her tropism is talk incessently. Anyway, there have been a number of important porches in my life.
The Next Assignment
"All the people we used to know are an illusion to me now." Write a reflection on that line from Bob Dylan's "Tangled up in Blue." Here's a link to the song:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4OHOGMeNOM. It's from "Blood on the Tracks," one of my favorite albums.In the assignment, feel free to change "people" to "things."
The Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on February 7, 2019 from 12:30-2 PM.
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