February 21, 2019

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Today is National Grain-free day and National Sticky Bun Day. I suggest we make it also National Old Poets Day although I'm about to speak of one poet who is Nicaraguan and one who is American so maybe International Old Poets Day.

Gerard will not be with us today.

News and Jabber

The Current Assignment

In an effort to prompt myself a couple of mornings ago I decided to take the last line of the last poem in Wallace Stevens's The Palm at the End of the Mind. It didn't work but I found the next-to-last poem interesting. Unfortunately I could not find it online and so photographed the book page. 

Now, after reading Wesley McNair, who I mentioned last time and whose book I continue to read, and after working on the assignment to the tune of ten or more journal entries, I begin to understand the meaning of place for the poet. At the Frost Place one year I sat through what was certainly a good and important lecture on place in the poetry of Robert Frost. It was a big snooze. Today I'd pay attention to it. What I discovered is that in a fundamental way, more fundamentally than the obvious, our poems originate in the formative experiences of us long before we became poets. They continue to be the pit from which we extract the histories, the mythologies, that are the bricks in the
foundations of our poems.

IN THE NEWS

Poet Ernesto Cardenal is out of the hospital. Pope Francis has lifted the sanction against religious activities imposed upon Ernesto Cardenal (and his brother, also a priest) in 1984 for his political activism in Nicaragua. This coincides with his release from the hospital for a kidney infection. Cardenal has been nominated for a Nobel Prize four times. He has been controversial, outspoken and a pretty good poet. Here is a link to his Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesto_Cardenal

I have a book of his, signed. It's worth reading.
(Read "A Prayer for Marilyn Monroe."
Also, Lawrence Ferlenghetti: https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/birthday-party-of-the-century-city-lights-to-celebrate-ferlinghettis-100-years. This link will take you to an article about his upcoming 100th birthday celebration at his City Lights Book Store. I had the good fortune to meet him while he was a poet in residence at Trinity College in Hartford; he lectured in the creative writing class I was taking at the time. I can't say I remember much other than going outside with him to lie in the grass and ponder the koan "I alone walk on the red heavens." He is most remembered, I think, for his "A Coney Islnad of the Mind." Noteworthy is that he was Alan Ginsberg's first publisher. 

The Next Assignment

Write a poem that deals with lipstick.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday, March 7, 2019.

Other Jabber

February 7, 2019

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Ed Ahern will not be with us today. 

News and Jabber

The Current Assignment

Illusion. It became an interesting topic, not least because I stumbled two days ago across an essay by Emerson that I had never read before, titled "Illusion." It opens with a poem:

Illusions  

Flow, flow the waves hated, 

Accursed, adored, 

The waves of mutation: 

No anchorage is. 

Sleep is not, death is not; 

Who seem to die live. 

House you were born in, 

Friends of your spring-time, 

Old man and young maid, 

Day's toil and its guerdon, 

They are all vanishing, 

Fleeing to fables, 

Cannot be moored. 

See the stars through them, 

Through treacherous marbles. 

Know, the stars yonder, 

The stars everlasting, 

Are fugitive also, 

And emulate, vaulted, 

The lambent heat-lightning, 

And fire-fly's flight.

When thou dost return 

On the wave's circulation, 

Beholding the shimmer, 

The wild dissipation,

And, out of endeavor 

To change and to flow, 

The gas become solid, 

And phantoms and nothings 

Return to be things, 

And endless imbroglio 

Is law and the world, -- 

Then first shalt thou know, 

That in the wild turmoil, 

Horsed on the Proteus, 

Thou ridest to power, 

And to endurance.

And the final paragraph reads:

The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, -- they alone with him alone.

Read the entire essay at this link: http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/essays/illusion.html

 Notice how the poem is echoed by Dru's poem and how the style is similar to that of MarLou's in her recent poems.

Unpublished work Copyright 2019 Emerson Gilmore

The Next Assignment

The next assignment is to write a poem about the street you grew up on.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be two weeks from today, February 21, 2019

Other Jabber

For you Valentine's Day pleasure:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

— E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), from Complete Poems:1904-1962,

ed. George J. Firmage, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1979