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Unpublished work Copyright 2019 Emerson Gilmore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