May 16, 2019

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Steph will not be here today. 

News and Jabber

WPS Office has issued a 2019 update. It's a free application that I have used for years and I think is more user-friendly while being fully as functional as MSWord. Nota bene: It's Chinese.

A poetry-writing AI has just been unveiled. It’s ... pretty good.

I found an interesting article on the VOX website (https://www.vox.com/2019/5/15/18623134/openai-language-ai-gpt2-poetry-try-it) and then went to this link:https://talktotransformer.com/ to try it out with the following result from the opening lines of my assignment for today:

 Completion

I try to cheer up,
cite the dawn,
the fresh-made tea,
one son now back from his war.
“No soap,” Li Po says.

 “Now", he says, his voice so steady and firm,
that it makes the sound of a voice speaking truth.
Li Po's voice is clear now, but even now,
all that is left
is the smile that has come back,
the joy that flows through
the air. The sky is bright with stars,
but there are no moonrises nor moonsets.
A gust of cold wind blows through the sky.
A few more moments of quiet.
"She's quiet. It's like she's holding her breath.
She can feel her heartbeat,
which is too slow."
Li Po is silent.
He doesn't cry.
He waits in a long, deep sleep.
Li Po:  No soap,  no tea.
Li Mo: I'll wait.

 

A new poet worth reading: Finuala Dowling

 Catch of the Day

My therapist shakes her head.
It’s much more complex than that, she says.

Even if I begin hesitantly:
– It seems to me, I say –
mimicking her style of hypothesis,
dangling before her some tadpole of my own analysis –
I’m wrong again in this.

Life cannot be scooped up like a fish.
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Afterwards she sees me out.
My car is parked beneath a gumtree
and I want to say:

It seems to me what we are looking at here
is a white Toyota Corolla parked beneath a gumtree.

Just to have one moment with no ambiguity!
To feel – even once – that I’m right,
that I’m holding – however briefly – the thing that slips away.

Beneath the eucalyptus
my Toyota sleeps in peace

but it is not a fish.

No. It’s much more complex than that.

Follow this link: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2019/may/13/poem-of-the-week-catch-of-the-day-by-finuala-dowling to the poem and a discussion of it and her writing in "The Guardian>"

And here, another link to a wonderful article in "The Atlantic" about Walt Whitman's notion of a thriving democracy. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/walt-whitman-leaves-of-grass-american-democracy/586045/,   

It's a splendid article, if only for the quotations from Whitman:

Like these:

The pure contralto sings in the organloft,
The carpenter dresses his plank … the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whaleboat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars of a Sunday and looks at the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case,
He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bedroom;
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco, his eyes get blurred with the manuscript;
The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist’s table,
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
The quadroon girl is sold at the stand … the drunkard nods by the barroom stove.

 

The Current Assignment

 

 

 

Dru's poems:

 

washed

rain takes me out of it

the gloom that hung from

the rack of my soul

wash me and

use me for good

soak the last cell

with free will

and a new 

start

love

axe finds tree

axe loves tree

axe kills tree

(axe gets new haft)

Hope you have a great time!

 

The Next Assignment

 

The next assignment is to write a poem in my style. I'll leave it up to you to figure that out. I will say that I try to give each phrase its own line. Sometimes, for clarity or smoothness, I'll combine more than one phrase, but I try not to.

The Next Meeting

 The next meeting will be on Thursday, June 6, 2019.

Other Jabber

 

 

May 2, 2019

May 2, 2019

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Let’s take a minute to decide how to ectivate the bulletin board MarLou has worked and worried about. What should we do with it?

News and Jabber

This link: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/04/les-murray-dissident-poet will take you to an article about Australian poet Les Murray, who died recently. The opening paragraph:

Les Murray, who died at age 80 on April 29, has been called Australia’s greatest poet, but such an encomium meant little to him.

Murray grew up in dire poverty on a farm with no electricity or running water, and always felt exiled from the privileged classes. Largely self-educated, at university he was so poor he ate the scraps he found on plates in the cafeteria. Profoundly asocial, he once called himself “a bit of a stranger to the human race.” He also suffered at times from debilitating depression, and was bullied in school for being bookish and fat. Yet he transformed his sense of personal injury to a poetic voice of rigor and flexibility, humor and empathy, and enormous formal range. He was a generous anthologist and editor as well as an essayist, poet, and verse novelist. “It was a very great epiphany for me,” he once said, “to realize that poetry is inexhaustible, that I would never get to the end of its reserves.”

Murray deserves to be ranked among the best devotional poets—from Donne and Herbert to Eliot and Auden—but his work has an earthiness and irreverence of its own, a tragic sense of human life and a Whitmanesque sympathy for the lives of animals. His wordscapes and landscapes were local, Australian, with everything that distinction signifies—including the transported convict’s sense of justice and the nation’s thoroughly multicultural heritage. His art wasn't bound by pieties, political or otherwise, because he understood the position of poetry—and of language itself—in relation to reality.

The Current Assignment

Who did it? Any comments about the processs, the ease, difficulty, worth, worthlessness?

The Next Assignment

The next assignment is to write a poem with only one-syllable words.

The Next Meeting

Two weeks from today, May 16, 2019

Other Jabber

Here’s a short piece by a writer you’ll all recognize the name of but may not guess on the first try:

POCKETS

You’re going to always have
pockets of something.
What—
you’re going to have people,
like the one-armed man
who blew up a restaurant.
You’re going to have pockets.