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!
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