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.