October 17, 2019
Welcome
I have no information about absentees except that Lisa may have other responsibilities keeping her away.
Thanks to Rich for handling the last meeting while I accompanied my wife to her doctor's appointment. Results all good in being negative.
News and Jabber
As too often happens, I discovered this Irish poet, Northern Ireland, by way of a Google search for poetry news. Here is a link to his obituary in the NYT:
In include a poem of his that I found interesting:
The Fetch
I woke. You were lying beside me in the double bed,
prone, your long dark hair fanned out over the downy pillow.
I’d been dreaming we stood on a beach an ocean away
watching the waves purl into their troughs and tumble over.
Knit one, purl two, you said. Something in your voice made me think
of women knitting by the guillotine. Your eyes met mine.
The fetch of a wave is the distance it travels, you said,
from where it is born at sea to where it founders to shore.
I must go back to where it all began. You waded in
thigh-deep, waist-deep, breast-deep, head-deep, until you disappeared.
I lay there and thought how glad I was to find you again.
You stirred in the bed and moaned something. I heard a footfall
on the landing, the rasp of a man’s cough. He put his head
around the door. He had my face. I woke. You were not there.
And here is a link to his bio and a selection of his poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ciaran-carson
Another poem of interest:
I am beginning to write in our language,
but it is difficult.
Only the elders speak our words,
and they are forgetting.
There are not many words anyhow.
They are scattered like clouds,
like Salmon in Stepping Creek
at Tonsina River.
I do not speak like an Ahtna elder,
but I hear the voice of a spirit,
hear it at a distance
speaking quietly to me.
• From Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages, edited by Chris McCabe (John Murray, £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. The Poetry International festival takes place at Southbank Centre, London SE1, on 19 October.
What interests me here is the source of the poem:
An anthology of poems in languages that are becoming extinct. "A common rule of thumb is that speakers of a language who are separated in time by around 1000 years will not be able to understand each other at all. There are no end of exceptions to this rule and both ends. But, in the normal course of language evolution, one could expect that whatever language is spoken by our descendants in 3017 will be so different that we couldn’t understand them and vice-versa." Quora
This interests me since my reading of an article about how to post warning signs at nuclear waste sights that need to be comprehensible for tens of thousands of years, not to mention our concern with species that are endangered.
The Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday, November 7, 2019.
The Current Assignment
Who did it? Any comments about it?
The Next Assignment
- The next assignment is to write a poem using blank verse. Follow this link
- to a brief example and explanation. Here is “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost, written in blank verse. Shakespeare wrote in blank verse.
Mending Wall
By Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.
