Friday, April 21, 2017

April 20, 2017

I occasionally have dry periods when the pen won't leak a decent word for me, am sort of in one now and, although I have come up with a couple of good things, I have x-ed out pages and pages immediately after writing them. Did so three or for days in a row. I could blame it on a lot of things but I think it is the fact that I'm on the third floor and cannot see the trashman, the mailman, the milkman (even imaginary), and the crow that crows making me want to shoot it. I can see part of a pine tree and I have heard that deer walk past but I haven't seen any. I will learn to write here but I don't like to think the muse has something better to do than grease the ink that currently clots my pen. I have written the assignment and didn't like what I wrote and so extracted from my trove to bring to the meeting an old poem done as the assignment called for (he said rather clumsily).

The following poem I found interesting for its original usage of brackets, pauses and // breaks. If you look/listen carefully you'll find surprising metrics supporting the strange graphical elements.

[Somewhere in Los Angeles] This Poem is Needed

She charges her ankle bracelet // from the kitchen chair
& Sunflowers in the white wallpaper [begin to wilt].

I wilt with them // before my sister // & her probation
Officer [who comes over to the house unannounced].

Just as we are // preparing dinner // & what are we supposed to
Do now. Cook for him?! Invite him to eat with us??

I am hacking the heads [from broccoli stems] & pretending
His body is spread across the cutting board. [Ugh].

This officer keeps talking nonsense & nudging his eyes around
The apartment. Looking for—drugs, alcohol

Alchemy. My sister waits for him to leave & then begins to rant.
Ramble about // her childhood // & how she used to be

[Before house arrest]. The confines of these plastered walls
& Her monitored route to work // where

Every corner has a cop [coddling a liquor store]. Protecting their
Notion of freedom. // My neighborhood eats fear.

Mothers are getting // handcuffed & harassed. Homes are being
Crushed [like cigarette butts]. Everyone I know

Hates the racist police & wants a revolution. // But we seldom
Aim the gun… Have you heard // how the bullets

Sing their anthem // throughout the body?? // It sounds like
God shutting the door— Bang. Bang.

When it’s dinnertime in heaven [& your officer’s knocking]
Ignore him sister— let the door bruise.

[Let the bears devour our enemies]. We have no obligation
To open // ourselves // for those who do us harm.

“[Somewhere in Los Angeles] This Poem is Needed” was originally published in American Poetry Review (January/February 2016)

This project was co-curated by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and its Puffin Story Innovation Fund.

TOPICS: ARTS & CULTURE

TAGS: ARTS, CIVIC POETRY, CULTURE, POETRY

CHRISTOPHER SOTO

Christopher Soto aka Loma is a poet based in Brooklyn. He is the author of Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016) and the editor of Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018). In 2017, he was awarded the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism by Split This Rock. In 2016, Poets & Writers honored Christopher Soto with the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award. He frequently writes book reviews for the Lambda Literary Foundation. His poems, reviews, interviews and articles have appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, The Advocate, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Poetry Review, Tin House and more. He is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript about police violence and mass incarceration. He co-founded the Undocupoets Campaign and worked with Amazon Literary Partnerships to establish grants for undocumented writers. Learn more about his work at his website and follow him on Twitter: @loma_poetry.

Terza Rima

Edward Hirsch also writes about the terza rima in his book A Poet’s Glossary (Harcourt, 2014):

terza rima: A verse form of interlocking three-line stanzas rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, etc. The terza rima form was invented by Dante Alighieri for the Commedia (The Divine Comedy, ca. 1304–1321), using the hendecasyllabic (eleven-syllable) line common to Italian poetry. In De vulgari eloquentia (“On eloquence in the vernacular,” 1304–1307), Dante called rhyme concatenatio (“beautiful linkage”), and the triple rhymes beautifully link together the stanzas. Rhyming the first and third lines gives each tercet a sense of temporary closure; rhyming the second line with the first and last lines of the next stanza generates a strong feeling of propulsion. The effect of this chain-rhyme is both open-ended and conclusive, like moving through a series of interpenetrating rooms or going down a set of winding stairs: you are always traveling forward while looking back.
Here is a poem written in terza rima by Robert Frost. Following is a much looser use of something like terza rima in a selection from "Gabriel" written by Edward Hirsch, a poem in which he eulogizes his son. More info here: http://www.edwardhirsch.com/books/gabriel-a-poem/.

Acquainted with the Night

Saturday, April 8, 2017

April 6, 2017

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

News and Jabber

So here we are, finally, again. It seems a long time. In that time we have seen the deaths of Derek Walcott, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Chuck Berry.

I have seen Chuck Berry in concert, up close. I have met Derek Walcott (in 1990 or so, before he won the Nobel in 1992 and before he published Omeros). Yevtushenko I have read a little of. Click the links for the two poets. Chuck Berry had a lot to do with my formative years, first heard on WMGM from New York, I think. I remember seeing his picture in the paper and being surprised that he was black.

The Current Assignment

The assignment, one I thought of without much thought was to write an acrostic poem that would down the side read Bigelow Poets, I think, although the one I did reads Bigelow Writers. Whatever.

Broken-hearted Melody

I remember you--

Get back,

Evil woman.

Love hurts.

Only love can break a heart.

Where is the love?

Where were you (when I wanted you)?

Rolling on the river?

It’s all right;

Time is on my side,

Even now.

Release me.

Stay, just a little bit longer.

The Next Assignment

I have ruminated a lot about the deaths of Walcott and Berry. As I did so I found myself gravitating back to the poems of Weldon Kees. This may have been little more than, having not read or written much since I started packing to move, Kees's was the first book of poems I unpacked and so I stopped and read. Now, being in a new place, unsettled and dead tired I wasn't ready to write. My space doesn't have to be elaborate but it has to be set and comfortable to the unwinding of my mind. When I cannot get into the zone I resort to finding interesting new lines from other poets and then ruminating upon them until I begin forming my own lines. Then I write something. I have now written several poems prompted by lines/phrases of Kees's, especially from The Fall of the Magicians. So, here is the assignment for next time: Find a new writer, one you haven't read. Find a poem/poems you like. Find a particular phrase that really brings you in. Ponder it. Then write a poem of your own that comes from this seed. For example, I like the line "learn sunlight/ if you can:". Here is the poem:

A Grace in Lies?

“Learn sunlight/if you can:”

Weldon Kees, “The Ambassadors”

Did he think

he was learning sunlight

when he disappeared?

Was it afternoon and

him traveling west

into a revelation of sun?

Or had he decided

that it could not be,

that one, he, could not

learn sunlight

and he in fact did not know

what he wrote?

Did he believe there are

those who can

and therefore should, must

for those of us who cannot;

or that no one can

but there must be some

to lie about it,

and with conviction

so that more of us

do not sharpen the blade,

mount the railing

to gash, pitch out and down

in the shining,

unlearned sun?

Unpublished Work Copyright 2017 Emerson Gilmore

What I'm getting at in the assignment is echoed by Octavio Paz in The Bow and the Lyre. "...poetry is a grace, something external that descends on the poet." p. 144. In meditating upon a line that profoundly catches me, I approach a state in which I can accept poetry. That's the essence of the assignment.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday, April 20, 2017 from 1-2:30PM. Remember to bring two friends.

Other Jabber

I draw your attention too to this article about baseball and poetry found on ESPN.com: http://www.espn.com/espnw/culture/article/19069292/how-baseball-poetry-bring-us-home. 'Tis the season.

Friday, February 17, 2017

February 16, 2017

Apologies for the absence of the usual format. The meeting was more discursive than usual but we liked it anyway.

The next meeting will be on March 2, 2017.

The assignment for the next meeting is to write your own obituary and/or birth announcement. This offers great opportunities for humor but I'm going to try to take it seriously although I may end up with two versions of the same thing.

I forewent an assignment to translate a poem from another language into English. Nonetheless Rich Anderson wants to do that so that is an option too.

See you in two weeks!

By way of explanation, Thomas Lux was a little more than acquaintance of mine, We met a few times and I had a short email exchange with him. I have long liked his poems and was more upset than I expected to be when I stumbled across his obituary on line.

http://www.ajc.com/news/local-obituaries/thomas-lux-esteemed-georgia-tech-teacher-and-poet/wewY41fQeneWb0Ey8CxoIM/

Thomas Lux, esteemed Georgia Tech teacher and poet

Bo Emerson The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
6:21 p.m Monday, Feb. 6, 2017 Atlanta Obituaries
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OBITUARIES

Thomas Lux, poet and professor at Georgia Tech, published 14 collections of poetry, and influenced a generation of writers. Photo: courtesy Georgia Tech

Distinguished by his booming laugh, his arresting poetry readings and his passion for baseball, Bourne Professor of Poetry at Georgia Tech Thomas Lux, was a self-described “literary oddball” who threw himself into teaching while remaining a dedicated master of the craft.

After weekly readings at Georgia Tech, “he would invite everyone who was at the reading to come to his house, and everyone would,” said Jericho Brown, associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University. “I would say he was an idol of mine.”

When Lux, 70, died Sunday, the internet came alive with reminiscences from those who held him and his work in high esteem.

“I was desperate to belong somewhere and Tom said, ‘Well, you can belong here, because I say you can,’ ” wrote Vijay Seshadri on Twitter. Lux, on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence for 25 years before coming to Georgia Tech in 2001, encouraged Seshadri and brought him to Sarah Lawrence.

“Only to my parents do I owe more than I do to Tom Lux. I can’t imagine being in the world without him,” Seshadri wrote.

Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, to a dairy farmer and a Sears, Roebuck & Company switchboard operator. He attended Emerson College in Boston and, according to the Poetry Foundation, “began publishing haunted, ironic poems that owed much to the Neo-surrealist movement in the 1970s.”

His poetry received critical praise for his first book in 1972, “Memory’s Handgrenade.” He eventually published 14 full-length collections. He was featured on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” radio spots, was published in the New Yorker, and won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1994 for the collection “Split Horizon.”

Kevin Young, University Distinguished Professor at Emory University and an accomplished poet, said “Tom Lux was not only a great poet, but a great poetry friend and friend to poetry. He was a terrific literary citizen, dedicated to trumpeting the power of poetry and championing the music and many moods of language.”

Said Young, “I once invited him to read in a Southern Poetry Festival at Emory as part of the Danowski Reading Series — he made clear from the stage that he wasn’t a Southern poet, but I can’t help but say that he became an Atlanta one, integral to the community. He will be deeply missed.”

In addition to his teaching Lux was director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as the director of Poetry@Tech.

He told the AJC in 2006 that teaching poetry at Georgia Tech was no mismatch — that poetry and science both require careful observation and creative thinking. “We’re trying to diminish the stereotype of the poet as some dreamy bozo who wanders around and then all of a sudden gets struck by inspiration,” he said. “Poems are made things. They have everything to do with intense emotions … but poems are made things. They don’t just happen.”

There was no information yet available about arrangements and services.

I love you sweatheart

A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway. And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work...?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognize his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before
of "something special, darling, tomorrow"?
And did he call her at work
expecting her to faint with delight
at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?
She will know I love her now,
the world will know my love for her!
A man risked his life to write the world.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed--always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.

Poems by Thomas Lux : 15 / 21

Refrigerator, 1957 - Poem by Thomas Lux

More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.

Thomas Lux

The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball

each day mowed
and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter acre,
the machine slicing a wisp
from each blade's tip. Dust storms rose
around the roar: 6:00 P.M., every day,
spring, summer, fall. If he could mow
the snow he would.
On one side, his neighbors the cows
turned their backs to him
and did what they do to the grass.
Where he worked, I don't know
but it sets his jaw to: tight.
His wife a cipher, shoebox tissue,
a shattered apron. As if
into her head he drove a wedge of shale.
Years later his daughter goes to jail.

Mow, mow, mow his lawn
gently down a decade's summers.
On his other side lived mine and me,
across a narrow pasture, often fallow;
a field of fly balls, the best part of childhood
and baseball, but one could not cross his line
and if it did,
as one did in 1956
and another in 1958,
it came back coleslaw -- his lawn mower
ate it up, happy
to cut something, no matter
what the manual said
about foreign objects,
stones, or sticks.

Thomas Lux

Friday, February 3, 2017

February 2, 2017

Poets’ Roundtable

February 2, 2017

Welcome

Gerard will not be with us today. I have two of his sestinas anyway.

News and Jabber

Ed Ahern has another and remunerative publication to his credit.

Following up on the movie "Paterson" is an article from the NYT about the poet who supplied several poems for the movie, Ron Padgett. Here is the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/nyregion/how-the-poet-ron-padgett-spends-his-sundays.html?_r=0.

What interests me is how comfortable he is with his life and his writing. The article doesn't get into the details of his writing process but highlights how normal and demotic his life is in most ways, at least on Sundays.

"JUDY-DEPRIVED It’s Sunday, so I’m deprived of one of my great pleasures, which is to completely goof off by watching “Judge Judy.” I am absolutely fascinated by her, and I have been for years. But she’s not on on Sunday, so if I want to just completely go mindless, lately I’ll watch a football game, usually with the sound off.

REGIMEN Our living room is also our dining room, which is also our library, which is also my work space. So it’s very easy for me to glide from our dinner table right over to my desk. It’s only two steps. So I kind of find myself able to make a seamless transition from eating lunch to writing a poem or writing email or doing some research online. I’m not undisciplined, but I don’t set a formal structure for myself.

The Current Assignment

Who did it? What was it like?

Gerard'spoems:

Bill’s Longtime Dying

1. Having heard that Bill was very ill and in hospital,
2. close to where we rented a cottage every summer,
3. vacationing and visiting with our home relatives,
4. we took the time to visit with our friends Doris and Bill
5. who had gone in for a regular visit with his doctor
6. who sent Bill to the Hospital because he was dying.

6. Serious illness arrives as a surprise. There’s dying
1. in the offing. Signs grew larger while in hospital.
5. His wife, Doris, held Bill’s hand while Bill’s doctor
2. gently examined his patient the last day of summer.
4. We were lucky to be close to where our friend, Bill,
3. was being held, pieta style, by his wife and relatives.

3. Bill and Doris were together, hands joined. His relatives
6 stood, shook their heads and left them to the dying.
4. Sons and their wives silently cried over their Bill.
1 Anticipating the moment of his relief from the hospital
2. Bill’s eyes went vacant as we imagined tomorrow’s summer
5. sky. His wife, suddenly, shuddered, cried out, “Doctor! “

5 The nurse outside the door ran in on the cry, “Doctor!”
3 She, full of anxiety, bypassed the sons and wife, his relatives
2 while those of us in the round walked out into the summer.
6 closing in the west to recite a prayer for the dying
1 Our grief gave way to those closest to Bill leaving the hospital
4 His wife’s spirit singing in the wind, “Because he was my Bill.” *

4 We suppose the death certificate was for William, not “Bill.”
5 We, his married neighbors at University, forgave the doctor
1 For the protocol naming of the patient at the hospital.
3 As for us, my wife and I, we left the grieving to his relatives,
6 And I drove to Connecticut, each of us with visions of dying.
2 A blazing, red sun, setting in a nest of clouds, closes on summer.

2. Some years later, retired, in a Florida nest of homes in summer,
4. Doris loses her mind out of loneliness, for having missed her Bill,
6. proving again that a broken heart can be the cause of one’s dying.
5. Bill had started in college working hard to avoid the doctor.
3. Doris had worked just as hard to please all of Bill’s relatives.
1. Doris died in Maine at a son’s home; Bill died in hospital.

2. We had met over a bottle of gin their first college summer.
4. A new couple with kids in our building. His name was Bill:
6. Doris, a Brit from Prestatyn# and Bill, a Yank always dying.

___________

* from “Showboat.”
# Prestatyn, Wales

Sestina on a Changing Back Pasture

From the barn to the back pasture
was less than a mile through an old orchard.
My John Deere put-puts with the scythe up.
The brim of my baseball cap hangs low
to keep the morning bugs from blinding
me, as I hang in my seat, one hand steering.

The apples are greenish. With the right hand on steering,
I glance at early birds that gulp bugs loving the near pasture.
Small birds skim along with aerobatic pleasure while blinding
Their prey—small, insects loving an old, untended orchard.
These small birds fly key patterns imbedded in their low,
pea-sized brains where altitudes are low and up.

The sun slowly streams through the clouds, low
on the eastern horizon where river birds, steering
north, fly in distributed formations, moving up
to older riverbeds where dams renew a pasture,
and old, dead apple trees sign a lifeless orchard.
Where cows once ambled, tails swishing, blinding.

Insects that voraciously aim for the target anus, blinding
To the core those that crash. I move my scythe to “low.”
Engage the scissors to mow through the orchard,
Make a cut toward the edge, squinting while steering
around old stumps in this retired orchard-pasture,
mow the edge, twice, before I bring the cutting blade up.

Sixty years later, a campus map in hand, I found the way up
the old pasture road, now paved, into a sun’s ray, blinding
my view across the way of the re- imagined, orchard-pasture
of memory and saw a momentary view of academic, high-low
buildings—dormitories, imaginative landscapes steering
me through what I believed was my field, my orchard.

Rotaries and “intelligent” landscaping favor vehicular blinding
at night by sports cars and buses where the old dead pasture
once knelt to my old, put-put John Deer, the scythe low
to catch rodents or deer gone to ground, hoping to pop up
when the scissor noise of the blade passed over the orchard
grass and opened the field of rotten apples to nose steering

I search the years when I, alone, roamed the pasture
over ground of “fallens” that worms inside ate into, steering
their way down corridors, as in tunnels , blinding.

And mine

Sestina for Kent State

Of course from Saigon we cannot see the smoke
of the rifles at Kent State where Chas fears the loss
of Susan who he knows would rise
to march against our war and wave
her sign against the phalanx that looms,
locked and loaded, for lovers that wander

in rebellion across a campus while real soldiers wander
in search of North Vietnamese troops that disappear like smoke
when we, those real soldiers, locked and loaded, loom,
dirty and ragged in a war where loss
seems the only option despite the flag we wave
and salute when the Captain calls us to rise.

When the students die Chas and I swear we will no longer rise.
We are tired, beaten, do not want to wander
in jungle and swamp where the only sound is the wave
of rice shoots whispering to the enemy and the only smoke
is from the cigarettes we drag on when, at a loss,
we feel the cold of nearby graves loom.

Yet, we do march again as if some black loom
weaves us into fabric that can only rise
to cloak in darkness the coming loss
before we ever again are free to wander
in anything but the fog of grim smoke
that spreads from Saigon back to Susan’s campus in a wave

that chills our hearts, turns them off as we weave
our bloody ways against troops that refuse to loom
in fronts we can confront. They steal away. And so we smoke
our grass and smoke their huts, listen to the cries rise,
watch our wretched victims wander
in their fields in a life they can only lose.

Susan does write Chas. She does not lose
her life but feels the wave
break and lets herself for hours wander
the mourning campus until at the loom
of dawn, on a rise
above that little killing field where smoke

speaks of loss that looms,
feels that wave in her throat rise,
recalls the dread day when Chas wanders off in the smoke.

Unpublished work Copyright 2016 Emerson Gilmore

The Next Assignment

I would like everyone to bring in a sheaf of poems (10, 15, 20?) for an experiment that I think is great but that I have never had success with. We will have a conversation of poems. Someone will read and then someone will volunteer a poem to answer/respond to the first. Then another and another until we have spent 90 minutes reading and commenting and doing whatever poets do when they read together. For this one meeting you can bring in one or two of your favorite poems by others to include, if you wish. Just keep them reasonably short; an excerpt from "Howl" (O victory forget your underwear we're free) rather than the whole thing. Be sure that at least one of your poems is new, preferably two.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday, February 16, 2017

Other Jabber

You may not be aware that Google has a cultural institute website. I was surprised by it, its depth. Of note today is that this is James Joyce's birthday (1882, I think) and the site has a photo presentation of Dublin in the days when Joyce was writing Dubliners. It is worth a long look, both the photos and the site in general. Of course, I checked out Walt Whitman and found a lot of interest to me.
Here is the link: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/gRa4m70L You will find it heavy on art and photography.

https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/

Bigelow Poets' Roundtable

Friday, April 21, 2017

April 20, 2017

CHRISTOPHER SOTO

Related Poem Content Details

Saturday, April 8, 2017

April 6, 2017

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

News and Jabber

The Current Assignment

The Next Assignment

The Next Meeting

Other Jabber

Friday, February 17, 2017

February 16, 2017

Refrigerator, 1957 - Poem by Thomas Lux

The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball

Friday, February 3, 2017

February 2, 2017

Welcome

News and Jabber

The Current Assignment

The Next Assignment

The Next Meeting

Other Jabber