Poets’ Roundtable
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News and Jabber
What do you think about advertisers using poetry?
Here is a link to an article from adweek's website. I'm of mixed emotions about it at the moment.
Here's a sample poem:
And here's a link to an article about the author of the poem. She's in advertising and has a Phd in literature and an MFA in creative writing.
Another useful site
This site I came across while writing a poem and wanting an adjective for atom. I just searched for adjectives for atom and came up with this list:
How atom often is described (“________ atom”)
single, central, neutral, asymmetric, free, excited,particular, second, isolated, heavy, individual,electronegative, normal, interstitial, smallest, nuclear,simplest, electron, third, gram, adjacent, level, additional,ultimate, original, terminal, extra, neighboring, metallic,tertiary, lightest, active, stable, mere, united, least,positive, tiny, peaceful, adsorbed, ordinary, indivisible, less,like, negative, primeval, corresponding, tetrahedral,minutest, substitutional, hydrogen, heavier, quaternary,fourth, trivalent, gaseous, typical, metastable, permanent,abstract, unstable, hetero, neighbouring, chiral, magnetic,hydrogenic, tiniest, displaced, bound
You can also get all these related words:
Who do you think wrote this?
Canto 1
My childhood’s home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There’s pleasure in it too.
O Memory! thou midway world
‘Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise,
And, freed from all that’s earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle,
All bathed in liquid light.
As dusky mountains please the eye,
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-notes that, passing by,
In distance die away;
As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar—
So memory will hallow all
We’ve known, but know no more.
Near twenty years have passed away
Since here I bid farewell
To woods and fields, and scenes of play,
And playmates loved so well.
Where many were, how few remain
Of old familiar things;
But seeing them, to mind again
The lost and absent brings.
The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray,
And half of all are dead.
I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.
Canto 2
But here’s an object more of dread
Than ought the grave contains—
A human form with reason fled,
While wretched life remains.
Poor Matthew! Once of genius bright,
A fortune-favored child—
Now locked for aye, in mental night,
A haggard mad-man wild.
Poor Matthew! I have ne’er forgot
When first, with maddened will,
Yourself you maimed, your father fought,
And mother strove to kill;
When terror spread, and neighbours ran,
Your dang’rous strength to bind;
And soon, a howling crazy man
Your limbs were fast confined.
How then you strove and shrieked aloud,
Your bones and sinnews bared;
And fiendish on the gazing crowd,
With burning eye-balls glared—
And begged, and swore, and wept and prayed
With maniac laughter joined—
How fearful were those signs displayed
By pangs that killed thy mind!
And when at length, tho’ drear and long,
Time soothed thy fiercer woes,
How plaintively thy mournful song,
Upon the still night rose.
I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed,
Far-distant, sweet, and lone—
The funeral dirge, it ever seemed
Of reason dead and gone.
To drink its strains, I’ve stole away,
All stealthily and still,
Ere yet the rising God of day
Had streaked the Eastern hill.
Air held his breath; trees, with the spell,
Seemed sorrowing angels round,
Whose swelling tears in dew-drops fell
Upon the listening ground.
But this is past; and nought remains,
That raised thee o’er the brute.
Thy piercing shrieks, and soothing strains,
Are like, forever mute.
Now fare thee well—more thou the cause,
Than subject now of woe.
All mental pangs, by time’s kind laws,
Hast lost the power to know.
O death! Thou awe-inspiring prince,
That keepst the world in fear;
Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence,
And leave him ling’ring here?
Written by Abraham Lincoln
Written by Abraham Lincoln
A poem by one of the Parkland School survivors:
Parkland freshman turns to poetry to ease her pain
Tragedy strikes in the middle of English class on Valentine's day. 17 students and teachers were massacred in a Parkland high school.
Anne Geggis Anne GeggisContact Reporter
Sun Sentinel
Her best friend died sitting next to her. Three other classmates in the same room also perished. So Eden Hebron has turned to poetry.
The 14-year-old daughter of Igal and Nicole Hebron, has written a poem about how her wholesome, all-American world dissolved into a national tragedy.
Eden, a lifelong Parkland resident, has been taking voice lessons since the age of 4, but now can’t even bear the sound of music.
“I can’t eat … I can’t talk to my friends. My life is a mess right now,” she said.
She started writing poetry a month ago. And writing this has eased the pain a little, she said.
“It helps organize what happened in my mind,” she said.
“We walked into class together and sat down.
It was Valentine’s Day in our sweet Parkland town.
We were laughing and doing our work, me and my best friend.
But little did I know that 5 minutes later, her life would come to an end.
I hear a sound. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Gunshots? That’s funny Alyssa, of course, we will survive.
We live in Parkland I thought, how could this be?
But sometimes your thoughts are not what you see.”
We run under the table in disbelief.
I have my friends next to me, what a relief.
They move to the desk to seek safer shelter.
But I stayed there, thinking the sound was just bad weather.
I close my eyes and wait for my teacher to say it’s a drill.
But before I knew it, our door was shot through and I saw his first kill.
Elaina, Alex, Justin, then Alyssa.
I’m next and this is not just paranoia.
He went to the next floor and the next.
All I could think about is, how many will be left?
The screams blasting in my ear.
The blood still won’t disappear.
I scream their names, call for my friends.
Nothing else to do, they are gone, they are dead.
Didn’t think I would live my worst nightmare.
I kept hearing shots and seeing gunpowder in the air.”“I run home and check the news.
How could you do this Nick Crus?
More and more I find out died.
I wish this didn’t happen, and he never got inside.
No feelings, no emotions
How can you comprehend this traumatic distortion?
There are no words to describe, nothing else to say
That will justify my English class on Valentine’s Day
Also, check out this video of a student reading his poem with inserted news video:
The Current Assignment
This song theme prompted at least two of us to an exchange. I often write a cluster of poems around a theme or topic. This time, after writing a reasonably good piece, I began riffing on "Rave ON!" by Buddy Holly. Gerard went on a tear on "Begin the Beguine" and we started writing back and forth. I ended up with at least five poems that form a sort of long poem of five parts that refer to "Rave On!" and look at my relationship with the muse, the act of writing., I hadn't expected so much.
The Next Assignment
Tanka: Poetic Form
The Japanese tanka is a thirty-one-syllable poem, traditionally written in a single unbroken line. A form of waka, Japanese song or verse, tanka translates as “short song," and is better known in its five-line, 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form.
One of the oldest Japanese forms, tanka originated in the seventh century, and quickly became the preferred verse form not only in the Japanese Imperial Court, where nobles competed in tanka contests, but for women and men engaged in courtship. Tanka’s economy and suitability for emotional expression made it ideal for intimate communication; lovers would often, after an evening spent together (often clandestinely), dash off a tanka to give to the other the next morning as a gift of gratitude.
In many ways, the tanka resembles the sonnet, certainly in terms of treatment of subject. Like the sonnet, the tanka employs a turn, known as a pivotal image, which marks the transition from the examination of an image to the examination of the personal response. This turn is located within the third line, connecting the kami-no-ku, or upper poem, with the shimo-no-ku, or lower poem.
Many of the great tanka poets were women, among them Lady Akazone Emon, Yosano Akiko, and Lady Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote The Tale of Genji, a foundational Japanese prose text that includes over 400 tanka. English-language writers have not taken to the tanka form in the same way they have the haiku, but there are several notable exceptions, including Amy Lowell, Kenneth Rexroth, Sam Hamill, Cid Corman, and Carolyn Kizer.
There are many excellent anthologies of Japanese verse, most of which feature lengthy selections of tanka. Rexroth’s translations, which include One Hundred Poems from the Japanese and One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, are considered classics, and The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi & Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani, continues this tradition.
read examples of the tanka:
A Spray of Water: Tanka [one narcissus]
Tada Chimako
one narcissus
draws close to another
like the only
two adolescent boys
in the universe
Tanka Diary [Awakened too early on Saturday morning]
Harryette Mullen, 1953
Awakened too early on Saturday morning
by the song of a mockingbird
imitating my clock radio alarm.
*
Walking along the green path with buds
in my ears, too engrossed in the morning news
to listen to the stillness of the garden.
Edward Hirsch also writes about the tanka in his book A Poet’s Glossary (Harcourt, 2014):
tanka: Also called uta or waka. The character for ka means “poem.” Wa means “Japanese.” Therefore, a waka is a Japanese poem. Tan means “short,” and so a tanka is a short poem, thirty-one syllables long. It is unrhymed and has units of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables, which were traditionally printed as one unbroken line. In English translation, the tanka is customarily divided into a five-line form. The tanka is sometimes separated by the three “upper lines” (kami no ku) and the two “lower ones” (shimo no ku). The upper unit is the origin of the haiku. The brevity of the poem and the turn from the upper to the lower lines, which often signals a shift or expansion of subject matter, is one of the reasons the tanka has been compared to the sonnet. There is a range of words, or engo (verbal associations), that traditionally associate or bridge the sections. Like the sonnet, the tanka is also conducive to sequences, such as the hyakushuuta, which consists of one hundred tankas.
The Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday, March 15, 2018.
Other Jabber
