September 20, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Rich Anderson will not be here today.

News and Jabber

I opened with a quiz regarding lyrics ostensibly of a poem but in reality was a song written by Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCnx2kjk8T4. Turn it up and drift away….

The Current Assignment

Who did it? I told you in an email that I was having a great time of it. Here is Dru Martin’s offering:

The Next Assignment

The next assignment is to write a poem about something abandoned.

I take this from an article I read about ancient Middle-Eastern poetry.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180820-the-6th-century-poems-making-a-comeback

The article discusses the poetry of ruins, losses as it existed in sixth-century and how it is being revived today in a variety of arts, but especially poetry. The introductory paragraph, inserted below, gives an idea of the kind of impetus I see behind the assignment. Still, the assignment is open to any interpretation you find appropriate. The two images below give an old and a new look at abandoned places, each prompting its own reflections.

By Paul Cooper

21 August 2018

“A bleak landscape stretches out in all directions, broken only by wind-hewed formations of sandstone. A lone traveller wanders this hostile, waterless place, looking for shelter. And then on the horizon, a line of ruined walls appears to him like an apparition. In the heat haze, they seem to hover above the ground. As he gets closer, memories of this place come back to him. Broken tents and pegs, abandoned fire pits, the signs of a camp long-since abandoned: this is the place where he once met the love of his life, now lost forever. As he wanders the ruins, he sees deer and goats grazing where he once walked with his beloved. He sees the plants of the desert bursting up through the tent where they once lay together. As the memories of this place rush back to him, the horizon flashes with thunder and the rain finally comes to the land.”

Standing Before the Ruins of Al-Birweh

Like birds, I tread lightly on the earth’s skin

so as not to wake the dead

I shut the door to my emotions to become my other

I don’t feel that I am a stone sighing

as it longs for a cloud

Thus I tread as if I am a tourist

and a correspondent for a foreign newspaper

Of this place I choose the wind

I choose absence to describe it

Absence sat, neutral, around me

The crow saw it

Halt, my two companions!

Let us experience this place our own way:

Here, a sky fell on a stone and bled it

so that anemones would bloom in the spring

(Where is my song now?)

Here, the gazelle broke the glass of my window

so that I would follow it

(So where is my song now?)

Here, the magical morning butterflies carried the path to my school

(So where is my song now?)

Here I saddled a horse to fly to my stars

(So where is my song now?)

I say to my two companions:

Stop so that I may weigh the place

and its emptiness with Jahili odes

full of horses and departure

For every rhyme we will pitch a tent

For every home to be stormed by the wind,

there is a rhyme

But I am the son of my first tale

My milk is warm in my mother’s breast

The bed is swung by two tiny birds

My father is building my tomorrow with his two hands

I didn’t grow up and so did not go to exile

The tourist says: Wait for the dove to finish its cooing!

I say: It knows me and I know it, but the letter has not arrived

The journalist interrupts my secret song:

Do you see that dairy factory behind that strong pine tree?

I say: No, I only see the gazelle at the window

He says: What about the modern roads on the rubble of houses?

I say: No, I don’t see them

I only see the garden under them

and I see the cobweb

He says: Dry your two tears with a handful of fresh grass

I say: That is my other crying over my past

The tourist says: The visit is over

I haven’t found anything to photograph except a ghost

I say: I see absence with all its instruments

I touch it and hear it. It lifts me high

I see the ends of the distant skies

Whenever I die I notice

I am born again and I return

from absence to absence

(Translated by Sinan Antoon, from Darwish`s posthumous collection, La Uridu Li-Hadhihi al-Qasidati an Tantahi (I Don`t Want This Poem to End) (Beirut: Riyad al-Rayyis, 2009).

* Al-Birweh is the village in which Darwish was born on March 13, 1941. It was occupied and depopulated in 1948 by Israeli forces. Its inhabitants became refugees, some in Lebanon, some internally displaced and designated present-absentees. In 1949, a Kibbutz was established. A year later a settlement was built on the lands of al-Birweh. )

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday, October 4, 2018

Other Jabber

September 6, 2018

 

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

I haven’t any word of pending absences, despite the alarming heat.

News and Jabber

I quoted from a Brain Pickin’s email and promised the link and here it is:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/15/louise-bourgeois-solitude/?mc_cid=7bb379bf57&mc_eid=6c170ebd12. It is always interesting to follow the links to other expressions on the theme of the post.

I commend to you this article from the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/sep/02/kate-tempest-observer-new-review-seven-questions-for-seven-poets

It’s always interesting to get other poets’ takes on things. Also, these poets, in their answers cite poems worth looking up. Like this one by Major Jackson

Selling Out

Off from a double at McDonald’s,

no autumnal pinata, no dying leaves

crumbling to bits of colored paper

on the sidewalks only yesterday,

just each breath bursting to explosive fog

in a dead-end alley near Fifth,

where on my knees with my fingers

laced behind my head and a square

barrel 9MM prodding my left temple,

I thought of me in the afterlife.

Only moments before Chris Wilder and I

jogged down Girard to warmth

and the promise of two girls who winked

past an army of food reps, across the ice-bin

and pitched lanes of burgers and square

chips of fish, at us reigning over grills and vats,

lost in a barrage of beepers and timers.

Moments before, we stood in a check

cashing line for our first pay, evidence

of hours spent flipping baskets under

a heat-lamp, during break, with

a motley bunch of mothers on relief,

college students on bad credit, hard-hatted,

day-workers coated in white dust,

the minimum-waged poor from the many

fast-food joints lining Broad,

all of us anxious to enact the power

of our riches – me in the afterlife.

What did it matter that Chris and I

were still in our polyester uniforms

caked with day-old batter, setting out

for an evening of passion marks?

Or that an archipelago of grease-stains

smeared the length of our chests?

Or that we wore GAZELLES, matching

sheepskins and the ushanka although

miles from Leningrad. Truth is I lacked

direction, so that when Chris said,

Let’s first cop some blow, I trailed.

A loose spread of dealers guarded

corners. Runners returned from boarded,

three-floor walk-ups, told us to come back

later, troubled by my schoolboy jitters

and lack of hip. Then a kid, large for the chrome

HUFFY he pedaled, said he had the white stuff,

and came to an alley fronted by an iron

gate on a gentrified street edging

Northern Liberties. So dark, I could

barely make out his shape up front

digging pocket deep. I turned to tell Chris

how the night air glowed dark as soil,

how jangling keys made my neck itch,

how maybe this wasn’t so good an idea,

just when the cold opening of gun-barrel

steel poked my head and Chris’s eyes

widened like two water spills before

he bound away into a future of headphones

and release parties. Me? the afterlife?

Had I ever welcomed back the old neighborhood?

You wonder if a yearning persistent

as the seedcorn maggot tunnels through me?

All I know is that a single dog barked his own

vapor and an emptiness echoed through blasted

shells of rowhomes rising above,

and I could not forget the bare,

fingered-branches lacing a series

of powerlines in silhouette to the moon’s

hushed excursion across the battered

fields of our lives that endless night

of ricocheting fear and shame. No one

survives, no one unclasps his few strands

of gold chains or hums AMAZING GRACE

or pours all his measly bills and coins

into the trembling, free hand of his brother

and survives. No one is forced face down

and waits forty minutes to rise and begin

again his march past the ice-crusted dirt,

without friendship or love, who barely knows

why the cry of the earth sets him in motion,

running even from the season’s string of lights

flashing its pathetic shot at cheer — to arrive

here where the page is blank, an afterlife.

And this one;

A Cedary Fragrance

Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water –

Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,

but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.


by Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2001

The Current Assignment

Who did it? Any comments on the ease/difficulty of the assignment? I tried making prose poems of poems I had already written. It didn’t work very well. I did manage a couple of decent things. I learned that the language still makes the difference, that the prose poem for all its prosiness still needs the elevated language we associate with poetry.

The Next Assignment

Any suggestions for the next assignment? I was thinking of a store poem, written as if you were a store. Here is a quotation from the online article I took the idea from:

The Assignment:  Create the store of your life.  What does this mean?  Consider this!  If your life and your personality could be represented by a store, what would it look like?  What would you sell in your store?  Who would be your customers?  Where would your store be located, and what would it be called?  What would the inside and outside of your store look like?  What would you do in your store?  Use the "store" as a metaphor for your character and personality.

And here is the link to the article: https://www.bespokeclassroom.com/blog/2017/7/23/beginning-the-year-with-creative-writing

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on September 20, 2018. Bring a friend.

Other Jabber

August 16, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Alpha will not be here. She is recovering from an inoculation received yesterday.

In this cyber age, we are able to be in someone’s face without being in their presence. What we have here is a place to be present in a most profound sense.

News and Jabber

Grammarly?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54119/the-bench bu Mary Ruefle

Also, check out “Blood Soup” by Mary Ruefle. If you chance to read her essays, do so; and should you be able to attend a lecture, also do so. She’s wonderful and refreshing, innovative.

The Current Assignment

The Next Assignment

The assignment for next time is to write a prose poem: Here are a couple of links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_poetry

At the last meeting we briefly discussed prose poetry, especially, I think in light of Rich’s poem about the earth, water, etc. So, I said, what if we all write a prose poem. It’s the kind of assignment that isn’t easy but may have some surprising rewards. I have lengthy notes to post to the blog with examples and links to further information. The Wikipedia entry gives an interesting history and has a lot of links to poets noted for their prose poems if not to the poems themselves.

Introduction to Prose Poetry

Have you ever encountered something that claims to be a poem but looks like prose? For instance, maybe it reads like a lyrical poem, but it's written in paragraph form? If so, you might have come across a prose poem. A prose poem, also known as prose poetry, is an example of a hybrid genre of writing. Prose poems occur when someone writes prose using poetry techniques.

Prose Poems Defined

Before we can understand what prose poems are, it's important to understand the genres of prose and poetry independently. Prose is anything written down that does not possess any poetic meter. Well, that's an easy enough definition, but what is meter exactly?

Poetic meter is the rhythm of a poem. Whether you've heard any of Shakespeare's famous sonnets or the latest hip-hop song burning up the charts, chances are that you've noticed that many poems or songs have a certain rhythm to them. This rhythm is based on different factors, including the syllables per line and what syllables are naturally emphasized or stressed if someone were to read the poem out loud.

There is more to poetry than poetic meter, of course. Poems are often image-driven and emphasize visual descriptions, including metaphors, while prose tends to focus on aspects such as narrative, characters, and plot arc. In addition, poems also play with the sound of language using repetition and rhyming.

To rephrase that: prose contains narrative and does not follow any set rhythm, while poetry is rhythmic and image-based. So, what is prose poetry then? It's quite simple. Prose poetry is anything that combines these elements into a single piece of writing! If you want a stricter definition, prose poetry is poetry that is not written in verse and contains other poetic attributes, such as rhythm and metaphors.

Characteristics of Prose, Poetry & Prose Poetry

Prose:

Written in paragraphs

Tells a story rather than describes an image or metaphor

Generally has characters and a plot

Poetry:

Written in verse

Written in poetic meter

Focuses on image-driven metaphors

Might have a narrative, but it might not or it might be harder to understand

Prose poetry:

Looks like prose (written in paragraphs)

Focuses on images

Includes instances of poetic meter

Contains language play, such as repetition

Gary Young

An example of a prose poem written by Gary Young, Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz county, is called 'I discovered a journal'.

'I discovered a journal in the children's ward, and read, I'm a mother, my little boy has cancer. Further on, a girl has written, this is my nineteenth operation. She says, sometimes it's easier to write than to talk, and I'm so afraid. She's offered me a page in the book. My son is sleeping in the room next door. This afternoon, I held my whole weight to his body while a doctor drove needles deep into his leg. My son screamed, Daddy, they're hurting me, don't let them hurt me, make them stop. I want to write, how brave you are, but I need a little courage of my own, so I write, forgive me, I know I let them hurt you, please don't worry. If I have to, I can do it again.'

Be Drunk

Charles Baudelaire, 1821 - 1867

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

The Dog

BY MATTHEW SWEENEY

BTW, Matthew Sweeney recently died. He was an Irish poet of some note. Here is a link to an article about him:  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/aosdána-poet-matthew-sweeney-dies-at-66-of-motor-neurone-disease-1.3587403

I used to be a dog. What kind? Oh, a mongrel. Nothing poncy like the black cocker spaniel called Bonzo I had as a child. And certainly not one of those four-footed, aloof snakes that go by the name of greyhound. I remember each and every one of the lice that lived on me.

Where did I live? In Sicily, where the sun shines like a fried egg every day of the year. I had the nose of an angel — I could smell porcini fifty trees away. I knew the man who would start a fight with my master the moment he walked in the bar door. I drank a saucer of red wine every day. I loved eating the butterflies that floated past me — one pounce and they were gone. And they were delicious. Better than the bones of a donkey whose meat provided salami for my master and his family. The boy was very good to me — he used to take me down to the sea and let me splash in the waves; then I’d come out onto the sand, barking, and I’d shake all the seawater onto him, wetting his clothes. He loved laughing, and I loved barking. Those were the days.

I never saw a kennel. My home was an old blanket under a gnarled vine that had been there since Dante wrote his only sestina, in homage to the troubadours. The heat was often scorching. The boy found it funny to put a straw hat on my head, one dyed in the colors of the Italian flag. I was up early, out scouting for rats to frighten away. 
I once peed on a hedgehog to see what it would do. I ran along the clifftop, barking at the wheeling seagulls, and at the fishing boats they flew above. I sometimes ate my master’s leftover spaghetti bolognese in the taverna. My tail would wag like a fan revolving from the ceiling. I was taught party tricks that I’d be asked to do when the grappa was being downed. I’d lie down on the floor and die, to great applause. I’d sit up and beg, to coos and laughter, and I’d be rewarded with a sausage, and those were sausages to swim the Adriatic for.

I’d sometimes go down to the harbor to look for an attractive gray bitch I liked the smell of. I’d have to fight off other dogs, but I was good at that. I ate one of their ears. Once I followed her onto a boat that was heading out to fill up with fish. I had to swim back and I lay on the sand and slept. When I got home my master whipped me. I ran to my blanket, whimpering.

I was once brought to a circus, and into the tent of a one-eyed woman with black hair who had a pet parrot. I barked at it, and the parrot expertly returned my bark. I lay on the multi-colored mat and observed the strange bird who observed me. I was glad to leave that tent.

I enjoyed hearing the boy play his flute in the evenings. I heard those notes flutter up into the air, and I tried to see them, but never could. I never stopped trying, though.

The one thing I couldn’t eat was cheese. The few times I tried it I vomited. On the first occasion that happened I tried to eat it again. If I got the chance now I’d manage it, I’m sure. Who would not like to be a dog in the sun? A dog in the sun, like I used to be, long ago. It was an honor.

Source: Poetry (January 2017)

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on September 6, 2018. That’s three weeks, plenty of time to write a prose poem.

Other Jabber

August 2, 2018

August 2, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Another excellent meeting. We missed MaryGrace. And we welcomed Steph.

Here is a link to Grammarly:

It is a spell and grammar checking application that I use a lot. There seemed to be some interest in it. Read my notes below so that you know some of what to expect.

Grammarly:  https://www.grammarly.com/native/windows

You will probably have to create a Grammarly account online and keep in mind that the editing occurs online. I make sure to delete everything I check when I'm done. Otherwise, I use the program a lot and find it excellent. I first save the original version that I want to check, then copy it and paste it into Grammarly. Then, after running Grammarly, I delete the original selected text and copy and paste the Grammarly corrected text back into the original document. (It's a lot easier than it sounds.) You will lose some formatting but the spell and grammar checks are worth it. Additionally, I often run my word processor spell check just to see if there is anything it catches. 

Welcome

Welcome to all and thanks for being here on this warm, summer day. As for me I no longer spend summer days thinking long, long thoughts, as the poet said:

 "A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." That’s by Longfellow and the entire poem may be found at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44640/my-lost-youth.

Although we’re not at that youthful stage, from what I see I can safely say we haven’t passed our sell-by date yet.

News and Jabber

Those breathlessly awaiting my next book will have to take a breath. I am revising it from the third person singular to the first person singular. This means I have to change not only nearly every personal pronoun but all of their attached verb tenses. I have good tools for this but it is still time-consuming and precipitates quite a few attendant revisions to surrounding words, line breaks, page breaks, pagination, table of contents entries, page numbers and so on. Hopefully, early September.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/jul/21/american-life-in-poetry-my-cousin-milton/

I reprint this link. Ted Kooser is finding some delightful American poetry here. I don’t know how often he posts to this but it’s worth checking out, again.

Here is Dru's poem for this meeting:

if the ocean would just settle down

i could dive in and lose these hounds

that tail me at every turn

i’ve found them persistant

i must be the top of their wish list

a bloodlust i have discerned

way high up in the branches

i’ve slightly increased my chances

if i can befriend the winds

to calm the squalls

and ease my fall

and be free yet again

but if i am to hit my mark

what of the sharks

who must certainly live below

it seems each environment

has its own tyrant fit

to end all that i know

so sharks or hounds

either way, i’ve found

that i can never be set free

that is unless

i no longer want to guess

just what is eternity

it was that day

the first saturday in may

i decided to make the leap

their barks disappeared

as my arc persevered

and i left the shaking tree

the sharks weren't there

but i did not care

for time was out of stock

despite my pleas

i saw the water recede

as i landed on the rocks

so now years on

if you close in upon

the tree on jumpers cliff

and its early in may

you can hear the hounds bay

ending with a thud of a stiff

Poet’s Word powers home past Crystal Ocean to win the King George

You can read the entire write-up here: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/jul/28/poets-word-powers-home-to-win-king-george

The Current Assignment

If the group is again large and productive we will change our reading format just a little. First, I’ll talk less. Second, we’ll pass copies around at the beginning. I would also like to try two readings, the first by the poet with the rest of us closing our eyes, the second by the person next to the poet, all eyes open to the manuscript.

Do we need a timekeeper?

The Next Assignment

The assignment for next time is a formal exercise. Write a poem in three-line stanzas, the last two of which rhyme. Any length, any topic although I was thinking of poems about horses earlier due to the story about Poet's Word winning the recent race in England.

Here is an example from Anne Sexton:

And One For My Dame by Anne Sexton

A born salesman,
my father made all his dough
by selling wool to Fieldcrest, Woolrich and Faribo.

A born talker,
he could sell one hundred wet-down bales
of that white stuff. He could clock the miles and the sales

and make it pay.
At home each sentence he would utter
had first pleased the buyer who'd paid him off in butter.

Each word
had been tried over and over, at any rate,
on the man who was sold by the man who filled my plate.

My father hovered
over the Yorkshire pudding and the beef:
a peddler, a hawker, a merchant and an Indian chief.

Roosevelt! Willkie! and war!
How suddenly gauche I was
with my old-maid heart and my funny teenage applause.

Each night at home
my father was in love with maps
while the radio fought its battles with Nazis and Japs.

Except when he hid
in his bedroom on a three-day drunk,
he typed out complex itineraries, packed his trunk,

his matched luggage
and pocketed a confirmed reservation,
his heart already pushing over the red routes of the nation.

I sit at my desk
each night with no place to go,
opening thee wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,

the whole U.S.,
its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,
through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

He died on the road,
his heart pushed from neck to back,
his white hanky signaling from the window of the Cadillac.

My husband,
as blue-eyed as a picture book, sells wool:
boxes of card waste, laps and rovings he can pull

to the thread
and say Leicester, Rambouillet, Merino,
a half-blood, it's greasy and thick, yellow as old snow.

And when you drive off, my darling,
Yes, sir! Yes, sir! It's one for my dame,
your sample cases branded with my father's name,

your itinerary open,
its tolls ticking and greedy,

its highways built up like new loves, raw and speedy.

The Next Meeting

August 16, 2018

Other Jabber

Anne Sexton

Jeffrey Skinner
re The Company of Heaven, not only is the poem good, but read the book as a work in toto and you'll find that it is a work of integrated parts.