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Wit and Wisdom Writers Club, Manchester Chapter of the CT Poetry Society
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Minutes of April Meeting
Probably none. Review that we met on the steps of the Mahoney Recreation Center since we were locked out.
Treasurer's Report
Debbie Howard. BTW, I need a check for $26 to pay for postage.
Chapter News, etc.
Night of the Arts was good although as a reading venue it fails due to noise. The jazz band was tuning up while Mina read. I will suggest two things: First, improved coordination among the events of Pride in Manchester week so that events do no compete for the audience. Also, it would be nice if we could read from the stage as part of the concert. Thanks to all the people who set up and planned and took down our table.
I was successfully inducted into the Manchester Arts Commission Hall of Fame. Special thanks to Ed, who introduced me, and to all the members who showed up.
Any year-end information or thoughts about the chapbook, the money we owe the MACC or whatever we might owe it?
CPS
Dues were due in April. Pay yours. Remember our dues will be due in September, on the 8 at our first meeting of the year
News
Guess the poet:
To the Moon by Soselo (Josef Stalin)
Saturday May 19, 2007
The Guardian
Move tirelessly
Do not hang your head
Scatter the mist of the clouds
The Lord's Providence is great.
Gently smile at the earth
Stretched out beneath you;
Sing a lullaby to the glacier
Strung down from the heavens.
Know for certain that once
Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man
Strives again to reach the pure mountain,
When exalted by hope.
So, lovely moon, as before
Glimmer through the clouds;
Pleasantly in the azure vault
Make your beams play.
But I shall undo my vest
And thrust out my chest to the moon,
With outstretched arms, I shall revere
The spreader of light upon the earth!
The Red Tsar and poetry
The Guardian
As a teenager, Stalin had a surprising talent for romantic poetry. Simon Sebag Montefiore wonders how the youthful scribbler became such a ruthless tyrant.
Young Stalin
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp 432, £25
Before he was a revolutionary, Stalin was known as a poet. In 1895, aged 17 and studying for the priesthood in Georgia, a province of the tsarist empire, he took a selection of his poems to show to the country's most famous editor and national hero, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze.
The prince was deeply impressed with both the poems and the poet, whom he called that "young man with the burning eyes". After looking through the verses, he chose five to publish in Iveria (an archaic name for Georgia), Russia's most fashionable and prestigious literary journal. It took someone of the young Stalin's ambition and colossal self-confidence to walk into the prince's office and offer his poems for publication.
When printed, they were widely read and much admired. They became minor Georgian classics, to be published in anthologies and memorised by schoolchildren until the 1970s (and not as part of Stalin's cult; they were usually published as 'Anonymous').
Stalin was no Georgian Pushkin. The poems' romantic imagery is derivative, but their beauty lies in the rhythm and language. Poetry remained a part of Stalin's life right up to and even during his three decades as tyrant, leading him to protect some poets and destroy others.
Chavchavadze, Stalin's patron, was a Georgian aristocrat, literary aesthete and respected writer, a romantic believer in an independent Georgia ruled by an enlightened nobility. The teenage student of the priesthood, then known as Josef 'Soso' Djugashvili, was a cobbler's son from a notoriously violent provincial town who had overcome paternal beatings, street fights, several almost fatal accidents and illnesses to enter the Tiflis seminary, one of the finest educational establishments south of Moscow.
It was an oppressive boarding school offering a classical and Orthodox education, not unlike an English Victorian public school. Intellectually precocious, the 10-year-old Stalin wrote verses instead of letters to his friends.
'Noble' verse
He was raised, like all Georgians, on the national epic, "The Knight in the Panther's Skin" by Shota Rustaveli, which he knew by heart. As a child, Stalin immersed himself in all the popular poems, especially those by two other aristocrats and national heroes, Prince Rafael Eristavi (his favourite poet) and Akaki Tsereteli.
At the seminary, the would-be priest worked on his romantic poems until he was confident enough to show them to Chavchavadze. The chosen five soon appeared in Iveria, published under his nickname 'Soselo'. Soselo was admired as a poet before anyone had ever heard of 'Stalin', the name he did not coin until 1912.
Deda Ena- the popular children's anthology of Georgian verse- included Stalin's first published poem, 'Morning', in its 1916 edition, where it remained (sometimes ascribed to Stalin, sometimes not) up to the days of Brezhnev. The scans and rhymes of 'Morning' work perfectly, but it was Soselo's fusion of Persian, Byzantine and Georgian imagery that won plaudits.
His next poem, a crazed ode called 'To the Moon', reveals more of the poet: a violent, tragically depressed outcast, in a world of glaciers and divine providence, is drawn to the sacred moonlight. In the third work, he explores- as Rayfield puts it- the "contrast between violence in man and nature and the gentleness of birds, music and singers".
The fourth is the most revealing of all: Stalin imagines a prophet not honoured in his own country, a wandering poet poisoned by his own people. Now 17, Stalin already envisions a 'paranoic' world where "great prophets could only expect conspiracy and murder". If any of Stalin's poems "contained an avis au lecteur", argues Rayfield, "it is this one".
Dedicated to Eristavi- if any of Stalin's colleagues had dedicated a youthful poem to a prince, it would have been used against them in the terror- Stalin's fifth poem was, with 'Morning', his most admired, and appeared in the Socialist weekly Kvali (The Plough). Entitled 'Old Ninika', its heroic sage requires both the harp to inspire and the sickle to kill.
When, 10 years after these works were published, he was a top Bolshevik, a political god-father running a gang of hitmen and bank robbers to fund Lenin's faction, he was still proud of his poetry. An unpublished memoir from the 1905 revolution recalls a pistol-toting Bolshevik boss leading packhorses bearing guns and stolen banknotes over the mountains, cheerfully declaiming his own poems to his companions.
The ex-romantic poet despised and destroyed modernism, but promoted socialist realism, his distorted version of romanticism. He knew Nekrasov and Pushkin by heart, read Goethe and Shakespeare in translation, and could recite Walt Whitman. He mused about the Georgian poets of his childhood. During the terror, he released a famous Georgian intellectual from prison in order to translate Rustaveli's "The Knight in the Panther's Skin" into Russian. He then edited it himself and delicately translated some of the couplets, asking modestly: "Will they do?" His translations were surprisingly fine, but he refused to be given credit for them.
Revolutionary politics
Stalin never publicly acknowledged his own poems. Why did he stop writing them? One answer is that, gifted as he was at poetry, he was superbly qualified for revolutionary politics in every way: Marxism was to be his religion and his poetry. As importantly, he would be a Russian statesman as well as a world revolutionary, while his poetry belonged in a small imperial province, Georgia, a parochial backwater, in a minor language. As he later told a friend: "I lost interest in writing poetry because it requires one's entire attention- a hell of a lot of patience. And in those days I was like quicksilver."
In 1949, for Stalin's official 70th birthday, the Politburo magnate and notorious chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria- a fellow Georgian, secretly commissioned the best translators of poetry, including Pasternak and Andrei Tarkovsky, to create a Russian edition of the five poems. They were not told who the author was, but one of the poets thought "this work is worthy of the Stalin Prize first rank"- though probably he had guessed the identity of the young versifier. In the midst of the project, they received the stern order, clearly from Stalin himself, to stop work.
Stalin wished to be remembered by history as the supreme leader of world Marxist revolution and the ruthless Red Tsar of the Russian imperium, not as a teenage poet from Georgia.
Quotation
The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. "
--Richard Rosen
" Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat."
-- Osbert Sitwell
"The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness." Christopher Morley
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell
Education
Learn to steal. Steal language. You've heard me say this before. We can go around the room and each of us give a term from our working lives or our avocational passions that is unique, unusual, and interesting and useful for a poem. The language of our work transmits to others our singleness as vocationally identified but also our love and commitment to the work or something about it. Remember "fugitive dust" I came across some time ago. Look in strange places for phrases worth stealing. "Lag screws", "flashing", ring-shank nails,. From an organ parts list: Reed scraper, return spring, belly cloth, mute skin-think about ways in which skin can be mute-- Look for words to steal, whole phrases that startle us when transplanted into our poems because they are new uses of language.
Assignment
Go around the room and have each name a favorite poem. Theses poems speak to us in some moving way and have for a long time. In order to find out what it is that moves us about these poems the summer assignment is to write a poem a week, each one starting with our using as a title one line from the favorite you just named, each one a different line.
Select a favorite poem and read it. Then, each week write a poem of your own beginning with a line from your favorite poem.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Minutes of Last Meeting
Treasurer’s Report
WWWC Business
I will not be available for the next meeting due to a trip to Ireland.
MACC
Poetry dining in April
Where?
Who will plan it?
CPS
Most recent newsletter?
Online links don’t all work. The one at the bottom of the opening page seems to be okay.
The Connecticut Poetry Society Newsletter
◊ Affiliate of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (NFSPS) ◊
P O Box 270554, W. Hartford, CT 06127
Website: www.ct-poetry-society.org
February 2007 Email: connpoetry@comcast.net
Mark your Calendars!
Sunday, April 29, 2-4 P.M.
CPS Annual Meeting and Poetry Reading, University of Hartford, 1265 Asylum Ave., Hartford, CT, Butterworth Hall
Special Guest Readers:
CPS Members reading from their new books:
Polly Brody, author of The Burning Bush; Peggy Sapphire, author of A Possible Explanation;
Jennifer Smith Turner, author of Lost and Found, Rhyming Verse Honoring African American Heroes,
and winners of recent CPS contests
followed by open microphone
Sunday, March 25, 1-5 P.M.
Workshop: Getting your Poetry Published, including
• What makes a poem marketable?
• Self-publishing – a good idea?
• What do editors look for?
• Online publication
led by Ravi Shankar and Tony Fusco
University of Hartford, 1265 Asylum Ave., Hartford, CT, Butterworth Hall
cost: CPS members: $30, nonmembers: $60
Tony Fusco is editor of Connecticut River Review, the journal of the Connecticut Poetry Society and editor of Caduceus, the poetry journal of the Art Place Yale Medical Group. Ravi Shankar, the founding editor of Drunken Boat and poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University, is the author of Instrumentality (Cherry Grove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards. Both Tony and Ravi have won numerous poetry awards.
SPACE IS LIMITED: Pre-register by e-mailing vglc@aol.com or calling 860-236-6772 (evenings). You may mail your registration information and fee to CPS, Box 270554, West Hartford, CT 06127 or pay at the door.
Announcements and Events
CPS Annual Dues ($25) are due April 1, 2007. Send to CPS Membership, PO Box 792, Manchester, CT 06045
March 1, 2007, and continuing Thursday nights until March 29, 6:30-8:30
Workshop: Poems and short Memoir of Place, led by CPS member Maria Sassi. For information, call West Hartford Continuing Education at 523-3555
March 9, 2007. Poetry Reading: Noah Webster House, West Hartford, CT, 7:00
March 22, 2007, CPS Vice President Emerson Gilmore will read at The Spoken Word Series at Wood Memorial Library, South Windsor, 6:30 PM. For information, call 289-1783
April 12, 2007 Poetry Reading sponsored by West Hartford Poet Laureate Maria Sassi, at Town Hall, West Hartford, Connecticut
May 24, 2007, CPS member Sherri Bedingfield will read at the Spoken Word Series at Wood Memorial Library, South Windsor, 6:30. For information, call 289-1783.
Member News
CPS member Robert Lund, who is also a member of Pittsburgh Poetry Society, has participated in several poetry readings recently and has had 18 poems and limericks published this spring. His column “Do You Know Your Poets?” appeared in AWW, Poetry Quarterly. Lund also received recognition as a finalist in a contest sponsored by Poet Forum Magazine and his poem took first prize in PPS Annual Poem Awards.
Polly Brody, CPS member from Southbury, won third prize in a poetry competition sponsored by Friends of Acadia, for her poem “Apis mellifera.” Her poem was one of over 600 submissions to the competition.
Tiffany Washington’s poem “No Palabras” was published in Caduceus, volume 4. Other CPS members whose poetry appeared in Caduceus include: Christine Beck, Sheryl Bedingfield, Kevin Carey, Ginny Lowe Connors, Nicholas Giosa, Lorence Gutterman, Nancy Kerrigan, Joan Malerba-Foran, Billie Morrill, Pit Menousek Pinegar, Charles Rafferty, Vivian Shipley, Lisa L. Siedlarz, Faith Vicinanza, and Tony Fusco.
Transcendent Thoughts. Poems of God, Love and Life is the name of a book of poetry just self-published by Charles Schenkel of Fenn Road in Thomaston. Charles has been writing poetry most of his life but since the fall of 1994 he has focused on spiritual subjects. He does a poetry reading once a month at Valerie Manor Convalescent Home in Torrington, Connecticut.
Alice E. Gross, of Southbury, was awarded Honorable Mention by Florida’s New River Poets for her poem “Love Test,” which appeared in last year’s volume of Long River Run II. She writes that it “gives me impetus to keep trying to improve.”
CONTEST WINNERS
Walter Winchell Contest:
1st Place: “Homeliness,” by Jeanne Wagner of Kensington, Ct.
2nd place “The Quarrel,” by Jean Tupper of Wrentham, MA.
3rd place: “Broken Dreams” by Margaret Iacobellis
Upcoming Contests
Deadline March 15, 2007. All members of CPS are also members of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Inc. (NFSPS). One of the advantages of membership is that you can enter up to 50 poetry contests sponsored by NFPS Societies. One mailing and a fee of $8 allows you to submit poems to eight different competitions. Information was mailed to all members in September 2006 with a yellow NFPS flyer. For further information, check the NFPS website at www.nfsps.com.
Attention: Connecticut Poets over Age 65: Poetry Contests for Seniors sponsored by Connecticut Community Care, Inc., begins March, 2007. For further information, contact Pat Mottola at patriciamottola@yahoo.com
Deadline March 1, 2007. Connecticut River Review Poetry Contest: Fee $10 for three poems, payable to Connecticut Poetry Society. Awards: 1st $150; 2nd $100; 3rd $50. 40 line limit. Include 2 copies of each poem, one with complete contact information in the upper right corner and one with NO contact information. Mark BOTH copies: Ct River Review Contest. Include SASE for results only (no poems will be returned.) Winning poems must be submitted by disc or electronically following notification.
Send to: Ct. River Review Contest, CPS, PO Box 270554, West Hartford, CT 06127.
If you’ve missed the CRR Poetry Contest, send your three poems to The Al Savard Memorial Poetry Contest, accepting submissions between March 1 and June 15.
College undergraduates may enter the Dehn Poetry Contest and high school students may enter the Lynn DeCaro Poetry Competition. These contests have a deadline of March 15. High school students do not need to include the $10 fee. College students, please identify the college or university you attend. See web site for more information (www.ct-poetry-society.org)
Note: CPS Officers and Board members are prohibited from entering any CPS-sponsored contest or from submitting poetry for consideration by the Connecticut River Review, the official poetry journal of the Connecticut Poetry Society.
HAVE YOU PUBLISHED A BOOK?
The Connecticut Poetry Society would like to compile a list of its members who have published books or chapbooks. If you have written or edited a book or chapbook that’s been published, please let us know. Tell us your name, title, publisher, publication date, and how to obtain the book. Please e-mail your information to connpoetry@comcast.net or send it to CPS, PO Box 270554, W. Hartford, CT 06127.
CPS members are also invited to bring copies of their books to sell at the annual meeting.
IN MEMORIAM
Billie A. Morrill, a long-time member of CPS, passed away suddenly on Friday, January 5, 2007 at the Lawrence & Memorial Hospital. Billie had worked as a copywriter for the Hartford Courant, G. Fox and Co., and was head of the Speaker’s Bureau at Travelers Insurance Co. She worked for 21 years at the East Lyme Public Library, first as head of circulation and then as a reference librarian. She is survived by her husband Richard M. Morrill of Niantic and daughter Celeste Morrill of Waterford.
Billie led the Poets of the Sound poetry group at Waterford Public Library and Creative Writers’ Group at East Lyme Public Library. Billie demonstrated her love of the English language through her profession and her poetry. She was loved by her family, co-workers, friends and fellow poets.
Many Connecticut poets will also miss Hugh Ogden, who died on December 31, after slipping through thin ice on his beloved Lake Rangeley in Maine. He was co-founder of the Creative Writing Program at Trinity and founder of a similar program at Hartford’s Academy for the Arts Magnet School. Hugh received many honors, but is best remembered as a nurturing teacher and mentor for countless writers.
Poetry by Annual Meeting Featured Readers
Polly Brody’s book, The Burning Bush, 88 pp., Antrim House, is available for $15 plus $2 for shipping from the author at berylline33@yahoo.com. Send check to Polly Brody, 218-B Heritage Vlg., Southbury, CT 06488. Poet Mark Doty praises the book’s “deep affection for the natural world, and adds that Brody’s “rewardingly close attention to many branches of the ‘Bush of Forms’ makes for an engaging record of participation, love and memory.” See www.antrimhousebooks.com/brody/html for excerpts and more information.
Instantly, out of the sky’s vault, the hummingbird
plummeted to hover, gem-like, just beyond my
fingertips. Breeze from its whirring wings tingled my
fingers. How can it be said? I felt a crystalline
YES! Yes to this wild bird, energetic as an emerald
cloud of electrons and I by it transformed, the atom’s
positive center.
Peggy Sapphire’s book, A Possible Explanation, has been published by Partisan Press and is available at amazon.com. Tena Starr calls the book “a blunt, wide-eyed examination of some fairly ugly truths – people don’t always die with dignity; poverty, injustice and cruelty are still with us; and what happens in the name of love isn’t always loving.”
Not Yet
I miss you tonight
someone’s talking about
her day to day
of bills she can’t pay unless
she shorts her landlord
or her kids’ dinner plates
how she sings the anthem
of this land to her kids
but the words don’t speak of poverty
for their floor-mopping father
don’t speak of faint wages
for their janitor mother
don’t speak In new language
the fears of getting sick
then sicker.
Jennifer Smith Turner, author of Perennial Garden, has recently published Lost and Found, Rhyming Verse Honoring African American Heroes, accompanied by illustrations by her sister. The book is available at the bookstores of the University of Hartford and University of Connecticut, and various booksellers listed on her website: www.jennifersmithturner.com.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Our entire history reduced
To bumper sticker, saying –
I have a dream.
Martin would not be pleased
To see his words, deeds
Breeze along highways
Stuck to dimpled metal chrome, by just anyone
No thought, understanding of any byways
Just two bucks to spare –
So unfair. . .
Editorial
The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, a bi-weekly summer program of music and poetry, will not be held this summer. The Festival, originally sponsored by local corporations and the Hartford Courant’s Northeast Magazine, has suffered decreased contributions, revenue, and patrons over the past few years. Although the Hill-stead Museum, owner of the gorgeous grounds where the Festival was held, is putting a brave face on a planned two-day poetry event to be held in September, we should not fool ourselves. A major poetry event that offered Connecticut audiences a chance to hear such poets as Li Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Billy Collins, and Maxine Kumin is out of business. This will be a sad summer for poetry in Connecticut. The Connecticut Poetry Society needs to send a message: poetry does matter.
News
Blackout Poems
NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS ARCHIVE
« Previous Entries
NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS IN TORONTO’S NATIONAL POST
Thursday, March 8th, 2007
I was really surprised (but pleased!) when Samantha Grice called me last week and said that the National Post in Toronto was interested in running a few newspaper blackout poems in the “Avenue” section of Arts and Life. The National Post is a fairly conservative newspaper, but they’ve won several awards for their layout and graphic design. The article ran yesterday, and here’s what Samantha wrote up:
How to find poems buried in the headlines of this newspaper using only a Sharpie and your wits
BY SAMANTHA GRICE
National Post
The financial pages make the worst poems.
“No offense to business writers, but in one article the same word will repeat itself over and over,” explains Austin Kleon, a writer and comic artist from Cleveland who started making blackout poems a year ago. “I did a poem recently where the word was acquisition and it was repeated several times.”
Kleon prefers the city or arts sections for optimum poetic artistry. His newspaper of choice is The New York Times for no other reason than his wife has a subscription to the Gray Lady and big stacks often pile up in their apartment. Kleon figured he should do something artsy with them.
“I really like Sharpies and I was playing with a Sharpie one day and it just happened,” he explains. “I wish I had a better story.”
For a while Kleon was doing a daily poem, but one day he stopped and didn’t do another for almost a year. When several blogs recently lauded their genius, Kleon picked up his Sharpie again. “The problem is they are fairly time-intensive, believe it or not,” he says of the poems. “They take anywhere from a half-hour to an hour and for what you get, it seems like a long time.”
Fans of the poems have told Kleon they are thrilled with what they have got from his efforts. “They say, ‘Omigod, I love them. I’m going to go home and try one right away,’ ” he says. “And I think as an artist that’s one of the coolest things you can hear. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”
The DIY factor does make blackout poems attractive as an interactive pastime. One can imagine taking up blackout poetry on their daily bus commute in place of sudoku or the crossword puzzle. Kleon says they are incredibly fun to do. “I come from a creative writing background in college and nothing takes the fun out of writing like taking a class on writing,” he says. “These are a joy to do.”
But not perhaps as easy to do as one might think. “My wife said to me, ‘You weren’t home the other night and I tried to do one and I couldn’t do it. I don’t know how you do one every day.’ I told her it’s a lot of sitting around and running your hand through your hair.”
Kleon has created a new blog on which people can submit their own blackout poems. Each week he will post the best. To submit your own, perhaps based on this very story, visit www.newspaperblackoutpoems. blogspot.com.
Omigod! Haha.
Posted in NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS | 6 Comments »
TELL IT TO THE JURY
Thursday, March 8th, 2007
Posted in NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS | No Comments »
THE CONTROLS
Tuesday, March 6th, 2007
the Challenge of the Week is due tonight
Posted in NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS | No Comments »
IN THE LOCKER ROOM
Monday, March 5th, 2007
send me your own at the new site
Posted in NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS | No Comments »
NEW WEBSITE DEDICATED TO NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
I’m not sure if it will fly or not, but so many people have expressed interest in these things that I’ve decided to create a blog dedicated solely to them. There’s going to be a “Challenge of the Week,” and also an “open submissions” feature where I’ll post really good stuff people send me.
newspaperblackoutpoems.blogspot.com
Check it out. Spread the word! Send me your poems!
blackoutpoems [at] gmail [dot] com
Posted in NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS | 1 Comment »
SHE GOT IN
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007
In honor of my brilliant wife who just got into graduate school, here is one of HER blackout poems:
Posted in NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS | 3 Comments »
THE HANDLING OF THE RECENT ACQUISITION
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
One thing I’ve learned: the business section makes for the worst poems. Go for the Arts or Metro.
Posted in NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS | 2 Comments »
WHEN YOU SEE THE REAL DEAL
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
Posted in NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS | 3 Comments »
TIME TRAVEL IN A DOMESTIC CAR
Monday, February 19th, 2007
I hope this blog hasn’t felt like too much of a copout lately. I hadn’t done one of these blackout poems in months, and then I got thousands (literally! thousands!) of visits from a few mentions and reading people’s comments (some of which are really hilarious) made me interested in doing them again. I love how on the internet you have no control over what you are. If somebody sees your poems, you’re a poet. If somebody sees your comics, you’re a cartoonist.
I am whatever you say I am. I think a famous poet said that once…
Oh wait: that was Eminem.
Ah, well.
Posted in NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS | 4 Comments »
THE OLD EMPHASIS ON CAPTURE
Friday, February 16th, 2007
Posted in NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS | No Comments »
Education
April is National Poetry Month and so here are some links to great poetry and poetics online. Take some extra time to immerse yourself in poetry more than usual during this special month.
Poetry Collections | Poetry Sites | Poetry in the Public Domain
- William Blake: Poems
- Anne Bradstreet: Poems and Meditations
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese
- Robert Burns: Poems and Songs
- Samuel Coleridge: Ancient Mariner and Select Poems
- Stephen Crane: War Is Kind
- Emily Dickinson: Poems
- John Donne: Songs and Sonnets
- T. S. Eliot: Poems
- T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
- Robert Frost: A Boy's Will
- Omar Khayyam: The Rubaiyat
- John Keats: Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems
- John Keats: Poems 1817
- Henry W. Longfellow: The Song of Hiawatha
- Andrew Marvell: Selected Poems
- John Milton: Paradise Lost
- William Shakespeare: Sonnets
- Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works
- Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Infoplease
Poetry Collections | Poetry Sites | Poetry in the Public Domain
- Academy of American Poets Best Site!!
- Originators of National Poetry Month
- Poetry 180 Best Site!!
- From former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, a poem for each school day
- Favorite Poem Project
- Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky's project encouraging people to write about and read aloud their favorite poems
- Poetry Daily
- A new poem, poet, and book featured each day
- The Internet Poetry Archive
- Poems from and biographical information about living poets
- Modern American Poetry
- Criticism, biographical information, and selected poems from modern American poets
- Passions in Poetry
- Classical and modern poems organized by theme
- The American Verse Project
- A University of Michigan project to put online American poetry published before 1920
Infoplease
Poetry Collections | Poetry Sites | Poetry in the Public Domain
- Bartleby.com Best Site!!
- Anthologies and volumes from major poets
- Representative Poetry Online
- From the University of Toronto; search for poets, poems, poetry terms, and more
- Internet Classics Archive
- Sponsored by MIT, offers classic works, mostly Greco-Roman, with some Chinese and Persians, in English
- Luminarium.com
- Offers Medieval, Renaissance, early 17th Century English poets, bios, and other reference material
- Digital Dante
- Sponsored by Columbia University, presents The Divine Comedy and other works by medieval poet Dante Alighieri
- Shakespeare Online
- William Shakespeare’s plays and poems, accompanied by related material
- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
- Operated by The Tech, an MIT student newspaper
- Byronmania
- Features material on Lord Byron
- 19th Century Poets
- From Barrett Browning to Wordsworth
Assignment
The assignment for April, which will be our dining event, is to write a poem about what nurtures you. This since the next meeting will be the dining event and nutrition of all types is fit fare for our poems.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
WWWC February 10, 2007
Minutes of January Meeting
Unavailable due to Linda’s absence
Treasurer’s Report
Debbie Howard
Chapter News, etc.
Further discussion of MACC money and check dur
Any hope of sunsetting the sales, payments, etc.
News
Valentine’s Day Poetry Contest accepting applicants
| Entries may be e-mailed to lorenzopress@att.net and must be received by Feb. 14. Poems must be original, romantic and no longer than fifty lines.
The authors of the best three poems will each receive a copy of 100 Love Sonnets by A.S. Maulucci. Winning entries will be posted on www.lorenzopress.com |
A legend returns: Former
By LISA DeNEAL Post-Tribune
Dick Barnett, legendary
He is sharing some of his 2,000 poems at "The Spoken Word: A Literacy Initiative," an exhibit that runs through March 5 at the Gary Public Library, 220 W. 5th Ave. Photos of Barnett during his 14-year NBA career, most with the New York Knicks, also are featured.
"I enjoyed (nearly) 15 years as a professional basketball player," he said. "Now I teach the young people that a career in sports can go beyond being a ballplayer."
Barnett, who played collegiately at
Barnett spent a week in
"We are going to develop internship programs with professional teams in the
"Sports is not a players-only club; there are careers in public relations, publications, sports medicine. All opportunities are available to these young people. I achieved success and had my 15 minutes of fame, then I had a couple of wake-up calls."
Barnett spoke of near career-ending injuries that spurred him to continue his education. He earned a Ph.D. in education from
To learn more
What: "The Spoken Word: A Literacy Initiative," with an exhibit by Dick Barnett
In Memory of the
Each of them must have terrified
his parents by being so big, obsessive
and exact so young, already gone
and leaving, like a big tipper,
that huge changeling's body in his place.
The prince of bone spurs and bad knees.
The year I first saw them play
Malone was a high school freshman,
already too big for any bed,
14, a natural resource.
You have to learn not to
apologize, a form of vanity.
You flare up in the lane, exotic
anywhere else. You roll the ball
off fingers twice as long as your
girlfriend's. Great touch for a big man,
says some jerk. Now they're defunct
and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19,
rises at 20 from the
his pet of a body grown sullen
as fast as it grew up.
Something in you remembers every
time the ball left your fingertips
wrong and nothing the ball
can do in the air will change that.
You watch it set, stupid moon,
the way you watch yourself
in a recurring dream.
You never lose your touch
or forget how taxed bodies
go at the same pace they owe,
how brutally well the universe
works to be beautiful,
how we metabolize loss
as fast as we have to.
"Fast Break"--Sometimes It's Not Just
What You'd Expect--(
A few days ago, we came across a remarkable anthology featuring stories and poetry (that's right, poetry) about basketball, entitled "Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball" editied by Dennis Trudell and published by Breakaway Books, which is available at Amazon.com (just click on the title above) and elsewhere. It's must reading for hoops fans who love the language of basketball. Among the many poems contain in the book is one that we especially enjoyed, written by Edward Hirsch (whose bio is also below in case you want to see it). The poem was written as an elegy to one of his closest friends, with whom he enjoyed playing basketball in college. One day the friend had a stomache, and went to see the doctor. It turned out that he had stomach cancer and died a short while later.
Fast Break
(In memory of Dennis Turner, 1946-1984)
A hook shot kisses the rim and
hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop
and for once our gangly starting center
boxes out his man and times his jump
perfectly, gathering the orange leather
from the air like a cherished possession
and spinning around to throw a strike
to the outlet who is already shoveling
an underhand pass toward the other guard
scissoring past a flat-footed defender
who looks stunned and nailed to the floor
in the wrong direction, turning to catch sight
of a high, gliding dribble and a man
letting the play develop in front of him
in slow motion, almost exactly
like a coach's drawing on the backboard,
both forwards racing down the court
the way that forwards should, fanning out
and filling the lanes in tandem, moving
together as brothers passing the ball
between them without a dribble, without
a single bounce hitting the hardwood
until the guard finally lunges out
and commits to the wrong man
while the power-forward explodes past them
in a fury, taking the ball into the air
by himself now and laying it gently
against the glass for a layup,
but losing his balance in the process
inexplicably falling, hitting the floor
with a wild, headlong motion
for the game he loved like a country
and swiveling back to see an orange blur
floating perfecting through the net.
From Wild Gratitude (1985), by Edward Hirsch.
Be sure to read this poem more than once. Really, read it slowly, and like the game of basketball, "let the game come to you" and you'll begin to appreciate Hirsch's choice of language, and his sense of the rythym of the game and the sensibility of the poem.
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Defending Walt Whitman
Basketball is like this for young Indian boys, all arms and legs
and serious stomach muscles. Every body is brown!
These are the twentieth-century warriors who will never kill,
although a few sat quietly in the deserts of
waiting for orders to do something, to do something.
God, there is nothing as beautiful as a jumpshot
on a reservation summer basketball court
where the ball is moist with sweat,
and makes a sound when it swishes through the net
that causes Walt Whitman to weep because it is so perfect.
There are veterans of foreign wars here
although their bodies are still dominated
by collarbones and knees, although their bodies still respond
in the ways that bodies are supposed to respond when we are young.
Every body is brown! Look there, that boy can run
up and down this court forever. He can leap for a rebound
with his back arched like a salmon, all meat and bone
synchronized, magnetic, as if the court were a river,
as if the rim were a dam, as if the air were a ladder
leading the Indian boy toward home.
Some of the Indian boys still wear their military hair cuts
while a few have let their hair grow back.
It will never be the same as it was before!
One Indian boy has never cut his hair, not once, and he braids it
into wild patterns that do not measure anything.
He is just a boy with too much time on his hands.
Look at him. He wants to play this game in bare feet.
God, the sun is so bright! There is no place like this.
Walt Whitman stretches his calf muscles
on the sidelines. He has the next game.
His huge beard is ridiculous on the reservation.
Some body throws a crazy pass and Walt Whitman catches it
with quick hands. He brings the ball close to his nose
and breathes in all of its smells: leather, brown skin, sweat,
black hair, burning oil, twisted ankle, long drink of warm water,
gunpowder, pine tree. Walt Whitman squeezes the ball tightly.
He wants to run. He hardly has the patience to wait for his turn.
"What's the score?" he asks. He asks, "What's the score?"
Basketball is like this for Walt Whitman. He watches these Indian boys
as if they were the last bodies on earth. Every body is brown!
Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God.
Walt Whitman dreams of the Indian boy who will defend him,
trapping him in the corner, all flailing arms and legs
and legendary stomach muscles. Walt Whitman shakes
because he believes in God. Walt Whitman dreams
of the first jumpshot he will take, the ball arcing clumsily
from his fingers, striking the rim so hard that it sparks.
Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God.
Walt Whitman closes his eyes. He is a small man and his beard
is ludicrous on the reservation, absolutely insane.
His beard makes the Indian boys righteously laugh. His beard
frightens the smallest Indian boys. His beard tickles the skin
of the Indian boys who dribble past him. His beard, his beard!
God, there is beauty in every body. Walt Whitman stands
at center court while the Indian boys run from basket to basket.
Walt Whitman cannot tell the difference between
offense and defense. He does not care if he touches the ball.
Half of the Indian boys wear t-shirts damp with sweat
and the other half are bareback, skin slick and shiny.
There is no place like this. Walt Whitman smiles.
Walt Whitman shakes. This game belongs to him.
Quotation
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the
Don Marquis
“The dog may be wonderful prose, but only the cat is poetry”
“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”
Oscar Wilde quotes (Irish Poet, Novelist, Dramatist and Critic, 1854-1900)
Education
Poetry exists in countless metrical configurations. The two we’ve looked at recently are 10-syllable and 8-syllable lines. The differences in the poems from last time to this are remarkable in various ways—what can we say about these differences?
oc·to·syl·la·ble 
(
k
t
-s
l
-bl)
n.
1. also oc·to·syl·lab·ic (kt
-s-l
bk)
a. A line of verse containing eight syllables.
b. A poem having eight syllables in each line.
2. A word of eight syllables.
kyrielle
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
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(French “repeated series of words or phrases”)
a French verse form in short, usually octosyllabic, rhyming couplets. The couplets are often paired in quatrains and are characterized by a refrain that is sometimes a single word and sometimes the full second line of the couplet or the full fourth line of the quatrain.
The word is from the Old French kiriele, which is a derivative of the word kyrie, a type of Christian…
kyrielle... (75 of 76 words)
cielito
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
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(Spanish “darling” or, literally, “little heaven”)
a poetic form associated with gaucho literature, consisting of an octosyllabic quatrain written in colloquial language and rhyming in the second and fourth lines. The Uruguayan poet Bartolome
Assignment
Friday, January 19, 2007
1/17/2007
WWWC January 20, 2007
Minutes of December Meeting
Linda Richardson
Treasurer’s Report
Debbie Howard
Any further thoughts about the MACC money
Have we received money from them?
What do we have for them?
Any further desire to sunset this project?
Any further impetus to sell the chapbooks?
Chapter News, etc.
Poetry dining event in February or March?
CPS News
Contests, etc.
CONNECTICUT RIVER REVIEW POETRY CONTEST
Open to all poets SEND IN YOUR ENTRIES NOW !
Deadline: December 1- March 1
Send up to 3 unpublished poems, any form, 40 line limit. Include two copies of each poem: one with complete contact information in the upper right hand corner and one with NO contact information. Both copies must be marked: CT River Review Contest.
Include SASE for results only (no poems will be returned). Winning poems must be submitted by disc or email following
notification.
Fee $10 for up to 3 poems. Please make out check to Connecticut Poetry Society.
Send submissions to:
Prizes of $150, $100, and $50 will be awarded and prize poems will be published in
This year's contest will be judged by Eloise Bruce. Eloise Bruce has been and continues to be active in many organizations associated with theater, poetry, education, social justice, and the arts, including Creative Theater in
CPS CONTESTS: HOW ARE THEY JUDGED?
PROCESS FOR CHOOSING JUDGES
Judges are selected by the President in consultation with the board. Judges will be announced on the flyers announcing the contest and on our website. Judges receive a nominal stipend.
PROCESS FOR JUDGING
Each entrant sends in two copies of a poem: one with contact information and one without.
The Contest Chair separates the poems and marks anonymous copies with numbers. Judges are asked to name a first, second, and third place winner and may also select up to three honorable mentions.
Winning poems are then submitted to the contest chair, who notifies winners and those who have submitted a SASE.
NUMBER OF ENTRIES
In recent years between 50 and 100 poets have participated in each contest, sending in up to three poems each.
PUBLICATION OF CONTEST WINNERS
The winners of Connecticut River Review Contest, the Brodine/Brodinsky Contest and the Wallace W. Winchell Contest are published in the Connecticut River Review. Winners of other CPS contests are published in Long River Run II. Although honorable mentions are not published, the poets’ names and titles of their poems are printed.
News
Quotation
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
John Ciardi
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
William
Education
The ten syllable lines will naturally fall into pentameter, a metric which developed from the length of the natural human speaking breath. Poetry was oral before written. Indeed, so was history and many other things requiring memory before writing and print. Poetry was once entirely a spoken medium. It was often accompanied by music since via song and rhythm things were rendered more memorable. Poetry has evolved to a visual medium at times (I have a poem written from the right-hand margin which I wanted to include at a reading but could not because it is necessary for the reader to see the poem) although it never can entirely lose its sonic components and sonic development is a major part of my revision process when writing.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Monday, April 18, 2005
Tom from Summit Studio is anxious for us to become a presence at their cafe. He's looking for activity there in the evening and welcomes the idea that we introduce our anthology there. This seems like a good idea and will be presented at the next meeting as we come to publication of the anthology.
Remember the assignment for May (meeting date the 14th) is to write a poem about your job/career-- your favorite job, most hated job, whatever-- using language unique to the job, language others will not use in there own. Use similes.
Monday, September 20, 2004
Poet Virginia Hamilton Adair Dies at 91
| Sun Sep 19, 1:58 PM ET | |
CLAREMONT, Calif. - Poet Virginia Hamilton Adair, who published her first collection of verse to wide acclaim at the age of 83 after years of writing in private, has died. She was 91.
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Adair, who had taught English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, died Thursday in Claremont.
She produced three volumes in all, but her first, "Ants on the Melon," caused the biggest stir. After glowing reviews in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Time magazine, the book sold 70,000 copies, an enormous amount for the genre, said her daughter Katharine Adair Waugh.
"She has arrived in our world like a comet," poet Galway Kinnell remarked after reading her work.
Admirers praised Adair's inventive rhymes and humor, while others argued that her compelling story as a blind widow toiling away in secret obscured views of her literary merit. Adair took both the accolades and criticism in stride.
"It's hard for me to say what I think about it because it's kind of embarrassing," she told The New York Times in 1996. "I think the stuff is very good — technically very good ... But I think it's the fact that I'm 83 and living here in one room and that I'm blind and I'm also kind of gamy. I think they gambled on this book, and I think part of it is this old nut, a character."
Born in New York City in 1913, she studied at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and later earned a master's degree at Radcliffe. She published some poems while in her 20s in several notable magazines, and was twice named the most promising poet in the Ivy League.
In 1955, she and her husband, historian Douglass Adair, moved to California so he could teach at the Claremont Graduate School. Adair went to teach at Cal Poly Pomona two years later.
She retired, however, after her husband committed suicide in 1968.
"I have never understood," she wrote of his death. "I will never understand."
Afterward, she discovered Buddhism and founded a local Zen center. She continued writing, but it was only after Pomona College's resident poet sent her work to several influential editors that she was published. Her other volumes are 1998's "Belief and Blasphemies" and 2000's "Living on Fire."
Even after losing all sight in 1992, she kept writing on an old Olympia typewriter with the help of volunteers. She stopped composing about a year ago.
"Words were in her head, but she couldn't express them," Waugh said.
Besides her daughter, she is survived by two sons, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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