Meeting October 13, 2007

Minutes of September Meeting

Small meeting made worse by the absence of anyone at Mahoney Rec Center to let us in.

Moved to Marco Polo and had a successful meeting. Decided to defer dues collection until October meeting. Will discuss relocation since we’ve been left out in the cold twice by Parks and Rec people. Assignment for next time is to write a disconnected poem, i.e. one in which each line has no apparent connection to the other lines in the poem. It must be grammatical and use real words. We missed and began to grieve over Carol Shapiro’s missing status.

Treasurer’s Report

Chapter News, etc.

Dues are due: $10 per.

We have finally put to bed the Golden Shoe chapbook and any ensuing profits belong to us. On reflection it was a marvelous piece of work well done by all. Thank you all and special thanks to the people who did the collating, editing, publishing, distribution, collection and etc. and etc.

Shall we relocate? Calvin Harris assures me that the scheduling is okay. He apologized for the problem in September and assured me that the problem has been solved. The usual issues vis-à-vis moving are appropriateness to the meetings, centrality of location and accessibility to those of us who continue to age rapidly. Ollie Jones offers her home. We need some specifics about arrangements. (I personally would rather not meet in someone’s home.) Shaws supermarket on Broad St has rooms that Sue Betko is excited about. I visited the site and concur with reservations. Charlie Gilbert may have checked with the Eight District.

The Poetry Corner is all but defunct. NFI at the moment.

CPS News

Members should have received their copies of Long River Run and The Connecticut River Review.

Why don’t we have more submissions? All you have to do is send a poem. It’s one of the benefits of being a member—publication in a nicely done journal. And you can use it in the credits you cite when you submit to other journals.

Current contests are:

WALLACE W. WINCHELL POETRY CONTEST

Open to all poets. NEW GUIDELINES AND PRIZE AMOUNTS

Submit poems: Oct. 1-Dec. 31 (postmark)

Prizes of $400, $200, and $100.

Send up to 3 unpublished poems, any form, 80 line limit each. Include two copies of each poem: one with complete contact info and one with NO contact info. Both copies should be marked Wallace Winchell. Include SASE for results only (no poems will be returned). Winning poems must be submitted by disc or electronically following notification. Send fee of $15 for up to three poems; make check out to Connecticut Poetry Society. Prize winning poems will be published in Connecticut River Review.

Send submissions to Wallace W. Winchell Poetry Contest, CPS, PO Box 270554, West Hartford, CT 06127.

LYNN DECARO POETRY CONTEST

Open to high school students

September 7, 2007t>

Prizes of $75, $50, and $25.

This contest was established to honor Lynn DeCaro, a promising young CPS member who died of leukemia in 1986. Send up to 3 unpublished poems, any form, 40 line limit each. Include two copies of each poem: one with complete contact info and one with NO contact info. Both copies should be marked DeCaro Contest. Include SASE, a stamped, self-addressed, stamped envelope, for results only (no poems will be returned). Winning poems must be submitted by disc or electronically following notification. There is no entry fee for this contest. Prize winning poems will be published in Long River Review II.

Send submissions to Lynn DeCaro Poetry Contest, CPS, PO Box 270554, West Hartford, CT 06127.

News

Scurlock passes, runs Poets to win

By Bob Daily Correspondent

Article Launched: 09/30/2007 12:12:24 AM PDT

WHITTIER - With a versatile offense and a thwarting defense, the Whittier College Poets posted a 28-7 victory over the visiting Pomona-Pitzer Sagehens in the SCIAC football opener for both teams on Saturday evening.

Whittier's offense, which scored on three consecutive possessions in the middle of the first half, was led by quarterback Josh Scurlock, who completed 19-of-36 passes for 289 yards and two touchdowns. He also rushed for 117 yards on 16 carries.

Meanwhile the defense had its shining moment with a goal-line stand midway through the fourth quarter.

The Poets (2-1 overall) began their scoring when Richard Gonzales ran 2 yards for a touchdown with six seconds left in the first quarter.

The TD capped a 55-yard drive, which featured passes of 47 and 13 yards from Scurlock to John Ollison.

On the Poets' next possession, Ollison caught a 19-yard scoring pass from Scurlock. The key play in the drive was a 45-yard scramble by Scurlock as he followed the blocks of Chris Anderson, Keith Hernandez and Ethan Schillinger.

Pomona Pitzer (1-2) responded with a 63-yard scoring march, capped by Russell Oka's 2-yard scoring run to reduce the deficit to 14-7 midway through the second

quarter.

Building the lead back to 14 points, Whittier put together a 74-yard scoring drive, culminated by a 14-yard touchdown pass from Scurlock to Chris Delgado.

The Poets concluded the game's scoring late in the third quarter when Ollison ran it in on an 8-yard reverse. Two plays prior to the touchdown, a pressured Scurlock flipped a pass to Gonzales, who turned the short pass into a 25-yard gain as he broke three tackles.

Whittier's defense stopped the Sagehens after Pomona had driven to the Whittier 7-yard line early in the fourth quarter.

On the first play in the series, a tackle by Whittier linebacker David Taylor sent the helmet of the Pomona ball carrier back into the Pomona backfield.

On fourth down, an aggressive pass rush by Poets lineman Daniel Lopez forced a hurried pass, which fell incomplete and ended Pomona's last threat.

Other defensive highlights for the Poets included an interception by defensive back James Monaco, which was eventually converted into the Poets' first touchdown.

On the opening possession of the second half, Whittier defensive back Brent Barstow intercepted a pass to stop another potential Pomona drive

Quotation

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), Mon Coeur Mis a Nu, XXII

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet.

Horace (65 BC - 8 BC), Odes

"Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind,
because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science."

Poetry Qoute by Sigmund Freud

Education

Go to this part after the first reading of poems that are normal, not disconnected, unless the disconnected poems make more sense in reverse.

Following our look last time into spamoetry, poetry made from the subject line in spam received in peoples’ emails, I searched for new forms of poetry and found “Versus RE Versus”.

Saxophonist delves into new form of inverted poetry (10/7/1999)

MUNCIE, Ind. – Ball State University saxophone professor George Wolfe’s latest exploration into music, creativity and cosmology is turning poetry upside down.

A new book of poems Wolfe produced this fall presents a new approach to writing poetry that he developed called "Verses Re Versus." Sixteen poems by Wolfe and a few other writers, including local poet Michael Brockley, illustrate the new form.

Published by Jomar Press, the book will make its debut at Muncie’s Humpback Barn Festival Oct. 16-17. Copies will be available for sale during the art and poetry festival.

Wolfe’s new form of poetry takes the first stanza of a poem and reverses the order of its words to comprise the second stanza. Punctuation and sentence division can be modified to help the second stanza make sense. The rearrangement usually gives the two stanzas very different meanings.

"When you turn it around, you can’t control the meaning," Wolfe said. "The poem then dictates its own meaning, and it’s a valuable educational exercise. This forces a person to allow meaning to emerge on its own."

Young artists and musicians often want to weave a specific, intended meaning into their work, Wolfe noted. "Verses Re Versus" shows them that various levels of meaning can arise from artwork as it’s created, and the artist might be pleasantly surprised.

"This is a very useful educational tool for teaching people about meaning in art and one’s own poetic creativity," he said.

The concept for the poetic form arose from Wolfe’s studies of Mozart’s "Canon Inversus," a musical duet in which the second half of the piece is the first half reversed. Wolfe recorded the work on his 1998 compact disc "Lifting the Veil."

"It shows how you can take a concept and express it in more than one artistic medium," he said. "I’m actively showing that music and poetry can interrelate and inspire each other."

For Wolfe, the "Verses Re Versus" poetry and Mozart’s "Canon Inversus" are also metaphors for the way creation can be viewed from opposing perspectives, such as theology and science, and still make sense, each perspective leading to the perception of a "wondrous order."

Two poems in Wolfe’s new book come from Ball State faculty composer Jody Nagel’s musical work "Three Universes." Another Wolfe poem in the book demonstrates his new approach:

Moon, deceptive, crisp,
that wildness with brittle
alluring light, receding into
time, turning cold, forgotten,
still...now passions with
restless rays, hiding love.
This is romance, fleeting,
like passing starlight.
Starlight passing like
fleeting romance. Is this
love, hiding rays restless
with passions, now still,
forgotten, cold, turning time
into receding light, alluring,
brittle with wildness? That
crisp, deceptive moon.

Wolfe has shared his new poetic form and discussed its relationship to cosmology with an English class at Muncie Central High School. The educational appendix to his new book might be used by Ball State classes, he said.

Wolfe is an associate professor of music performance at Ball State, where he received the university’s Outstanding Creative Endeavor Award in 1997. His creative projects over the years have included extensive studies of North Indian music and the historical relationship between music and cosmology.

As a saxophone performer and teacher, Wolfe promotes a motivic approach to classical improvisation and has performed throughout the United States and in Europe, Costa Rica, Canada, Korea and Japan.

By Ted Buck, Communications Manager

One of mine:

Meditation, yoga—

cheap tricks to muffle the pain.

Alcohol just abets the serpent.

In the beginning was pain.

I wonder if all birth is painful,

if the earth grimaces

as each new tumor issues forth.

Forth issues tumor

as each grimaces the earth.

Painful is birth.

All wonder.

Pain was beginning

The serpent abets alcohol

to pain the muffle, tricks cheap—

yoga, meditation.

Today’s Assignment Notes

First we wrote poems referencing lines from our favorite poets. At the last meeting we looked at spamoetry and today we had a look at verses re versus. The disconnected poems reveal something about sound in poetry in that, being meaningless, (but are they really?) they feature only sound. As T. S. Eliot reminds us a poem should mean before it is understood. Music affects us without words. The sonic elements of poetry areessential and the disconnected poems bring out the value of sonics. Paul’s poetry relies heavily upon the sonic elements. I’ve been reading Basil Bunting lately and his sonic elements are apparent when you hear his poems—here read the quotation from the introduction to the book. Frost’s sonics are essential to his meanings. Frost, however, tricks us into misunderstandings via sonics, as with his “The Road Not Taken” which sounds far simpler than the meaning.

(CONSIDER READING THE DISCONNECTED POEMS IN REVERSE.)

Another aspect of the disconnected poems is apparent if you ponder that all the images used (and look at how image-based the poems might be—mine is largely so) came to mind for some reason—all from within you. I referenced Crabtree’s Bludgeon last week:

"No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated."

Is it possible, then, to relate the disconnections in any way? I went nuts trying to. My head hurt afterward. One of the exercises employed by people trying to activate the creative (right) brain is to find ways to connect the disconnected, the apparently unrelated, usually done with a pair of items. In the case of our poems we might wonder how the whole relates, how the relationships occur outside of word and logic, perhaps solely in sonics. As we go forward from here, take an awareness to your next poems that permits a deeper reading of relationships in the images and words that come up and seem unrelated. That is, entertain some of those things you normally discard. I discovered myself doing this over the summer during the writing of the chapbook I now have out in search of a publisher.

Next Assignment

The conachlann is a simple bardic form of chain verse. The last word of one line, starts as the first word of the next line. You have a bit of slight leeway, as you will see in the examples. This is a medieval Irish poetic form.

Here is a modern example of a conachlann that I pulled from a Celtic poetry forum.

Conachlonn Anam: A Prayer by Ben

Only because of the Tuatha De Dannan do I draw breath
From first breath to last breath
Breath of spirit
Spirit that gives Life
Sustainer of Life, she who is the Land
Land of shining mountains
Mountains of my birth
Birth of song
Song churning in my blood
My blood the Land
The Land of Elder Gods
The Elder Gods giving my breath
Only because of the Tuatha De Dannan do I draw breath

Rannaicheacht Ghairid (ron-a'yach cha'r-rid):

A quatrain stanza with uneven lines. The first line has three syllables, the other three have seven. The stanza rhymes a a b a, with a cross-rhyme between three and four.

x x a
x x x x x x a
x x x x x x b
x x b x x x A

#35 RANNAIGHEACHT GHAIRID EXAMPLE

Father mourned,
cried all month, the year, and scorned
serene calls for happiness
though he blessed whom he forlorned.

His daughters
cried: "Go to China." One purrs:
"Give yourself something to talk
about," walking, she demurs,

"if you come
back, or if not, we'll have some
occasion to mourn forlorn."
Though quite torn he went still numb

"Never fear,"
he said, going with a tear,
off to China at eighty.
Now pity Father's mourned year.

Jan Haag....2-4-98

Internet Connection

www.mobysaurus.com

Mobysaurus Thesaurus is a comprehensive, feature-rich, easy-to-use English thesaurus for Windows.

In addition to numerous built-in powerful features (usually seen only in commercial products), it offers some major unique benefits that no other thesaurus product (software or otherwise) does, including a huge database of 2.5 million synonyms, Find Synonymous Headwords and Suggest Headwords, that make this free thesaurus software the right tool for you to find the right words at the right time.

NB If you are using MSWord in a fairly recent version if you right-click a word with the cursor within it or at the end of it you open a menu that includes a “synonym” link which, selected instantly gives you a list of synonyms for that word. There is also a link to a thesaurus. Failing this try Mobysaurus.