1/12/2008
Minutes
Treasurer’s Report
Get check for my expenses
Notes
Linda away until April meeting.
Carol Shapiro, NFI
I need a check for postage and supplies
Relocation
Julia?
CAST:
scheduling issues
donation necessary?
Whiton Library
Does the second floor have handicap access?
News
Poet of the dead leaves driven like ghosts,
Driven like pestilence-stricken multitudes,
I read you first
One rainy evening in
In my atrocious Slavic accent,
Saying the mellifluous verses
From a battered, much-stained volume
I had bought earlier that day
In a second-hand bookstore on
Run by an initiate of the occult masters.
The little money I had being almost spent,
I walked the streets my nose in the book.
I sat in a dingy coffee shop
With last summer’s dead flies on the table.
The owner was an ex-sailor
Who had grown a huge hump on his back
While watching the rain, the empty street.
He was glad to have me sit and read.
He’d refill my cup with a liquid dark as river
Shelley spoke of a mad, blind, dying king;
Of rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know;
Of graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.
I too felt like a glorious phantom
Going to have my dinner
In a Chinese restaurant I knew so well.
It had a three-fingered waiter
Who’d bring my soup and rice each night
Without ever saying a word.
I never saw anyone else there.
The kitchen was separated by a curtain
Of glass beads which clicked faintly
Whenever the front door opened.
The front door opened that evening
To admit a pale little girl with glasses.
The poet spoke of the everlasting universe
Of things … of gleams of a remoter world
Which visit the soul in sleep …
Of a desert peopled by storms alone …
The streets were strewn with broken umbrellas
Which looked like funereal kites
This little Chinese girl might have made.
The bars on
There had been a fist fight.
A man leaned against a lamp post arms extended as if
crucified,
The rain washing the blood off his face.
In a dimly lit side street,
Where the sidewalk shone like a ballroom mirror
At closing time –
A well-dressed man without any shoes
Asked me for money.
His eyes shone, he looked triumphant
Like a fencing master
Who had just struck a mortal blow.
How strange it all was … The world’s raffle
That dark October night …
The yellowed volume of poetry
With its Splendors and Glooms
Which I studied by the light of storefronts:
Drugstores and barbershops,
Afraid of my small windowless room
Cold as a tomb of an infant emperor.
From Selected Poems 1963-2003, by Charles Simic
Copyright © Charles Simic, 2004
A monosyllabic European called Sax
Invents a horn, walla whirledy wah, a kind of twisted
Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating
Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone
Widening ever outward and bawaah spouting
Infinitely upward through an upturned
Swollen golden bell rimmed
Like a gloxinia flowering
In Sax's Belgian imagination
And in the unfathomable matrix
Of mothers and fathers as a genius graven
Humming into the cells of the body
Or cupped in the resonating grail
Of memory changed and exchanged
As in the trading of brasses,
Pearls and ivory, calicos and slaves,
Laborers and girls, two
Cousins in a royal family
Of Niger known as the Birds or Hawks.
In Christendom one cousin's child
Becomes a "favorite negro" ennobled
By decree of the Czar and founds
A great family, a line of generals,
Dandies and courtiers including the poet
Pushkin, killed in a duel concerning
His wife's honor, while the other cousin sails
In the belly of a slaveship to the port
Of Baltimore where she is raped
And dies in childbirth, but the infant
Will marry a Seminole and in the next
Chorus of time their child fathers
A great Hawk or Bird, with many followers
Among them this great-grandchild of the Jewish
Manager of a Pushkin estate, blowing
His American breath out into the wiggly
Tune uncurling its triplets and sixteenths--the Ginza
Samba of breath and brass, the reed
Vibrating as a valve, the aether, the unimaginable
Wires and circuits of an ingenious box
Here in my room in this house built
A hundred years ago while I was elsewhere:
It is like falling in love, the atavistic
Imperative of some one
Voice or face--the skill, the copper filament,
The golden bellful of notes twirling through
Their invisible element from
Rio to Tokyo and back again gathering
Speed in the variations as they tunnel
The twin haunted labyrinths of stirrup
And anvil echoing here in the hearkening
Instrument of my skull.
CPS contests
http://www.ct-poetry-society.org/
Guidelines and Contests
The
Open to all poets. NEW GUIDELINES AND PRIZE AMOUNTS
Submit poems: Dec. 1-March 1 (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 CRR Contest. 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
Send submissions to CT River Review Poetry Contest, CPS,
This year's CRR contest judge: Kim Bridgford is a professor of English at
LYNN DECARO POETRY CONTEST
Open to
March 15th 2008 Deadline
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
Send submissions to Lynn DeCaro Poetry Contest, CPS,
Poetry Dining
I would like to move it to April since we’ll have Linda back then.
Education
Wordsworth also makes the points that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" (151). These two points form the basis for Wordsworth's explanation of the process of writing poetry. First, some experience triggers a transcendent moment, an instance of the sublime. The senses are overwhelmed by this experience; the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" leaves an individual incapable of articulating the true nature and beauty of the event. It is only when this emotion is "recollected in tranquility" that the poet can assemble words to do the instance justice.
Psychology tells us that memory is not accurate, that each time we remember something the memory is re-constructed anew and not always the same way. Thus the recreation of the moment of impulse is destined to be flawed, inaccurate in some ways. This puts great importance upon the details we do remember since they will mix with the somewhat inaccurate memory depiction of the incident. When writing we start with the impulse and try to recreate the feeling of it, the sense of it in both physical sensation and the emotional feeling of it. I find that at some point in every first draft I reach a point at which I ask “How do I go on?” At this point I see that I am not reconstructing the event as it was but as I can remember it and as it has been modified by the attempt to put it into words. This is where the poem will rise or fall dependent upon my willingness to accept that the poem now cannot do what I may want. By the application of suspect memory and the rigors of word and language the poem has become something different from any intention I may have had at the start and I must grant the poem its own life and work with it to let it express itself. It is no longer my will alone that drives it forward. With luck and practice the poem will go to a surprising end that is informed well enough by the original impulse to create an emotional experience perfectly relevant to the original although far different from it. The poem becomes its own experience. When this works the reader recognizes that the poet has indeed been struck by lightning and we share in the shower of sparks from it.
I came to pondering this from considering Joan Chaput’s poems in which there is great detail about earlier events—clamming, whatever—associated with profound memories and the struggle to get the emotion and detail to harmonize toward the resolution of the poem. I think the understanding that the memory is flawed and the emotion outside the specifics will help the process. It also requires great faith and the courage to trust the process. And it takes practice.
I thus come to Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine”.
Print: Guns N' Roses - Sweet Child O' Mine Lyrics print version
She's got a smile that it seems to me
Reminds me of childhood memories
Where everything
Was as fresh as the bright blue sky
Now and then when I see her face
She takes me away to that special place
And if I'd stare too long
I'd probably break down and cry
Sweet child o' mine
Sweet love of mine
She's got eyes of the bluest skies
As if they thought of rain
I hate to look into those eyes
And see an ounce of pain
Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place
Where as a child I'd hide
And pray for the thunder
And the rain
To quietly pass me by
Sweet child o' mine
Sweet love of mine
Where do we go
Where do we go now
Where do we go
Sweet child o' mine
This song expresses somewhat unwittingly the point at which the poet says “How do I go on from here?” except that in the song it never gets beyond that point even with chord progressions taking it into another key. The music cannot carry the song and fails to amend the words where the song gets stuck. As poets the challenge is to get beyond the sticking point and permit the poem to become itself.
Assignment
Over the past couple of years I have addressed some of the difficulties posed by writing about powerful, passionate topics by writing in the third person. I have used several names for this person—Jobhunter, Remainder and Neoman—with varying success. Earlier this meeting year we wrote prompted by favorite poems and writers and experimented somewhat with changing voices. The assignment for next time is to write a poem in the third person. It can be Uncle John, your dog Rover, simply she, it, or make up a person in whose name to write. The key is to write without the first person singular or plural—no I, no we. Put the person out there and see what that person will do in your poem. If you wish, re-write a poem by changing it from first person to third person.
(At the next meeting we’ll re-write these poems in the first person.)
An exercise for today
Last April you wrote a collaborative poem at the poetry dining meeting. Today we’re going to do something a little bit different. Take a blank sheet and write a line of poetry, perhaps from today’s poem, as the first line of a new poem. Then, pass the paper to the person on your left and that person will add a second line. Then pass to the next and so on. When you get your own paper back you’ll have a poem of lines by each of us and we’ll have ten or so new poems in the room.
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