cpsmanchester: March 8, 2008

--- March 8, 2008 ---

--- Announcement ---

The next meeting of the Wit and Wisdom Writers Club (Manchester Chapter of the Connecticut Poetry Society) will be on Saturday, March 8, 2008 from 1-4PM at the Mahoney Recreation Center, , 114 Cedar St, Manchester. We will plan the dining event for April and discuss relocation. The assignment is to write a minimum of 20 lines of rhyming couplets. Further notes and additional details may be found at http://cpsmanchester.blogspot.com.

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 (1892-1969)

--- Minutes of Last Meeting ---

A good meeting although ill-attended

--- Treasurer's Report ---

Debbie

--- CPS ---

Announcements

CPS sponsors Workshop on Poetry based on Nature and Art by Maria Sassi, followed by open mic; Saturday, March 29, 1:30-4p.m., University of Hartford, For more information.click here

April 19 Reading to launch poetry journal Caduceus 5 at Yale Book Store.click here

CPS Contests currently accepting submissions: DeCaro, Dehn

Click Here

Ct River Review accepting submissions.Click Here

Call for Submissions. click here

For a list of poetry books published by CPS members Members books

How to submit your poetry to magazines

Click Here.. #

How to order back issues of Connecticut River Review or Long River Review. full story...

--- WWWC Business ---

--- April dining ---

Sue, any word on Georgina's?

Any other ideas?

Anything wrong with Marco Polo?

What about treating Ed and honoring him?

Who will ask him? Charlie?

--- Relocation ---

Current status is undecided. The library advisory board offered little help, suggesting that we can get a waiver of insurance but that this will be of little value if we cannot find space in the town's buildings.

My Glastonbury office?

Julia's?

--- News ---

Stanford Report, March 5, 2008

Iran’s leading poet receives new Stanford literature prize

BY CYNTHIA HAVEN

* Printable Version

Simin Behbahani

Iranian poet Simin Behbahani is the first recipient of Stanford's Bita Prize for Literature and Freedom. The new $10,000 prize is part of the Daryabari Persian Studies Fund, recently endowed by Bita Daryabari to support and promote teaching, research and scholarship relating to Iran, including the area formerly known as Persia, and people of Iranian or Persian heritage.

The award ceremony is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 11, in Cubberley Auditorium. The ceremony will include a talk by Behbahani titled "Iran Today: A Poet's Vision."

Behbahani is one of the most prominent figures of modern Persian literature and one of the most outstanding among contemporary Persian poets, as well as a leading dissident. She is Iran's national poet and an icon of the Iranian intelligentsia and literati, who affectionately refer to her as the "lioness of Iran." Her poems are quoted like aphorisms and proverbs.

Behbahani was born in 1927 in Tehran. Her father was a writer and newspaper editor; her mother was a noted feminist, teacher, writer, newspaper editor and poet. Behbahani started writing poetry at 12 and published her first poem at 14.

She has expanded the range of the traditional Persian verse forms and has produced some of the most significant works of Persian literature of the 20th century. While many poets of her time embraced free verse, Behbahani's signature writing focused on the traditional ghazal form and took it to new lyrical heights-with a modern twist in perspective and voice. For example, while the form traditionally is a male poet courting a woman, in Behbahani's verse the man is the object.

She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1997. She also was awarded a Human Rights Watch-Hellman/Hammett grant in 1998 and, in 1999, the Carl von Ossietzky Medal for her struggle for freedom of expression in Iran.

Behbahani said: "I have put my poems forward for everyone to see. What can they be from the year 1979 onward? We wrote our books not with ink but with blood. No doubt, the same is true about the works of every other poet."

As she has written in one of her poems: "To stay alive, you must slay silence … / to pay homage to being, you must sing."

Behbahani was selected for the honor by Stanford's Program in Iranian Studies in consultation with leading members of the Iranian American community.

Click on photo(s) to enlarge.

* Contact

* Directories

* Maps & Directions

Stanford News Service

Gracefully she approached

Gracefully she approached,

in a dress of bright blue silk;

With an olive branch in her hand,

and many tales of sorrows in her eyes.

Running to her, I greeted her,

and took her hand in mine:

Pulses could still be felt in her veins;

warm was still her body with life.

"But you are dead, mother", I said;

"Oh, many years ago you died!"

Neither of embalmment she smelled,

Nor in a shroud was she wrapped.

I gave a glance at the olive branch;

she held it out to me,

And said with a smile,

"It is the sign of peace; take it."

I took it from her and said,

"Yes, it is the sign of...", when

My voice and peace were broken

by the violent arrival of a horseman.

He carried a dagger under his tunic

with which he shaped the olive branch

Into a rod and looking at it

he said to himself:

"Not too bad a cane

for punishing the sinners!"

A real image of a hellish pain!

Then, to hide the rod,

He opened his saddlebag.

in there, O God!

I saw a dead dove, with a string tied

round its broken neck.

My mother walked away with anger and sorrow;

my eyes followed her;

Like the mourners she wore

a dress of black silk.

washingtonpost.com

ad_icon

A Poet Who 'Never Sold Her Pen or Soul'

By Nora Boustany

Saturday, June 10, 2006; A16

The voice of poet Simin Behbahani rises, soothing the wounds of Iranians betrayed by a revolution that has curtailed their rights and failed to deliver social justice.

To stay alive, you must slay silence . . .

to pay homage to being, you must sing .

At 79, the revered poet has only peripheral vision, but she still writes. To defy the ravages of macular degeneration, she records her verses vertically, down the edge of the paper.

She described an incident in March when riot police approached her during a gathering in Tehran to mark International Women's Day. "Hey, don't hurt this lady. She is Simin Behbahani," a student in the crowd protested. "If you touch her, I will set myself on fire."

His outburst enraged the police. One of the officers lashed Behbahani's right arm and back with a whip and then beat her with a club that emitted electric shocks, she recalled. A passing policeman recognized her, intervened and bundled her into a taxi.

Sitting composedly in the solarium of her niece's home in McLean recently, Behbahani discussed her work and life through an interpreter. She was on her 15th tour of the United States, with speaking events in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, and will travel on to Canada.

"I have always been drawn to social issues. Even before the eruption of the revolution, while under the shah, I was also suffering," she said, referring to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown in the Islamic revolution of 1979. "There was no democracy in Iran. Even then, we had censorship."

Before the revolution, her poetry dealt with poverty, orphans and corruption, reflecting her concern for the outcast, the marginalized and the neglected. Her recent work has touched on the themes of freedom of expression and the rights of minorities and prisoners.

"I will identify her as the most iconic Iranian poet alive," said Farzaneh M. Milani , director of Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia. "I can really say she has become a cultural hero, and she is treated as such outside and inside her country." Milani, an authority on Behbahani, teaches a course on Iranian female poets.

"She reminds me of T.S. Eliot," Milani said. "She dives deep into her culture and literature, and the product is a truly modern outlook on the role of the individual, concern for democracy and human rights. The form is traditional, but the perspective and poetic persona are quite progressive."

Behbahani is known for her ghazals , sonnet-like love poems distinguishable by their special rhyme scheme and lilting lyrics. Traditionally, the ghazal featured a male poet romancing a woman. Behbahani reversed the roles; in her poems, men are the objects of desire.

"It was not only sensuous but courageous," Milani said of her dedication to the form. "While most of her contemporaries from the '20s and '30s wrote free verse at the height of the modern movement, she stuck to ghazal . Some poets claimed the genre was dead, but she pursued it and took it to new heights."

Roya Hakakian , an Iranian American poet and author, said that when she was growing up in the 1970s, Behbahani was not at all fashionable, eclipsed by the late Forough Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou, the literary giants of that time.

"When the revolution failed to deliver people to democracy and greater freedom, people turned away from modern poetry," Hakakian said. But Behbahani "has remained extremely loyal to the classical concept and has become a symbol of resistance, which is why, 30 years later, she looms so large," she said.

"She has been very fair to tradition and has never sold her pen or soul to any political group or political party. Yet, she is also very political because she has always spoken truth to power. Now some of her poems have become like aphorisms, sayings and proverbs," said Milani, who with Kaveh Safa translated some of Behbahani's poems into English in "A Cup of Sin: Selected Poems."

My country, I will build you again,

if need be, with bricks made from my life.

I will build columns to support your roof,

if need be, with my bones.

Unlike younger intellectuals swept up in the fervor of the early stages of the revolution, Behbahani was suspicious. "I realized changes were not going in the right direction," she said.

She was frightened by the wave of terror that followed, encompassing executions, kangaroo trials and mysterious disappearances of ordinary Iranians. "We had gone the wrong way from the very beginning," she said.

She took a public stand against the tyrannical rule of the ayatollahs and their infringements on freedom of expression. Her work was banned for 10 years after the revolution, and newspapers and magazines frequently published broadsides targeting her.

One night in 1996, while attending a gathering at a German diplomat's home, she was hauled off to jail. "I was slapped around, blindfolded and taken to prison," she recalled. "We were released the next morning. They led us out and dropped us in the middle of the street with our blindfolds still tied."

The Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi , who wrote about the incident in her recently released memoir, "Iran Awakening," described Behbahani as a "kindred spirit" and an inspiration for her own work on the suffering of women and the celebration of their rights.

Ebadi wrote that while she was in jail, she revisited her friend's ghazals, with their images of "monsters soaring the sky in trails of smoke, of plundered mermaids."

Behbahani smiles when asked whether she ever considered leaving Iran.

"I want to live there and die there," she said. "I feel for my people, the language, the ability to write about them through cultural bonds. The creativity in me comes from them, and I want to share it."

--- Education ---

Fill the blanks exercise:

The Hand

by Mary Ruefle

The teacher asks a question.

You know the answer, you suspect

you are the only one in the classroom

who knows the answer, because the person

in question is yourself, and on that

you are the greatest living authority,

but you don’t raise your hand.

You raise the top of your desk

and take out an apple.

You look out the window.

You don’t raise your hand and there is

some essential beauty in your fingers,

which aren’t even drumming, but lie

flat and peaceful.

The teacher repeats the question.

Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,

a robin is ruffling its feathers

and spring is in the air.

Reprinted from Cold Pluto: by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press © by Mary Ruefle 1996.

The Hand

by Mary Ruefle

The _____ asks a question.

You know the answer, you suspect

you are the only one in the _____

who knows the answer, because the person

in question is _____, and on that

you are the greatest living _____,

but you don’t raise your hand.

You _____ the top of your desk

and take out a(n) _____.

You look out the window.

You don’t _____ and there is

some essential _____ in your fingers,

which aren’t even _____, but lie

_____ and peaceful.

The _____ repeats the question.

Outside the window, on a(n),_____

a robin is _____ its feathers

and _____ is _____.

Reprinted from Cold Pluto: by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press © by Mary Ruefle 1996.

--- Next Assignment ---

The assignment for the April dining event is to write a poema bout food:

Deep Fat

I've had all I want of trans-fatty acid.

I will not be silent. I can't remain placid.

I couldn't care if my French fries are flaccid.

It lays on my belly for days till it's passed.

I think they use it because it won't spoil.

It's not a quality natural oil.

It gets so hot that an ice cube will boil.

Watch how the liquid will bubble and roil.

I think it has a bad taste that's synthetic.

It's an industrial solvent, pathetic.

It sits around in your gut like emetic.

You could throw up. It is not copacetic.

They won't disclose that it's some kind of lard.

They boil it and steam it and heat till it's charred.

There's nothing they won't disallow or is barred.

They're keeping secrets, so be on your guard.

They keep the barrels stored under the fryer.

The stuff never spoils, though it makes me a liar.

It doesn't have like potential for fire.

Restaurants like it and are the best buyer.

I think the stuff tastes like motor oil gunk.

It's nothing but acid and piggy fat junk.

Look at the globby white goop of the gunk.

To say it tastes better is restaurant bunk.

The prefix of trans implies something beyond.

They make it with heat and a chemical bond.

It probably stews in a pressurized pond.

I have opinions and want to respond.

My foremost thought is it tastes like some lube,

The kind that a grease monkey squeezed from a tube.

He must be thinking we're some kind of rube.

I've some choice words for this chemistry boob.

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That's all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at, and I sigh.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

I always eat my peas with honey;

I've done it all my life.

They do taste kind of funny

but It keeps them on my knife.

This poem is listed as Anonymous in all collections of poetry where I have seen it mentioned.

Random House book of Poetry; Ring a Ring O'Roses (Flint Public Library), etc.

It is said to be an old Bostonian rhyme, a jump rope rhyme etc.

I have also received emails attributing it to Shel Silverstein and Spike Milligan

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain,

With grammar, and nonsense, and learning;

Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,

Gives genius better discerning.

Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774)

Pablo Neruda's "Ode to an Onion" on the centenary of his birth

Here's Pablo Neruda's "Ode To The Onion." Neruda, Chilean writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was born a century ago this month.

Onion,

luminous flask,

your beauty formed

petal by petal,

crystal scales expanded you

and in the secrecy of the dark earth

your belly grew round with dew.

Under the earth

the miracle

happened

and when your clumsy

green stem appeared,

and your leaves were born

like swords

in the garden,

the earth heaped up her power

showing your naked transparency,

and as the remote sea

in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite

duplicating the magnolia,

so did the earth

make you,

onion

clear as a planet

and destined

to shine,

constant constellation,

round rose of water,

upon

the table

of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.

I have praised everything that exists,

but to me, onion, you are

more beautiful than a bird

of dazzling feathers,

heavenly globe, platinum goblet,

unmoving dance

of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives

in your crystalline nature.

What are your favorite food poems?

cpsmanchester

March 8, 2008