Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle! Date: May 21, 2024 Theme: Poetry and Growth Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave, 3rd Fl. Or by email (see addresses below)
Find a poem! Show up! Or, send a poem by email! We’re back for the sixteenth spring season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people examine the works of established poets. While there is no instructor and this is not a workshop for personal writing, once a month OPPC gives everyone a place to become teachers and learners to explore the form, content, language and meaning of poetry. Since the circle began, participants have selected and discussed 1612 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.
As spring pours in, we witness growth of nature all around us. In the meantime we are hoping to grow, not in size, but in understanding. Abigail is reminded by growth of how often nature pierces through in the most unlikely places as in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall”:
Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, all in all, I should know what God and man is.
AnnaLee remembered Anais Nin’s eight-line poem “Risk,” about what it takes to grow or propagate. The poem begins with the word “And” as if there were a narrative and the reader is entering in the middle. The spare writing uses the metaphor of a bud swelling in its protective case until it can no longer be contained and bursts into bloom.
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
GOOD NEWS! The One Page Poetry Circle has returned to the St. Agnes Library. In addition, for those who are unable to attend, you will still be able to participate by email.
—If you can make the May 21st meeting, we ask that you bring a poem with you on the theme of Poetry and Growth, with copies for others if you can.
—If you’re unable to attend, send us the poems you’ve selected with a comment on why you chose them. We’ll share the poems with you in person, by email, and through our blog.
For the May 21st meeting, whether a poem concerns growth or change or not, choose a poem that has meaning to you. If you can attend the Poetry Circle, bring a poem, with copies for others if possible. If you’re unable to attend, email your selection to one of us by May 21, with a brief comment of why you chose it. Can’t locate a poem you want to send? Check Poetry Foundation or poets.org. In the meantime, please blog with us onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.
Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle! We met both in person and through email on April 16 to discuss Poetry and Insects.
AnnaLee opened the Circle with “The Brook” by Edward Thomas, a poet known for his depictions of rural England and his realizations about modernity’s detachment from the natural world. She loved the poem for its enjambments—continuation of sentences without a pause beyond the ends of lines—that chase each other downstream: “A butterfly alighted. From aloft/He took the heat of the sun, and from below./On the hot stone he perched contented so,/As if never a cart would pass again/That way; as if I were the last of men/And he the first of insects to have earth/And sun together and to know their worth.”
Ellen selected Pakistan-born British poet Imtiaz Dharker’s “The Host,” in which a writer tells of returning home to find a colony of fruit flies has taken up residency while she was gone. She enjoyed its humor and straightforward writing as the verses recount the mission to rid the place of uninvited guests and the writer’s empty feelings that accompany her success. Might “the guest I miss” refer to the untamed ideas that once swirled in the writer’s head?
Through the rest of the day I revisit the site. No sign of return. The next morning no-one is there, the jar untouched, my table bare in the desolate kitchen. I try to work but keep coming back to stand like an expectant host waiting to welcome the guest I miss.
Fred found Robert Frost’s short poem in iambic pentameter, “Fireflies in the Garden,” in which earth’s creatures try to mimic the universe, but mortality is never up to the task: “Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,/And here on earth come emulating flies,/That though they never equal stars in size,/(And they were never really stars at heart)/Achieve at times a very star-like start./Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.”
Daria loved Emily Dickenson’s 1788 poem “Fame Is a Bee,” saying she was drawn to the poem because the author uses brevity and a powerful insect to show us the fleeting nature of fame. The bee announces its presence with a buzz, shocks us with its potency, then disappears.
Fame is a bee. It has a song— It has a sting— Ah, too, it has a wing.
Gail brought the circle around with Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” that depicts a grasshopper connecting with a human being, inspiring the narrator to ask questions both universal and personal. The award-winning poet is known for her explorations of nature. She took a daily walk in woods and fields, and is said to have tucked pencils in trees to have a writing implement whenever she was inspired: ”Who made the world?/Who made the swan, and the black bear?/Who made the grasshopper?/This grasshopper, I mean–/The one who has flung herself out of the grass,/the one who is eating sugar out of my hand.”
Abigail marveled at William Blake’s view of the similarities between the fly and man in “The Fly,” “Am not I/A fly like thee?/Or art not thou/A man like me?” Was this the basis for those horror movies?
Kai has “always been intrigued by how many haiku have been written about insects. I think the economy of words and syllables in a haiku lends itself to subjects that are small but significant. Additionally the contemplative nature of Buddhism focuses in on the power and meaning found in nature, paying notice to even the smallest details.” “Bashō,” translated by Robert Hass:
Stillness the cicada’s cry drills into the rocks.
Roger enjoyed Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “To an Insect,” in which he imagines the katydid as a gossiping woman and tries to understand what she is saying, “Oh tell me where did Katy live,/And what did Katy do?/And was she very fair and young,/And yet so wicked, too?”
June sent Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider”: “I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,/Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,/It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,/Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.” “I’m so moved by its comparison of the isolated little creature’s endless attempts at connection with the larger world to the individual soul’s (perhaps especially the poet’s) efforts to connect.”
Carol found William Roscoe’s “The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast”: “And there was the Gnat and the Dragon-fly too,/With all their Relations, Green, Orange, and Blue./And there came the Moth, with his Plumage of Down,/And the Hornet in Jacket of Yellow and Brown.” Roscoe was an early abolitionist and “I’m not convinced this charming poem is totally geared to the children’s market. Could this not be a subtle plea for acceptance of diversity?”
Larry chose John Keats’s poem, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket,” which he first encountered in high school. The sonnet was written in fifteen minutes in a competition with his friend Leigh Hunt. Larry likes “its description of how things can blend together in the imagination”:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.
In a nod to our lovely spring flowers, we close with Nancy’s selection of a poem that has meaning for her—insects or not: William Wordsworth’s beloved “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” “It’s an all-time favorite of mine. I had to memorize it in 6th grade! Love it to this day.”
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle! Date: April 16, 2024 Theme: Poetry and Insects Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave, 3rd Fl. Or by email (see below)
Find a poem! Show up! Or, send a poem by email! We’re back for the sixteenth spring season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people examine the works of established poets. While there is no instructor and this is not a workshop for personal writing, once a month OPPC gives everyone a place to become teachers and learners to explore the form, content, language and meaning of poetry. Since the circle began, participants have selected and discussed 1598 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.
GOOD NEWS: The One Page Poetry Circle has returned to the St. Agnes Library. In addition, for those who are unable to attend, you will still be able to participate by email. •If you can make the April 16th meeting, we ask that you bring a poem with you on the theme of Poetry and Insects, with copies for others if you can. •If you’re unable to attend, send us the poems you’ve selected with a comment on why you chose them. We’ll share the poems with you in person, by email, and through our blog.
Insects, beloved or hated, form a large part of the natural world. British biologist J.B.S. Haldane once said that if a god had created all living organisms on Earth, then that creator must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.”
Abigail finds Ezra Pound’s Cantos incomprehensible, but has always admired Canto 81:
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from the
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace
AnnaLee was enchanted by a 2013 article in the Atlantic by Lafcadio Hearn, in which the author explores 2000 to 2500 year-old Greek insect poems. These lines, translated into free verse from a poem about a night cricket are attributed to Meleager, “one of the sweetest singers of the later Greek literature”:
O thou cricket that cheatest me of my regrets, the soother of slumber;—O thou cricket that art the muse of ploughed fields, and art with shrill wings the self-formed imitation of the lyre, chirrup me something pleasant, while beating thy vocal wings with thy feet. How I wish, O cricket, that thou wouldst release me from the troubles of much sleepless care, weaving the thread of a voice that causes love to wander away! And I will give thee for morning gifts a leek ever fresh, and drops of dew, cut up small for thy mouth.
For April’s meeting, whether a poem concerns insects or not, choose a poem that has meaning to you. If you can attend the Poetry Circle, bring a poem with copies for others if possible. If you’re unable to attend, email your selection to one of us by April 16, with a brief comment of why you chose it. Can’t locate a poem you want to send? Check out Poetry Foundation or poets.org.
Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle! We met on March 19 to discuss Poetry and Rabbits, a subject many thought would be difficult and were surprised to see the wealth of poems about rabbits and hares.
Abigail loves Frank Mitalsky’s “Rabbit in the Moonlight” which perfectly captures her own thrill when seeing a rabbit:
Moonlight is sharp until I see A rabbit sitting quietly. Then wall and fence and tree and burr Grow soft and touch the night with fur.
Kai sent a poem by Ogden Nash where “what is left unsaid has every bit as much meaning as the words themselves. Because, you know. Rabbits!”
Here is a verse about rabbits That doesn’t mention their habits.
Kai also sent “The Rabbit” by Gary Snyder, “the American Zen-environmentalist-visionary poet”: “The rabbit in this poem has a message to share for all mankind, on behalf of nature”: “A grizzled black-eyed rabbit showed me/irrigation ditches, open paved highway/white line/to the hill./bell chill blue jewel sky/banners/Banner clouds flying,/The mountains all gathered.”
AnnaLee was moved by Sarah Holland-Batt’s “This Landscape Before Me,” which uses the struggling flora and fauna to consider the effects of colonizing Australia: “But this morning I saw a young rabbit/hunched in brush and shadow./I saw its lesioned face, its legs too thin to scramble,/the blood-berry red and pink scab of its eye./It had caught the disease we brought here for it/and wanted a quiet place to die.”
Roger enjoyed “Ballad of the Lost Hare” by Margaret Sidney (author of the Five Little Peppers) in which a hare seeks safety from many different animals. Finally, to escape dogs, he goes into a hole: “The dogs tumble up/To stare at his toes./They gnash their jaws,/And bewail their fate;/But to eat little Hare/Must wait—must wait!”
Gail selected Kentucky novelist and poet Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ “The Rabbit,” from The Golden Books Family Treasure of Poetry edited by Louis Untermeyer and illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund. Appearing in the “Creatures of Every Kind” section, the poem “is clearly intended to appeal to children with its rhyming couplets and simple vocabulary.” It begins:
When they said the time to hide was mine, I hid back under a thick grape vine.
June sent “The Names of the Hare,” a Middle English poem translated by Seamus Heaney. “It’s a very strange and darkly witty list-poem that begins by asking for praise for the hare, follows with a long list of names that criticize, rather than praise, and ends with ‘come to me dead/in either onion broth or bread.’” June reflects, “Perhaps the meaning is to give respect to all creatures, no matter how lowly, before you kill and eat them.”
Yasmina brought “A Rabbit’s Case” written by a young girl: “It hops, leaps and jumps/Through the grass collecting greens.”
Fred read us “Thumper” by Scottish poet and scientist Colin Will whose work relates nature’s ways of looking at the world. In the poem “Thumper” the poet shows us that what looks like cruelty may be compassion:
My pregnant neighbour came to the door cradling her frightened little boy. ‘There’s a baby rabbit in our garden. It’s been injured by a cat; Can’t walk; I think its eyes are out.’
Cate writes “After a frustrating search for a ‘rabbit’ poem, I was about to give up when I opened Joy Harjo’s An American Sunset. Right in front of me was ‘Rabbit Invents the Saxophone,’ a rhythmically, often rhyming, fun story of Rabbit coming of age and coming into his own musicianship in New Orleans. She describes his commitment to finding and sharing his art along with the impact it has: “the next day, no one shows up to vote because they were sleeping: ‘We danced through the night, and nobody fought.’”
Jo sent “Market Square” by A.A. Milne, a poem that tells us “that sometimes we go looking for what we want in the wrong place, without realizing it might be right in front of us, in our own little piece of the world.” A child goes to buy a bunny but goes to all the wrong merchants. After he has spent his money, he walks on the common, “The old-gold common…/And I saw little rabbits/’Most everywhere!”
Daria read Jeffrey Battistoni’s “When the Rabbit Met the Cheetah” a prose poem in which a rabbit and a cheetah seem to see each other in a new light. However, at the end, we are not sure what became of this relationship: “Despite the talent of the cheetah, she continued to lay there and watch with such flare in her eyes. Though the rabbit never understood why the cheetah showed such interest, he was quite thankful for her.”
Larry sent his favorite rabbit poem by Lisel Mueller, “Small Poem About the Hounds and the Hares.” “This poem addresses, via metaphor, a human trait, which is to memorialize, after the fact, societies that have been the victims of subjugation, to the point of genocide.”
After the kill, there is the feast. And towards the end, when the dancing subsides and the young have sneaked off somewhere, the hounds, drunk on the blood of the hares, begin to talk of how soft were their pelts, how graceful their leaps, how lovely their scared, gentle eyes.
Carol reports that she “had no idea so many poems had been written about hares and rabbits. All kinds of poems for children, hunters, drinkers, singers, Easter celebrants, and here, one by a kind and kindred soul, a poem of friendship”: “The Garden” by William Cowper: “If I survive thee I will dig thy grave;/And, when I place thee in it, sighing, say,/I knew at least one hare that had a friend.”
We’ll meet again in April for Poetry and Insects. For April’s meeting, whether a poem concerns insects or not, choose a poem that has meaning to you. If you can attend the Poetry Circle, bring a poem, with copies for others if possible. If you’re unable to attend, email your selection to one of us by April 16, with a brief comment of why you chose it. Can’t locate a poem you want to send? Check out Poetry Foundation or poets.org.
Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle! Date: March 19, 2024 Theme: Poetry and Rabbits Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave, 3rd Fl. Or by email (see addresses below)
Find a poem! Show up! Or, send a poem by email!
We’re back for the sixteenth spring season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people examine the works of established poets. While there is no instructor and this is not a workshop for personal writing, once a month OPPC gives everyone a place to become teachers and learners to explore the form, content, language and meaning of poetry. Since the circle began, participants have selected and discussed 1582 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.
GOOD NEWS: The One Page Poetry Circle has returned to the St. Agnes Library. In addition, for those who are unable to attend, you will still be able to participate by email.
If you can make the March 19th meeting, we ask that you bring a poem with you on the theme of Poetry and Rabbits, with copies for others if you can.
If you’re unable to attend, send us the poems you’ve selected with a comment on why you chose them. We’ll share the poems with you in person, by email, and through our blog.
Poetry and rabbits? We can’t help but think of the March Hare this month, but there is also a white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland and another (or perhaps the same one) in the Jefferson Airplane Song, “White Rabbit.” Once you look for them, rabbits are everywhere, even leading to an article in the July 1932 issue The Atlantic, “The Plague of Rabbits in Poetry.”
Abigail admired the way that William Cowper made a friend of one of his hares, another, not so much, as described in his “Epitaph on a Hare”: “Though duly from my hand he took/His pittance every night,/He did it with a jealous look,/And, when he could, would bite.”
AnnaLee read Wallace Stevens’s “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” in which the poet uses a rabbit’s life to reflect our feelings that when night falls we can relax from the perils of the day:
To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time, Without that monument of cat, The cat forgotten on the moon; And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light, which everything is meant for you And nothing need be explained;
Whether a poem concerns rabbits or not, choose a poem that has meaning to you. If you can attend the Poetry Circle, bring a poem, with copies for others if you can. If you’re unable to attend, email your selection to one of us by March 19, with a brief comment on why you chose it.. Can’t locate a poem you want to send? Check out Poetry Foundation or poets.org.
Our topic for February was Poetry and Paint. We had an unusual number of duplicate poems and authors this month. Several participants thought of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” perhaps the most famous of ekphrastic poems; two found Sexton’s “The Starry Night”; we had three poems by Kooser; and one poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and one by his sister, Christina Rossetti.
AnnaLee opened the circle with X. J. Kennedy’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s infamous painting of the same name. Poetry and painting merge as the author describes a nude woman making her way down a flight of stairs. The mechanical and energetic aspects that Duchamp captured in paint, Kennedy conveys with insight and humor: “Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,/a gold of lemon, root and rind,/she sifts in sunlight down the stairs/with nothing on. Nor on her mind.”
Ed brought “The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton, inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s beloved painting of the same name. The poem begins with an epigraph from a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars” after which the poem’s speaker gazes up to describe a roiling night sky with moon, stars, and a cypress tree resembling a drowned woman. Using slant rhymes, full rhymes, enjambment, anaphora, and many other poetic devices, the poem ends in a wish for annihilation: “into that rushing beast of the night,/sucked up by that great dragon, to split/from my life with no flag,/no belly,/no cry.”
Daria selected “Painting vs. Poetry” by poet Bill Knott. In plain language and a single sentence, the poem delivers a masterful twist to define what is painting and what is poetry. Poet Thomas Lux writes, “As dense as [Knott’s] poems can be, they rarely defeat comprehensibility. Some are so lucid and straightforward, they are like a punch in the gut, or one’s first great kiss.”
Painting is a person placed between the light and a canvas so that their shadow is cast on the canvas and then the person signs their name on it whereas poetry is the shadow writing its name upon the person.
Janina attended the poetry circle for the first time and contributed with insight to our discussion.
At the last minute Cate was unable to attend the February program, but sent us two selections, “Spring Landscape” and “In April.” “These two poems by Ted Kooser seemed appropriate for the theme.… I like these as examples of his own painterly writing style.” Gail read us “Spring Landscape”: “Spring on the prairie, a sky reaching forever/in every direction, and here at my feet,/distilled from all that blue, a single drop/caught in the spoon of a leaf, a robin’s egg.”
Gail completed the circle with “Painted Turtle” by Gretchen Marquette from May Day, her first published book of poetry. To quote the author, “The book is a report from a dark time,” a reference to her breakup of a lengthy affair. Laying psychic pain alongside the natural world, the poem addresses her once lover: “Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence./Why aren’t I your wife?/You swerved around a turtle sunning itself./I wanted to go back. To hold the hot disc of it and place it in the grass.”
Abigail enjoyed that Dante Gabriel Rossetti had inscribed the first four verses of his poem “The Blessed Damozel” on the frame of the painting of the same name. In the painting the damozel looks longingly (over a row of angels) at her lover on earth, while he, lying on the ground, gazes back at her. “The blessed damozel leaned out/From the gold bar of Heaven;/Her eyes were deeper than the depth/Of waters stilled at even.”
Roger found “The Painter” by John Ashbery. Written in sestina, a complicated form, the poem asks the question if a work of art is art if it is not painted or written down: “He chose his wife for a new subject,/Making her vast, like ruined buildings,/As if, forgetting itself, the portrait/Had expressed itself without a brush.”
June chose Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” “This dramatic monologue is a brilliant—and wonderfully creepy—psychological analysis” (of the narrator rather than the Duchess, the subject of the painting described):
Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands As if alive…
Philip sent W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “a complex poem by a complex poet” with a link to the New York Times interactive discussion of both the poem and the painting—part of a fabulous series linked above.
Scott reported that while reading about Auden’s poem, “I stumbled on William Carlos Williams’s inferior poem on the same theme, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.’ Why did he bother? I was also directed to some other Breughel paintings that fit the first stanza, so my horizons were broadened.”
Kai prophetically wrote, “I’m sure I won’t be the only person to choose this poem. Written in 1938 while Auden was living in Brussels, the author was witnessing first-hand the violent events leading up to WWII, juxtaposed against the background of daily life in Belgium carrying on unaffected by the turmoil and death occurring in its neighboring countries. It is no wonder that this painting inspired Auden to write a poem about how human suffering can coexist casually and simultaneously alongside human indifference.”
Jo found Christina Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio”: “One face looks out from all his canvases,/One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:/We found her hidden just behind those screens,/That mirror gave back all her loveliness.” “Rossetti painted in a way that was soft and beautiful while showing how a muse was used at times as she filled the artist’s view of what she was and not necessarily as everyone else saw her.”
Susan was struck by the red in Jane Kenyon’s “Small Early Valentine”: “I have your note/with flights and phone numbers/for different days…/Dear one, I have made the bed/with red sheets.” “Telling the absent lover that she has made the bed, reminds us of the bed that Odysseus built, her faithfulness, all the times he has left her with ‘flights and phone numbers’ … on the same wind that carried Odysseus away from Penelope. But, most important, it is the red of the sheets that puts the flaming passion and burning desire in Kenyon’s love letter.”
Carol sent Don McLean’s song “Vincent” and also Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night,” both responses to Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting. “Sexton wrote this piece as a way of celebrating Van Gogh’s painting and exploring the deeper emotions, good/evil that he was struggling with while painting it and which she may have felt while looking at it. Both Sexton and Van Gogh committed suicide”: “The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars./Oh starry starry night! This is how/I want to die.”
Larry wrote, “I have five books of poems relating to paintings. Browsing through them, I came upon this poem by one of my favorite poets”: “A Box of Pastels” by Ted Kooser:
I once held on my knees a simple wooden box in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken. It was a set of pastels that had years before belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt, and all of the colors she’d used in her work lay open before me.
Look for our next blog with information about the March 19, One Page Poetry Circle, Poetry and Rabbits. In the meantime blog with us here at one pagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com .
Spring 2024 Schedule March 19, Poetry and Rabbits April 16, Poetry and Insects May 21, Poetry and Growth
Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle! Date: February 20, 2024 Theme: Poetry and Paint Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave, 3rd Fl. Or by email (see addresses below)
Find a poem! Show up! Or, send a poem by email! We’re back for the sixteenth spring season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people examine the works of established poets. While there is no instructor and this is not a workshop for personal writing, once a month OPPC gives everyone a place to become teachers and learners to explore the form, content, language and meaning of poetry. Since the circle began, participants have selected and discussed 1564 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.
GOOD NEWS:The One Page Poetry Circle has returned to the St. Agnes Library.
In addition, for those who are unable to attend, you will still be able to participate by email.
If you can make the February 20th meeting, we ask that you bring a poem with you on the theme of Poetry and Paint, with copies for others if you can.
Plutarch wrote, “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.” Both are art forms, one oral or written and the other is visual. “Poetry and Paint” may be about artistic materials, the painter, or about the act of painting. One type of poetry, ekphrastic poetry, describes works of art, either actual or imaginary works.
Abigail loves Ford Madox Brown’s short verse describing his 1855 painting, The Last of England, and predicting the changing future of this family: “She grips his listless hand and clasps her child,/Through rainbow tears she sees a sunnier gleam,/She cannot see a void where he will be.”
AnnaLee loves Canto I of Wallace Stevens’ 1937 poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” The poemponders Pablo Picasso’s 1903 painting “The Old Guitarist” and the ways in which the artist alters and finds reality:
The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar, You do notplaythingsastheyare.”
The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon theblue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.”
If you’re unable to attend, send us the poems you’ve selected with a comment on why you chose them. We’ll share the poems with you in person, by email, and through our blog.
Whether a poem concerns paint or just paints a picture, choose a poem that has meaning to you. Then email it to one of us by February 20, with a brief comment of why you chose it. Can’t locate a poem you want to send? Check out Poetry Foundation or poets.org.
Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle! We’re at the end of the sixteenth fall season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people examine the works of established poets. Since the circle began, participants have selected and discussed 1547 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.
We met on December 19th to discuss Poetry and Mysticism.
AnnaLee looked for ways in which mysticism related to the here and now. She opened the circle with verse VII, from “Sunday Morning” by Pulitzer Prize-winning, American Modernist, Wallace Stevens. She loves how the writing imagines a boisterous chant to the rising sun, voices entering the waters of life, the choir of sounds made by the trees, and the fellowship of mortality in which humans leave their mark upon the world: “And whence they came and whither they shall go/The dew upon their feet shall manifest.”
Cate found a metaphysical work by Jane Hirshfield, in which the author plays with time. Hirshfield was influenced by Zen Buddhism, science, and biology. The poem, titled for its first five words, begins: “I imagine myself in time looking back on myself—this self, this morning,/drinking her coffee on the first day of a new year/and once again almost unable to move her pen/through the iron air.” We noticed its slant rhyme and its ironic play on words. At the poem’s ending, the author asks: “And that other self, who watches me from the/distance of decades,/what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred/or with compassion,/I whose choices made her what she will be?”
Susan read Adam Zagajewski’s “Mysticism for Beginners,” in which the narrator has a sudden insight into the meaning of life. He sees that memories in his experience, “are only mysticism for beginners,/the elementary course, prelude/to a test that’s been/postponed.”
Daria found mystical poet William Blake’s “The Divine Image,” which brings a message that both God and Man are one, and that all humans, no matter their creed, skin tone, gender, or state of mind, are worthy: “And all must love the human form,/In heathen, Turk, or Jew;/Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell/There God is dwelling too.” Blake, who lived from 1757 to 1827, received criticism for his radical beliefs.
Jane thought of a much beloved and enigmatic Robert Frost poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The poem begins with a man pausing in a wooded area near an empty farmhouse on his journey during the darkest evening of the year—the winter solstice. With simple imagery and few words Frost creates an outer world of silence giving the stage to our inner voices to ponder life: “The woods are lovely dark and deep,/But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.”
Gail completed our circle with a reading of Debora Greger’s “A Single Night in the City of Gold,” in which a once splendid movie theater, the protagonist’s state of aloneness, and a tragic-comic Chaplin movie classic—Gold Rush—come together in a magical connection.
O silent film of my life, unwind!
It wasn’t the wind but the silence that howled, ecstatic in the emptiness at the heart of the West. But Chaplin had a mystic’s hunger for the finer things: he boiled his boot. He wound a shoelace on a fork. He tasted shame for me, and found it sweet.
Abigail read “The Owl” by Edward Thomas, and felt the melancholy today of the owl’s cry heard in 1917 as the narrator thinks of what he “escaped and others could not”:
And salted was my food, and my repose, Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice Speaking for all who lay under the stars, Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
Roger loved “Haunted Houses” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with its expression of how those who have gone before us, linger with us, “So from the world of spirits there descends/A bridge of light, connecting it with this,/O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,/Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.”
Scott wrote, “The worst thing that can happen to a parent is the death of a child. When my brother died at 20, I read through the sympathy cards that poured in. I did not find them comforting—except one. A friend of the family who was a bit of a mystic herself sent Kahlil Gibran’s ‘On Children.’ While perhaps not a source of comfort, it serves as a reminder that the loss is not just theirs. It begins”: “Your children are not your children./They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself./They come through you but not from you,/And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
June sent “the poem whose title is usually shortened to ‘Tintern Abbey,’ which is one of my favorite poems by William Wordsworth, my favorite Romantic poet. This section enables me, a practical person who lives in the everyday, to glimpse the sublime joy of mysticism.” The poet describes a mood in which “the burthen of the mystery” of this world is lightened:
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
Kai felt the simplicity and depth of “Prayer” by Marie Howe which ends, “Help me. Even as I write these/words I am planning/to rise from the chair as soon as/I finish this sentence.” Kai comments, “The poet captures the constant and almost wistful human yearning for spiritual connection, for feeling the presence of the Divine in our lives, while acknowledging how difficult it is to cut through the noise of busyness of the mundane to reach a place of oneness with God.”
Carol discovered “Ghazal 119” by Rumi, “This instructs the reader to find kind people, sweet friends, and to turn away from bitter companions who turn life to vinegar, ‘getting more sour with time.’”
I don’t need a companion who is nasty sad and sour the one who is like a grave dark depressing and bitter.
Philip looked for Jewish mystical poems and came across “Think of yourself as nothing” by The Maggid of Mezeritch: “Think of yourself as nothing,/And totally forget yourself when you pray./Only have in mind that you are praying for the Divine Prescence/You can then enter the Universe of Thought,/A state that is beyond time.” The mystical poem reminded him of Emily Dickinson:
I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?
Christine had been waiting for the right One Page Poetry Circle theme to send us the two opening lines from a poem by German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke, saying “these words speak to me.” Here, in a translation by Annemarie S. Kidder, is the full first verse of “I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone“:
I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough to truly consecrate the hour. I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough to be to you just object and thing, dark and smart. I want my free will and want it accompanying the path which leads to action; and want during times that beg questions, where something is up, to be among those in the know, or else be alone.
Jane S. found two poems in her beloved copy of News of the Universe: Poems of twofold consciousness chosen and introduced by Robert Bly. She compares “I Live My Life” by Rainer Maria Rilke: “I live my life in growing orbits,/which move out over the things of the world” to David Ignatow’s “I should be content/to look at a mountain/for what it is/and not as a comment/on my life” observing that the poets seem to be grappling with “two sides of the same idea…I love them both and my life is richer for it.”
Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle! Date: December 19, 2023 Theme: Poetry and Mysticism Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave, 3rd fl. Or by email (see below)
Find a poem! Show up! Or, send a poem by email! We’re back for the sixteenth fall season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people examine the works of established poets. While there is no instructor and this is not a workshop for personal writing, once a month OPPC gives everyone a place to become teachers and learners to explore the form, content, language and meaning of poetry. Since the circle began, participants have selected and discussed 1530 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.
GOOD NEWS: The One Page Poetry Circle has returned to the St. Agnes Library. In addition, for those who are unable to attend, you will still be able to participate by email.
The theme for December is Poetry and Mysticism. Poetry and mysticism have much in common—concern with questions such as death, love, the soul, immortality, and God. Both share the liberating power of deep levels of consciousness and the unity of all things. As one mystic poet, William Blake, wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to a man as it is, infinite.”
Yet, some may ask, what exactly is mysticism? It is all around us, as in these lines of Adam Zagajewski’s “Mysticism for Beginners” translated by Clare Cavanagh:
Suddenly I understood that the swallows patrolling the streets of Montepulciano with their shrill whistles, and the hushed talk of timid travelers from Eastern, so-called Central Europe, and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?— like nuns in fields of rice, . . . are only mysticism for beginners, the elementary course, prelude to a test that’s been postponed.
The Victorian poet and novelist Emily Brontë expressed her belief in the unity of all in “No Coward Soul”:
Though earth and moon were gone And suns and universes ceased to be And Thou were left alone Every Existence would exist in thee
Whether a poem talks about mysticism or has a mystical element, choose a poem that has meaning to you. If you can attend the Poetry Circle, bring a poem, with copies for others. If you’re unable to attend, email your selection to one of us by December 19 with a brief comment on why you chose it. Try Poetry Foundation or poets.org. We’ll share the poems with you in person, by email, and through our blog here at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com
Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle! We’re back for the sixteenth fall season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people examine the works of established poets. We met on November 21st to discuss Poetry and Promises.
AnnaLee opened the circle by reading a Jane Hirshfield poem, “The Promise” with its liberal use of anaphora (word repetition). In vain, the author asks her many loves to stay rather than evolve: “Stay, to the earth/of riverine valley meadows,/of fossiled escarpments,/of limestone and sandstone./It looked back/with a changing expression, in silence.”
Ed found a Haiku, which prompted a discussion of other spare Eastern forms of poetry: haibun and Zen koans. “The Promise” by Paul Warren, questions whether a promise can be broken in the space between the saying and the hearing:
A promise leaves your lips As it floats to me sweetly Is it now too late
Daria brought the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti’s much loved “Promises like Pie-Crust,” with its three stanzas of eight lines each and many arguments showing the ease with which both a crust and a promise are broken: “You, so warm, may once have been/Warmer towards another one;/I, so cold, may once have seen/Sunlight, once have felt the sun.”
Cate chose “Eye” by Jamaica-born Colin Channer, an associate professor of literary arts at Brown University. The poem with its lush imagery and word sounds, is from his poetry volume Console, which is among The New York Times Best Books of 2023:
Mist and drizzles turn to buffets then all normal snaps from roots, havoc sent to ravage wave to wave. So it was for Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Niantic, Pequot, Narragansett— deluge-colonizing, gust insults, bodies shook like canoes in crosscuts, pneumonic fear, and the drowned boy’s last view—the eye—what stillness. One new god’s promise. Peace.
Gail brought the circle around by reading “Promises to Keep” by Robert David O’Brien published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1944. She loved the poem for its intriguing comparisons, sounds, and imagery, yet found its message elusive. The author was elusive too, as other than the Poetry Foundation’s website, she found no more information. This led to a thoughtful group discussion, as we cracked the poem’s verses open and teased out meaning: “Inchoate and unredeemed/Saviours without scars,/Perforate the opaque night/With promises of stars.”
Abigail loves the way that David Kirby brings his forsaken promises to life in “Broken Promises”: “This morning I caught one;/small and stupid, too slow to get away,/it was only a promise I had made to myself once/and then forgot, but it screamed and kicked at me.”
Scott thought about “Western Star” by Stephen Vincent Benet and wondered if anyone read Benet anymore. “He started writing this epic poem about the settlement of the US. He got off to a great start and then dropped dead of a heart attack. I have always been haunted by his Prelude, where he seeks the assistance of the Muses. What a wonderful evocation of the promise of what America might have been”:
Lend me your music for a little while, … Till I can see the fate, and see it all, With something of the wonder and the awe Those mutinous sailors saw… To see before them there, Neither the kraken nor the loadstone rock But, thin with distance, thin but dead ahead, The line of unimaginable coasts.
Roger enjoyed Shakespeare’s promise of immortality in “Sonnet 18” which begins: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate” and ends with the promise that “thy eternal summer shall not fade … So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Long live poetry!
Larry chose “Promise of Peace” by Robinson Jeffers, “If I should wish to live long it were but/To trade those fevers for tranquility,/Thinking though that’s entire and sweet in the grave/How shall the dead taste the deep treasure they have?” Larry was pleased to fulfill the “assignment,” but he also likes “Jeffers enough, that on October 27, 2007, I attended a panel discussion celebrating Jeffers’ induction into the Poet’s Corner at The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan.”
Mary Ball sent “Why I Needed To,” saying “I love this poem by Richard Blanco, which is essentially about the human condition”:
because I needed the seagulls tending the horizon to teach me again to be as still as them, to peer calmly into the void of the skies I face … because I needed to hear the waves
break and break me into the lines of this poem … because I needed to burn, to see myself shine just as beautifully as the rosy glow of the sunlight bathing my closed eyes
Carol remembered the “irrepressible poetry/songs/lyrics of a Broadway Play!!! taking me back to times of optimism”—Burt Bacharach’s song, “Promises, Promises” from Neil Simon’s play of the same name: “Oh, promises, their kind of promises can just destroy a life/Oh, promises, those kind of promises take all the joy from life/Oh, promises, promises, my kind of promises/Can lead to joy and hope and love.” Carol comments, “These words cut both ways—moving from broken promises, frustration and sadness to the hopefulness of future love, future joy.”
Ann was intrigued by Simon J. Ortiz’s “The Promise We Live By” a poem that finds meaning in the unreliability of weather forecasting on the West Coast: “We never quite know what the sky promises,/and there is certain assurance in that fate./It is for that we wait. We’ve already weathered/more than promises. They’ve passed us by.”
Kai sent Ernest Dowson’s “Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae”: “And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,/Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:/I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.” “Even though there is no direct reference to a promise made (or a promise broken), the poet’s melancholic attachment to his lost love is clear evidence of a promise remembered, if not kept. His heavy heart is faithful to the promises made to his erstwhile love, even as his body engages in other passions.”
Phil remembered a favorite poem from his old copy of The Poems of Robert Frost (A Modern Library Book) “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,/But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.
Susan sent Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Time does not bring relief; you have all lied,” noting that “The word ‘promise’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the poem. However, the poem is about a woman whose heart is broken. She has lost the man she loves. Her disappointment is so deep that life itself now seems to her a broken promise”: “Time does not bring relief; you have all lied/Who told me time would ease me of my pain!/I miss him in the weeping of the rain;/I want him in the shrinking of the tide.
We are thrilled to be able to share such an outpouring of poetry. We hope you will continue to attend the One Page Poetry Circle in person so we don’t lose our home at the New York Public Library. But if that’s not possible, keep sending us your selections for the month’s subject (see schedule below). For ideas of what to send: try Poetry Foundation or poets.org. In the meantime, we invite you to blog with us here at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.
Fall 2023 Schedule December 19: Poetry and Mysticism
One Page Poetry Circle 