Next One Page Poetry Circle—Poetry and Choices, May 8, 2018

Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle at St. Agnes Branch Library! where people gather to examine the works of established poets. While there’s 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 1066 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

For the May 8 One Page Poetry Circle program, Poetry and Choices, we’ll examine how poets express choices, why they make them, and the consequences. One of the most famous poems on the subject, and perhaps the most abused, is Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in which the narrator reaches a crossroads. He argues that the choice of which way to go is equal, yet reflects that merely choosing “has made all the difference.” A seemingly smaller choice, a decision of which trees to cut to improve the view, is made by the narrator of Tess Gallagher’s “Choices”:

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

We’re looking forward to the poems you bring and read aloud on the subject of Choices. Whether a poem concerns a choice, or a poem chooses you, bring one that has meaning for you. And bring copies for the group, if you can. Can’t locate a poem you want to bring? Browse the poetry section at the library or check out Poetry Foundation or poets.org. 

In the meantime, please blog with us. Comment on the poems discussed here, or post a poem on the subject of Choices or another subject and tell us what it means to you. 

Check back in a month for our new fall 2018 series.

Abigail Burnham Bloom and AnnaLee Wilson

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible. 

Date: Tuesday, May 8
Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm
Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave., 3^rd Fl.
Theme: Poetry and Choices

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Recap of April 17, One Page Poetry Circle program

 

Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle at St. Agnes (OPPC) blog.

We met on April 17th to talk about Poetry and Timing. The poems people brought were diverse in their interpretation, prompting everyone to agree that every poem written would fit the subject.

Abigail opened the circle by reading “Shadow March” by Robert Louis Stevenson, in which a child in bed describes the terrors of the night with lines that create a unique timing by alternating meters and rhymes, “The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,/The shadow of the child that goes to bed — /All the wicked shadows coming tramp, tramp, tramp,/With the black night overhead.”

Roger read “Time and Life” by Algernon Charles Swinburne with its contrasting views of time, “Girt about with shadow, blind and lame,/Ghosts of things that smite and thoughts that sicken/Hunt and hound thee down to death and shame,” followed by the thought that “rest is born of me for healing.”

Hazel read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Sunset” from Queen Mab, an intoxicating view of a particular time of day, “Whilst suns their mingling beamings darted/Through clouds of circumambient darkness,/And pearly battlements around/Looked o’er the immense of heaven.”

Gail read Robin Chapman’s “Time” in which the narrator’s 87 year-old neighbor rings the doorbell and proceeds to give an update on her life, “her car and driver’s license/are missing though she can drive perfectly/well, just memory problems, and her son/is coming this morning to take her up/to Sheboygan, where she was born.” The poem is also a wonderful example of Enjambment, which was last month’s theme.

Terry read Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 49” on the unreliability of love and the law of human nature, which begins, “Against that time, if ever that time come,/When I shall see thee frown on my defects,” and ends, “To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws,/Since why to love I can allege no cause.”

Christiana read “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare, with its enigmatic sense of bad timing, “But only a host of phantom listeners/That dwelt in the lone house then/Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight/To that voice from the world of men.”

Cate read Carolyn Kizer’s “Reunion” in which the narrator describes meeting a man she knew thirty years before, who had taught her, “inadvertently” that “The finest intellect can be a bore”…“I nod, I sip my wine, I praise your view,/Grateful, my dear, that I escaped from you.”

AnnaLee closed the circle with Edith Sitwell’s raucous “Sir Beelzebub” which begins “When/Sir/Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell/Where Proserpine first fell” and ends “None of them come!” The poem was set to music by William Walton and recited by Barbara Hannigan.

Linda couldn’t attend the poetry circle but had chosen Langston Hughes’s “What Happens to a Dream Deferred”:

What happens to a dream deferred?
 Does it dry up
 Like a raisin in the sun?
 Or fester like a sore—
 And then run?
 Does it stink like rotten meat?
 Or crust and sugar over—
 like a syrupy sweet?
 Maybe it just sags
 like a heavy load.
 Or does it explode? 

We look forward to seeing you for Poetry and Choice, Tuesday May 8 at St. Agnes Branch Library in Manhattan. Choice will conclude the Spring Season of the One Page Poetry Circle. Look back here in the coming weeks for the Fall schedule and poetry themes.

In the meantime, please blog with us here at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

See you soon —
Abigail Burnham Bloom and AnnaLee Wilson

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.

Next One Page Poetry Circle—Poetry and Timing, 4/17/18

Poetry and Timing at the One Page Poetry Circle at St. Agnes Branch Library!

We’re back for the spring season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people gather to examine the works of established poets. Since the circle began, participants have selected and discussed 1057 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

For April’s program, Poetry and Timing, we’ll take a close look at how a poem creates its own beat through meter or the lack of meter (free verse), punctuation, line breaks, and words. The poet uses these instruments to create a unique timing that gives a poem its cadence. Often the timing of a poem reflects its subject.

Through repetition, time comes to a standstill in Robert Browning’s two-line poem, “Rhyme for a Child Viewing a Naked Venus in a Painting of ‘The Judgement of Paris.’”

He gazed and gazed and gazed and gazed,
Amazed, amazed, amazed, amazed.

Meter and alliteration speed up these lines from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Nephelidia”:

From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,
Palid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float—
Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine,
These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten with throbs through the throat?

Whether a poem has an interesting meter or has a theme connected with time, feel free to post it here at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com . Let us know what you like about it. If you are looking for a poem, browse the poetry section at your local branch library, or check out Poetry Foundation or poets.org.

Date: Tuesday, April 17
Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm
Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave, 3^rd Fl.
Theme: Poetry and Timing 

Spring 2018 Schedule
April 17: Poetry and Timing
May 8: Poetry and Choices

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.

Recap—One Page Poetry Circle, March 6th Meeting

The One Page Poetry Circle (at St. Agnes Branch Library) met on March 6th to talk about Poetry and Enjambment. The word comes from the French meaning “legs straddling,” as the thought in a poem can flow beyond a line.

Abigail opened the circle with Núala Ni Dhomhnaill’s “The Language Issue,” her answer to why she writes in Irish (the poem was translated into English by Paul Muldoon) and begins, “I place my hope on the water/in this little boat/of the language, the way a body might put/an infant/in a basket of intertwined/iris leaves.” The poem reflects the flowing water with enjambment.

Roger read “The Poet of Bray” by John Heath-Stubbs, a humorous history of a poet’s changing political views. His excitement is captured with enjambment, “Back in the dear old thirties’ days/When politics was passion/A harmless left-wing bard was I/And so I grew in fashion.”

Hazel read Hamlet’s “To Be or Not To Be” speech from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. We were delighted to revisit this poem and examine how the thoughts move forward, “To be, or not to be—that is the question:/Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.”

Gail read “The Good Life” by the current American Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith, a poem that captures shifting images in a single sentence and is given in its entirety here:

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

Ken read the start of “Endymion” by John Keats, with its many beautiful images created through enjambment, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness; but still will keep/A bower quiet for us, and a sleep/Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”

Christiana read Marianne Moore’s “The Fish,” which proceeds in ocean-like waves, “wade/through black jade/Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps/adjusting the ash heaps;/opening and shutting itself like/an/injured fan.”

Linda read Sylvia Plath’s “Edge,” written just six days before she died, in which the sentences run on into the next verse, “The woman is perfected./Her dead/Body wears the smile of accomplishment,/The illusion of a Greek necessity/Flows in the scrolls of her toga.”

Cate read Ted Kooser’s “Gyroscope,” which creates a beautiful image in one sentence, “I place this within the first order/of wonders: a ten-year-old girl/one on a sunny, glassed-in porch/in February, the world beyond/the windows slowly tipping forward into spring.” We noted that when you first read the line ending “the world beyond” there seems to be a natural stop, but the thought continues into the next line and the thought changes.

Susan read “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams in which a husband apologizes for eating the plums in the icebox that his wife was saving for breakfast, “Forgive me/they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold.”

AnnaLee read Archibald MacLeish’s “The End of the World” in which a mad circus disappears when the top blows off, “There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,/There in the sudden blackness the black pall/Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.”

Please blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com. And join us for our next program at the St. Agnes Branch of the New York Public Library, 81st and Amsterdam Avenue, Manhattan. Dates and times follow:  

Spring 2018 Schedule
April 17: Poetry and Timing (5:30 – 6:30 pm)
May 8: Poetry and Choices (5:30 – 6:30 pm)

Abigail Burnham Bloom and
AnnaLee Wilson

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.

Next One Page Poetry Circle—March 6, 2018

Find a poem! Show up! Read a poem! Discuss a poem!

Join us Tuesday, March 6, 5:30 – 6:30 pm at St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave. at 81st St. for the theme of Poetry and Enjambment

Sometimes we like to choose a theme that teaches us something about poetry. Recently we looked at poetry and punctuation, and since then we’ve noticed that we are paying more attention to how punctuation is used in poetry. And now for March we’ll explore enjambment, a technique where one poetic line moves to the next, without punctuation at the end of the line; it is the opposite of an end-stopped line. Enjambment creates tension as we are used to pausing at the end of poetic lines, and yet we must read on to the next line in order to complete the sentence or thought. Homer used enjambment as did John Milton in Paradise Lost, calling it “sense variously drawn out from one verse into another.” The start of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land uses enjambment in lines 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, and end stops in lines 4 and 7:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

In the ten enjambed lines of “Between Walls” by William Carlos Williams, the poet forces us to both speed up to complete the thoughts, and slow down to consider words at the end of lines:

The back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

In rereading our blog post before hitting the “publish” button, I’m intrigued with the line endings of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Taken together, the last words make up a little rhythmical chant poem of their own:

Breeding, mixing, stirring, rain.
Covering, feeding, tubers.

Blog your thoughts on the poems you find here, or post an enjambed poem of your choice and say why you like it.

 

Please blog with us here at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com. If you know someone who might be interested in our program, please pass this on. And like us on Facebook!

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.

Recap—February 2018 Meeting

We all enjoyed the nice turnout on February 20^th for Poetry and Lies! Starting around the Circle…

Abigail read sections from Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” which begins, “My first thought was, he lied in every word,/That hoary cripple with malicious eye.” Despite the inauspicious thought that the directions are a lie, Childe Roland follows them through a nightmare landscape.

Roger read “All the World’s a Stage” from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which ends: “Last scene of all,/That ends this strange eventful history,/Is second childishness and mere oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Roger commented that the poem is a protracted metaphor and metaphors may have truth in them, but they also have some exaggeration or lying.

Hazel read “Mary, I Believed thee True” by Thomas Moore, a more hopeful verse because although his beloved has proved false, the narrator believes in the possibility of true love, “For you, distracting woman, see/My peace is gone, my heart is broken./Fare thee well!”

Gail read Karin Gottshall’s “More Lies” which evokes a subtle melancholy and perhaps a wistful hope, “Sometimes I say I’m going to meet my sisters at the café—/even though I have no sister—just because it’s such/a beautiful thing to say.”

Linda read “Lies about Love” by D. H. Lawrence, which shows how love can change, “We are all liars, because/the truth of yesterday becomes a lie tomorrow,/whereas letters are fixed,/and we live by the letter of truth.”

Ken read “Where the Mind Is Without Fear” by Rabindranath Tagore, an idealistic poem of a world without lies, “Where words come out from the depth of truth/Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection/Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way.”

Christiana read Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” in which a mother lies to her children, “Life is short, though I keep this from my children./Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine/in a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways/I’ll keep from my children.”

Cate read Seamus Heaney’s “A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also” which tells a fable of a dog going to tell Chukwu the human reaction to death, “But death and human beings took second place/When he trotted off the path and started barking/At an other dog in broad daylight just barking/Back at him from the far bank of a river.”

Ann read Jeffrey Harrison’s “Our Other Sister” in which the narrator lies to his younger sister about having an older sister, “Our other sister/had already taken shape, and we could not/call her back from her life far away/or tell her how badly we missed her.”

Carol brought “A Place Called Lie Lie Land” by Bob B on a subject which is much in all of our minds, “Once there was a nation, which/Boasted of its wealth and size./In that nation lies became truth,/And truth became known as lies.”

AnnaLee rounded up the Circle with Susan Dwyer’s “The Lies of Sleeping Dogs: A Fable,” read in memory of her dog, Zoe, “That they’re sleeping is the first lie:/but with the same mechanism by which/they sense your fear, you already know/that they’re pretending, feigning sleep/because they too are afraid.”

Please blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Spring 2018 Schedule
March 6: Poetry and Enjambment
April 17: Poetry and Timing
May 8: Poetry and Choices

~Abigail Burnham Bloom and AnnaLee Wilson

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.

Mark your calendars for “Poetry and Lies,” 2/20/18

Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle at St. Agnes Branch Library!
Date: Tuesday, February 20
Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm
Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave.
Theme: Poetry and Lies

Find a poem! Show up! Read a poem! Discuss a poem!
We’re back for the spring season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people gather to examine the works of established poets. While there’s 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 1034 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

Everyone lies. We do it to protect ourselves or to be kind to our friends, saying, “I’m busy next Saturday” or “You look terrific!” And what one calls a truism, can be shown by another to be false. Horace wrote, “Dulce et deorum est pro patria mori” [It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country], but Wilfred Owen, after witnessing a gas attack in The Great War, referred to the phrase as “the old Lie.” Plato called all poets liars as they are mired in illusion and create fiction.

Around 1592, Sir Walter Raleigh published a poem called “The Lie.” The poet publically accused the social elite and their organizations of lying or “giving them the lie.” But the authorship of this influential poem is not assured, so attributing it to Raleigh may be untrue.

Tell potentates, they live
Acting by others’ action;
Not loved unless they give,
Not strong but by a faction.
If potentates reply,
Give potentates the lie.

Tell zeal it wants devotion;
Tell love it is but lust;
Tell time it is but motion;
Tell flesh it is but dust.
And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie.

Dorothy Parker’s “Unfortunate Coincidence” concerns love and lying:

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

We take a broad approach to our themes. Whether a poem is literally about lies, uses “lie” in its title, or even has a remote connection to the idea of lying, deception or untruth, feel free to bring a poem that has meaning for you. Having trouble locating a poem to bring? Look through a poetry book at the library or check out Poetry Foundation or poets.org. Please blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Spring 2018 Schedule
February 20: Poetry and Lies
March 6: Poetry and Enjambment
April 17: Poetry and Timing
May 8: Poetry and Choices

Abigail Burnham Bloom and AnnaLee Wilson

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.

Recap of One Page Poetry Circle Poetry and Windows

The One Page Poetry Circle met on December 12 to discuss Poetry and Windows.

Abigail opened the circle with William Allingham’s poem about a pool glimpsed from his window when he was a boy, “Many fine things had I glimpse of,/And said, ‘I shall find them one day.’”

Roger read Carl Sandburg’s “At a Window” which accepts life’s hunger and pain, yet asks for something more, “But leave me a little love,/A voice to speak to me in the day end,/A hand to touch me in the dark room.”

Hazel read “Now and Then” by Ian Hamilton in which the narrator describes an Institution as “so far away,” where “A gentle sun/Smiles on the dark, afflicted heads/Of young men who have come to nothing.”

Gail read Daisy Aldan’s “Women at Windows,” “Always, everywhere, at twilight, a woman/in a black dress leans on her elbows at a window”; these women do not see the world outside, “their eyes are focused IN rather than OUT.”

Patty read John Updike’s “Evening Concert, Saint-Chapelle” revealing the effect of music and stained glass windows: “The music surged; the glow became a milk,/a whisper to the eye, a glimmer ebbed/until our beating hearts, our violins/were cased in thin but solid sheets of lead.”

Linda read the first poem of the evening by Rainer Maria Rilke, “Sense of Something Coming”: “the doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full/of silence,/the windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.”

Cate read “New Rooms” by Kay Ryan which gave us a good laugh at the end: “The mind must/set itself up/wherever it goes/and it would be/most convenient/to impose its/old rooms—just/tack them up/like an interior/tent. Oh but/the new holes/aren’t where/the windows/went.”

Christiana read “Tulips and Addresses” by Edward Field which combines humor with editorializing, “The Museum of Modern Art on West Fifty-third Street/Is interested only in the flower not the bulb.” Consequently the narrator rescues the bulbs and eventually plants them in his windowbox where we can only hope they flowered.

Carol read Taylor Mali’s “Undivided Attention” in which a teacher loses the focus of his students, “See, snow falls for the first time every year, and every year/my students rush to the window/as if snow were more interesting than math,/which, of course, it is.”

AnnaLee read sections II and V from “Les Fenêtres” by Rainer Maria Rilke where inner and outer worlds meet, “You add to everything,/window, a sense of ritual:/ in your frame, merely standing/becomes waiting or meditating.”

Two extra short poems are given in their totality.

First, “Window” by Carl Sandburg

Night from a railroad car window
Is a great, dark, soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light. 

And this poem written with a diamond on her window at Woodstock by Queen Elizabeth I

Much suspected by me,
Nothing proved can be,
Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.

Enjoy the holidays! We look forward to seeing you in 2018.

Please blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Spring 2018 Schedule
February 20: Poetry and Lies
March 6: Poetry and Enjambment
April 17: Poetry and Timing
May 8: Poetry and Choices

Abigail Burnham Bloom and
AnnaLee Wilson

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.

Next One Page Poetry Circle December 12—Poetry and Windows

Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle at St. Agnes Branch Library!

Windows are a frequent form of metaphor. Eyes, the windows of the soul, look out onto the world. A great poem should change our view slightly, letting us see the world in a different manner than we usually do. In the first verse of his poem, “The Windows,” George Herbert depicts man as a window through which God makes himself known,

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
    He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
    This glorious and transcendent place,
    To be a window, through thy grace. 

In Howard Nemerov’s “Storm Windows,” the narrator gains a glimpse of lucidity through the lens of rainwater on a storm window lying in the grass:

People are putting up storm windows now,
Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain
Drove them indoors. So, coming home at noon,
I saw storm windows lying on the ground,
Frame-full of rain; through the water and glass
I saw the crushed grass, how it seemed to stream
Away in lines like seaweed on the tide
Or blades of wheat leaning under the wind.
The ripple and splash of rain on the blurred glass
Seemed that it briefly said, as I walked by,
Something I should have liked to say to you,
Something … the dry grass bent under the pane
Brimful of bouncing water … something of
A swaying clarity which blindly echoes
This lonely afternoon of memories
And missed desires, while the wintry rain
(Unspeakable, the distance in the mind!)
Runs on the standing windows and away.

Why has the poet used parens in the middle of his closing thought? 

Please blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Spring 2018 Schedule
February 20: Poetry and Lies
March 6: Poetry and Enjambment
April 17: Poetry and Timing
May 8: Poetry and Choices

Abigail Burnham Bloom and
AnnaLee Wilson

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.

Recap—November One Page Poetry Circle

The One Page Poetry Circle at St. Agnes Branch Library in Manhattan met on November 14 to discuss Poetry and Power.

Abigail read “Power” by Audre Lorde, an account of the killing of a ten year-old by a policeman who was acquitted “by eleven white men who said they were satisfied/justice had been done/and one Black Woman who said/‘They convinced me.’”

Roger read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” with its beautiful evocation of the futility of power: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;/Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!/Nothing beside remains.”

Hazel read “The Tempest” by James T. Fields which begins with the description of a storm, the power of nature, “’Tis a fearful thing in winter/To be shattered by the blast,/And to hear the rattling trumpet/Thunder, ‘Cut away the mast!,’” and then explores other kinds of power.

Gail read Gabriel Preil’s “The Power of a Question” describing the conversation between two old men, “Even a drop of Mozart/does not sweeten/the aridity of the hour./You are a squirrel in confrontation/with an uncracked nut,” which comes to life through the power of time.

Elizabeth read “I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman and we were reminded of the power of the individuals in this country who make up the whole, “Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,/The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,/Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.”

Christiana read Sir John Collings Squire’s “Ballade of the Poetic Life,” “Princess, inscribe beneath my name/‘He never begged, he never sighed,/He took his medicine as it came’—/For this the poets lived— and died.”

Ken read “The Power of Words” by Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.), “Anger and fear are in them; grief and joy/Are on their sound; yet slight, impalpable:—/A word is but a breath of passing air.”

Terry read “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou, in which the poet celebrates the power of believing in herself, “I walk into a room/Just as cool as you please,/And to a man,/The fellows stand or/Fall on their knees./Then they swarm around me,/A hive of honey bees.”

AnnaLee read “Fall 1961” by Robert Lowell, “All autumn, the chafe and jar/of nuclear war;/we have talked our extinction to death.” Yet he finds relief from this dire situation in nature.

Linda could not attend the circle, but brought “The Return of Lucifer” by Louis Ginsberg, father of Allen Ginsberg and Linda’s former high school teacher. In this poem Lucifer looks at his projects on the earth, “‘I’ll stay,’ he chuckled, ‘things are going well;/For, under Heaven, Earth’s a better Hell.’”

Look for our next post about the upcoming program for December. And, please blog with us here at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Abigail Burnham Bloom and
AnnaLee Wilson

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.