One Page Poetry Circle: Review of May 16, 2023 Poetry and Power

Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle!

Our May theme, Poetry and Power, resulted in a shower of emailed and in-person responses:

AnnaLee opened the circle at the St. Agnes library by reading Louise Gluck’s “Circe’s Power,” in which the sorceress from Homer’s Odyssey addresses Odysseus and shows him her real power—the power of her love:

I foresaw your departure
Your men with my help braving
The crying and pounding sea. You think

A few tears upset me? My friend,
Every sorceress is
A pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can’t
Face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.

Lenny brought a translation of “Stalin Epigram” written in 1933 by the Russian and Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. The satirical poem, with its grim rhymes, expresses what it was like to live in Russia under Stalin: “We are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay,/More than ten steps away you can’t hear what we say./But if people would talk on occasion,/They should mention the Kremlin Caucasian.”

Cate read “Give It Time” in which the poet Wendell Berry shows us the slow but steady power of a moving river to cut through the binds that restrain it:

The river is of the earth
and it is free. It is rigorously
embanked and bound,
and yet is free. “To hell
with restraint,” it says.
“I have got to be going.”
It will grind out its dams.
It will go over or around them.
They will become pieces.

Daria selected “The Power of One,” by the Indian poet Ashish Ram, in which single acts have might: “One song can spark a moment,/One whisper can wake the dream./One tree can start a forest,/One bird can herald spring.”

Elisabeth treated us to two poems by her favorite poet W.S. Merwin. “The Present” relates the tale of exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, in which the couple receive the present of union: “you will not be able to keep it/but you will not be able/to keep anything/yet they both reached at once/for the present/and when their hands met/they laughed.” The spare poem, “Wish,” written at the end of Merwin’s life, is his last. These powerful words, found after his death, were penned in his hand:

Please one more
kiss in the kitchen
before we turn the lights
off

Eileen gave us the second Wendell Berry poem of the evening, “Dark with Power,” in which the poet, an environmentalist, reminds us of America’s desecration of land during the Vietnam war: “Pray to us, farmers and villagers/of Vietnam. Pray to us, mothers/and children of helpless countries./Ask for nothing.”

Gail completed the circle with “Human Beauty” in which the celebrated poet Albert Goldbarth speaks of the power of humans to seek beauty in their everyday lives. He unfolds his poem with these lines:

If you write a poem about love …
the love is a bird,

The poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death …

The death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cut-out flames

Chris was unable to attend, but gave us Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” a popular sonnet at the One Page Poetry Circle, that highlights the transitory nature of power: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;/Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!/Nothing beside remains.”

Abigail reacted to the striking dactylic beat of Emily Brontë’s “High Waving Heather” in which nature reveals its power, freeing man’s soul from his body:

High waving heather, ‘neath stormy blasts bending,
Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars;
Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending,
Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending,
Man’s spirit away from its drear dongeon sending,
Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars.

Roger loves the quality of mercy speech from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice which suggests that mercy “is twice blest;/It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:/’T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes/The throned monarch better than his crown.”

Richard, too, picked Shakespeare giving us the famous opening lines of his play, Richard III. “The play fictionalizes the reign of King Richard III, who lived from 1452-1485 and ruled over England from 1483 until his death two years later. This poem speaks to the new king after he has assumed power.”

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York,
And all the clouds that loured upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stem alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Scott was impressed by the closing lines of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, which he remembered from Six Nonlectures by e.e. cummings:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Christiana thought about the power of hope in Lisel Mueller’s poem, Hope, which “expresses the essence of perpetual power which is seeded in each being. Even when it seems that all is lost and surely even hope has flown, somehow there is a glimmer that continues, steadying our faltering, even gracefully surviving cruelty and reinventing itself without visible means of support”:

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

Philip sent “Die Gedanken sind frei (Thoughts Are Free)”, a German song of unknown origin, popularized by Hoffmann von Fallersleben in 1842: “Thoughts are free who can guess them?/They fly by like nocturnal shadows … And if I am thrown into the darkest dungeon/all these are futile works/because my thoughts tear all gates/and walls apart: Thoughts are free.”

Kai remembered “The Tyger” by William Blake: “Tyger Tyger, burning bright,/In the forests of the night;/What immortal hand or eye,/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” “There are two types of power evident in this highly visual and evocative poem. First is the mighty and immortal power of the creator with its dread hand, dread feet, and dread grasp wielding a mighty hammer and anvil to bring the Tyger into being. Then there is the Tyger itself, the mighty beast of fearful symmetry.”

Have a wonderful summer and we hope to see you in the fall! In the meantime, please blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com

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.

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Next One Page Poetry Circle, May 16th—Poetry and Power

Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle!

Date: May 16, 2023
Theme: Poetry and Power
Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm
Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave, 3rd Fl. Or by email (below)

Find a poem! Show up! Or, send a poem by email!

We’re back for the fifteenth 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 1375 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

GOOD NEWS:

The One Page Poetry Circle returns to St. Agnes Library, spring 2023.
In addition, for those who are unable to attend, you will still be able to participate by email.

If you can make the May 16^th meeting, we ask that you bring a poem with you on the theme of Poetry and Power, 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.

According to an article in The Atlantic, poetry provides a means of saving man from the corruptions of power. “When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgement.”

Right now we are witnessing a different show of power—that of nature pushing out whatever it can during the spring rebirth. This is most evident in the trees reaching skyward, showing the strength of their trunks, and the ability of their limbs to leaf out, and bear fruit.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote, “The Power of Words,” suggesting how a puff of air can contain the means of influencing us:

‘Tis a strange mystery, the power of words!
Life is in them, and death. A word can send
The crimson colour hurrying to the cheek,
Hurrying with many meanings; or can turn
The current cold and deadly to the heart.
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.

May Swenson wrote “Earth Your Dancing Place.” Her prescription for a woman to live a powerful life begins:  

Beneath heaven’s vault
remember always walking
through halls of cloud
down aisles of sunlight
or through high hedges
of the green rain
walk in the world
highheeled with swirl of cape
hand at the swordhilt
of your pride
Keep a tall throat
Remain aghast at life

Whether a poem concerns power or expresses itself with power, choose a poem that has meaning to you. Then email it to one of us by May 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.

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

Spring 2023 Schedule
May 16: Poetry and Power

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com

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.

Review of April 18, Poetry Circle—Poetry and Ordinary Things

Those who could attend met in person for the first time in three years at the St. Agnes Branch of the New York Public Library. The theme for April 2023 was Poetry and Ordinary Things.

Abigail was transfixed by the sentiment of Lisel Mueller’s “A Day Like Any Other” as the narrator searches the outside world for some evidence of her own concerns, but finds the ordinary. She expects “a new crack in the pavement,/a flag at half-mast—signs/of some disturbance in the world/because your friend, the morning sun,/has turned its dark side toward you.”

Roger discovered “To a Poor Old Woman” by William Carlos Williams, with its description of a woman eating plums on a street with pleasure, “Comforted/a solace of ripe plus/seeming to fill the air/They taste good to her.”

Susan sent a poem of disputed origin (the version here being written down by Ezra Pound) that celebrates the ordinary:

Hast thou 2 loaves of bread
Sell one + with the dole
Buy straightaway some hyacinths
To feed thy soul.

Carol sent Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks.” When the narrator puts the soft, knit socks on his feet, “my feet were/two fish made/of wool,/two long sharks/sea-blue, shot/through/by golden thread.” “His feet become animate creatures themselves, able to turn into other animals in a form of transcendent metamorphosis. In this ode, a short lyric poem, Neruda uses enjambment and mid-sentence line breaks to create his short, choppy style. And it makes me smile.”                                                                                  

Philip was reminded by the weather, the most ordinary of events, of “Fog” by Carl Sandburg:

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.                                                                                        

Kai sent “The Beginning of September” by Robert Hass with its “elegant simplicity, written entirely about ordinary objects and random moments, but the sum is truly greater than the parts. The shortest stanza is just two words: ‘ripe blackberries,’ but in the context of the poem, those two words mean abundance, sweetness, seasonality, fleeting happiness, easily overlooked or squandered treasure.”

AnnaLee started us off with Amy Clampitt’s “Vacant Lot with Pokeweed,” in which the author observes the ordinary weeds and wreckage of a vacant lot, and transforms it with lush language into something extraordinary: “a pokeweed, sprung up from seed/dropped by some vagrant, that’s/seized a foothold: a magenta-/girdered bower, gazebo twirls/of blossoms.”

Cate gave us a beautiful reading of “Singing Back the World,” by Dorianne Laux, in which a group of middle-aged women friends driving in a car, throw back their heads and sing their way home: “Driving home in a blue Comet singing/I’ll Be Seeing You and Love Is a Rose./The love songs of war. The war songs/of love. Mixing up verses, eras, words./Songs from stupid musicals./Coming in strong on the easy refrains.”

Daria chose an apt poem for our first in-person poetry circle in three years, a short symmetrical poem, “Ordinary Day,” by Elizabeth Romero. In speaking about how the nature of life can change unexpectedly, the poem begins with a perfectly ordinary day where life is solid and predictable. The poet adds a fulcrum line about silence, to end with: “We never came back/We learned that on one perfectly ordinary day/Life can change forever.”

Gail brought one of her favorite poems “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams. The poet, a pediatrician, was a member of the Imagist movement. He strove to write in common, everyday language, about everyday circumstances, for the lives of ordinary people. Williams was awarded a Pulitzer Prize posthumously in May 1963. The poem follows in its entirety:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Christiana who was unable to attend sent Philip Larkin’s “Trees” because they are so beautiful at this time of year:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Lenny didn’t bring a poem but gave us his own thought: “Poetry is an escape from the prose of life.”

The group read two other poems: “Happiness” by Raymond Carver, in which two boys enjoy delivering newspapers at dawn, and “Bay Leaves,” by Nikki Giovanni, in which the author absorbs the practical cooking lessons from her grandmother, her mother’s more modern approach, and develops a strong one for herself.

Whether a poem concerns power or expresses itself with power, choose a poem that has meaning to you. Then email it to one of us by May 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.

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

Spring 2023 Schedule
May 16: Poetry and Power

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com

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, April 18—Poetry and the Ordinary

Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle!

Date: April 18, 2023
Theme: Poetry and the Ordinary

Find a poem! Show up in Person. Or blog here,

We’re back for the fifteenth 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 1363 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

GOOD NEWS:
The One Page Poetry Circle returns to St. Agnes Library on April 18, 2023. In addition, for those who are unable to attend, you will still be able to participate by email.

If you can make the April 18^th meeting at St Agnes Library, 5:30 pm, we ask that you bring a poem with you on the theme of Poetry and the Ordinary. Bring 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 can help us to see the extraordinary in the ordinary or the ordinary in the extraordinary because of the poet’s uncanny ability to see and to describe in unusual ways.

Here are the two lines of Ezra Pound’s poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” suggesting the beautiful in the midst of the mundane:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The first lines of “Night Without End,” an anonymous poem of the Six Dynasties Period in China (220-589), tell of a typical sleepless night during a full moon. The last two lines crack the poem open to infinite possibilities:

Night without end. I cannot sleep.
The full moon blazes overhead.
Far off in the night I hear someone call.
Hopelessly I answer, “Yes.”

—translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Whether a poem concerns an ordinary topic, sees something extraordinary in the ordinary, or approaches an ordinary topic in an extraordinary way, choose a poem by a known poet that has meaning to you. Then meet in person on April 18th, with a poem and copies for others if you can, at the One Page Poetry Circle at St. Agnes Library, 444 Amsterdam Avenue, 3rd Floor, 5:30-6:30 pm. If you are unable to meet in person, you may post your selection here and tell us why you selected it with a brief comment of why you chose it.

Spring 2023 Schedule (in person or virtual)

April 18: Poetry and the Ordinary
May 16: Poetry and Power

Review of March 14, Virtual One Page Poetry Circle—Poetry and Capitalization

Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle!

GOOD NEWS:
The One Page Poetry Circle returns to St. Agnes Library on April 18, 2023. In addition, for those who are unable to attend, you will still be able to participate by email.

Our theme for March 2023 was Capitalization.

Abigail enjoyed the way that Douglas Scotney describes the Germanic use of capital letters in “A Case for Germany”: “Embellished letters are what capitals are,/(capitals are embellished letters),/so a page of German/strikes England as rather embellished:/on top of the double dots/(umlauts)/there’s a capital to every noun.”

Scott remembered that “Maya Angelou read ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton. Rock, River, and Tree are capitalized throughout; everything else is conventionally capitalized”: “The horizon leans forward,/Offering you space to place new steps of change./Here, on the pulse of this fine day/You may have the courage/To look up and out upon me, the/Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.”

Roger chose William Butler Yeats’ “The Song of Wandering Aengus” in which, with traditional capitalization, Yeats tells a magical tale of a fish becoming a “glimmering girl/With apple blossom in her hair/Who called me by my name and ran/And faded through the brightening air.”

Christiana also found words from William Butler Yeats, this one—“a kind of free verse”—in visual form. “The assignment gave me a lot of fun on the Internet.” The selection was lettered by a calligrapher who calls himself Calligranerd.

Kai sent “the cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls” by E. E. Cummings. Kai comments, “The Cambridge Ladies live drab lives of intellect and posturing, while missing out entirely on nature’s beauty. Cummings’ rebellious refusal to employ traditional poetic capitalization seems particularly fitting in this context”: “the Cambridge ladies do not care, above/Cambridge if sometimes in its box of/sky lavender and cornerless, the/moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy”.

Carol sent Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats,” writing, “A prolific writer, paring down her lines, words and punctuation to the essentials, I always find something I respond to in the work of Lucille Clifton”: “may you/open your eyes to water/water waving forever/and may you in your innocence/sail through this to that”.

Cate selected best-selling Palestinian-Danish poet Yahya Hassan’s poem “THE BAG OF SKUNK AND THE GHETTO BANK” telling us that the poet died three years ago at 24. One hundred and twenty thousand copies of his first poetry collection have been sold and sales are still going strong. Hassan’s translator, Jordan Barger, notes “Translating Hassan is living in ALL CAPS, juggling ambiguities and managing intense directness.” The poem begins:

I STOLE 50 GRAMS OF SKUNK
FROM AN AMERICAN STUDENT
THE SCENT WAS STRONG
I PUT THE BAGGIES IN A BAG
THAT I PUT IN A SECOND BAG
THAT I PUT IN A THIRD BAG IN THE BOTTOM OF MY BACKPACK

Tom sent G. R. Kramer’s “Stars Over Central Park” with its noticeable lack of capitalized words (only 4 out of 160), and effective use of enjambment: “The dead are the dirt/that heave up green/notes in the hot dusk/to break the glass/of this islet/riverine sliver/in granite and light/it splits the Hudson flow.” (excerpted from March 5, 2023 ed. of Times Metropolitan Diary)

Richard and Gail both chose the same E. E. Cummings poem, a coincidence that rarely happens at the One Page Poetry Circle. For Richard, Cummings “is the King of non-CapitAlization. I like his love poem especially.” Gail wrote “This is one of the most famous E. E. Cummings poems.” Here is a link to some of the biographical information she sent (from Wikipedia). The poem, which uses enjambment and has few spaces between punctuation and letters, indicates the closeness of the lovers. The title is the first line: “i carry your heart with me(I carry it in/my heart)i am never without it(anywhere/i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done/by only me is your doing,my darling/i fear.”

AnnaLee brings us around full circle with Billy Collins. “I was sitting down to find a poem for the theme of Poetry and Capitalization, when the latest New Yorker poetry newsletter popped into my email. ‘Incipit’ with its references to ornate initial caps in illuminated manuscripts was perfect. The poem begins”:

Too bad this poem wasn’t written
in a 12th-century monastic scriptorium
because it would have begun
with a much bigger T,
which would loom over the smaller letters,
their tiny serifs fluttering in the breeze.

Whether a poem concerns an ordinary topic, sees something extraordinary in the ordinary, or approaches an ordinary topic in an extraordinary way, choose a poem that has meaning to you. Then email it to one of us by April 18, 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.

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

Spring 2023 Schedule (In Person and Virtual)

April 18: Poetry and the Ordinary
May 16: Poetry and Power

Moderators:
Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com

A Case for Germany, Billy Collins, blessing the boats, Douglas Scotney, e.e commings, G. R. KRAMER, G.R. KRAMER, i carry your heart with me, Illuminated Manuscripts poem, Incipit, Lucille Clifton, maya angelou, On the Pulse of Morning, One Page Poetry Circle, STARS OVER CENTRAL PARK, THE BAG OF SKUNK AND THE GHETTTO BANK, the cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls, The Song of Wandering Aengus, Times Metropolitan Diary March 5, Times Metropolitan Diary March 5 2023, William Butler Yeats, Yahya Hassan

A Case for Germany, Billy Collins, blessing the boats, Douglas Scotney, e.e commings, G. R. KRAMER, G.R. KRAMER, i carry your heart with me, Illuminated Manuscripts poem, Incipit, Lucille Clifton, maya angelou, On the Pulse of Morning, One Page Poetry Circle, STARS OVER CENTRAL PARK, THE BAG OF SKUNK AND THE GHETTTO BANK, the cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls, The Song of Wandering Aengus, Times Metropolitan Diary March 5, Times Metropolitan Diary March 5 2023, William Butler Yeats, Yahya Hassan

Next One Page Poetry Circle, 3/14/2023—Poetry & Capitalization

Welcome to the Virtual One Page Poetry Circle!

Date: Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Theme: Poetry and Capitalization

Find a poem! Send a poem by email!

We’re back for the fifteenth 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 1351 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

GOOD NEWS:
The One Page Poetry Circle returns to St. Agnes Library in April, (date to be determined). In addition, for those who are unable to attend, you will still be able to participate by email.

Until then we will gather virtually by email. We ask you to send us poems you have selected on the subject of Poetry and Capitalization, with a comment on why you chose them. We’ll share the poems with you through our blog and by email.

Our theme for March is Capitalization. Each line of ancient poetry did not begin with a capital letter. This thirteenth century lyric, “How Long the Night” (translated by Michael R. Burch), uses a capital at the start of each sentence although the original lacked even this feature:

It is pleasant, indeed, while the summer lasts
with the mild pheasants’ song …
but now I feel the northern wind’s blast—
its severe weather strong.
Alas! Alas! This night seems so long!
And I, because of my momentous wrong,
now grieve, mourn and fast.

With the invention of the printing press, a capital letter at the start of each line became a defining aspect of poetry, distinguishing it from prose. In the twentieth century, capitalization at the start of each line, or even each sentence, became optional. Rules for the capitalization of words within the lines also changed over time, as in this poem by Emily Dickenson, who employed capitalization and pauses for emphasis, as in this poem, where the emphasis is on what the wife is expected to put up with:

She rose to His Requirement — dropt
The Playthings of Her Life
To take the honorable Work
Of Woman, and of Wife —

If ought She missed in Her new Day,
Of Amplitude, or Awe —
Or first Prospective — Or the Gold
In using, wear away,

It lay unmentioned — as the Sea
Develop Pearl, and Weed,
But only to Himself — be known
The Fathoms they abide —

Whether a poem uses capital letters at the start of each line, within the lines, or no capital letters at all, choose a poem that has meaning to you. Then email it to one of us by March 14, 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.
In the meantime, please blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.                                

Spring 2023 Schedule
March 14: Poetry and Capitalization
April: Poetry and the Ordinary
May: Poetry and Power

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com

Recap of One Page Poetry Circle, December 2022—Poetry and Winter Solstice

Welcome to the Virtual One Page Poetry Circle!

We conclude our fall 2022 season with an exploration of Poetry and the Winter Solstice.

Abigail wanted to share Emily Brontë’s mysterious poem, “The night is darkening round me”: “The giant trees are bending/Their bare boughs weighed with snow;/The storm is fast descending,/And yet I cannot go.” “No explanation is given for why the narrator cannot or will not go—the poem evokes the sense of a worsening situation that must be endured.”

Cate appreciates “The House in Winter” from The October Palace collection, in which the poet Jane Hirshfield “finds gold in winter: the canned peaches carried over from summer caught in the ‘low-flung sunlight’”:

Its jars 
of last summer’s peaches 
have come into their native gold—- 
not the sweetness of last summer, 
but today’s, 
fresh from the tree of winter. 
The mouth swallows peach, and says gold. 

Gail chose “Winter Gulls” by Marcia Southwick, published in 1979. “I think its harsh imagery captures some of the bleakness and isolation of walking along the water in winter. The narrator thinks that the seagulls ‘are usually thought of as beautiful,/while to me they look like scraps of dirty cloth/as they flap about over a dead fish left on the dock.’ Although the narrator is surrounded by other strollers near the docks, she feels lonely and mute: ‘It’s as if I were asleep/and trying to open my mouth.’”

The theme of winter solstice reminded Scott of the line, “The darkest evening of the year,” which he remembered from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Scott wrote, “I reread the poem to check whether the line referred to the solstice or had another meaning. I found, like everything else in the poem, that it is both, which is one of the many wonders of the poem that rewards constant revisiting.” Scott was also intrigued by the poem’s intricate rhyme scheme where the third line in each quatrain does not rhyme, but rhymes with three lines in the next quatrain. 

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year

Hazel discovered that “it is not just me who finds the early sunsets sad. Witness Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in ‘Snow-flakes’”: “Out of the bosom of the Air,/Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,/Over the woodlands brown and bare,/Over the harvest-fields forsaken,/Silent and soft and slow/Descends the snow.” 

Roger enjoyed William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 97” which begins, “How like a winter hath my absence been/From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!/What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!/ What old December’s bareness everywhere!” Roger remarked, “The poem suggests not that winter is the dark time of year, but that any time can feel like winter without love.”

Carol selected “Snowy Night” by Mary Oliver, saying “I appreciate Oliver’s acceptance of not understanding, not deciphering everything—‘aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, sweeter?’ she asks. Oliver welcomes the beauty and mystery she observes in nature: ‘if this were someone else’s story/they would have insisted on knowing/whatever is knowable—would have hurried/over the fields/to name it—the owl, I mean.’”

Victoria sent “The Snowman” By Wallace Stevens, which begins: “One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.” Victoria commented, “I like the way the poem’s language evokes the hush of a snowman standing alone among the snow-crusted trees. Wallace Stevens’s instructions to the reader in the first line to ‘have a mind of winter’ remind us not to project human feelings or emotions on the chilly nothingness of a winter landscape.”

Richard chose “Ancient Music” by Ezra Pound adding, “I think it describes what I think of winter.”

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, tis why I am, Goddamm.
So ’gainst the winter’s balm
Sing Goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm
Sing Goddamm, sing Goddamm, DAMM.

Christiana selected “How to Make a Fire (a sonnet)” by Beatriz Badikian-Gartler from Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry. Christiana noted that the poet illuminates dark and hints at the darkness that daylight may hold: “a match. Watch the blue wedge/flutter in the strong wind, weakening,/weakening. Hurry up. That’s your last/one. Throw it on top of the woodpile.” 

AnnaLee completes the circle with a poem featured on KNAU, Arizona Public Radio’s Poetry Friday. The poet Rob Bettaso wrote “Thermal Shirts and Wool Socks” while propped up in bed, drinking coffee, and waiting for the sun to come up…. “just being contemplative”: “Think not, Summer’s sweetly singing Tanager,/It’s now a muted, Mountain Chickadee,/Perched, shivering, on a spruce bough,/In the black, pre-dawn.”

We hope you enjoy this selection and that you follow all the links to the poems. Take pleasure in the holidays ahead and we will see you in spring! In the meantime, please blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com 
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com

Next Virtual One Page Poetry Circle, December 13—Poetry and Winter Solstice

Welcome to the Virtual One Page Poetry Circle!
Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Theme: Winter Solstice

Find a poem! Send a poem by email!

We’re back for the fifteenth 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 1421 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

This fall we will continue to gather virtually, by email. We ask you to send us the poems you have selected on the subject of Poetry and the Winter Solstice by December 13th, with a comment on why you chose them. We’ll share the poems with you through our blog and by email.

The Winter Solstice will happen in the Northern Hemisphere at 4:47 pm (EST) on Wednesday, December 21. This is the exact moment when half of the earth is tilted the farthest away from the sun. Following the solstice, the shortest day of the year, the days will become longer and the nights shorter.

Robert Frost’s “An Old Man’s Winter Night” speaks of the drear of winter in a small house at the end of a man’s life. In its opening lines, the poem brings nature and man together:

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.

The darkness of the solstice might be more appreciated if we immersed ourselves in it as Wendell Berry describes in the four lines of “To Know the Dark”:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Whether a poem speaks of the Winter Solstice or mentions the changing season, or of anything you associate with winter, email it to one of us by December 13th, 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.

In the meantime, please blog with us here on Poetry and Winter Solstice, or all things poetry at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.                                

Fall 2022 Schedule
December 13: Winter Solstice

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com

 

Recap of the November One Page Poetry Circle—Poetry & Blank Verse

Welcome to the Virtual 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.

 Our theme for November was Poetry and Blank Verse. What follows are the poems people sent on the subject with a few words on why they chose them and links to the work.

Abigail rediscovered Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” with its stirring final words (especially for those of us who are older): “Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’/We are not now that strength which in old days/Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;/One equal temper of heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Roger chose Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” with its famous line, “Good fences make good neighbors.” The narrator of this poem, who walks on separate sides of the wall with his neighbor while putting the stones back in place, thinks, “Before I build a wall I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/And to whom I was like to give offense./Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,/That wants it down.”

Jane sent “Magnitude and Bond” by Nicole Terez Dutton saying that whether or not the poem fits the subject she was so captivated that she wanted to share it. Here is an excerpt:

I need little black boys to be able to be
little black boys, whole salt water galaxies
in cotton and loudness—not fixed
in stunned suspension, episodes on hot
asphalt, waiting in the dazzling absence
of apology. I need this kid to stay mighty
and coltish, thundering alongside
other black kids, their wrestle and whoop,
the brightness of it—I need for the world
to bear it. And until it will, may the trees
kneel closer, while we sit in mineral hush,

Gail chose “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee, “in which a roadside peach symbolizes not only the poignant joy of summer days but also the heartbreaking fragility of our own lives: ‘There are days we live/as if death were nowhere/in the background; from joy/to joy to joy, from wing to wing,/from blossom to blossom to/impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.’”

Christiana chose Conrad Aiken’s “The Room.” Christiana writes that she found this month’s subject pushed her to revisit and explore poets that she likes. “Aiken (1889-1973) was writing when I was a young reader. I liked his work then and now. ‘The Room’ captures my reluctance to accept this time of year when encroaching darkness threatens.” The poem works for both the November theme of blank verse and December’s theme of Darkness:

Through that window—all else being extinct
Except itself and me—I saw the struggle
Of darkness against darkness. Within the room
It turned and turned, diving downward. Then I saw
How order might—if chaos wished—become:
And saw the darkness crush upon itself

Scott wrote, “My mother would sometimes recite a few lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” humorously emphasizing the dactyls: ‘THIS is the FOrest priMEval./The MURmuring PINES and the HEMlocks.” So in honor of her and Longfellow—who is much honored in the town in which I live for he lived here for a while—I read this blank verse epic. I can’t say it was particularly rewarding, as it is overly sentimental for the modern reader, but it was not painful and kept my attention.”

Cate met the challenge with George Eliot’s “I Grant You Ample Leave” saying “Eliot’s fascination with the science of her era in turn fascinates me. I find her choice not to rhyme to be structurally consistent with her choice of subject matter, quite contemporary in its conflicting identity.”

Carol chose the same poem (a phenomenon that doesn’t happen often in our poetry circle), writing: “In this philosophical lyric, Eliot expressed her thoughts on perception, consciousness, and language in 21 short lines, ending with a question mark. Eliot’s poem contains the seeds of a postmodern understanding of self and word: as things composed of language, shaped by perspectives, are so inherently unstable. The poem feels so modern: its form reflects its content.”

Your subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’
Turns nought but object, melts to molecules,
Is stripped from naked Being with the rest
Of those rag-garments named the Universe.
Or if, in strife to keep your ‘Ego’ strong
You make it weaver of the etherial light,
Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time –
Why, still ‘tis Being looking from the dark,
The core, the centre of your consciousness,
That notes your bubble-world: sense, pleasure pain,
What are they but a shifting otherness,
Phantasmal flux of moments?—

Hazel commented, “Do we ever think how amazing it is that one man, William Shakespeare, could have created such a vast treasure of literature? Here is something which every living reader must know comes from Romeo and Juliet”:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.

Richard continued the theme of Shakespeare saying “The moment Miranda discovers men in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest is one of my favorite lines from the bard: “O, wonder!/How many goodly creatures are there here!/How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/That has such people in’t.”

Victoria selected a William Mathews’s translation of Horace’s “Satire II”. “His discussion of style, tone, and meter are all just as intriguing and enjoyable as reading the poem itself.” In the poem the country mouse, much like the narrator, visits his friend in the city and enjoys being pampered until, “Fear speeds the pair/the whole length of the room and the house/begins to vibrate with the harsh barking/of tremendous hounds. Then the country/mouse says, ‘I don’t need any of this, and so/good-bye to it. I long for my safe woods/and bare hole, and a small meal of vetch.’”

AnnaLee brings the circle around with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” in its insistent iambic pentameter beat. “I chose it to recognize my new status as a grandmother. In the conversation poem published in 1798 the narrator muses about his own youth and his hopes for his infant”:

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

Fall 2022 Schedule
December 13: Winter Solstice

Abigail Burnham Bloom and AnnaLee Wilson

Next One Page Poetry Circle, Nov. 8, 2022—Poetry and Blank Verse

Welcome to the Virtual One Page Poetry Circle!
Date: Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Theme: Blank Verse

Find a poem! Send a poem by email!

We’re back for the fifteenth 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 1410 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

This fall we will continue to gather virtually, by email. We ask you to send us the poems you have selected on the subject of Poetry and Blank Verse by November 8th, with a comment on why you chose them. We’ll share the poems with you through our blog and by email.

Blank verse is unrhymed verse, usually written in iambic pentameter. Beginning with the 16^th century, approximately three quarters of all English poetry has been written in blank verse. Shakespeare and Jonson wrote plays in blank verse, and Milton used it in Paradise Lost. Since then, many of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern poets have used blank verse with variations in meter and stress (or not) on the last syllable of the line. The rhythm creates an elevated mood which captures the attention of the reader, as in the soliloquys of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Here is the start of “Rain” by Edward Thomas, a World War I poet:
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die

In “Sunday Morning,” poet Wallace Stevens speaks to us through a woman questioning religion versus the natural world:
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
is divinity if it can come in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

Whether a poem speaks of blank verse or is written in blank verse, or of anything you associate with verse, email it to one of us by November 8th, 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.

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

Fall 2022 Schedule
November 8: Blank Verse
December 13: Winter Solstice

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com

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Blank Verse, One Page Poetry Circle, Poetry and Blank Verse, Rain, Edward Thomas, Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens, Milton, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, Jonson,