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.