Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle at St. Agnes Branch Library!
Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm
Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Avenue (near 81st St), 3rd Fl.
Subject 
: Poetry and Red
Find a poem! Read a poem! Discuss a poem!
The theme for March is red, a color found on the far end of the visible spectrum. Red is associated with everything from virtue to sin, from safety to danger. In Christianity red is associated with both the Blood of Christ and the Whore of Babylon. Poetic references to the color include such diverse items as politics, the sun, birds, anger, fiery beards, tresses, and poppies.
In the haiku-like stanzas of “Red Beans” the poet Victor Hernández Cruz treats us to servings of red beans and white rice. On one plate iron-colored beans are ringed by hills of white rice. In another the red of the gravy becomes the lava seeping through a field of white rice. The poem ends in a vision of red beans and milk mixing to make a delicate burgundy. Is Cruz speaking about a beautiful hot and fiery mixing of peoples?
Next to white rice
it looks like coral
sitting next to snow
Hills of starch
border
The burnt sienna
of irony
Azusenas being chased by
the terra cotta feathers
of a rooster
There is a lava flow
through the smoking
white mounds
India red
spills on ivory
Ochre cannon balls
falling
next to blanc pebbles
Red beans and milk
make burgundy wine
Violet pouring
from the eggshell
tinge of the plate.
The beloved poet Robert Burns uses red as an expression of deep emotion in this excerpt from his 1794 song, “A Red, Red Rose”:
O my Luve’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve’s like the melody
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I:
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry:
In Burns’ famous lines the speaker boasts of his undying love, aligning this with the eternities of nature. At the same time the image of the “red, red rose” indicates the spring of love, which must, like the flower, fade in the fall. An interesting note: Bob Dylan selected this as the poem that had the greatest impact on his life.
We look forward to reading and discussing your selections for our next program, Poetry and Red, on March 10th. Bring a friend and widen the circle!
And remember to blog with us here about all things concerning poetry. Don’t be shy.
Schedule for the spring:
March 10: Poetry and Red
April 14: Lyric poetry
May 12: Poetry and Health
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.
One Page Poetry Circle 
The Rothko Room
Gillian Clarke
He crushed charcoal with a city’s rubies,
saw such visions of soft-edged night and day
as stop the ears with silence. In this,
the last room after hours in the gallery,
a mesh diffuses London’s light and sound.
The Indian keeper nods to sleep, marooned
in a trapezium of black on red.
We few who stop are quiet as if we prayed
in this room after Turner’s turbulence.
Coming and going through paint’s water-curtains
turning a corner suddenly we find
a city burns, a cathedral comes down
with a last blaze filling its gaudy lantern
and windows buckle as a tenement falls.
Rack the heart for memory or sense
and reds like these come crowding out of dream;
musk mallow, goat’s rue, impatiens,
loosestrife, hellebore, belladonna, nightshade,
poppysilks crushed in their velvety soot,
and digitalis purpurea, red on maroon,
drop dappled gloves along an August lane.
A morning’s laundry marking glass with steam
on rainy Mondays where a blackbird sings
sodden in dripping dark-red lilac trees.
We look, myopic, down his corridors
through misted spectacles of broken glass
window on window, scaffolding of pain
red on maroon and black, black on maroon.
__________________________________
The painting is in the Tate Gallery.
Gillian Clarke was orn in Cardiff. After reading English at University College Cardiff she worked for the BBC in London before returning to Wales to raise a family and now lives in Cardiganshire. She began writing poetry in 1970 and was Editor of the Anglo-Welsh Review, 1975 – 84, and Writer-in-Residence at the ST David’s University College, Lampeter, 1984-5. Publications include Letter from a far country (Carcanet,1982), Letting in the Rumour (Carcanet,1989).
[…] with red bison/painted in their own blood./after their kind.” Larry posted Gillian Clarke’s “The Rothko Room” on our blog. This poem describes the effect of the paintings in this museum where “The Indian […]