September Meeting

Our topic for September was Free Choice, but in a very full afternoon we did not get through many poems. Those we did cover were ‘The Cat and the Moon’ by W. B. Yeats, and Shakespeare’s ‘Prologue from Romeo and Juliet’, both of which generated a good deal of discussion. The rest of the afternoon was given over to the provocative OULIPO ‘poem’, an N+7 version of Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Snow Man, that was my choice.
Chosen to try to help is unravel our feelings about ‘what is a poem’, what is a good poem’ – topics we come back to at almost every meeting – the OULIPO creation certainly provided a challenge. It also revealed some interesting things about how we as readers relate to the ‘thing’ on the page.
Some of us were ready and willing to attempt interpretations, at least of the bits that made some syntactical sense. Some of us thought it an annoying waste of personal time. This was the reaction I had thought would be most general. I didn’t expect anyone to regard it as worthy of further contemplation. This raised interesting thoughts about how form and authorial declarations may control our reception of poems.
We also compared the OULIPO ‘poem’ against Shakespeare’s Prologue which divided opinion and opened up the vexed question of the ongoing effect of the old Leavisite idea of the ‘canon’ of literature. All in all we covered a great deal of ground in our discussion – everyone participated and it made for a rich diversity of attitudes towards poetry.
Because the OULIPO discussion took up so much time our meeting in October will again be on the topic of Free Choice.