December meeting

Almost the end of another year, but we did not have a Christmas or a Winter theme, but a Nautical one. And an interesting selection resulted. From Brian Patten’s enigmatic ‘Ghost Ship’, to Sophie Hannah’s intricate ‘Rondeau Redouble’, by way of Oscar Wilde’s sonnet ‘Impression du Voyage’ we had plenty to discuss, although this poem divided opinion slightly – was it tongue-in-cheek some of us wondered? Matthew Arnold’s famous and beautiful Dover Beach was less difficult, as was the short ‘Journey’ by William Orange, while Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The White Ship’ provided an easily assimilated narrative before we were plunged into the complexities of H.D.’s ‘Helen in Egypt’ from Eidolon Book III. A stimulating afternoon all round.


At our meeting in January we will have Free Choice again.

November Meeting

We did not have a specific topic for this month, but the proximity of Remembrance Sunday seemed to permeate the free choice poems. We began with Wilfred Owen’s rivetting account of the effects of battle on land and individual alike in ‘The Show’. This divided opinions between those who disliked the intensity of the vocabulary of horror, and those who saw it as showing ‘decorum’ in the old sense of fitting the language to the topic. Keith Douglas’s light but intense ‘Canoe’ continued the theme of soldiers contemplating their fate. He died at Normandy aged 24. Modest to look at, this poem is more complex than it seems. Alun Lewis’s ‘All Day It Has Rained’, reflected the tedium of waiting for action in camp in England. Its emphasis on the cheerful companionship in idleness in bucolic (if wet) surrounding, was applauded, as was the stark contrast of its ending. It was particularly significant for us as it mentions other places in Hampshire.




A change of topic and pace came in the form of A.S.J. Tessimond’s ‘Black Monday Lovesong’. And Wendy Cope’s inventive ‘The Lavatory Attendant’ was well received. James Elroy Flecker’s ‘To a Poet a Thousand years Hence’ gave a charming sense of ‘handing on the baton’ of poetry, while Ben Jonson’s ‘To My Old Faithful Servant …’ records Jonson’s commendation to his servant, and perhaps apprentice, the playwright Richard Brome. Frank O’Hara’s ‘Ave Maria’ continued and extended the sense of witty comment, but we returned to a more thoughtful mood with John Donne’s ‘A Hymn to Christ, at the Authors Last Going Into Germany’. It is a meditation on death replete with Donne’s grief and uncertainty, it was also the poem used to dedicate our session to our late and much missed friend and colleague Brigitte.



Our topic for next time – is N – and the theme is all things nautical.

Meeting 1st October

This meeting took ‘Murder’ as its ‘M’ theme. No one relied on extracts from any of Shakespeare’s great murders. No ‘Put out the light and then put out the light’ (Othello), nor ‘I can smile and smile and be a villain’ (Richard III), but a fascinating selection of poems from several centuries. These included ‘Dilemma of a Would-be Writer’ by Daphne Helliwell; ‘The Murdered Traveller’, by William Cullen Bryant; ‘The Poet’s Obligation’ by Pablo Neruda; ‘The Staffordshire Murderer’ by James Fenton, ‘He Fell Among Thieves’, by Sir Henry Newbolt; Robert Browning’s ‘The Laboratory’; John Heath-Stubbs poetic take on murder mystery novels – ‘Send for Lord Timothy’, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s creepy fantasy piece ‘The Mewlips’.

Our meeting in November will be Free Choice, but it is Bonfire Night so maybe we can expect fireworks!

September

After such a long absence from our usual routine of meetings everyone seemed glad to be back, and we celebrated a return to our discussions with the usual wide variety of writers and free choice topics. We began with a delightful 17th century lyric, quite clearly written to be sung, 'There is a Lady Sweet and Kind' by Thomas Ford, court musician to Prince Henry, James I and VI's short-lived son. Two of us remembered hearing it set to music when we were younger, and the poem called up other memories of learning to sing at school. We moved on to a very different  poem by Simon Armitage ' The Six Comeuppances', beginning with the memorable line 'My mind is like a tree full of monkeys'! This was followed by Mark Haddon's 'Poets', a wry and whimsical piece. Section IV of Matthew Arnold's 'Faded Leaves' is called 'On the Rhine', and this prompted us to wonder why poetry like this is no longer written. The detrimental effect of modern instant gratification was our conclusion. The mood changed with Pam Ayres humorous and poignant 'The Dolly on the Dustcart'. Still tending towards humour, 'Achilles - for David Beckham', by Carol Ann Duffy, showed an accomplished take on a contemporary event by the poet laureate. Finally, the tiny, compact 'Cut Grass' by Philip Larkin gave us much to consider.

Next month we reach 'M' in our alphabetical list, and the topic will be 'murder'! Much Shakespearean tragedy springs to mind!

July 2nd

Firstly, apologies for the lateness of this blog report on our July meeting, and secondly, apologies that August had to be cancelled owing to illness. By the time we get to September we may all need to look back and recall what we did in July, so here is the selection of our poems on Love.

We began with uncomfortably perceptive 'The Cat Goddess' by Rupert Graves, followed by 'The Ballad of Love's Skeleton', by Thomas Hardy. A Sonnet by Christina Rosetti divided opinion as to whether it referred to her mother or a lover. Rupert Brooke's 'The Great Lover', was followed by 'The Mess of Love' by D.H. Lawrence, and a perversely brutal piece by the early 19thC Eliza Ado which printed out as 'Reveizge' but may be 'Revenge' as it desires to inflict the sufferings of love on an enemy. Shakespeare's culturally perverse sonnet 'My Mistress Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun' lightened the mood, and a translation of one of the ghazals of the late 17thC Mughal princess Zebunisa - 'You with the dark burly hair and the breathtaking eyes' gave us the chance to enjoy her rather daring celebration of female desire.

September's topic will be Free Choice, held over from August.

June Meeting

This afternoon’s meeting began with and example (in translation) of probably the oldest poet we have encountered so far as we heard one of Horace’s Odes. To be precise it was Odes, Book1, No. 6 by Quintus Horatius Flaccus (BC65-8), trans. James Michie. Following on from Thursday, and entirely by accident, we also had Tony Harrison’s poignant ‘Book Ends’, Luke Wright’s amusing lesson on time management: ‘When Instant Coffee Just Isn’t Enough’, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’, which divided opinion, ‘Ken Edwards’s ‘Rilke Driving School’, which has demanded that we track down the statue of Rilke in the Queen Victoria hotel in Ronda (it does exist). Amazingly, 2 people brought Emily Bronte’s ‘High Waving Heather'. Roald Dahl’s version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ amused us, and ‘Titanic’ by David Slavitt challenged our desire for a watery grave, but not so much as the handout kindly produced by Sandy on Found Verse. This was a response to our ongoing debate about what constitutes a poem.


Opinion, mostly detrimental, revolves around the problem of how one distinguished a poem in free verse from a piece of ordinary prose merely arranged in lines. The handout seemed to prove that there is no real distinction. This demanded further consideration and no doubt we will revisit the topic again (and again!)
Our topic for next month will be Love.

Tower and Fountain 2

A separate blog page is now available. It will show the poems read and discussed at the Thursday meetings.

Saturday May 7th

The topic today was Kings (and Queens), as the letter for this session was K. The range of poems was fascinating as always. A.A. Milne’s ‘The King’s Breakfast’ didn’t require much analysing, but was simply delightful. W.N Herbert’s ‘The King and Queen of Dumfriesshire’ could hardly have been more different as it depicted the bitterness of failed marriage in powerful images. Two poems by Kipling recalled English history of different periods: ‘The Reeds of Runnymede’ looking back to 1215 and the beginnings the English justice system. ‘The Widow at Windsor’, one of The Barrack-room Ballads’ was startlingly political. The tiny ‘Epitaph on Charles II’ by John Wilmott, earl of Rochester summed up the failings of that significant monarch in a quatrain. Opinions about Elizabeth I’s ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’ varied considerably, while John Betjeman’s ‘Death of King George V’ turned out to be more impressive than some of us had expected. Emily Dickinson’s ‘I heard a Fly Buzz’ only mentions ‘the King’ in passing, but the poem prompted comments, as did the off-topic ‘Hope’, by Christine Bousfield (it’s not often that the making of lemon curd is mentioned in a poem).



Our next Saturday meeting (4th June) will be Free Choice, as will the second meeting of the Thursday afternoon poetry group (2nd June).

'Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote' > April is the cruellest month ...

Oddly, as our topic was Free Choice, no one brought either Chaucer's famous opening lines to the Canterbury Tales, nor T.S. Eliot's callous parody from The Waste Land, but we did have a number of poems that picked up the feeling of spring with their use of flowers images.

The poems chosen for this afternoon’s meeting were the provocative ‘Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes’ by the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This had been left over for several months but was definitely worth waiting for. Among the others were some short selections from A.E. Housman’s charming ‘A Shropshire Lad’, Philip Larkin’s ‘Sympathy in White Major’ – a poem that taxed our hermeneutic powers and called on different cultural contexts; Archibald MacLeish’s deceptively compact but equally testing ‘Ars Poetica’; the exquisite and finely crafted ‘The Spring’ by the Cavalier poet Thomas Carew; selections from ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, by Rupert Brooke, which divided us into those who liked the very English images of the garden at the start and those who felt it was too ‘sweet’. Balancing the nostalgia we also had Martin Southall’s ‘May 1945’, and Ezra Pound’s plea for classical rigour in ‘The Return’.

Next month our topic will be ‘Kings and Queens’ – so there should be plenty of scope!

March Meeting (with apologies for lateness)

For our March meeting we took Journeys as our topic, and this produced plenty of variety. A number of poems dealt with death as a journey, but others were more optimistic. Among the poems read were Russell Edson’s, ‘A Journey Through the Moonlight’, John Jarman’s ‘Embarkation, 1942’; W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Song of the Wandering Aengus’, which prompted many different approaches within the group; the very entertaining ‘From Epistle to John Bradshaw Esq.’ by the 17thC poet Charles Cotton; Thomas Hardy’s ‘Weathers’ – setting out the journey from Spring to Autumn, Philip Larkin’s thought-provoking ‘Dockery and Son’; ‘Baby Song’, by Thom Gunn; W.H. Auden’s ‘Johnny’; Alan Albers’s inventively cheeky, ‘As I was coming to school’; and Hermann Hesse’s small but intense ‘On a Journey’. This raised the old concern about reading poetry in translation, and what may be lost in the process.
Next month we will again have Free Choice.
 Please note, membership of the Saturday Poetry Reading Group is now closed because we are unable to accommodate any more participants.

 A new Poetry Reading Group is being launched.


 It will meet monthly on the first Thursday of each month from 2.15 – 3.45 pm


 It will begin on May 5th.


 New members are most welcome to join this Thursday group.

 For more information please contact Dr. Lynn Forest-Hill, email: lynnevdaATclaraDOTcoDOTuk

 See also lfhdramandmedievalism.blogspot.com

February Meeting: Free Choice

We had a very busy meeting this afternoon. 16 people attended and we ran out of time so some poems will be held over to another ‘free choice’ meeting. The poems that were read prompted a wide range of responses. They also fell into clear categories. Perhaps these were an unconscious response to the miserable weather, but we had several poems on death and grief, including the horrific poem for Holocaust Day ‘More Light! More Light!: for Heinrich Blucher and Hannah Arendt’ by Anthony Hecht. Christopher Reed’s ‘Afterlife’ at least allowed some choice in the disposition of the body, while Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Voice’, remembered the dead with regretful nostalgia. The feminist icon ‘Lady Lazarus’ by Sylvia Plath called forth the usual comments. We moved on from death itself to various somatic topics. Roger McGough’s ‘The Wrong Beds’ was taken to sum up general human experience. More beds evoked melancholic observations in Elizabeth Jennings ‘One Flesh’. Away from beds, David Scott-Blackhall’s ‘Because it’s There’ discussed his own blindness, while Mimi Khalvati expressed female togetherness in ‘The Waiting House’. The body images in ‘So Do We’ by Elsa Linguanti caused much debate and we concluded for the most part that the poem was an intense consideration of language. After so much concentration on the fragility of the human body Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ was a timely reminder of physical strength, and Joan B. Howe’s ‘Rosemary’ at least had the brightness of flowers, even thought its associations are with death and remembrance.


Our theme next time (March) will be Journeys.

January 8th Meeting

After the snow before Christmas we have been enjoying a brief milder spell of weather, but the memory of the bitter cold made our topic of ICE perfectly appropriate for this meeting. Among the poem discussed were Wilfred Gibson's incantatory 'The Ice Cart', Archibald Lumpsman's 'A January Morning', both of which contrasted brilliant colours against dullness, and Matthew Sweeneys ' The Appointment', a puzzling, rather mythic poem. John Clare's 'January - a Winter's Day' from his long work The Shepherd's Calendar delighted us with its simplicity, as did Shakespeare's song of Winter from Love's Labour's Lost. We had more Shakespeare, with Sonnet 97 'How like the Winter...' Robert Frost's 'An Old Man's Winter Night' provoked some diverse opinions, but not so many as Wallace Steven's provocative 'The Emperor of Ice Cream'. Judith Wright's 'Halfway' about a tadpole trapped in ice was a more unusual image, while J.H. Prynne's 'Charm Against too many Apples' led to a good deal of discussion.

February meeting will again be Free Choice.