Tuesday, March 29, 2011

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