Our topic for today was ‘Offspring’, and it proved more difficult to find poems for this topic than we had expected. In addition, we seemed to have inadvertently turned it into a meeting about daughters, since most of the ‘offspring’ turned out to be daughters. Maybe this was because we were an all-female group, although that seems unlikely.
We began with a poem we had a few weeks ago: Carol Rumens’ ‘Rules for Beginners’, and it was well worth revisiting. This is a brilliant sestina, perfectly formed, and in its use of trite and colloquial language for the repeated patterns of line endings and three-line envoi it conveys the sense of the subjects constricted life and limited ambitions, until the final breakout. Gillian’ Clarke’s ‘Cold Knap Lake’ turned out to be an uncomfortable read, moving as it does from heroism to brutality and uncertainty. A short poem illustrating maybe why Gillain Clarke is the Welsh poet laureate. Adrian Henri’s ‘Mrs Albion You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter: For Allen Ginsberg’ is full of recollections of the 1960s when Liverpool was the centre of the universe for the younger generation. Two poems by Sylvia Plath ‘Morning Song’ about her own baby daughter, and ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ about her troubled relationship with her father/ husband (as usual) were full of her startlingly apt imagery. Section 29 of George Oppen’s ‘Of being Numerous’ was, in contrast to Plath’s lushness, stripped bare as it explored his own unsatisfactory relationship with his daughter Linda. So it was pleasant to have John Clare’s ‘The Vixen’ to return us to the soft English countryside, a protective maternal relationship and probably numerous offspring of the cuddly russet kind.
Next month will be free choice again, and maybe when we get to ‘S’ we should redress the balance by taking ‘sons’ as our topic!
We began with a poem we had a few weeks ago: Carol Rumens’ ‘Rules for Beginners’, and it was well worth revisiting. This is a brilliant sestina, perfectly formed, and in its use of trite and colloquial language for the repeated patterns of line endings and three-line envoi it conveys the sense of the subjects constricted life and limited ambitions, until the final breakout. Gillian’ Clarke’s ‘Cold Knap Lake’ turned out to be an uncomfortable read, moving as it does from heroism to brutality and uncertainty. A short poem illustrating maybe why Gillain Clarke is the Welsh poet laureate. Adrian Henri’s ‘Mrs Albion You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter: For Allen Ginsberg’ is full of recollections of the 1960s when Liverpool was the centre of the universe for the younger generation. Two poems by Sylvia Plath ‘Morning Song’ about her own baby daughter, and ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ about her troubled relationship with her father/ husband (as usual) were full of her startlingly apt imagery. Section 29 of George Oppen’s ‘Of being Numerous’ was, in contrast to Plath’s lushness, stripped bare as it explored his own unsatisfactory relationship with his daughter Linda. So it was pleasant to have John Clare’s ‘The Vixen’ to return us to the soft English countryside, a protective maternal relationship and probably numerous offspring of the cuddly russet kind.
Next month will be free choice again, and maybe when we get to ‘S’ we should redress the balance by taking ‘sons’ as our topic!
No comments:
Post a Comment