August Meeting

This month our topic was Beginnings. As usual we enjoyed a wide and varied selection of poems. They were William's Blake's deceptively simple 'Lamb', 'New Every Morning' by Susan Coleman, an untitled poem by Simon Armitage that caused a good deal of debate; Walt Whitman's enormously long 'I Sing the Body Electric' - we only had time for the first and last sections. Amy Clampitt's meditative 'Beach Glass', Edwin Muir's post-apocalyptic 'The Horses'; the very appropriate 'Rainy Summer' by Alice Meynell, and taking the topic literally - Caedmon's Hymn, said to be the very first English poem.
September will be Free Choice

June, July, and August

It has taken us 2 meetings to complete our latest 'Favourites' topic because 15 of us attended the meeting in June so we only managed to get half way through our poems. With such a full house, Sandy and I decided it might be wise to see about a bigger room, and guess what, for our July meeting only 9 of us enjoyed the facilities in the much larger seminar room! However, it was a lively and interesting meeting as always. Among the poems read was an extract from John Betjeman's verse autobiography Summoned by Bells which prompted a good deal of debate.

For our August meeting we will be bringing poems on 'Beginings'

March Poems

Some of our poems in March were carried over to April as we spent some time in each meeting on technical aspects of poetry. The topic was Favourite Poems again and includes:
My Best Friend-Jeremy Lloyd; The Weeds of Warwickshire-Felix Dennis; The Crack-Denise Levertov; The Windhover-Gerald Manley Hopkins; The Snow Man-Wallace Stevens; Toast-Sheenagh Pugh; From A Shropshire Lad-A.E. Housman; Digging-Seamus Heaney; Harlem Night Song-Langston Hughes. They all gave us plenty to talk about. We also had Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard as an example of accentual-syllabic iambic pentameter verse and considered the complex use of stress and meaning in the poem.

February 7th

Winter
This turned out to be a very pertinent topic given the snow, ice and frost that had been gripping the country. However, in spite of this most of the usual members managed to make it in and we had a lively meeting. Poems by John Clare (February-a Thaw), T.S.Eliot (Song for Simeon), Sylvia Plath (Winter Trees), Ambrose Philips (A Winter Piece), and Louis McNiece (Snow), gave us plenty of food for thought, while Ogden Nash (Winter Complaint) made us all smile. Our next meeting on 7th March will be a free choice and I have offered to give the short talk on Iambic Pentameter that had to be postponed last autumn.

Saturday 3rd January 2009

We started the new year with more of our favourite poems. The session was almost oversubscribed and we had to ask for 2 more chairs to accomodate the 14 of us! Our Topic for February will be Winter.

November Meeting

Sandy reports: We had 8 people but only managed to get through 7 of the poems as there was a lot of interesting discussion.
Tim read 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' (Eliot) which generated a lot of discussion. It's such a dark, atmospheric poem and was just right for such a dreary day. We all read Vicky's choice 'The Raven' (Poe) as it was quite long but once again very appropriate. Lawrence read 'Sweeney Among the Nightingales' (Eliot) which sparked much discussion too; although most of us liked it we still didn't understand it too well! Keely, the new lady, came and joined in a lot which was great. She brought 'Begin' (Brendan Kennelly) which was a nice contrast amongst all the doom and gloom.
'The Raven' and 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' were particularly appropriate after halloween and for such a dismal, grey day.

Next meeting: 6th Dec. The topic is Parodies.

Special Topic for October was Gold.

Sandy reports: We had another great mix of poems at the last poetry meeting. My favourite was 'Gold' by Donald Hall which had so much under the surface. Nobody felt able to criticise it because of the circumstances under which it was written (his wife dying of cancer)- it is just so poignant. 'Churning Day' by Heaney is beautiful and brought up the old poetry vs. prose debate and Mark managed to stun us all again with 'Byzantium' by Yeats. Freda read 'Soybeans' which also sparked a lot of discussion. Lolly came along and brought a Carol Ann Duffy poem, 'Education for Leisure', which had recently been controversially banned from the school syllabus for potentially inciting and glorifying knife crime. As you can imagine this also raised some interesting discussion.