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.

December Meeting

Our December meeting was something of a triumph of determination to beat the bad weather and bitter cold and enjoy some pre-Christmas poetry, and not a carol in sight! Among the poems were several on wintry themes, such as ‘Skater’ by Fiona Sampson, one of the poets nominated for the T.S.Eliot prize this year. Philip Larkin’s deeply atmospheric sonnet ‘Winter Nocturne’ continued the theme of frozen winter nights, while Edna St Vincent Millay’s mournful sonnet ‘What lips my lips have kissed’ overlaid wintry motifs with grief for the lost young men of WW1. Yet another sonnet, curtailed but not quite ‘curtal’ was Theodore Roethke’s ‘Dolor’. Changing the tone but not the form, Milton’s sonnet ‘Lawrence, virtuous father of virtuous son’ mention winter in order to celebrate the power of companionship. After so many sonnets, Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Bird’ began with a storm and after 6 stanzas ended in brightness. Not everyone chose seasonal poetry. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Aquatic Nocturne’ plunged deep into the submarine world, while Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The Diet’ plunged into the modern [female] psyche. Finally, Hamlet’s Ghost’s speech ‘So lust, though to a radiant angel linked’ took us into adultery, incest, and murder.

Our next meeting will take Ice as its theme. Let's hope it is only a topic for poetry, not a fact of life on January 8th.

November Meeting

The afternoon after Bonfire Night, and just a week after Hallowe’en, seems apt for our discussion of poems on the twin topic of Heaven and Hell. The balance tipped towards Hell, but included poems that asserted the reality and the unreality of Heaven and the Sartrian notion that Hell is other people. Among the poems chosen Paradise Lost occurred twice. Extracts from the fall of Lucifer and his first actions and response to the burning lake and its surrounding ‘darkness visible’, followed the building of Pandemonium. This of course reverses the order of these episodes in the poem, and the building of the Satanic palace posed the question of why Milton includes elegant refinements of architectural fashion, such as Doric columns, and symphonies of music, when Hell is the antithesis of all heavenly harmony. Theories were advanced for the literary necessity of including an aesthetic more consistent with Heaven.

Among the other poems chosen were ‘The English Lesson’, by Michael Schmidt; ‘Annabel Lee’ by Edgar Allen Poe; ‘Back in the Playground Blues’ by Adrian Mitchell; ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young by Wilfred Owen; Lucifer in Starlight by George Meredith; and ‘All Souls’ by Dana Gioia; and the first part of Richard III's opening speech from Shakespeare's play.

December will be Free Choice again.

October Meeting

Our October meeting was very well attended, with the usual wide range of poems from the famous to the ‘utilitarian but fun’. We were trying to catch up with poems left over from last month, but once again discussions were so enthusiastic and varied in opinion that some members of the group did not get to read their poems. This will eventually work itself out in further ‘Favourite poems’ sessions.


The poems we did manage to cover this month were the very inventive ‘Recipe for a Salad’, by Sydney Smith – surprisingly modern for an 18thC poet; the famous and entertaining ‘A Smuggler’s Song’ by Kipling; a whimsical but untitled poem discovered as part of an advertisment for Dulux paint - this is the 'utilitarian but fun poem' created for a commercial purpose and none the worse for that. We also heard and commented on Andrew Motion’s clever comment on middle class complacency: ‘A Glass of Wine’; the insightful, beautifully restrained and very witty ‘A Message to My Grandson’ by the Australian poet Michael Thwaites; ‘Nettles’ by Vernon Scannell; and the renowned ‘Lady of Shallott’ by Tennyson. This poem caused more comment and controversy that might be expected. Disliked by some, loved by others, we almost ended up deciding on a whole session devoted to (1) this poem, or (2) Tennyson, or (3) similar works of the 19thC. In the end we agreed that the next meeting in November should take on the topic of Heaven and Hell – very appropriate for a meeting that will take place less than a week after the Feast of All Hallows!

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.

August 7th 2010 - Geography

As we reassembled after a 5 week month, we welcomed 2 new participants to the group and the discussion during the afternoon was as diverse and lively as usual. Our topic was Geography and we found many approaches to it.

Starting very sensibly we heard Caroline Bird’s short and somewhat pessimistic ‘Geography Lessons’. This was followed by Keat’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ – what a contrast as the poet presents his excitement at intellectual discovery in terms of geographical exploration. My poem was the last part of Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, and after this, came Ian McKay’s ‘Volcanoes’. It was remarked that the first 4 poems all contained references to mountains of one kind or another – but all very differently handled.

We had a complete change of location with Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Peninsula’ and Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’. Following their engagement with psychology and to some extent even with epistemology, Edward Thomas’s profoundly melancholy ‘Rain’ provoked a good deal of comment.
The emerging poet Miriam Gamble’s ‘On Fancying American Film Stars’ generated some discussion on one of our perpetual themes: ‘what makes a poem a poem and what makes a good poem?’
We finished gently with Frances Thomson’s ‘Arab Song’.
In September we have Free Choice again.