April Meeting

7.4.12 (Easter Saturday)


We did not have an Easter theme, but our topic today was Pictures. We began with Howard Nemerov’s ‘Vermeer’. Initially pronounced unsatisfactory as a poem, for its inclusion of some banal vocabulary, discussion ranged from approval to disdain, but some allowance was made for the possibility that Nemerov had succeeded in describing the inability of words to truly capture what the eye can see.

U.A. Fanthorpe’s compact little ‘Portraits of Tudor Statesmen’ was approved for its representation of anxiety. Stephen Dobyns’s ‘The Street’, written as an evocation of Balthus 1933 painting of the same name was more difficult to deal with, as the painting (reproduced in photocopy) was thought to be influenced by Surrealism. Some of us were disconcerted by the baby, others by the one-dimensional workman. Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Disquieting Muses’ also came with a print of the picture by George Chirico that inspired it.

We were on easier ground with Anne Stevenson’s ‘Who’s Joking with the Photographer?’ We all enjoyed the honest and finely rendered impression of a woman confronting depictions of her aging face.

Norman Nicholson’s ‘Thomas Gray in Patterdale’ was not about a picture but about the 18thC framing of landscape to make a picture, and its ‘Wordsworth-esque’ effect on the viewer when not constrained by ideas of control.

We ended with further controversy with another Stephen Dobyn’s poem ‘Where We Are’. Not ostensibly about a picture, it takes Bede’s famous simile for the Christian in the world as like a sparrow that flies briefly through the warmth and safety of the feasting hall and returns out into the storm.

After an afternoon packed with intense discussion, we may look forward to next time, when we have Free Choice.

March Meeting

March was being a lamb for this meeting, before turning into a polar bear! But we began by looking back to earlier meetings when we were looking at Carol Rumens’ sestina. The form itself caused much interest but we had not considered its origins. They are:
That the invention of the sestina form is usually attributed to Arnaut Daniel (fl.1190) and it was then widely practised by other Occitan poets, and later by renaissance poets in Italy. A version with rhyme in the first stanza was developed in France in the 16thC. Swinburne and Ezra Pound experimented with the form.

On to our poems for the afternoon. These included Vernon Scannell’s ‘Legs’ a poem full of interesting imagery, but also having a slightly troubling feel to it. Roger McGough amused as usual with ‘A Good Poem’. John Donne’s Satyre II (an extract) was perhaps more poetically contorted that was really comfortable for a Saturday afternoon, but Edward Field’s ‘Mae West’ was certainly not, and prompted both discussion and distant recollections of the star on scene. ‘Our Photograph’ by Frederick Locker-Lawson teased and amused, and slightly surprised with its final choice of vocabulary. Eleanor Farjeon’s ‘Mrs Malone’ challenged us to feel emotionally engaged with the eponymous character, but as it turned out, we felt the pathos less than the sense of a folk-tale motif, but we all enjoyed the poem. ‘Leaving the Tate’, by Fleur Adcock, provoked a lot of comment as it intersects with visual art and manages to question our perception of all forms of art. We were also introduced to the work of an Estonian poet Bernard Kangro. His ‘Frogs’ from the collection Earthbound, posed a few problems, not least the image of the blue crown. A basic search shows that the Estonian flag is bands of Blue, Black and White, and the shade of blue is officially ‘cornflower blue’, as the cornflower is the national flower. In the absence of this knowledge, it was suggested that the image of the frogs with blue crowns on their heads was reminiscent of the Frog Prince of fairy tales, just waiting for the transformative kiss.

Cornflower

As always, we enjoyed a wide variety of poems and agreed that next time (April) our topic will be ‘pictures’

Additional - on the sestina form

The sestina form as used by Carol Rumans for 'Rules for Beginners' is exactly a sestina. Rhyme isn't necessary, but repetition of words at line ending is. The last 3 lines of the poem are called the envoi because the form originated with the French troubadours. It is described as the most complicated verse form they ever devised.

February Meeting

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!

January Meeting

On an unseasonably mild day, calm after a week of stormy winds, we gathered for a Free Choice meeting. Emily Bronte’s ‘Tell me tell me smiling child’ charmed with its simple form. Staying in the 19th century Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’ – again simple at first appearance – generated a vigorous debate between the humanists and others in the group as we thrashed out the suggestion that it was overly sentimental, indebted to pre-Raphaelite imagery, and whether shells can ‘paddle’. Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Edinburgh’ from Marmion was much less controversial, while Adrienne Rich’s ‘Peeling Onions’ was approved and struck a chord with all those among us who suffer from peeling onions. An extract from John Donne’s ‘The Storme’ showed the poet in rare wryly humorous vein, while T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding swept us wonderfully into a particularly English beauty and spirituality.




Our topic for February will be ‘Offspring’.

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.