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.

Meeting 1st October

This meeting took ‘Murder’ as its ‘M’ theme. No one relied on extracts from any of Shakespeare’s great murders. No ‘Put out the light and then put out the light’ (Othello), nor ‘I can smile and smile and be a villain’ (Richard III), but a fascinating selection of poems from several centuries. These included ‘Dilemma of a Would-be Writer’ by Daphne Helliwell; ‘The Murdered Traveller’, by William Cullen Bryant; ‘The Poet’s Obligation’ by Pablo Neruda; ‘The Staffordshire Murderer’ by James Fenton, ‘He Fell Among Thieves’, by Sir Henry Newbolt; Robert Browning’s ‘The Laboratory’; John Heath-Stubbs poetic take on murder mystery novels – ‘Send for Lord Timothy’, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s creepy fantasy piece ‘The Mewlips’.

Our meeting in November will be Free Choice, but it is Bonfire Night so maybe we can expect fireworks!

September

After such a long absence from our usual routine of meetings everyone seemed glad to be back, and we celebrated a return to our discussions with the usual wide variety of writers and free choice topics. We began with a delightful 17th century lyric, quite clearly written to be sung, 'There is a Lady Sweet and Kind' by Thomas Ford, court musician to Prince Henry, James I and VI's short-lived son. Two of us remembered hearing it set to music when we were younger, and the poem called up other memories of learning to sing at school. We moved on to a very different  poem by Simon Armitage ' The Six Comeuppances', beginning with the memorable line 'My mind is like a tree full of monkeys'! This was followed by Mark Haddon's 'Poets', a wry and whimsical piece. Section IV of Matthew Arnold's 'Faded Leaves' is called 'On the Rhine', and this prompted us to wonder why poetry like this is no longer written. The detrimental effect of modern instant gratification was our conclusion. The mood changed with Pam Ayres humorous and poignant 'The Dolly on the Dustcart'. Still tending towards humour, 'Achilles - for David Beckham', by Carol Ann Duffy, showed an accomplished take on a contemporary event by the poet laureate. Finally, the tiny, compact 'Cut Grass' by Philip Larkin gave us much to consider.

Next month we reach 'M' in our alphabetical list, and the topic will be 'murder'! Much Shakespearean tragedy springs to mind!

July 2nd

Firstly, apologies for the lateness of this blog report on our July meeting, and secondly, apologies that August had to be cancelled owing to illness. By the time we get to September we may all need to look back and recall what we did in July, so here is the selection of our poems on Love.

We began with uncomfortably perceptive 'The Cat Goddess' by Rupert Graves, followed by 'The Ballad of Love's Skeleton', by Thomas Hardy. A Sonnet by Christina Rosetti divided opinion as to whether it referred to her mother or a lover. Rupert Brooke's 'The Great Lover', was followed by 'The Mess of Love' by D.H. Lawrence, and a perversely brutal piece by the early 19thC Eliza Ado which printed out as 'Reveizge' but may be 'Revenge' as it desires to inflict the sufferings of love on an enemy. Shakespeare's culturally perverse sonnet 'My Mistress Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun' lightened the mood, and a translation of one of the ghazals of the late 17thC Mughal princess Zebunisa - 'You with the dark burly hair and the breathtaking eyes' gave us the chance to enjoy her rather daring celebration of female desire.

September's topic will be Free Choice, held over from August.

June Meeting

This afternoon’s meeting began with and example (in translation) of probably the oldest poet we have encountered so far as we heard one of Horace’s Odes. To be precise it was Odes, Book1, No. 6 by Quintus Horatius Flaccus (BC65-8), trans. James Michie. Following on from Thursday, and entirely by accident, we also had Tony Harrison’s poignant ‘Book Ends’, Luke Wright’s amusing lesson on time management: ‘When Instant Coffee Just Isn’t Enough’, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’, which divided opinion, ‘Ken Edwards’s ‘Rilke Driving School’, which has demanded that we track down the statue of Rilke in the Queen Victoria hotel in Ronda (it does exist). Amazingly, 2 people brought Emily Bronte’s ‘High Waving Heather'. Roald Dahl’s version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ amused us, and ‘Titanic’ by David Slavitt challenged our desire for a watery grave, but not so much as the handout kindly produced by Sandy on Found Verse. This was a response to our ongoing debate about what constitutes a poem.


Opinion, mostly detrimental, revolves around the problem of how one distinguished a poem in free verse from a piece of ordinary prose merely arranged in lines. The handout seemed to prove that there is no real distinction. This demanded further consideration and no doubt we will revisit the topic again (and again!)
Our topic for next month will be Love.

Tower and Fountain 2

A separate blog page is now available. It will show the poems read and discussed at the Thursday meetings.

Saturday May 7th

The topic today was Kings (and Queens), as the letter for this session was K. The range of poems was fascinating as always. A.A. Milne’s ‘The King’s Breakfast’ didn’t require much analysing, but was simply delightful. W.N Herbert’s ‘The King and Queen of Dumfriesshire’ could hardly have been more different as it depicted the bitterness of failed marriage in powerful images. Two poems by Kipling recalled English history of different periods: ‘The Reeds of Runnymede’ looking back to 1215 and the beginnings the English justice system. ‘The Widow at Windsor’, one of The Barrack-room Ballads’ was startlingly political. The tiny ‘Epitaph on Charles II’ by John Wilmott, earl of Rochester summed up the failings of that significant monarch in a quatrain. Opinions about Elizabeth I’s ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’ varied considerably, while John Betjeman’s ‘Death of King George V’ turned out to be more impressive than some of us had expected. Emily Dickinson’s ‘I heard a Fly Buzz’ only mentions ‘the King’ in passing, but the poem prompted comments, as did the off-topic ‘Hope’, by Christine Bousfield (it’s not often that the making of lemon curd is mentioned in a poem).



Our next Saturday meeting (4th June) will be Free Choice, as will the second meeting of the Thursday afternoon poetry group (2nd June).

'Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote' > April is the cruellest month ...

Oddly, as our topic was Free Choice, no one brought either Chaucer's famous opening lines to the Canterbury Tales, nor T.S. Eliot's callous parody from The Waste Land, but we did have a number of poems that picked up the feeling of spring with their use of flowers images.

The poems chosen for this afternoon’s meeting were the provocative ‘Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes’ by the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This had been left over for several months but was definitely worth waiting for. Among the others were some short selections from A.E. Housman’s charming ‘A Shropshire Lad’, Philip Larkin’s ‘Sympathy in White Major’ – a poem that taxed our hermeneutic powers and called on different cultural contexts; Archibald MacLeish’s deceptively compact but equally testing ‘Ars Poetica’; the exquisite and finely crafted ‘The Spring’ by the Cavalier poet Thomas Carew; selections from ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, by Rupert Brooke, which divided us into those who liked the very English images of the garden at the start and those who felt it was too ‘sweet’. Balancing the nostalgia we also had Martin Southall’s ‘May 1945’, and Ezra Pound’s plea for classical rigour in ‘The Return’.

Next month our topic will be ‘Kings and Queens’ – so there should be plenty of scope!

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

 See also lfhdramandmedievalism.blogspot.com

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!