Poetry Session — Dec 19, 2017

 Zakia, Shoba, Preeti, Priya by the CYC Christmas tree

The very last session of 2017 commanded a good attendance. Many of the poems recited were in the spirit of the Christmas festival. Though some of the poets selected were performed before in the years of poetry celebration by our group, the poems chosen were different.

Shoba, Thommo, Zakia, Pamela reading, Hemjit back to camera

Joe and KumKum were still abroad but keen to participate, and left voice files in the dropbox that were played at the session for the readers.

Zakia

Priya who orchestrated the session brought in Christmas plum cake for the readers, and Santa Claus caps for them to wear while reading. A Christmassy spirit of peace and harmony descended over the assembled readers.

Thommo

Preeti, coming late, made a surprise entry toward the end of the session, but contributed a humorous and expressive reading of a children’s poem called Chocolate Cake by Michael Rosen. You can hear a snippet of her delightful enactment of the poem in an embedded voice file further down.

Hemjit

Preeti

Salutations and greetings to all our readers who have contributed this past year in making our sessions memorable and pleasurable! We look forward to 2018 with relish. Here are the readers at the end of the session.

Zakia, Preeti, Priya, Thommo, Shoba, Hemjit seated
(Pamela had to leave early)

Full Account and Record of the Poetry Session

Dec 19, 2017

Present: Priya, Zakia, Thommo, Hemjit, Pamela, Preeti, Shoba

Present Virtually: Joe & KumKum (with voice reading and comments)

Absent: Saras, Kavita, Ankush

The session began by playing Joe’s recorded voice file. Joe read the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. The reading was thoroughly enjoyed. Zakia liked Pessoa’s characterisation as ‘The Man Who Never Was.’

Priya found the poem of Pessoa’s heteronym, Alvaro De Campos, much to her liking, Ah, The Freshness In The Face Of Leaving A Task Undone. Everyone stressed the fact that Joe enhances the joy of listening to poetry by his sonorous rendition.

Later, when Preeti read her poetry selection Thommo commented that she matched Joe and could give him a run for his money!

Pamela had to rush for choir practice and wished to read her piece ahead of others. She chose the Arab-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, and some of her poems written after Sep 11, 2001 atrocity. Fundamentalism and Kindness are the titles. Nye is an activist and writes strongly about the root causes of terrorism. Her poems are popular as performance poems for the vigor and strength of their language and ideas.

Nye believes that poetry asks its readers to pause and reflect. Pamela quoted Nye’s words to contemporary poets: “I have always loved the gaps between things as much as things themselves.”

Zakia chose to read Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who has been read and enjoyed by the group earlier. He is as popular in India as in Pakistan. The celebrated Urdu poet was a leftist and founded the Progressive Writer’s Movement. Zakia read two of his evocative poems (in translation) and played on her iPad a rendition by Faiz from his hospital bed when he was recovering from an affliction.

KumKum chose the modern American poet Max Ritvo, who died of cancer in his twenties. She regretted the fact that she had chosen rather melancholic poems at this cheery time of Christmas. The poems were sad indeed but the members enjoyed the poet’s felicity of language – blending commonplace imagery with a depth of emotion; this thought was expressed by Hemjit.

Thommo chose the American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. He said that Emerson is known more as a public speaker and one of his famous speeches is The American Scholar (1837). It is recognised as America's “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” In it Emerson steered America away from its dependence on Europe for cultural values. He discussed the influence of nature , the influence of the past and books, and the influence of action on the education of the thinking man. He became famous for his interest in non-Western philosophy and he elaborated the concept of the ‘transcendent’ from Eastern philosophies.

In Emerson’s poem Brahma, there occur these lines

   If the red slayer think he slays, 

   Or if the slain think he is slain,

Who is the slayer? - asked Zakia and Thommo. Priya ventured it might be one of the Hindu gods or goddesses, perhaps Durga, who kills the demon Mahisasura. It could be any from the Hindu pantheon. The cycle of the slayed and the slayer, is the cycle of life and death that ends with moksha in Hinduism.

Everyone was very happy that Shoba made it to the poetry evening, as she had just recovered from dengue fever. She chose to read a short and simple poem by Derek Walcott and said she liked its briefness and that “it was neat.” Though short and simple it makes the point that when you have wandered, searching high and low for love from others, one day on returning home you will meet yourself in the mirror, and discern who it was you were refusing to recognise as your first lover: yourself! Learning to love others begins with learning to love ourselves, as some Zen teachers say.

Hemjit read Bengali poet Toru Dutt, who has been read before by our faithful member Mathew from old times before he was transferred to Mumbai. You will find there a more discursive treatment of her life and work. Hemjit said he found her poems, “simply beautiful and beautifully simple,” and ventured to explain them at length.

In keeping with Christmas spirit Hemjit chose a poem of Toru Dutt called Christmas. The other poem, The Lotus, a sonnet, Hemjit said was fit to be recited by a child at a poetry reading competition. The sonnet is a conceit in which the rose and the lily compete for honours as the loveliest flower, but the title goes to the lotus in the end for combining the best features of both. It has a Petrarchan rhyme scheme.

Priya wanted to read T.S. Eliot’s The Journey of The Magi, a poem that fit in with the theme of Christmas. Eliot is one of her favourite poets. However, on reflection she found it was a serious poem that required study, as it was rich in allusions and imagery. Therefore she chose two lighter poems conveying Christmas cheer.

The first was Christmas at Sea, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Exquisite poet and essayist though he was, his fame is more associated with the novels Treasure Island, and Kidnapped, Priya said. The second poem was the popular A Visit from St Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore, which everyone enjoyed. Moore is not remembered any longer but the single poem, anonymously published at first, became a much-quoted, much-loved, favourite in America at the time.

Priya tried to make the session Christmassy and brought a plum cake and three Santa Claus caps for members. A cake she chose at Bismi Supermarket turned out to be very tasty, the members agreed.

But just as the session was coming to a close – the members concluding it was a fair session as far as spirits went – there breezed in Preeti, like Santa Claus, to lift our hearts and minds. She came prepared to read a delightful poem called Chocolate Cake by Michael Rosen, a poet of fun and laughter, writing and performing primarily for children. She communicated all the tomfoolery of a child slurping and eating chocolate cake and getting it all over the body. What an apt selection to end our Christmas session!

Joe

Fernando Pessoa (Portugal, 1888–1935)

(Here is the audio of Joe’s reading that was captured in Arlington, MA, and shared with the readers when Priya played it on her computer.)

Looking around for a poet to read from for our next session at KRG I chanced upon Fernando Pessoa who was new to me. A poet from Portugal, he had a part of his education in English in Durban, but the remarkable poems are those in his own language. I found a translation of a selection of them by Richard Zenith and requested it from the local library.

https://www.amazon.com/Fernando-Pessoa-Co-Selected-Poems/dp/0802136273/

Reading it I felt as if I was in the presence of a spirit devoted to poetry of a very modern kind — not the incomprehensible stuff that wears the name of poetry, but simple words that had a deep resonance of feeling.

Pessoa has been called ‘The Man Who Never Was’. He sacrificed a normal life for his literary projects.He wrote in several different personas and styles, which is quite strange, so much so they say Pessoa is four of the greatest poets of modern times, the others being Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, whom Pessoa called heteronyms of himself with distinct styles and belief systems.

Their fragmented universe constituted his work. He had almost no biography of his own and wrote himself out of his work, and the few poems of Pessoa as Pessoa only gives few facts: he smoked a lot, drank more than was good for his health, traveled Lisbon in tram-cars, and often sat by his window looking out on life in a reclusive manner. He never married, but worked in commercial translation, just enough to finance his literary projects. He became fairly well-known in Europe through translations, but was little read in the English-speaking world until recent translations.

Prof David Jackson, a Yale university professor, and authority on literature in Portuguese, says Pessoa is Portugal’s greatest poet and a signal figure in European modernism.

Pessoa published relatively little in his lifetime, but left 25,000 sheets of literary manuscripts in a wooden trunk, now housed in the National Library of Portugal — written often on scraps of paper. Teams of researchers are going through it to decide how to order it, and where it all belongs. What he wrote and what it meant is still a subject of active discovery. He wanted to be a universal writer. In fact he wrote an entire literature, working through his heteronyms in a vast range of forms and styles. The depth of his imagination, and the deep significance of the many different ways in which he wrote is remarkable. He also wrote a play, The Mariner.

He wrote 325 quatrains in the last two years of his short life (too short alas!) in a typical Portuguese style and they were translated cleverly by Philip Krummrich of Morehead State University in a bilingual edition. The subjects are as diverse and varied as one can expect from a multi-faceted person like Pessoa.

Hemjit

TORU DUTT – 1856 to 1877

Toru Dutt (R) with her sister Aru

An enigmatic poet who died at the young age of 21 due to Tuberculosis, Toru Dutt a Bengali spent part of her childhood in England and France before returning to her country. A born linguist fascinated by languages she mastered Sanskrit too besides Bengali, English and French during her short span on earth. She is acclaimed as the first Indian woman writer to write a novel in English and the first Indian to write a novel in French. She also left behind great poetry in English and French that evoked her beautiful memories of childhood etc. They instill pathos, beauty and a yearning for the innocence of childhood.

KumKum

(Here is the audio of KumKum’s reading that was captured in Arlington, MA, and shared with the readers when Priya played it on her computer.)

Max Ritvo. (1990 – 2016) Max Ritvo was an modern American poet. This was my first introduction to his poems. It was by sheer chance I came upon his book of collected poems titled Four Reincarnations, while browsing at the local library in Arlington. I have been reading his poems, of which there not there too many, on account of his short life. He was born on December 19, 1990 and died on August 23, 2016.

Ritvo’s poems are beautiful. They are melancholy in mood, perhaps because he struggled with cancer (a deadly childhood bone cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma) almost all his adult life. Ritvo's life, full of promise, was cut short, too soon. Most of his poems reflects the mood of being in the presence of divinity.

Here is a quote from a tribute offered by Max Ritvo's teacher at Columbia University:

This is what it felt like to be Max’s teacher. I was the supervisor on roller skates. I believe his imagination must have been born fully formed, before he had a language for his gifts. I think he was an infant scholar, a child genius, a Brother from Another Planet. For him, all of the synapses and fantasies, the humanity and spirit, were there just for the plucking. For me, as his mentor, all I needed to learn in order to teach him was to stay one roller glide ahead of him, to oversee the geometries and the effulgences of his imagination, to help beckon and tease each right wire into each right plug.

Thommo

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882

Most of the biographical information below is taken from the Poetry Foundation note on Emerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson , born in Boston in 1803, was an influential writer and thinker of the nineteenth century. He was an essayist, lecturer, poet, and philosopher, rolled into one. He opened up America to Asian thinking, and mythologys.

Boston being a port he came into contact with non-Western merchandise and ideas. His father, William Emerson, was a Unitarian minister and a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He edited reviews a periodical that dealt with South Asian thinking. Sir William Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s play Sakuntala, or the Fatal Ring, was printed in the United States in a journal he edited.

Emerson entered Harvard College at age 14. Since the curriculum focused on Greek and Roman writers, he got little opportunity to indulge his interest in Eastern thought. Early in life Emerson began to keep a journal about about Eastern life and letters. .

Emerson read extensively treatises, travelogues, religious, and poetic texts from India. Emerson also read selections of Eastern poetry. He came into contact with the famous Persian poets, Saadi and Hafiz, whom he studied deeply.

Emerson composed a poem called Indian Superstition for Harvard College’s graduation ceremonies in 1822. Emerson was misled as to the extent of fanatic adherence to creeds, and also represented Brahmins as a caste that crushed the yearning of lower-caste Indians to rise in social status. Emerson said India could rise by throwing off British imperialism and religious superstition.

After graduating he wanted to become a Unitarian minister. and began to lose interest in Indian literature. In the early 1830s, a comparative history of philosophical systems by Joseph-Marie de Gérando convinced Emerson that Hindu, Chinese, and Persian schools of thought were as valuable as their Hebrew, Greek, and Christian counterparts. The Mahabharata played a major role in this. Emerson began to read the Hindu scriptures like the Gita as an argument for the fundamental identity of all things.

In 1831 Emerson’s wife died of tuberculosis, an event that galvanized a series of personal and professional changes in his life. He gave up the Unitarian faith. He travelled to Europe, meeting William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, and returned to his home in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1836 Emerson published Nature, a mature philosophical work. He married again and it was a happy union. Emerson is grouped with the New England Transcendentalists, a group of reformers that included Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. The movement was a form of philosophical and spiritual idealism that valued intuition over the senses.

As Emerson continued his interest in the East he moved further away from the Western religion. He shared his library of Indian, Persian, and Chinese texts with his Transcendentalist friends. Emerson excerpted key passages from notable Asian and Middle Eastern works, and published a regular column. Emerson also read the Shanameh or the Book of Kings, a compendium of Persian poetry seven times longer than the Iliad. He began an interest in Sufism, regarded as the pantheism branch of Islam.

With the publication of his Essays in 1841 and Essays: Second Series in 1844, Emerson emerged as a trans-Atlantic literary celebrity.

Emerson’s engagement with Eastern cultural sources is also evident in his poetry from the 1840s. His verse became inspired by his readings of Persian and Sanskrit verse. For example, Emerson wrote Saadi in 1842, a portrait of a man of the people who resists materialism. Similarly Hamatreya published in 1846, is another poem based on a passage from the Vishnu Purana .

Emerson had India as the exemplar when he spoke about Asia. In 1856 Emerson composed a lyric poem published in the Atlantic in 1857 under the title, Brahma. The poem seizes on the idea that the material world is essentially an illusory mask of the divine spirit that dwells in all beings. The speaker enumerates the ways in which Brahma acts. It opens:
 

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

The poem summaries Emerson’s understanding of Hindu scriptures from his reading. Perhaps the “red slayer” is Siva the Destroyer. Though Siva is a destroyer, Brahman is without end, so everything that emanates from Brahman is also deathless

In 1858 Emerson published a long essay, in which Emerson included his own English translations of the poets Hafiz, Saadi, Khayyam. In 1872 Emerson sailed for England and then Egypt with his daughter, Ellen. Ten years later, on 27 April 1882, Emerson died in Concord, leaving an enduring legacy as the seminal figure of modern American Orientalism.

Concord Hymn immortalises the beginning of the American revolution with the Minutemen who ‘fired the shot heard round the world.’ The monument which gave rise to the poem is only a ten miles from where Joe is currently staying with his daughter in Arlington, Massachusetts.

In Rhodora Emerson takes up a lyrical defense of a species of rhododendron, saying Beauty is its own excuse for being. Fruitless to ask why such beautiful flora appear from nowhere, seemingly to waste their charm on the earth and sky. Better to wonder at the good fortune that enables the human eye to rejoice at these accidental beauties of nature.

Priya

Priya said she wished to read TS Eliot’s The Journey of The Magi as it was Christmas time, but found that it was a serious poem that required study as it was rich in allusions and imagery. Eliot she said is one of her favourites. Instead she chose to read two light-hearted poems with Christmas cheer.

Robert Louis Stevenson

She read R.L. Stevenson’s Christmas at Sea. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, traveller and travel writer. Stevenson is best known for his novels, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and the amazing horror story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He spent his final days in the South Pacific, in Samoa. What he wrote about in the poem, he likely experienced on board ship. The heavy going of the ship in wintry weather contrasts with the fireside Christmas of magazines in England. Stevenson conveys the feel of the sails frozen hard with images. He chooses a regular metre which seems to reflect the ship’s heaving to and fro without making progress. The poet nimbly weaves dialect and nautical terms to show he is at home in conveying a sea-faring drama believably. Stevenson was an elegant writer of prose, but also a real craftsman when it came to verse. You can read more about this poem in Carol Rumen’s Poem of the Week.

Clement Clarke Moore 

The other poem Priya chose was the popular A Visit from St Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore (1779–1863). Everyone enjoyed this. Moore was born in New York City, schooled at home, and graduated in 1798 at the head of his class in Columbia University. He married and had nine children. He was professor of Eastern and Greek literature from 1823 until he retired in 1850.

He wrote books on esoteric subjects, but also wrote poetry throughout his career.  A Visit from St. Nicholas was first published anonymously, but its authorship was acknowledged in Moore’s collection Poems in 1844. Moore died in 1863 at a house he bought after retirement in Newport, Rhode Island.

Pamela

Pamela read poems of Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian-American poet born in 1952. The biographical information below is taken from the Poetry Foundation page on the poet. Naomi Shihab Nye was born 1952 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent. Growing up in Jerusalem and Texas she experienced different cultures which influenced her work. Nye says, “the primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.”

Paul Christensen noted that Nye “is building a reputation…as the voice of childhood in America.” In her work, according to Jane Tanner in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Nye observes the business of living and the continuity among all the world’s inhabitants…She is international in scope and internal in focus.” Nye is a leading woman poet of the American Southwest.  

Nye got her BA in San Antonio, Texas and continues to live and work in the city. “My poems and stories often begin with the voices of our neighbors, mostly Mexican American, always inventive and surprising,” Nye wrote for Four Winds Press. Nye’s first two chapbooks, published in the 1970s were Tattooed Feet (1977)and Eye-to-Eye (1978). They are written in free verse and structured around the theme of a journey or quest. Her first full-length collection, Different Ways to Pray came out in 1980 exploring cultures from California to Texas, from South America to Mexico.

Hugging the Jukebox (1982), a full-length collection won the Voertman Poetry Prize. In it Nye continues to focus on the ordinary, on connections between diverse peoples, and on the perspectives of those in other lands. Although the action is often mundane Nye manages to extract satisfying poetry by distilling it.


The poems in a further collection Yellow Glove (1986) present a more mature perspective tempered by tragedy and sorrow. In Red Suitcase (1994), Nye continues to explore the effect of on-going violence on everyday life in the Middle East. She deals with the search for peace in Palestine. Her vocabulary is unadorned and direct.

Fuel (1998) is perhaps Nye’s most acclaimed volume. Like her mentor, William Stafford, Nye again and again manifests her belief in giving witness to everyday life, and conveying the moral concerns behind them.

After the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, Nye became an active voice for Arab-Americans, speaking out against both terrorism and prejudice. She brought out a collection which dealt with the Middle East and her experiences as an Arab-American into one volume, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002). Nye’s next book, You and Yours (2005), continues to explore the Middle East and a poet’s response.

In addition to her poetry collections, Nye has produced fiction for children, poetry and song recordings, and poetry translations. She edited several anthologies, including the award-winning This Same Sky (1992), which represents 129 poets from sixty-eight countries.

As a children’s writer, Nye is acclaimed for her sensitivity and cultural awareness. In 1997 Nye published Habibi, her first young-adult novel. Readers meet Liyana Abboud, an Arab-American teen who moves with her family to her Palestinian father’s native country during the 1970s, only to discover that the violence in Jerusalem has not yet abated. The novel magnifies through the lens of adolescence “the joys and anxieties of growing up.”


Nye told Contemporary Authors: “I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things … Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.”

Zakia

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911 — 1984)

Zakia chose to read Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who has been recited once before by Pamela and enjoyed by the group. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born on February 13, 1911, in Sialkot, now part of Pakistan. He is a celebrated Urdu poet and was leftist in his views. He founded the Progressive Writer’s Movement. He lived later in self-exile in Beirut. He was born into privilege. His father was a prominent lawyer and a member of an elite literary circle which included Allama Iqbal, the national poet of Pakistan.

Faiz was later admitted to the Scotch Mission High School (now Murray College) where he studied Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Arabic, followed by a master’s degree in English, from the Government College in Lahore in 1932, and later received another master’s degree in Arabic from the Oriental College in Lahore. After graduating in 1935, Faiz began a teaching career at M.A.O. College in Amritsar and then at Hailey College of Commerce in Lahore.

Faiz’s early poems were conventional, but in Lahore he began to expand into politics. It was also during this period that he married Alys George, a British expatriate and convert to Islam, with whom he had two daughters. In 1942, he gave up teaching to join the British Indian Army, for which he received a British Empire Medal for his service during World War II. After the partition of India in 1947, Faiz resigned from the army and became the editor of The Pakistan Times, a socialist English-language newspaper.

On March 9, 1951, Faiz was arrested with a group of army officers for conspiring against the nation and sentenced to death. He spent four years in prison before being released. Two of his poetry collections deal with life in prison. Faiz was appointed to the National Council of the Arts by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government, and his poems, which had previously been translated into Russian, earned him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963.

In 1964, Faiz settled in Karachi and was appointed principal of Abdullah Haroon College, while also working as an editor and writer for several distinguished magazines and newspapers. He worked in the Department of Information during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, and wrote despairingly over the bloodshed between Pakistan, India, and what later became Bangladesh. However, when Bhutto was overthrown by Zia-ul-Haq, Faiz was forced into exile in Beirut. There he edited the magazine Lotus, and continued to write poems in Urdu. He remained in exile until 1982. He died in Lahore in 1984, shortly after receiving a nomination for the Nobel Prize.

Throughout his tumultuous life, Faiz continually wrote and published, becoming the best-selling modern Urdu poet in both India and Pakistan. While his work is written in fairly strict formal diction, his poems maintain a casual, conversational tone in the tradition of Mirza Ghalib, the renowned 19th century Urdu poet. Faiz is especially celebrated for his poems in traditional Urdu forms, such as the ghazal, and his remarkable ability to expand the conventional thematic expectations to include political and social issues.

Shoba

Derek Walcott (1930 — 2017) was Shoba’s choice. He was recited by KumKum in Mar 2011. Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. The experience of growing up isolated in an ex-British colony, had a strong influence on Walcott's life and work. He is the descendant of slaves via his grandmothers. His father, a a water-color painter, died when Derek was only a few years old. His mother ran the town's Methodist school. After studying at St. Mary's College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he worked as a theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962). In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays.

Though Walcott felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements, he travelled extensively. For many years, he divided his time between Trinidad, where he made his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he taught literature and creative writing.

He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Homeric epic poem Omeros, which Walcott wrote in 1990, is viewed as his major achievement. Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and the Queen's Medal for Poetry. In 2011 he won the T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets. 

One controversy that dogged his career was in 2009, when Walcott was a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry. But he had to withdraw his candidacy after reports of the accusations against him of sexual harassment from 1981 (in Harvard) and 1996 (at Boston University) surfaced — apparently originated by Ruth Padel, the other contestant for the position. She had to resign in a furore after being elected as Oxford Professor of Poetry, the only woman so honoured.

Preeti

Michael Rosen b. 1946

This bio is taken mostly from the Poetry Foundation site. Michael Rosen is a children’s book author and broadcaster who lives in London. He studied Medicine for a year before transferring to Oxford University where he studied English. Rosen’s first book of children’s poetry was in 1974, titled Mind Your Own Business; it was illustrated by Quentin Blake, the well-known illustrator of books for children, that have won numerous prizes and awards, including the Whitbread Award, the Kate Greenaway Medal. Through Michael Rosen’s writing and teaching and as an editor of anthologies, he has helped to make poetry accessible to children. 

Rosen’s books include You Can’t Catch Me (1982), winner of the Signal Poetry Award, and We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (1989), illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, which received a number of prestigious awards: the School Library Journal Best Book of the Year; a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Award; Nestlé Children’s Book Prize; and Outstanding Picture Book from Abroad Award by the Japanese newspaper, Mainichi Shimbun. 

Rosen most often writes in a humorous vein, even addressing bereavement in Sad Book (2004), winner of the Exceptional Award for the Best Children’s Illustrated Books of 2004 (4 to 11 range), and in the prose poem collection Carrying the Elephant: A Memoir of Love and Loss (2002) about his son’s death from meningitis. 

Rosen regularly visits schools to read his poetry and has taught children’s literature at the university level. He has written over 220 books for children. He has his own website at

http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/

For a more informal biography by the children’s author himself see:

http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/about/

READINGS

Joe

Poems — all translations by Richard Zenith, except as noted for the quatrains

Alberto Caeiro

My gaze is as clear as a sun-flower.

It is my custom to walk along roads

Looking right and left,

And sometimes looking behind me,

And what I see at each moment

Is what I never saw before,

And I’m very good at noticing things.

I’m capable of having that sheer wonder

That a new-born child would have

If he realized he’d just been born.

I always feel I’ve just been born

Into an endlessly new world.

I believe in the world as in a daisy,

Because I see it. But I don’t think about it,

Because to think is not to understand.

The world wasn’t made for us to think about it

(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)

But to look at it and to be in agreement.

I have no philosophy: I have senses.

If I speak of Nature it is not because I know what it is,

But because I love it, and for that very reason,

Because those who love never know what they love,

Nor why they love, or what love is.

To love is eternal innocence,

And the only innocence is not to think.

I’m a keeper of sheep.

The sheep are my thoughts

And each thought a sensation.

I think with my eyes and my ears

And with my hands and feet

And with my nose and mouth.

To think a flower is to see it and smell it,

And to eat a fruit is to know it’s meaning.

That is why on a hot day

When I enjoy it so much I feel sad,

And I lie down in the grass

And close my warm eyes,

Then I feel my whole body lying down in reality,

I know the truth, and I’m happy.

Ricardo Reis

LET THE GODS

Let the gods

Take from me

By their high and secretly wrought will

All glory, love and wealth.

All I ask

Is that they leave

My lucid and solemn consciousness

Of beings and of things.

Love and glory

Don't matter to me.

Wealth is a metal, glory an echo,

And love a shadow.

But accurate

Attention given

To the forms and properties of objects

Is a sure refuge.

Its foundations

Are all the world,

Its love is the placid Universe,

Its wealth is life.

Its glory is

The supreme certainty

Of solemnly and clearly possessing

The forms of objects.

Other things pass

And fear death,

But the clear and useless vision of the Universe

Fears and suffers nothing.

COUNTLESS LIVES INHABIT US

Countless lives inhabit us.

I don't know, when I think or feel.

Who it is that thinks or feels.

I am merely the place

Where things are thought or felt.

I have more than just one soul.

There are more I's than I myself.

I exist, nevertheless,

Indifferent to them all.

I silence them: I speak.

The crossing urges of what

I feel or do not feel

Struggle in who I am, but I

Ignore them. They dictate nothing

Το The I I know: Ι wτite.

13 NOVEMBER 1935

Alvaro de Campos

AH, THE FRESHNESS IN THE FACE OF LEAVING A TASK UNDONE

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!

To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!

What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!

I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.

I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,

Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn't come.

I’m free and against organized, clothed society.

I'm naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.

It’s too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have

been at the same time,

Deliberately at the same time . . .

No matter, I'll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.

This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!

I can't even light the next cigarette . . . If it's an action,

It can wait for me, along with the others, in the nonmeeting called

life.

17 JUNE 1929

I’M BEGINNING TO KNOW ΜYSELF. I DΟΝ’T EXIST

I’m beginning to know myself. I don't exist.

I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made me,

Or half of this gap, since there's also life . . .

That's me. Period.

Turn of the light, shut the door, and get rid of the slipper noise in the hallway.

Leave me alone in my room with the vast peace of myself.

It's a shoddy universe.

Fernando Pessoa

I don’t know how many souls I have.

I’ve changed at every moment.

I always feel like a stranger.

I’ve never seen or found myself.

From being so much, I have only soul.

A man who has soul has no calm.

A man who sees is just what he sees.

A man who feels is not who he is.

Attentive to what I am and see,

I become them and stop being I.

Each of my dreams and each desire

Belongs to whoever had it, not me.

I am my own landscape,

I watch myself journey -

Various, mobile, and alone.

Here where I am I can’t feel myself.

That’s why I read, as a stranger,

My being as if it were pages.

Not knowing what will come

And forgetting what has passed,

I note in the margin of my reading

What I thought I felt.

Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”

God knows, because he wrote it.

Quatrains (just a few of the 325, translated by Phillip Krummrich)

Your tenderness, put on, gives me

this solace at the end:

at least you haven’t quite forgot

the right way to pretend.

O head of softly dimming gold

with eyes blue as the sky

who taught you the bewitchment that

makes me no longer I?

My feelings are the ash

Of my imagination,

And I’ll deposit that ash

in the ashtray of ratiocination.

Hemjit

Christmas

The sky is dark, the snow descends:


Ring, bells, ring out your merriest chime!


Jesus is born; the Virgin bends


Above him. Oh, the happy time!


No curtains bright-festooned are hung,


To shield the Infant from the cold;


The spider-webs alone are slung


Upon the rafters bare and old.


On fresh straw lies the little One,


Not in a palace, but a farm,


And kindly oxen breathe upon


His manger-bed to keep it warm.


White wreaths of snow the roofs attire,


And o'er them stars the blue adorn,


And hark! In white the angel-quire


Sings to the Shepherds, 'Christ is born.' 

The Lotus

Love came to Flora asking for a flower


That would of flowers be undisputed queen,


The lily and the rose, long, long had been


Rivals for that high honour. Bards of power


Had sung their claims. "The rose can never tower


Like the pale lily with her Juno mien"--


"But is the lily lovelier?" Thus between


Flower-factions rang the strife in Psyche's bower.


"Give me a flower delicious as the rose


And stately as the lily in her pride"—


"But of what colour?"--"Rose-red," Love first chose,


Then prayed,—"No, lily-white,— or, both provide;"


And Flora gave the lotus, "rose-red" dyed,


And "lily-white,"— the queenliest flower that blows.

KumKum

Afternoon

When I was about to die

my body lit up

like when I leave my house

without my wallet.

What am I missing? I ask

patting my chest

pocket.

and I am missing everything living

that won’t come with me

into this sunny afternoon

—my body lights up for life

like all the wishes being granted in a fountain

at the same instant—

all the coins burning the fountain dry—

and I give my breath

to a small bird-shaped pipe.

In the distance, behind several voices

haggling, I hear a sound like heads

clicking together. Like a game of pool,

played with people by machines.

Leisure-Loving Man Suffers Untimely Death

You ask why the dinner table has been so quiet.
 

I’ve felt, for a month, like the table:



holding strange things in my head


when there are voices present.



And when the voices die,


a cool cloth and some sparkling spray.



I’m on painkillers around the clock,


and I fear it’s always been 



just the pain talking to you.



The last vision was of the pain leaving—


it looked just like me as it came out



of my mouth, but it was holding a spatula.

 
It was me if I had learned to cook.



The pain drifted to the kitchen.


He hitched himself to the oven, was a centaur



completed by bread, great black loaves


bursting from the oven,



and then the vision vanished.


I followed, and stood where he had stood.



The knives rustled in the block,


the pans clacked overhead.



I’m sterile from chemo,


and thought of that.



Sure, I wish my imagination well,


wherever it is. But now



I have sleep to fill. Every night


I dream I have a bucket



and move clear water from a hole


to a clear ocean. A robot’s voice barks



This is sleep. This is sleep.


I’d drink the water, but I’m worried the next 



night I’d regret it.


I might need every last drop. Nobody will tell me.

Thommo

Brahma

If the red slayer think he slays, 

Or if the slain think he is slain, 

They know not well the subtle ways 

I keep, and pass, and turn again. 

Far or forgot to me is near; 

Shadow and sunlight are the same; 

The vanished gods to me appear; 

And one to me are shame and fame. 

They reckon ill who leave me out; 

When me they fly, I am the wings; 

I am the doubter and the doubt, 

I am the hymn the Brahmin sings. 

The strong gods pine for my abode, 

And pine in vain the sacred Seven; 

But thou, meek lover of the good! 

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven. 

Concord Hymn

Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837

Minuteman Statue stands at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. On its base is the first verse of Emerson’s poem ‘Concord Hymn.’ Statue is by Daniel Chester French

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, 

   Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, 

Here once the embattled farmers stood 

   And fired the shot heard round the world. 

The foe long since in silence slept; 

   Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; 

And Time the ruined bridge has swept 

   Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. 

On this green bank, by this soft stream, 

   We set today a votive stone; 

That memory may their deed redeem, 

   When, like our sires, our sons are gone. 

Spirit, that made those heroes dare 

   To die, and leave their children free, 

Bid Time and Nature gently spare 

   The shaft we raise to them and thee.

The Rhodora

Rhodora, the purple Rhododendron canadense

On Being Asked Whence Is the Flower

(May 1834)

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew:

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

Priya

Christmas at Sea

The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;

The decks were like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand;
The wind was a nor'wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But 'twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops'l, and stood by to go about.

All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So's we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every 'long-shore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it's just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessèd Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard's was the house where I was born.

O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china plates that stand upon the shelves.

And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessèd Christmas Day.

They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
'All hands to loose top gallant sails,' I heard the captain call.
'By the Lord, she'll never stand it,' our first mate, Jackson, cried.
… 'It's the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,' he replied.

She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
As the winter's day was ending, in the entry of the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.

And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

(R.L. Stevenson)

A Visit from St. Nicholas

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds;

While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;

And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,

Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,

Gave a lustre of midday to objects below,

When what to my wondering eyes did appear,

But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer,

With a little old driver so lively and quick,

I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick.

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,

And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:

"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!

On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!

Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"

As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;

So up to the housetop the coursers they flew

With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too—

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof

The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.

As I drew in my head, and was turning around,

Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,

And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;

A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,

And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.

His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!

His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,

And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow;

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,

And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath;

He had a broad face and a little round belly

That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,

And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;

A wink of his eye and a twist of his head

Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,

And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,

And laying his finger aside of his nose,

And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,

And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight—

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

(Clement Clarke Moore)

Pamela

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Fundamentalism

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Because the eye has a short shadow or

it is hard to see over heads in the crowd?

If everyone else seems smarter

but you need your own secret?

If mystery was never your friend?

If one way could satisfy

the infinite heart of the heavens?

If you liked the king on his golden throne

more than the villagers carrying baskets of lemons?

If you wanted to be sure

his guards would admit you to the party?

            The boy with the broken pencil

            scrapes his little knife against the lead

            turning and turning it as a point

            emerges from the wood again

            If he would believe his life is like that

            he would not follow his father into war

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Fundamentalism” from Fuel. Copyright © 1998 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Used by the permission of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org

Shoba

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Preeti

Here is a video snippet of her recitation that was captured and shared by Priya.

Chocolate Cake - Poem by Michael Rosen

I love chocolate cake.

And when I was a boy

I love it even more.

Sometimes we used to have it for tea

and mum used to say,

"If there's any left over

you can have it to take to school

tomorrow to have at playtime."

And the next day I would take it to school

wrapped up in tin foil

open it up at playtime and sit in the

corner of the playground

eating it,

you know how the icing on top

is all shiny and it cracks as you

bite into it

and there's that other kind of icing in

the middle

and it sticks to your hands and you

can lick your fingers

and lick your lips

oh it's lovely.

yeah.

Anyway,

once we had this chocolate cake for tea

and later I went to bed

but while I was in bed

I found myself waking up

licking my lips

and smiling.

I woke up proper.

“The chocolate cake”

It was the first thing

I thought of.

I could almost see it

so I thought,

what if I go dowstairs

and have a little nibble, yeah ?

it was all dark

everyone was in bed

so it must have been really late

but I got out of bed,

crept out of the door

there's always a creaky floorboard, isn't there ?

Past Mum and Dad's room,

careful not to tread on bits of broken toys

or bits of Lego

with your bare feet,

yowwwwwww

shhhhhhhhhh

downstairs

into the kitchen

open the cupboard

and there it is

all shinning.

So I take it out of the cupboard

put it on the table

and I see that

there's a few crumbs lying about on the plate,

so I lick my finger and run my finger all over the crumbs

scooping them up

and put them into my mouth.

ooooooooommmmmmmmm

nice.

Then

I look again

and on one side where it's been

cut,

it's all crumbly.

So I take a knife

I think, I'll just tidy that up a

bit,

cut off the crumbly bits

scoop them all up

and into the mouth

oooooooommmmm mmmmmm

nice.

Look at the cake again.

That looks a bit funny now,

one side doesn't match the other

I'll just even it up a bit, eh ?

Take the knife

and slice.

This time the knife makes a little cracky noise

as it goes through that hard icing on top.

A whole slice this time,

into the mouth.

Oh the icing on top

and the icing in the middle

ohhhhhh oooo mmmmmmmm.

But now

I can't stop myself.

Knife —

I just take any old slice at it

and I've got this great big

chunk

and I'm cramming it in

what a greedy pig

but it's so nice,

and there's another

and another and I'm squealing and I'm smacking my lips

and I'm stuffing myself with it

and

before I know

I've eaten the lot.

The whole lot.

I look at the plate.

It's all gone.

Oh no

They're bound to notice, aren't they ,

a whole chocolate cake doesn't just disappear

does it ?

What shall I do ?

I know. I'll wash the plate up,

and the knife

and put them away and maybe no one

will notice, eh ?

So I do that

and creep creep

creep

back to bed

into bed

doze off

licking my lips

with a lovely feeling in my belly.

Mmmmmmmmm.

In the morning I get up,

downstairs,

have breakfast,

Mum's saying,

Have you got your dinner money ?

and I say,

Yes.

And don't forget to take some chocolate cake with you.

I stopped breathing.

What's the matter ?, she says,

you normally jump at chocolate cake ?

I'm still not breathing,

and she's looking at me very closely now.

She's looking at me just below my mouth.

What's that ? she says.

What's what ? I say.

What's that there ?

Where ?

There, she says, pointing at my chin.

I don't know, I say.

It looks like chocolate, she says

It's not chocolate cake is it ?

No answer.

Is it ?

I don't know.

She goes to the cupboard

looks in, up, top, middle, bottom,

turns back to me.

It's gone.

It's gone.

You haven't eaten it, have you ?

I don't know.

you don't know ? you don't know if you've eaten a whole

chocolate cake or not ?

When ? When did you eat it ?

So I told her,

and she said

well what could she say ?

That's the last time I give you any cake to take

to school.

Now go. Get out

no wait

not before you've washed your dirty sticky face

I went upstairs

looked in the mirror

and there it was,

just below my mouth,

a chocolate smudge.

The give-away.

Maybe she'll forget about it by next week.

You can hear the poet reciting this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BxQLITdOOc

Michael Rosen has his own channel on Youtube at

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7D-mXO4kk-XWvH6lBXdrPw