Poetry Session – Feb 21, 2020

Readers have great expectations of the Poetry Sessions because these often reveal new poets not read before. Since we did away with paper and started circulating the poems as PDF files in advance there is an opportunity to get acquainted with the text and linger over the words.

Eleven of us gathered to read poets from all over the globe, four women poets and eight men. Rumi and Neruda were artfully translated from the original Farsi and Spanish; the others wrote in English. The texts are gathered at the end.

Priya, Joe, Thommo, Geetha, Thommo, Shoba, Pamela, Devika

Zakia was returning from the hajj and brought a packet of fine dates for us along with date cake. Some were left over when the session was done and Joe wrote that he was lucky to return home with six abandoned dates: 

Six dates in cluster
From the sands of Araby –
A toothsome muster!

The World T20 Women's Cricket Tournament had its inaugural match on the same day, and India making 132, bowled out Australia, the current holders for 119. That victory gave an air of lightness to the proceedings. India remains undefeated after the four matches in Group A, and plays the semifinals against South Africa or England on March 5 in Sydney.

India squad for ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2020

Cricket has given rise to more poetry than any other game, perhaps because of those balletic moments at the end of a fluid stroke when the batter holds the pose frozen in time; or the grace with which a fielder running backwards grasps a ball high above, plucking it from the air with one hand! Sometimes it's the sheer pleasure of seeing a master at work, playing a practiced stroke with singular ease. Thus Harold Pinter, the playwright, who held England’s opening batsman Len Hutton in high regard, wrote once to his friend, the writer Simon Gray: 

I saw Len Hutton in his prime. 
Another time, another time.

Len Hutton in 1946, one of England's greatest opening batsmen

Gray said Pinter hadn't had time to finish the poem! Cricket has also given rise to humorous poems such as this one titled Strange Dismissal by an Australian poet, Damian Balassone:

It sounds silly
but it’s harsh
to be caught Lillee
bowled Marsh,
but that’s what happened to me
the over prior to tea.

The group were all there (except Kavita) at the end for the rounding off:

Pamela, Geetha, Devika, Shoba, KumKum, Gopa, Geeta, Priya

(seated) Thommo, Joe

Full Account and Record of the Poetry Session on Feb 21, 2020

The next session to read the novel The Reader by Bernhardt Schlink has been scheduled for March 27, Friday.

KumKum
Bio of Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith is the author of Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017) and other poetry chapbooks

The poet Maggie Smith was born in Columbus, Ohio. She is 43 years old. Creative writing has been her profession. She has been an accomplished faculty member at several Universities in the US, teaching creative writing. She has published three books of poems and several prize winning chapbooks (booklets containing poems, tales, fictions). Her poems have appeared in prominent magazines in the US. KumKum noticed her poem Bride,  in the January 2020 issue of  The New Yorker and liked it immensely and therefore decided to read two poems of hers at this session. 

In 2016 her poem Good Bones went viral and was translated into a dozen languages. National Public Radio International called it “The official poem of 2016.”


A dance troupe in Chennai made Good Bones into a dance number. Meryl Streep, the actress, read the poem at Lincoln Center in New York city in 2017.

KumKum

The first poem Bride celebrates a woman who needs no other, and feels complete in herself:
How long have I been wed
to myself? Calling myself
darling, 
...
I am my own bride,
lifting the veil to see


my face. Darling, I say,
I have waited for you all my life.

Studies have indeed shown that 59% of women say women can have a satisfying life without marriage, while only 39% of women think that men can (see Do Men "Need" a Spouse More than Women?: Perceptions of the Importance of Marriage for Men and Women by Gayle Kaufman and Frances Goldscheider, The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 29-46). Such attitudes of self-sufficiency, without marriage, have been reinforced in the twenty-first century.

In the second poem, Good Bones, Maggie Smith though sceptical that the real world is benign, seeks to hide the truth from her children:

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

She argues in the manner of a realtor who shows a shoddy property and claims it has ‘good bones’ which the client can fix up to be a real sweet home. Just so is the world.

Devika
Devika was surprised that one the poems of Robert Frost she chose had not been recited before, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.
Poet Bio

Robert Frost (1874-1963) won four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry - ‘In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life - it goes on’

Robert Frost though born in San Francisco, is remembered as a Massachusetts poet because his family moved there. Frost’s poetry is about New England. He was the class poet in his school, and published his first poem My Butterfly soon after. Frost's first book of poems was published near the age of 40; he won four Pulitzer Prizes and was the most famous poet of his age in America. He died at age 88.

Frost attended Dartmouth and Harvard and earned a living teaching school and, later, worked at a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. But he was constantly rejected by American magazines, and therefore travelled to England in 1912; there he met with success. He had two books published, A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), which established his reputation so that he could return to the United States in 1915 as a celebrated literary figure. 

Frost was considered the unofficial poet laureate of the United States. On his 75th birthday, the US Senate passed a resolution in his honour which said, “His poems have helped to guide American thought and humour and wisdom, setting forth to our minds a reliable representation of ourselves and of all men.” At the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as President in 1961, Frost was given the privilege of reading a poem and he wrote one for the occasion called Dedication.

Poet and critic Ezra Pound said of his poetry “it has the tang of the New Hampshire woods, and it has just this utter sincerity.” He wrote in classic metres and went his own way, regardless of anyone else’s rules. One of his sayings was that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.

Some of his poems are in the form of epigrams, which appear for the first time in Frost’s work. Frost’s most famous and, according to J. McBride Dabbs, most perfect lyric, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, was included in the collection Fire and Ice. 

A Further Range (1936), which earned Frost another Pulitzer Prize, had some didactic, as well as humorous and satiric pieces. Frost’s poetry in the 1940s and ‘50s grew more abstract and cryptic. His politics and religious faith, hitherto informed by skepticism and local colour, became more and more the guiding principles of his work. Like most people who are radical when young, he turned conservative in his seniority.  

By the sixties he was writing more philosophic poems and whether you liked them or not depended on whether you shared the philosophy. Even those who did not, found delight and significance in his poetry. He once expressed his view of poetry as the first form of understanding. “If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t worth anything.” 

His Collected Prose was published in 2010, and his Collected Letters came out soon after in a two-volume edition published in 2014 and 2016.

Robert Frost is a modern poet but not immediately recognisable as such. He bridged 19th-century American poetry and modernism. His sense of directness and economy reflected modernism and the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.  But he didn’t cause any revolution in modern poetry as later Eliot, Yeats, and others were to do.  

Frost’s use of New England dialect is only one aspect of his often discussed regionalism. Within New England, his particular focus was on New Hampshire, which he called “one of the two best states in the Union,” the other being Vermont (hurrah for Senator Sanders…)

Fall Colours – Homer Noble farm, Robert Frost's home in New Hampshire

Frost was aware of the ultimate separateness of nature and man. Below the surface of Frost’s poems is the sense of the helpless cruelty of things. This natural cruelty is at work in some poems. Frost senses that man might be alone in an indifferent universe, but he may nevertheless look to the natural world for reflections of his own condition. Frost is often compared with Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose poetry, events can be elevated to take on greater mystery or significance. The poem Birches is an example. 

The symbolic import of the mundane, lies at the core of Frost’s poems, and he explained in Education by Poetry: “Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, ‘grace’ metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. ... Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.” 

(Taken from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-frost and Devika)

Devika

The first poem Devika recited is in iambic tetrameter, rhyming the first and third lines of a quatrain, and second and fourth lines. It is commonly used in hymns and known as Long Metre in contrast to Common Metre, where the quatrain consists of a tetrameter followed by a trimeter. The last quatrain

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.

is referred to often. Jawaharlal Nehru kept a copy of Robert Frost's book close to him till his last years. He hand-wrote this last stanza of the poem on a pad that lay on his desk.

Fire and Ice, the second poem is a short reflection on the destructive power of natural forces in two modes:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.

Joe
Hemjit once recited a couple of poems (Hoeing, Perfection Wasted) by John Updike, a writer primarily known for his novels. But Joe had demonstrated in 2009 when KRG read his novel Rabbit is Rich, that Updike's prose is so visually rich that descriptions abound on every other page that with small transpositions and lineation could be turned into passable verse. He gave an example:
He feels his way 
Through the tummocks and swales;
The earth is red and crowded with 
The shimmering green of vegetation
So inexorable
It allows not ev'n the crusty road embankments 
To rest a barren mass, but makes them bear
The tufts and mats 
Of vetch and honeysuckle vines
And fills the stagnant air
With the haze of vaporous exhalation. 


One can discover such things in Updike novels by pausing awhile, as one would to smell the flowers, instead of hurrying on with the story, for the sensual pleasure resides in the language itself.

Poet Bio

John Updike, portrait by Michael O‘Neill

John Updike, who died in 2009 at the age of 76, was an indefatigable writing machine. Of course, he is known as a novelist first – he wrote twenty-two of them – but he graced other genres as well: essays, art criticism, poetry, short stories, memoirs, as well as cartoons, sports writing, and children’s stories. 

His talent was evident from his school years. He won a full scholarship to Harvard and graduated having shown his prowess and wit at the Lampoon, Harvard's literary magazine. He went to Oxford, to attend the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and returned hoping to make a career in cartooning but switched to writing. He was a New Yorker magazine contributor for fifty years from the late fifties onward, having his first short story published there and also his first poem.

He was lauded by friends and authors for his work and his easy affability, but he preferred fading into the background and left frenetic New York city to write by the little sea-side town of Ipswich in Massachusetts. Many will vouch there was no finer prose stylist in America in the latter half of the twentieth century. He seems to have lavished care on his prose. Pick up if you can the book of essays titled Due Considerations (only ~₹325 as an e-book) and you will see how polished the writing is, how full of visual delight and precise expression as he reaches for the right word. He personifies Nabokov’s maxim: “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” (Priya made the intemperate remark that a writer in present company is a bit like that). When we read his novel Rabbit is Rich in March 2009, we were made aware of many passages which had the haunting quality that they almost cried out to be transformed into a poem. Consider this passage from an essay in which he considers books on paper versus e-books:

“Books preserve, daintily, the redolence of their first reading – this beach, that apartment, that attack of croup, this flight to Indonesia. Without their physical evidence my life would be more phantasmal; as is, they are stacked around me, towering even over my head, as not only an extension into my past, sinking their foundations securely down to my accreted jejune marginal comments and reaching up into clouds of noble intention – books waiting to be read, as tempting as grapes unharvested and musky, …”


Now you can see John Updike could always write poetry, indeed he has always written poetry, and his collections of verse span seven volumes. 

The first poem tells the drama of a bird that came to eat berries hidden in a hedge, not noticing that a net had been laid above. As it thrashes about to exit, the poet ponders seeing the white fluff of the bird's (a junco) breast on the ground:

How many starved hours of struggle resumed

in fits of life’s irritation did it take

to seal and sew shut the berry-bright eyes

and untie the tiny wild knot of a heart?

One of the marvels of human life is our ability to partake in the animal world and feel its pain. This poem is from his last collection Endpoint, released posthumously. In the second poem Updike is by the sea watching a rainbow emerge after rain,

on the rinsed atmosphere's curved edge,

struck by the re-emergent sun

in impermanent and glorious coinage,

mint-fresh from infra-violet to ultra-red,

The language is as fresh as the image, and conjures over the bay

a strange confetti of itself, bright dots

of pure, rekindled color, neon-clear.

This poem was published in 2000 in The Atlantic monthly. You may like to read a collection of tributes to Updike by people who knew him well and gathered for a commemoration.

Kavita

Having to leave early Kavita took on her poet, Sylvia Plath and the well-known poem, Tulips next. 

Poet Bio

Sylvia Plath with her two children, Freida and Nicholas, April 1962

Plath lived a short life from 1932 to 1963 and is best known for her novel, The Bell Jar, and two collections of poetry, The Colossus and Ariel. She met the English poet Ted Hughes in Cambridge at a party and the very first encounter ended in a kiss which bloodied his lip. They married in 1956 and had two children. 

The son had the naturalist instincts of his father and went to Alaska but for some reason committed suicide, like his mother. The daughter Freida (three years old when her mother died) is alive and well, an Australian painter who has married three times and lives near Perth.

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston and won a scholarship in 1950 to the exclusive Smith College for women about 100 miles to the West in Northhampton. She first attempted suicide by sleeping pills when she held a summer job in New York while at college. She recovered and completed her degree in 1955, and then went on a Fulbright scholarship to England. The relationship with Ted Hughes was full of ups and downs. 

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Yorkshire, UK, 1956

A year after marrying Ted Hughes Sylvia Plath returned to America and taught in Smith College, and got to know the poets Robert Lowell and Ann Sexton. She went back in 1959 to England, and had her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, published in England in 1960. The same year, she had her first child, a daughter named Freida. Two years later, Plath and Hughes had a second child, a son named Nicholas. But the couple's marriage was falling apart.

Plath fell into a deep depression when Ted Hughes left her for another woman, Assia Wevill in 1962. She wrote The Bell Jar (1963), her only novel, which was based on her life and deals with a young woman's breakdown. She also wrote the poems that would make up the collection Ariel (1965), which was released after her death. Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963.

Hughes became her literary executor and edited Ariel, which contains several of her best poems. No mention of Plath is complete without the formidable volume, Birthday Letters, written to her over a period of 25 years after her death by Ted Hughes. Separately published was the Last Letter in 2010 after Ted Hughes had also died. The full text is here. It lays out as well as he could the thoughts and events concerning the suicide of Sylvia Plath.

Kavita

In the poem Tulips the poet is recovering in the hospital from an appendectomy and faces a vase full of red tulips that excite and shock her, contrasting with the peace and quiet in the white hospital ward. Her complaint is that

The tulips are too excitable

She has been washed and bathed and purified:

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley

...

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

...

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

...

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

...

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,

The poet/patient has been driven out of her wits by the tulips which threaten to suck the breath of life out of her; what should have been a restful recuperation has turned into a nightmare as she imagines the red tulips balefully watching her. The poet's fevered imagination is on display.

Zakia
Poet Bio
Rupert Brooke, the glamour boy of early twentieth century English poetry, who loved to skinny dip and romance young women, died early during the war, rather ingloriously of an infected mosquito bite while on his way to fight in Gallipoli in World War I.

Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915) – Yeats called him ‘the handsomest young man in England’

His best-known work is the sonnet sequence 1914. Brooke went to school at Rugby where his father taught and distinguished himself in sports as well as studies. He attended King’s College, Cambridge, and passed out in 1906; he was very popular there. A spell on the Continent was de rigeur for aspiring English aesthetes and he went to study in Germany, and later traveled in Italy. His favourite pastime was roving the countryside around the village of Grantchester, which he celebrated in a charming ecstatic poem that Zakia recited. It reminded her of her own lovely home in the Alfa Serene condo which she lost in the court-enforced demolition, because the builder had violated Kerala's Coastal Zone Regulations.

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester  was written in 1912. His collection called Poems was published in 1911. He spent a year (1913 – 14) travelling in the America, Canada, and the Pacific Islands.  When World War I began, he joined the Navy. An expedition to Antwerp ended in a retreat; he then sailed to join the fight in Gallipoli were UK and France were fighting against the Ottoman Empire. While on his way he died of septicemia on a hospital ship and was buried on the island of Skyros.

Memorial to Rupert Brooke in the Chapel, Rugby School, Warwickshire, sculpted by James Havard Thomas, 1919 (click to enlarge)

Brooke’s wartime sonnets, 1914, brought him immediate fame. They express an idealism in the face of death that is in strong contrast to the later grim poetry of trench warfare by other war poets. One of his most popular sonnets, The Soldier, begins with the familiar lines:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

Zakia

The Grantchester poem was written from Germany. The poet recalls in detail the characteristics of the village and the villagers and the contrast with the environs.  He refers to the river there,

How the May fields all golden show,

And when the day is young and sweet,

Gild gloriously the bare feet

That run to bathe ...

Grantchester captivates the poet:

I only know that you may lie

Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,

And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,

Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,

Until the centuries blend and blur

In Grantchester, in Grantchester ...

Zakia, Kavita

The spirit of the village quite overcomes him, and the poet can't wait to get back from Germany which he finds stuffy:

God! I will pack, and take a train,

And get me to England once again!

For England’s the one land, I know,

Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;

And Cambridgeshire, of all England,

The shire for Men who Understand;

And of THAT district I prefer

The lovely hamlet Grantchester.

Of course it's full of national pride, and jingoism even, but the words and rhymes flow freely from Rupert Brooke's pen. England was a genuine enchantment for him, and of all England the little village where he dwelt.

Geetha

Poet Bio

James Henry Leigh Hunt, known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet. Hunt co-founded The Examiner, a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles. He was the centre of the Hampstead-based group that included William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, known as the ‘Hunt circle.’ He had ten children by his wife. Her death impelled him to appeal to his sister-in-law to become his amanuensis. He had a speech impediment.

Leigh Hunt, portrait by Benjamin Robert Haydon (best known for his life mask of John Keats)

Through The Examiner Hunt introduced the poets John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson to the public.

The Examiner soon acquired a reputation for unusual political independence; it would attack any worthy target, “from a principle of taste,” as John Keats put it. In 1813, The Examiner attacked the Prince Regent, George. The British government tried the three Hunt brothers and sentenced them to two years in prison for the offence. Leigh Hunt served his term at the Surrey County Gaol.

One of the most popular poems of Leigh Hunt (included in anthologies) is Jenny Kiss’d Me:

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,

Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

Sweets into your list, put that in!

Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,

Say I’m growing old, but add,

Jenny kiss’d me.

Another of his poems is often recited at elocution contests in junior school: Abou Ben Adhem.

Leigh Hunt’s visitors at the Surrey County Gaol included Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, Lord Henry Brougham, and Charles Lamb. The stoicism with which Leigh Hunt bore his imprisonment attracted general attention and sympathy. His imprisonment allowed him some luxuries and access to friends and family, and Lamb described the decorations inside his cell as something not found outside a fairy tale. When Jeremy Bentham called on him, he found Hunt playing the game of battledore (like badminton).

Geetha

The Glove and the Lions by Leigh Hunt is a four-stanza poem first published in The New Monthly Magazine, in London in May of 1836. The poem follows follows a simply structured rhyme scheme of, aabbccdd, throughout. This gives the piece a sing-song-like melody and keeps the intense climax of the poem from changing the overall tone.

The speaker’s voice is lighthearted and good-natured throughout. There is no real spite on the part of the king, nor any constructed malice on the part of the lady he loves. The poet is seeking to tell a story of how love and the need for attention and validation, can shape one’s actions and stretch them beyond what is appropriate.

Shoba

Poet Bio
Andrew Motion (born October 26, 1952), is a British poet, biographer, and novelist who  served as poet laureate of England from 1999 to 2009. Andrew Motion was the first poet laureate to retire. In an article he opened up to the constraints of the position.  He looked back on the thankless task of being a poet laureate, tossed between familiarity and sycophancy, and having his poems for royal occasions held up to mockery.

Motion attended University College, Oxford (M.Litt., 1977), where he was a student of the poet John Fuller. From 1976 to 1980 he taught at the University of Hull, and he later joined the faculty at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich (1995–2003). He was the editor of Poetry Review (1980–83) and worked in a variety of editorial capacities for two London publishing houses. He subsequently taught at the University of London and at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Andrew Motion

Motion’s first verse collection, The Pleasure Steamers, was published in 1978. It contains Inland, which describes the fear and helplessness of 17th-century villagers who must abandon their homeland following a devastating flood; the poem received the Newdigate Prize in 1975. Noted for his insight and empathy, Motion frequently wrote about isolation and loss. Motion wrote critical works on poets Edward Thomas, The Poetry of Edward Thomas (1980) and Philip Larkin (1982), as well as a biography of Larkin (Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, 1993). He also produced a biography of the poet John Keats (Keats, 1997).

He has said of his own work, “I want my writing to be as clear as water. I want readers to see all the way through its surfaces into the swamp.”

Motion’s later collections of poetry included Secret Narratives (1983), Dangerous Play: Poems, 1974–84 (1984), Natural Causes (1987), Love in a Life (1991), The Price of Everything (1994), Salt Water (1997), Public Property (2002), The Cinder Path (2009), Peace Talks (2015), and Coming In to Land: Selected Poems 1975–2015 (2017).

Among his works of fiction are The Pale Companion (1989); Famous for the Creatures (1991); Wainewright the Poisoner (2000); and The Invention of Dr. Cake (2003), a fictional biography of the obscure poet-doctor William Tabor. Silver: Return to Treasure Island (2012) and The New World (2014) are sequels to Robert Louis Stevenson’s popular adventure novel, centring on the young character Jim Hawkins. In 2006 Motion published a memoir, In the Blood, and in 2008 he released a collection of essays titled Ways of Life: On Places, Painters, and Poets.

Motion is also cofounder of the Poetry Archive which offers over 8,000 poems and 500 poets on the Web. He is former president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. In 2015, he moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to become the Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University.

Rainfall is not about Climate Change, but Evolution over the Earth's history and the place of rain in that story. It is true Andrew Motion has a great interest in Climate Change, and wrote a sequence of five sonnets, The Sorcerer's Mirror, to alert the world to its dangers. Peter Maxwell Davies set it to music.

KumKum, Shoba

Rainfall, however, tells the story of the Evolution on Earth, taking Rain as its driving force. Consider the theme of each stanza as follows:

Stanza 1 – On other planets rain fell, but it froze (Mars) or turned into noxious vapours (Venus)

Stanza 2 – But on Earth after the planet cooled and volcanic action abated, the rain fell on hospitable soil and vegetation sprang up

Stanza 3 – The Sun provided warmth and impelled four-legged creatures to rise up and walk on two feet across the savannahs of Africa

Stanza 4 – Over the last 12,000 years great civilisations arose and collapsed,  until the rain became a regular feature of life in all societies. Umbrellas appeared

Stanza 5 – The Sun reappears after rain and causes the moisture to evaporate back into the sea, but sometimes it causes floods too

Some of the characteristic lines are worth noting:

Stanza 2 – 

           it fell silently on the first outcrops of moss.

                          On the tender grass with a sizzle.

             With more strenuous drumming

                          on the resilient fronds of ferns.

It became an orchestra of millions

             across the luxurious expanse of the tree canopy.

Stanza 3 – 

They rose in amazement

                          onto their hind legs

and crept from shelter

                          across the dazzling savannah.

Stanza 4 – 

after the extinction

                          of many beautiful languages

rain by and large

             found its place in the scheme of things.

It began to defeat its purpose

             on the private sky of umbrellas.

Stanza 5 – 

                             The rain sweats

and evaporates into the ocean of its air.

             The ocean continues on its way

                          continually overflowing here and there

in quick little splashes

             or reckless floods and drenching.

Thommo
Poet Bio

Andrew Barton Banjo Paterson was born in 1864 and died in 1941. Paterson was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author. He wrote many ballads and poems about Australian life, focusing particularly on the rural and outback areas, including the district around Binalong and New South Wales, where he spent much of his childhood.

Banjo Paterson's image appears on the Australian $10 note

(the text of his poem ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ appears in microprint behind)

Paterson's more notable poems include Clancy of the Overflow, The Man from Snowy River and Waltzing Matilda, which is widely regarded as Australia's unofficial national anthem.

Paterson's family lived on an isolated sheep station in NSW until he was five when his father lost all the wool clipped in a season in a flood and was forced to sell up. In his childhood he saw horsemen who took part in polo matches, which led to his fondness for horses and inspired his writings.

Paterson's early education came from a governess, but when he was able to ride a pony, he was taught at the bush school at Binalong. In 1874 Paterson was sent to Sydney Grammar School, performing well both as a student and a sportsman. He left the school at 16 after failing an examination for a scholarship to Sydney University.

Paterson was a law clerk with a Sydney firm, and was admitted as a solicitor in 1886. He also started writing and began submitting poetry for publication in The Bulletin, a literary journal. Paterson's work appeared under the pseudonym of “The Banjo”, the name of his favourite horse. He formed friendships with other significant writers in Australian literature.

Paterson became a war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age during the Second Boer War, sailing for South Africa in October 1899. His graphic accounts of the relief of Kimberley, the surrender of Bloemfontein and the capture of Pretoria attracted the attention of the press in Britain.

In 1908 he abandoned journalism and moved with his family to a 40,000-acre property near Yass in NSW. In World War I, Paterson became an ambulance driver with the Australian Voluntary Hospital. He returned to Australia early in 1915. He was commissioned in the 2nd Remount Unit, Australian Imperial Force on 18 October 1915, serving initially in France. He returned to Australia and was discharged from the army having risen to the rank of major in April 1919.

The third collection of his poetry, Saltbush Bill JP, was published soon after and he continued to publish verse, short stories and essays while continuing to write for the weekly Truth.

On 8 April 1903 he married Alice Emily Walker, of Tenterfield Station. The Patersons had two children, Grace (born in 1904) and Hugh (born in 1906). Paterson met Christina Macpherson, who composed the music for which he then wrote the lyrics of the famous “Waltzing Matilda.”

Paterson died of a heart attack in Sydney on 5 February 1941 aged 76. Paterson's grave, along with that of his wife, is in the Northern Suburbs Memorial Gardens and Crematorium, Sydney.

Although for most of his adult life, Paterson lived and worked in Sydney, his poems mostly presented a highly romantic view of the bush and the iconic figure of the bushman. Influenced by the work of another Australian poet John Farrell, his representation of the bushman as a tough, independent and heroic underdog became the ideal qualities underpinning the national character. Paterson authored two novels; An Outback Marriage (1906) and The Shearer's Colt (1936), wrote many short stories; Three Elephant Power and Other Stories (1917), and wrote a book based on his experiences as a war reporter, Happy Dispatches (1934). He also wrote a book for children, The Animals Noah Forgot (1933).

Thommo

The Man from Ironback is a bit of a lark, a humorous poem, about a barber who plays a joke on a tough guy from Ironbark by administering a shallow cut across his throat with a razor. This elicits a violent reaction and mayhem ensues. When it's all over the man from Ironbark believes it is the iron-toughness of his throat that deflected the injury. Here’s an animation of Banjo Paterson reading his own poem.

Pamela

Poet Bio

Oodgeroo Noonuccal, was born Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska on the 3rd of November 1920, a descendant of the Noonuccal people of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island). The name she adopted in 1988, Oodgeroo, means ‘paperbark tree.’

During her lifetime she was, and continues to be, recognised as one of Australia’s leading literary figures, who used her pen to give voice to the Indigenous struggle for rights and justice. In 1962, she was instrumental in advocating for citizenship rights for Indigenous people as Secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), work that gave rise to the 1967 referendum.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920 - 1993) was an Aboriginal rights activist, poet, veteran, environmentalist and educator

Oodgeroo received numerous awards, such as the Mary Gilmore medal (1970), the Jessie Litchfield Award (1975), the International Acting Award and the Fellowship of Australian Writers Award. In 1970 she was appointed as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (Civil) for services to the community, but returned it in protest over the bicentenary celebrations held in 1988.

In 1972, she withdrew from active involvement in political organisations to live in semi-retirement on a leasehold property, Moongalba (‘sitting-down place’), on Minjerribah, establishing the Noonuccal-Nughie Education and Cultural Centre, where she regularly conducted programs for groups of school students and visitors.

In recognition of a lifetime commitment to Indigenous peoples and her outstanding contributions to Australian literature Oodgeroo Noonuccal was awarded three honorary doctorates by Universities within Australia.

Two honorary doctorate awards were conferred on her for her contribution to Australian literature: a Doctorate of Letters from Macquarie University and a Doctor of the University from Griffith University.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal in the Australian Women’s Army Service, 1942 

In 1992 Oodgeroo Noonuccal received an honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Education Queensland University of Technology for her contribution to literature, and in recognition of her work in the field of education.

The QUT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Support Unit was named the Oodgeroo Unit in 2006, in her honour.

You may read more about this remarkable woman here. 

Pamela

In the poem Integration — Yes! the poet affirms the greater antiquity of the Australian aborigines in contrast to the two hundred-year old arrivals from England. She says her people are ready to integrate, but not to assimilate. 

No, not assimilation but integration,

Not submergence but our uplifting,

So black and white may go forward together

In harmony and brotherhood.

The cruelty of assimilation was tried for sixty years (1910 to 1970) by separating aboriginal children from their parents and bringing them up in European schools, allowed to speak only in English and observe European manners. They are called the Stolen Generations.

Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is a novel by Doris Pilkington, published in 1996. It is based on a true story, the personal account of an indigenous Australian family's experiences and the forced removal of mixed-race children from their families during the early 20th century. It was later made into a film.

According to one theory the original settlers of Australia came from Southern India. Australian artist Daniel Connell made charcoal drawings of  local labourers for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale of 2012 and plastered them on several walls. But in in this one below he has written at the bottom left:

“LOOK BACK maybe 60,000 to 80,000 years ago people from this area were arriving in Western Australia. This is a portrait of one of them, my friend, Justin Alan Magridge from Port Augusta, South Australia.”

Daniel Connell's drawing (click to enlarge) – that's my grandson Gael in the foreground

Gopa

Poet Bio

Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet, diplomat and a Communist was one of the greatest South American poets of the last century. Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Basoalto, he was forced to publish his poems under various pen names because his father did not want the family name associated with his son’s poetry writing.

Pablo Neruda young – Ricardo Reyes

In 1920 when he was 15 years old and had adopted the pseudonym ‘Pablo Neruda’, he was already a published author of poems, prose and journalism.

Neruda’s connection with India started in 1928 when he presided at the AICC meeting in Kolkata where he met with Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose. He was a fervent supporter of independence for India and remained a loyal friend of India and Nehru.

In the 1970s Neruda was popular amongst Hindi poets and writers. Some Hindi literary magazines even published translations of his poem Heights of Machu Picchu. A Hindi translation of Neruda’s My Life, My Time titled ‘Mera Jeevan Mera Samay’ by Prof. Karan Singh Chauhan was very readable and retained a feel of the original poem which was very popular in those days.

Pablo Neruda in the US Library of Congress Recording Laboratory reciting his poem “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” for the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape. June 20, 1966

Neruda received The International Peace Prize in 1950 and The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Many more awards followed from Russia and other leftist countries of South America.

His political convictions caused him to be exiled from Chile on more than one occasion. He met his death in 1973, during the regime of the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet.

Devika, Gopa, Kavita

Gopa selected two of his love poems. One of them Your Feet was for reading last year in February. There is also a poem titled Your Hands by Neruda but the poem to be read in the month of Valentine’s Day is the former – a poem for all who believe in foolish love, i.e., loving for foolish reasons. The poet does not ignore the obvious erogenous zones of his lover’s body – the breasts, the mouth, the eyes, the hair – but after listing them, concludes

But I love your feet

only because they walked

upon the earth and upon

the wind and upon the waters,

until they found me.

Priya humorously remarked, 

‘One kick, he will get’,  

to which Joe replied 

‘But he, has not yet!’

Gopa mentioned that Sivaram Srikandath, our former reader, was a fan of Pablo Neruda whose love poems have to be read by those who have been lucky enough to love. Someone commented that the film Pakeezah elaborately features feet in the rhythmic motion of dancing (by Meena Kumari). 

The second poem is from his One Hundred Love Sonnets. These poems were for his third wife, Matilde Urrutia. The love differs from that of the first poem. It is quiet, intense and satisfying, arising from a deep co-dependence between the lovers. A beautiful poem. 

For those who are interested here's an article about How the US Library of  Congress helped get Pablo Neruda’s poetry translated into English.

Priya

Poet Bio

Nikki Giovanni. Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr (born June 7, 1943) is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. She was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio; she and her sister returned to Knoxville each summer to visit their grandparents. Nikki graduated with honours in history from her grandfather's alma mater, Fisk University. She is a well-known African-American poet, and her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, covering topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. 

Nikki Giovanni has been on the faculty at Virginia Tech since 1987, where she is a University Distinguished Professor

Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost promoters of the Black Arts Movement. She was influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement of the period. Her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the “Poet of the Black Revolution.” 

During the 1970s, she began writing children's literature, and co-founded a publishing company, NikTom Ltd, to provide an outlet for other African-American women writers. In the following decades, her works dissected social issues, human relationships, and hip hop. 

Giovanni has taught at Queens College, Rutgers, and Ohio State, and is currently a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Following the shooting there in 2007, she delivered a chant-poem at a memorial for the victims. 

Her more recent works include Acolytes, a collection of 80 new poems, and On My Journey Now. Acolytes is her first published volume since her 2003 Collected Poems. It is a celebration of love and recollection directed at friends and loved ones, and it recalls memories of nature, theatre, and the glories of childhood. 

In Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid (2013), Giovanni describes falling off of a bike and her mother saying, “Come here, Nikki and I will pick you up.” She has explained that it was comforting to hear her mother say this, and that “it took me the longest time to realise – no, she made me get up myself.”

Chasing Utopia continues as a hybrid (poetry and prose) work about food as a metaphor and as a connection to the memory of her mother, sister, and grandmother. The theme of the work is love relationships. 

In October 2017 Giovani published her newest collection A Good Cry: What We Learn From Tears and Laughter. This collection includes poems that pay homage to the greatest influences on her life, people who have passed away, including her close friend Maya Angelou who died in 2014.

Giovani often reads from her books. In one reading she shared her poem, I Married My Mother. In 2017, Giovanni presented at a TEDx event. Here she read the poem, My Sister and Me. She called her and her sister, ‘Two little chocolate girls.’ After reading the poem she claims, “Sometimes you write a poem because dammit, you want to.”  

Giovanni wrote a memoir in Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet (1971), which earned a nomination for the National Book Award. In an excerpt from that essay, Giovanni expresses the hope, “we are born men and women ... we need some happiness in our lives, some hope, some love ... I really like to think a black, beautiful loving world is possible.”

“Writing is ... what I do to justify the air I breathe,” Giovanni once wrote. “I have been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from? A poem has to say something. It has to make some sort of sense; be lyrical; to the point; and still able to be read by whatever reader is kind enough to pick up the book.”

She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has been named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 “Living Legends.”

Priya

The poem called Ego-Tripping is the poet on Ecstasy, the pill. She is irrepressible in her fustian; her braggadocio exceeds every Trumpian boast of self-aggrandisement. One supposes it is all just tomfoolery.

I sat on the throne

    drinking nectar with Allah

...

My oldest daughter is Nefertiti

    the tears from my birth pains

    created the Nile

...

    For a birthday present when he was three

I gave my son Hannibal an elephant

    He gave me Rome for Mother's Day

...

    On a trip north

I caught a cold and blew

My nose giving oil to the Arab world

...

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal

I cannot be comprehended

https://nikki-giovanni.com/ is a guide to her further accomplishments.

Geeta

Poet Bio

Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi. Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi was a 13th century Persian poet, and a Sufi mystic. Born in 1207 AD, he belonged to a family of learned theologians. He made use of everyday life’s circumstances to describe the spiritual world. Rumi’s poems have acquired immense popularity, not only among the Persian speakers of Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan, but in the Western world also. His master work, the Masnavi, has been translated into 26 languages. Rumi is often described as the best-selling poet in the United States.

I recommend a selection of his poems translated by the Indian poet Farrukh Dhondy:

It may be browsed free online at:

https://issuu.com/magiimaa/docs/rumi_a_new_translation_of_selected_

Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi – Portrait of the 13th-century Persian poet and mystic

Jalaluddin Rumi was born on September 30, 1207, in Balkh (in what is now Afghanistan). His father, was a theologian, jurist and a mystic. When the Mongols invaded Central Asia, between 1215 and 1220, Rumi left Balkh with his family and a group of disciples. The migrating caravan traveled extensively in Muslim lands, including Baghdad, Damascus, Malatya, Erzincan, Sivas, Kayseri and Nigde. After performing hajj in Mecca, they eventually settled in Konya, located in the present-day western Turkey. 

Rumi on the 5000 Turkish Lira banknote

Rumi was a disciple of Sayyed Burhan ud-Din Muhaqqiq Termazi, one of his father’s students. Under his guidance he practiced Sufism and acquired a deep knowledge about spiritual matters and the secrets of the spirit world. After the Burhan ud-Din’s death in 1231 Rumi inherited his father’s position and became a prominent religious teacher. He preached in the mosques of Konya. By the time Rumi reached the age of 24, he had proven himself as a religious scholar.

The fateful event in Rumi’s life took place in 1244 when he came across a wandering dervish named Shamsuddin of Tabriz. It was a turning point. Shamsuddin and Rumi became very close friends. Shams went to Damascus, were he was allegedly killed by the students of Rumi who were resentful of their close relationship. 

Rumi coped by writing poetry. “Most of the poetry we have comes from age 37 to 67. He wrote 3,000 [love songs] to Shams, the prophet Muhammad and God. He wrote 2,000 rubai, four-line quatrains. He wrote a six-volume spiritual epic, The Masnavi, in rhyming couplets.” Dance and music are also part of the Sufi tradition and there is a whirling dervish ceremony at Konya on 17 December, the anniversary of his death.

Rumi – the Mevlana Museum or Mausoleum

Rumi incorporated poetry, music and dance into religious practice. It was common for Rumi to whirl around while he was meditating or composing poetry, which he dictated. As Rumi wrote, in Ghazal 2,351: “I used to recite prayers. Now I recite rhymes and poems and songs.” 

For nearly ten years after meeting Shamsuddin, Rumi devoted himself in writing ghazals. He made a compilation of ghazals and named it Diwan-e-Kabir or Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. Rumi spent most of the later years of his life in Anatolia, where he finished six volumes of his masterwork, the Masnavi.

Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi is one of the masterpieces of Rumi. It is a collection of ghazals named in the honour of dervish Shamsuddin, who was Rumi’s great friend and inspiration. It also contains an assortment of poems arranged according to the rhyming scheme. 

Rumi’s popularity has gone beyond national and ethnic borders. He is considered to be one of the classical poets, by the speakers of the Persian language in Iran and neighbouring countries, as far as India. For many years, he had a great influence on Turkish literature. The popularity of his works inspired many other artists. Rumi’s works have been translated to many languages across the world, including Russian, German, Urdu, Turkish, Arabic, French, Italian and Spanish.

Rumi's tomb in Konya at the Mevlana Museum

Rumi departed from the world on 17th December 1273 AD, in Konya, within the Seljuk Empire's territory (now in Turkey). He was buried beside his father. A tomb named the Mevlana Museum was built in Konya, commemorating the great Sufi poet. It consists of a mosque, living quarters for scholars and dervishes, and a dance hall. The sacred site is visited by his admirers coming from different parts of the world; although far from tourism’s hotspots in Turkey the Mevlana Museum attracts 3m visitors a year. Joe and KumKum visited it in 2003: 

Rumi's tomb in Konya, Turkey - Sep 30 2007 is his 800th birth and KumKum & Joe's 40th wedding anniversary

Geeta

Story Water, translated by Coleman Barks, the US populariser of Rumi, is a poem you feel you grasp, and yet not. The poet visualises the body and the senses as entry points to the higher realms of knowledge.

Beauty surrounds us,

but usually we need to be walking

in a garden to know it.

The body itself is a screen

to shield and partially reveal

the light that’s blazing

inside your presence.

And the final reflection is 

enjoy this being washed

with a secret we sometimes know,

and then not.

Intriguing ... do you get it?

The Poems

(click to see the PDF file)