W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne was a great Irish romance.
W.B Yeats had one great romance in his life, pursuing the fiery activist Maud Gonne and proposing to her three times, being turned down each time. As his lifelong muse she inspired several of his poems. When Yeats told her he wasn’t happy without her, she replied: “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness, and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.”
The Wild Swans at Coole which Devika recited has these wonderful lines about swans, who reportedly mate for life:
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still
Amy Lowell – Garden by Moonlight
Amy Lowell in a quiet poem presented by Arundhaty speaks of a Garden by Moonlight – besides flowers, there are animals and insects too. A vision of her dead mother appears:
Then you come …
Quiet like the garden
And white like the alyssum flowers,
… do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.
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Edgar Allan Poe's poem 'A Dream Within A Dream' questions the nature of reality and human existence
Edgar Allan Poe has a meditation on life as maya. His poem A Dream Within a Dream has the unmistakable sound and rhythm of his great poems; it was rendered by Geetha with great understanding. By the sandy shore the poet grasps at grains of golden sands and wonders
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
… can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
He meditates finally
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
One of the poets recited was Christopher Reid, who lost his wife to cancer after 35 years of marriage and felt totally lost. He writes about his Conundrum as a widower in a mini poem by that name that Joe intoned:
I’m the riddle to an answer:
I’m an unmarried spouse,
a flesh and blood revenant,
my own ghost inhabitant
of an empty house.
Kanakakunnu Palace, Trivandrum – the second edition of the Hay Festival was held there 17-19 Nov, 2011 and Simon Armitage was among the poets who presented poems.
We had a poem from KumKum by the current Poet Laureate of UK, Simon Armitage, whom she met in 2011 at the Hay Festival in Trivandrum; she heard him recite this very poem, The Shout. He is a prolific Poet who takes his responsibilities to compose for royal occasions seriously – with happy results. As it turned out Pamela too lighted on the same poet, filling the evening with two more nature poems.
Vikram Seth – The Humble Administrator’s Garden cover
Priya chose a poem from Vikram Seth, harking back to his student days in China when he was gathering data for an Economics doctorate. There in the town of Suzhou he chanced on the ancient park laid out on classical lines by a high official who relinquished his career and built a garden to meditate in and there live frugally. There is a Chinese saying: in the sky there is heaven, on Earth there is Hangzhou and Suzhou (pronounced su-jow). VS brings to bear his observant eye in describing the quiet pleasures of Suzhou garden, now a UNESCO Heritage site:
As magpie flaps back to pine.
A sparrow dust rolls, fluffs, and cheeps.
The humans rest in a design:
One writes, one thinks, one moves, one sleeps.
As often, VS writes in the sonnet form, using iambic tetrameter, following the pattern of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which he was to adopt later for his tour-de-force in verse, The Golden Gate.
Anti-war poems by Denise Levertov, a passionate advocate of peace and justice
A wonderful poem, Making Peace, by Denise Levertov seemed especially relevant in our time when bombs and missiles are raining devastation in Europe, and the belligerents have yet to consider the alternative of peace.
Levertov writes –
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses …
That seems to be the key: to stand back, pause, and ponder – weigh the suffering of blown limbs and snuffed out lives against the necessary compromise that will gain a peace, fragile, but still achievable.
Arundhathy
Arundhaty chose the poem The Garden by Moonlight from Amy
Lowell’s collection to showcase her use of image and poetic
diction in expressions such as
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
In this poem a feminine mood is emphasised by using
words such as – moonlight, folded poppies, ladies’ delight, and so on. The
garden represents the female body. The sexual energy of the
poem is being depicted with the ‘sparks of fireflies.’
The poet turns at the end to the subject of childlessness, and
the language itself changes from a dense, rich texture to a kind of
barren tone in the last line.
Amy Lowell, as a young poet
Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school, which promoted a return to classical values. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
She was the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. The Lowell family would later include acclaimed poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977) among its members. The Lowells are considered the elite among the so-called
‘Boston Brahmin’ families. People recall an untitled quatrain celebrating this:
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to the Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.
Amy Lowell was considered forthright and opinionated, and found high school very trying. Her family considered it improper to send a girl to college, so she never went to one. Lack of collegiate education was compensated by avid reading and a
near-obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 (aged 28) after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse, an Italian actress, rated by many as the greatest of her time in Europe. Though a
late starter at poetry, Lowell became an enthusiastic student and disciple of the art.
Lowell was a lesbian and she became romantically involved for many years with the actress Ada Dwyer Russel. Lowell’s best-known works are the love poems she wrote for her partner, with whom she shared her home in Brookline, a suburb of Boston. Ada had previously been married and had one daughter. Russell is reputed to be the subject of Lowell's more erotic works, most notably the love poems contained in Two Speak Together. Here is a one:
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste
you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Pound considered Lowell's embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hijacking of the movement, calling it
‘Amygism.’ Throughout her working life, Lowell was a promoter of both
contemporary and historical poets. Her book Fir-flower tablets was a poetical re-working of literal translations of the works of ancient Chinese poets, notably Li Tai-po (701–762), nowadays referred to as Li Bai.
You may have free access to this translation by Amy Lowell at
archive.org:
Amy Lowell published not only her own work, but also that of other writers. Her writing also included critical works on French literature. Throughout her working life, Lowell was a promoter of both contemporary and historical poets. At the time of her death, she was attempting to complete her two-volume
biography of John Keats.
Though she sometimes wrote sonnets, Amy Lowell was an early adherent of free verse and one of the major champions of this method. Free verse or vers libre is poetry without the even rhythm of metrical feet. Here the lines are allowed to flow as they will when read aloud. Free verse within its own law of cadence has no absolute rules.
Her first published work appeared in 1910 in The Atlantic Monthly.
The first published collection of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later, in 1912. An additional group of uncollected poems was added to the volume The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, published in 1955.
Honor Moore has produced a graceful Selected Poems of Lowell for the American Poets Project. The columnist and editor Heywood Broun said, “Lowell was
upon the surface of things a Lowell, a New Englander and a spinster. But inside everything was molten like the core of the earth ... Given one more gram of emotion, Amy Lowell would have burst into flame and been consumed to cinders.”
Yeats is considered one of the key twentieth-century English-language poets. He was a Symbolist poet, using allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career.
After 1910, Yeats’s dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyrical poetry. The volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.
W.B. Yeats Portrait by Tom Byrne, oil on canvas
Yeats died in January 1939 while abroad. Final arrangements for his burial in Ireland could not be made, so he was buried at Roquebrune, France. The intention of having his body buried in Sligo was thwarted by World War II. In 1948 his body was finally taken back to Sligo and buried in a little Protestant churchyard at Drumcliff, as he specified in the last stanza of Under Ben Bulben, in his Last Poems, writing his own epitaph:
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
The Wild Swans at Coole is a poem published in a collection of the same name in 1917. Written when Yeats was in his fifties, the poem sees a speaker visiting Coole Park in Ireland (which Yeats himself had visited). Here, he observes a large group of swans, and compares the present moment to his first visit to the park 19 years prior. Though the speaker admires the swans, the whole poem is suffused with an atmosphere of melancholy and regret—with the speaker projecting the kind of traits onto the swans that he feels he now lacks. There has been much speculation about the source of the speaker’s feelings. The poem itself subtly alludes to lost love, and many critics also point to the timing of the poem's composition—shortly before the end of World War I, during the Irish struggle for independence from the British—as being highly significant. This poem is remarkable for Yeats’ Symbolism.
Geetha
Geetha
Edgar Allan Poe, born on 19th January, 1809, in Boston, USA, was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre.
"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality,“ said Poe. He defined the Poetry of words as the “rhythmical creation of beauty.”
He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, and one of the greats of American literature. He was an early practitioner of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the then nascent genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer who earned a living through writing alone, though his life and career were never on a firm financial footing.
Poe achieved arguably his greatest triumph in 1845 when his poem, The Raven, was published to great acclaim. It is often billed as the most famous poem in American literature, and it made him a celebrity.
Poe and his works influenced literature around the world, as well as specialised fields such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.
Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘A Dream Within A Dream’ questions the nature of reality and human existence.
Geetha being a fan of the poetic works of Edgar Allan Poe, selected A Dream Within a Dream, one of his last poems, published in 1849 towards the end of his life.
Split in two stanzas, this poem uses hope and hopelessness to explore the significance and reality of life and to question the meaning of life. After losing many people close to him, Poe spiralled into a pattern of grief and depression, leading him to feel isolated and dependent on alcohol.
The narrator watches as the things that are important to him are taken away and he struggles to hold on to them. He realises that no matter how hard he tries, he is not in control; and wonders if life is just “a dream within a dream.”
Reid is a well established poet and was poetry editor of Faber and Faber between 1991 and 1999, filling the post once occupied by T.S. Eliot. His debut collection was Arcadia in 1979. Since then Reid has published some 15 collections of poetry, two children’s books, and five collections and anthologies. He also served as editor of the collected letters of poet Ted Hughes. Previous awards include the Somerset Maugham award, the Hawthornden prize and the Signa poetry award. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull.
Christopher Reid and wife Linda Gane.
Lucinda Gane, Christopher Reid's wife, was an actress and died in October 2005 after 30 years of married life. She was 57. A Scattering is his tribute to her and consists of four poetic sequences. The Flowers of Crete, written during her final illness; next The Unfinished, A Widower's Dozen and Lucinda's Way, all written after her death. His poems are understated and unsentimental, but there is a depth of feeling beneath a very natural tone of voice. The book was published by a small press, Areté, in 2009 and won Britain’s Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book of the Year Award in 2009 – other poets who won this award were Ted Hughes, Douglas Dunn and Seamus Heaney.
Lucinda Gane, Christopher Reid's wife, was an actress and died in October 2005 after 30 years of married life. She was 57. A Scattering is his tribute to her and consists of four poetic sequences. The Flowers of Crete, written during her final illness; next The Unfinished, A Widower's Dozen and Lucinda's Way, all written after her death. His poems are understated and unsentimental, but there is a depth of feeling beneath a very natural tone of voice. The book was published by a small press, Areté, in 2009 and won Britain’s Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book of the Year Award in 2009 – other poets who won this award were Ted Hughes, Douglas Dunn and Seamus Heaney.
Christopher Reid – Winner of the 2009 Costa Book Award, British author & poet Photograph- SHAUN CURRY.
A Scattering – Elephant Graveyard.
The title poem, which gives the name to the book tells how elephants, coming upon the bones of another elephant will “decide to do something about it,” a final embrace perhaps as only these majestically intelligent animals can perform:
They can't, of course
reassemble the old elephant magnificence;
they can't even make a tidier heap. But they can
hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them
this way and that way. So they do.
Scattering is the second poem from the third section of the collection titled A Widower’s Dozen.
The collection, A Scattering, is written mostly in first person, and some sequences address his wife as “you,” making it a very personal statement. It turns out to be the memoir of a marriage in both its soothing past and under the looming threat of cancer later. Near the end, the wife becomes a “she”as the separation threatens. There is a third sequence A Widower’s Dozen, composed of eleven brief untitled poems, each a page long. The second sequence is titled Unfinished and treats the actual passing and Joe read the first excerpt from that which begins....
Sparse breaths, then none —and it was done
In the next poem, the poet is going to work after this wife’s death, and passes the hospital to which she willed her body after death. This is the last poem from the third section, A Widower's Dozen. He reflects on the uses that may have been served by her body in a poem titled Afterlife:
As if she couldn’t bear not to be busy and useful
after her death, she willed her body to medical science
The last poem Joe recited was very brief, the sort of thing that might occur when the poet ruminates on the words of an oncoming poem in his mind. It is the first poem from the third section A Widower’s Dozen. It hangs there as a lightness in the air, a coda to the grieving in the book:
Conundrum
I’m the riddle to an answer:
I'm an unmarried spouse,
a flesh-and-blood revenant,
my own ghost, inhabitant
of an empty house.
ChatGPT, the AI-enhanced chatbot that is all the rage now, commented thus on the poem, being given the text:
“Conundrum is a brief and enigmatic exploration of identity and existence. The speaker describes himself as a ‘riddle to an answer,’ a paradoxical figure who is both an ‘unmarried spouse’ and a ‘flesh-and-blood revenant,’ or living ghost. The final line, ‘inhabitant / of an empty house,’ suggests a sense of isolation and vacancy, as if the speaker is a ghost haunting an abandoned space. Overall, the poem conveys a sense of unease and uncertainty, inviting the reader to contemplate the mysteries of identity and being.”
Joe saluted ChatGPT for its perspicacity.
A final factoid of the poetry collection A Scattering. The first word of the first poem in the collection is ‘Blessed’
Blessed by the indifference of the creatures
…
we take our breakfast of coffee and yoghurt out in the sun.
and the last word of the last poem is ‘blessing:’
While the innumerable air kisses
we exchanged in passing
remain suspended to this day,
each one an efficacious blessing.
References:
A Scattering, poetry collection by Christopher Reid, free to read on Internet by borrowing.
The poet Christopher Reid on how he turned the death of his wife into a prize-winning poetry collection
A short bio and a few recordings of his poems in his voice
Review of two collections, A Scattering and The Song of Lunch.
Kavita
John Clare
KumKum
Pamela
John Clare was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he was born in 1793 in Helpston north of city of Peterborough. He became known for his celebrations of the English countryside, lamenting its disruptions in later times. His biographer Jonathan Bate called Clare ”the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self.”
Clare became an agricultural labourer while still a child, but attended school in Glinton church until he was 12. In his early adult years, Clare became a potboy in the Blue Bell public house Later he was a gardener at Burghley House. He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth, Rutland, as a lime burner in 1817. In the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief. Malnutrition stemming from childhood may have been the main factor behind his five-foot stature and contributed to his poor physical health in later life.
Clare had bought a copy of James Thomson's The Seasons and began to write poems and sonnets. In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller, Edward Drury, who sent them to his cousin, John Taylor of the Taylor & Hessey firm, which had published the work of John Keats. Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. The book was highly praised and the next year his Village Minstrel and Other Poems appeared. Frederick Martin, his biographer, says “There was no limit to the applause bestowed upon Clare, unanimous in their admiration of a poetical genius coming before them in the humble garb of a farm labourer.”
On 16 March 1820 Clare married Martha ("Patty") Turner, a milkmaid, and they had 7 children. Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbours, between a need to write poetry and a need for money to feed and clothe his children. His health began to suffer and he had bouts of depression, which worsened after his sixth child was born in 1830 and as his poetry sold less well. In 1832, his friends and London patrons clubbed together to move the family to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston. However, he only felt more alienated there.
John Clare
Clare's last work, Rural Muse (1835), was noticed favourably by Christopher North and other reviewers, but its sales were not enough to support his wife and seven children. Clare's mental health began to worsen. His alcohol consumption steadily increased along with self-dissatisfaction. He also became delusional and was put in an asylum. During his early asylum years in High Beach Essex he rewrote poems of Shakespeare and Byron.
In July 1841, Clare absconded from the asylum in Essex and walked some 80 miles home. Later Clare was committed to Northampton asylum. His maintenance at the asylum was paid for by Earl Fitzwilliam. He remained there for the rest of his life under the humane regime of Thomas Octavius Prichard, who encouraged and helped him to write. Here he wrote possibly his most famous poem, I Am. It was in this later poetry that Clare “developed a very distinctive voice, an unmistakable intensity and vibrance, ” says his editor Geoffrey Sommerfeld.
John Clare died of a stroke on 20 May 1864 in his 71st year.
(Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare)
Simon Armitage was born on May 26, 1963. He is an English poet, playwright, musician, novelist, and currently the Poet Laureate of the UK. He was elevated to this prestigious position on May 10, 2019, succeeding a famous woman poet of our time, Carol Ann Duffy, whose collection The World's Wife and why Shakespeare bequeathed his ‘second best bed’ to Anne Hathaway was introduced to our readers by Talitha. See:
Simon Armitage is a Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. Before that he taught Poetry at the University of Oxford. He has published more than 20 collections, among them The Shout (June 5, 2012). The title poem by the same name is what KumKum chose to read.
Simon Armitage portrait painting by Paul Wright
She took pleasure in the fact that she had met and heard Simon Armitage recite this poem at the second edition of Hay Festival that took place in Trivandrum in 2011, which was reported in the KRG blog:
She stood beside Armitage after that session admiring the beautiful venue, Kanakakkunnu Palace (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanakakkunnu_Palace), where this literature festival took place over 4 days. Vikram Seth joined soon after – and she was in seventh heaven.
Simon Armitage's poem The Shout highlights an incident that took place when the poet was in school. He, along with a now nameless young schoolmate, were the two actors. They were taking part in an exercise to measure the range of the human voice. Two of them walked away from each other while they kept on shouting, until they were out of earshot.
Twenty years on, the nameless boy went to live in Australia, just about as far away as it's possible to get from Yorkshire where the poet lived. Then the poem takes a surprising, tragic turn.
He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.
What makes The Shout a touching poem and not a piece of prose, is the skilful use of end-rhyme and metre. How poignant the end of the poem is! The poet is addressing the anonymous dead boy here,
Boy with the name and face I don't remember,
You can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.
KumKum has not read any of the novels by Armitage, but has been keenly following his writing since he became the Poet Laureate of the UK in May 2019. One of the duties expected of the Poet Laureate is to pen poetry for royal events and national occasions – although this is no longer an official requirement. Traditionally, the Poet Laureate received an annual payment of sherry and a small amount of money, but the modern Poet Laureate, is appointed for a 10-year term, and receives a stipend and an honorarium in addition to the symbolic sherry. Armitage has taken his Laureate’s duties in earnest.
He wrote two beautiful poems praising the late queen Elizabeth II. The first was for her platinum jubilee, titled Queenhood. The second, after the queen died, is titled Floral Tribute. It is an excellent poem whiich BBC included in their tributes to the late queen. I can't resist the temptation to link the poem for the KRG blog.
I will cite James Gregory's article in BBC news, where the author praises the poem and the poem too: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-62886384
Simon Armitage – Queen Elizabeth II – The flower at the centre of the poem is the lily of the valley, which was included in the Queen’s coronation bouquet and was said to be one of her favourite flowers (Photo - Max Mumby)
Floral Tribute is written through the metaphor of the lily of the valley – one of the late Queen's favourite flowers, which appeared in her coronation bouquet.
Armitage – Lily of the Valley, Queen Eliizabeth’s favourite flower.
The first letter of each line spells out ‘Elizabeth’. Explaining his decision to employ the acrostic technique, Armitage said: “It's a lovely name but a name she probably rarely got to hear very much because everybody had to preface that with ceremonial nominals.”
Floral Tribute
Evening will come, however determined the late afternoon,
Limes and oaks in their last green flush, pearled in September mist.
I have conjured a lily to light these hours, a token of thanks,
Zones and auras of soft glare framing the brilliant globes.
A promise made and kept for life – that was your gift –
Because of which, here is a gift in return, glovewort to some,
Each shining bonnet guarded by stern lance-like leaves.
The country loaded its whole self into your slender hands,
Hands that can rest, now, relieved of a century’s weight.
Evening has come.
Rain on the black lochs and dark Munros.
Lily of the Valley, a namesake almost, a favourite flower
Interlaced with your famous bouquets, the restrained
Zeal and forceful grace of its lanterns, each inflorescence
A silent bell disguising a singular voice.
A blurred new day
Breaks uncrowned on remote peaks and public parks, and
Everything turns on these luminous petals and deep roots,
This lily that thrives between spire and tree, whose brightness
Holds and glows beyond the life and border of its bloom.
Pamela chose two poems of Armitage. The first was A Vision. The last stanza reminded her of how we build castles in the air, and even before they materialise they're gone.
These lines made her think of the relevance to our times:
I pulled that future out of the north wind
at the landfill site, stamped with today’s date,
riding the air with other such futures,
all unlived in and now fully extinct.
Pamela liked the vision of the future created in the rest of the poem because they sounded very contemporary:
blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel,
board-game suburbs, modes of transportation
…
electric cars, or after the late show -
strolling the boulevard.
The second poem, A sky stretched thin, was written in 2020 and talks about the lockdown experience of the Covid pandemic. The last two lines of the poem:
I’m watching all this
through
bullet-proof glass.
recounts a feeling similar to what we all went through during the lockdown.
We could watch the deathly walk of the SARS-CoV-2 virus all around us while isolating ourselves in our homes, and wearing safety masks if we ever went out. A reader said that bullet-proof glass couldn't have kept the virus at bay!
In his gloss on the poem Armitage noted what was worst for him about the Covid-19 pandemic:
“I miss my friends, going out for a meal, a drink, getting on trains, seeing the world go past through the window. I miss giving readings and travelling: picking up different feelings and ideas and getting that chance to express yourself outwardly. Not being able to do that has become a kind of artistic claustrophobia.”
These poems made Pamela feel a closeness to the poet.
From 1980 to 1982, Vikram Seth, then a doctoral student in economics at Stanford, visited Nanjing University and did his research in some towns along the Yangtze river. The field researches, though boring, brought him to the city of Suzhou, where he became so completely infatuated by the classical gardens that he wrote a succession of poems on them, and even named his 1985 poetry collection The Humble Administrator’s Garden, after one of the four most reputed classical gardens in Suzhou. These poems are delightfully exotic and show intricate craft.
Vikram Seth – Humble Administrator
Seth, by portraying the people and objects of classical gardens in Suzhou, demonstrates the garden owners’ as well as his own high hopes and aspirations for moderate reclusion. It is widely acknowledged that the classical gardens in Suzhou are a product of the tradition of reclusion in China.
What is the Tradition of Reclusion?
The general consensus among scholars is that the most prominent recluse in Chinese history is the renowned fourth-century poet Tao Yuanming, who renounced his government service by throwing his official girdle in a tree, and that the theme of reclusion surfaced in China during the time of Confucius. According to Sturman, however, the theme of reclusion goes back even further, to 2000 BC, with the tale of Xu You and Chao (Nester) Fu. This tale, which involves Xu You cleaning his ear of the dirty political schemes he heard while working in the government. In the Confucian model there is a complicated relationship between emperors and kings and the virtuous countrymen who seek to serve them in their courts.
The recluse tradition has survived thousands of years of construction and selection by scholar-bureaucrats, sinking deep into their minds, even to this day. One can consult the reference:
Moderate Reclusion in Vikram Seth’s Poems of Suzhou Classical Gardens. by Zhi Huang, College of Foreign Languages, Soochow University, China
Suzhou’s classical gardens
The Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou
Suzhou classical gardens can generally be termed earthly gardens, which are definitely in the recluse tradition. Apart from Lion Grove, all the Suzhou gardens, including Gentle Waves Pavilion, Master-of-Nets Garden, Humble Administrator’s Garden, Tarrying Garden, Mountain Villa with Embracing Beauty, Garden of Couple’s Retreat, Garden of Cultivation, were constructed with utmost care by the highly cultured noble lords in seclusion. The earliest date from the 12 century CE.
Saras
Fleur Fleur Adcock, in full Kareen Fleur Adcock, (born February 10, 1934, Papakura, New Zealand), New Zealand-born British poet known for her tranquil domestic lyrics intercut with flashes of irony and glimpses of the fantastic and the macabre.
Adcock’s family moved to England in 1939 but returned to New Zealand in 1947. After earning degrees at Wellington Girls’ College and Victoria University of Wellington, she served as lecturer and librarian at a number of New Zealand institutions before permanently immigrating to England in 1963.
Adcock’s first collection of poetry, The Eye of the Hurricane, appeared the following year. In that and subsequent volumes—including Tigers (1967), High Tide in the Garden (1971), The Incident Book (1986), Time Zones (1991), and Looking Back (1997)—Adcock brought a measured, classical detachment to bear upon the vagaries of emotional experience. The Inner Harbour (1979) is generally cited as her most artistically successful work. Her later collections included Poems, 1960–2000 (2000), Dragon Talk (2010), The Land Ballot (2015), and Hoard (2017).
In addition to writing, Adcock served as a commentator on poetry for the British Broadcasting Corporation. She was also noted for her work translating medieval Latin and contemporary Romanian poetry. Adcock edited several works as well, including The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982) and (with Jacqueline Simms) The Oxford Book of Creatures (1995).
Fleur Adcock, poet from New Zealand
Adcock became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 1996. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006 and received the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2008. Adcock was married to two notable New Zealand literary personalities. In August 1952, she married Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (divorced 1958), and in February 1962 she married Barry Crump, divorcing in 1963. She has two sons, Gregory and Andrew, both with her first husband.
Adcock's mother Irene Adcock is also a writer, and her sister Marilyn Duckworth is a novelist.
Adcock’s poetry is characterised by images drawn from her immediate experience. Although the subject of her poetry often deals with personal matters, it is not confessional. She writes, “The content of my poems derives largely from those parts of my life which are directly experienced. Relationships with people or places; images and insights which have presented themselves sharply from whatever source, conscious or subconscious; ideas triggered off by language itself.”
Her poetry is characterised by impressionability because of the ways in which Adcock links subject and tone with her immediate setting and surroundings.
Click on the link below to hear Fleur Adcock reciting Leaving the Tate taken from Poems 1960-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), copyright Fleur Adcock 2000, used by permission of the author.
Sources:
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/01/adc
ock-fleur/
Saras chose to read two poems by Fleur Adcock, Leaving the Tate and Happy Ending. Leaving the Tate was a commission by the Tate Museum when they held a competition where Adcock was one of the judges. The subject was either one of the painting or work of art at the Tate or the Tate Museum itself and the judges were also asked to write on the same subject. Adcock wrote about how our vision is different when you come out of the art gallery, you see things differently.
For Saras the poem was a painting in words. She was able to visualise the scene that Adcock describes in her poem. It reminded her of the time when once when she was on the Venduruthy bridge she saw a flock of water birds take off from the water. The grey monsoon skies and the rays of the setting sun on the birds’ wings made it look silver. That sight has remained with her all these years.
Happy Ending is a poem about relationships – friends who go to bed together (too much wine with dinner, perhaps?) and almost at once realise they have made a mistake and do not make love. But later when they meet, they are able to get over the embarrassment and continue with their friendship.
Herbert Trench (1865-1923) was an Irish poet and playwright. His parents were William Wallace Trench and Elizabeth Trench. Born at Cork in Ireland, he was educated at Oxford. On graduation, he was employed by the Board of Education.
Trench’s poetry deals with universal rather than personal themes. He acknowledged Matthew Arnold as an inspirational force. Having spent most of his life outside of Ireland, he considered himself more English than Irish. Trench was the artistic director of the Haymarket theatre, London. His only completed play was Napoleon, set mainly in and around the French coast of the English Channel.
Herbert Trench
In 1891, he married Lilian Isabel Fox. He died in 1923 at Boulogne-sur-Mer.
The poem She comes not when the noon is on the roses, reflects on the idea that inspiration from the muse does not arrive when we expect or desire it.
The poem suggests that the muse is beyond our control to summon at will. It arrives on its own terms, when we are receptive and open to its influence.
Denise Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex. Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University. In Poland as a Russian Hasidic Jew he was held under house arrest during the First World War, classed as an 'enemy alien' by virtue of his ethnicity. He emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity.
Denise Levertov, who was educated at home, showed an enthusiasm for writing from an early age and studied ballet, art, piano and French as well as the standard subjects. Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide (née Spooner-Jones) Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales. She wrote about the strangeness she felt growing up part Jewish, German, Welsh and English, but not fully belonging to any of these identities.
When Levertov was five years old she declared she would be a writer. At the age of 12, she sent some of her poems to T. S. Eliot, who replied with a two-page letter of encouragement. In 1940, when she was 17, Levertov published her first poem.
During the Blitz, Levertov served in London as a civilian nurse. Her first book, The Double Image, was published six years later. In 1947, she met and married American writer Mitchell Goodman and moved with him to the United States the following year. Although they divorced in 1975, they did have a son, Nikolai, and lived mainly in New York City, but spent summers in Maine. In 1955, she became a naturalised American citizen.
Denise Levertov young – ‘the gift of being able to write poetry must always be considered as a gift. It’s a responsibility, whether one considers it given by God or Nature’
Levertov's first two books comprised poems written in traditional forms and language. But as she accepted the US as her new home and became more and more fascinated with the American idiom, she began to come under the influence of the Black Mountain poets, most importantly William Carlos Williams. Her first American book of poetry, Here and Now, shows the beginnings of this transition and transformation. Her poem With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads established her reputation.
During the course of a prolific career, Denise Levertov created a highly regarded body of poetry that reflected her beliefs as an artist and a humanist. Her work embraced a wide variety of genres and themes, including nature lyrics, love poems, protest poetry, and poetry inspired by her faith in God. She converted to a non-denominational Christian faith during the mid-1980s, then to Catholicism in 1989.
Levertov died of lymphoma at the age of 74. Almost until the moment of her death she continued to compose poetry, and some forty of them were published posthumously in This Great Unknowing: Last Poems (1999).
The poem Thomo recited, Making Peace, is loved by peace activists. It talks of peace, not just the absence of war. In the midst of war it is difficult to imagine what peace is like; poets have the responsibility to light the image of peace in human hearts
The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.
She affirms the role of war-profiteering in its continuation:
peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
Yes, pause. Pause from the destruction, pause from the killing, recover one’s humanity. Peace activists long not just for the end of war but to go beyond that and to achieve lasting peace. Denise Levertov posits peace as
an energy field more intense than war,
Just as poems must be written, peace will arrive inevitably after war.
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What ChatGPT said:
Denise Levertov's poem "Making Peace" is a thoughtful and well-crafted meditation on the nature of peace and how it can be achieved. The poem opens with a voice from the dark calling out for poets to give us an imagination of peace, which can oust the familiar imagination of disaster. This sets the stage for the poem's central message, which is that peace is not something that can be imagined before it is made.
Levertov argues that peace, like a poem, is created through the process of its making. It cannot be known except in the words of its making, the grammar of justice and the syntax of mutual aid. This suggests that peace is a process that must be actively pursued, rather than a static state that can be achieved through inaction.
The poem then suggests that we can begin to approach peace by restructuring the sentence of our lives. We must question our needs and revoke the reaffirmation of profit and power. By allowing long pauses and creating space for reflection, we can begin to create a cadence of peace that balances the weight of the world on a different fulcrum.
Levertov's use of metaphor is particularly effective in this poem. She suggests that peace is a presence, an energy field that is more intense than war. This metaphorical language helps to create a sense of the transformative power of peace, which can pulse into the world stanza by stanza, with each act of living becoming one of its words.
Overall, "Making Peace" is a powerful and insightful poem that offers a compelling vision of what peace can be. While it acknowledges the difficulty of achieving peace, it also suggests that it is possible through the collective effort of all of us, and that the process of creating peace can be as beautiful and transformative as a work of art.
References:
Denise Levertov reads six poems
Spiritual Exercises in a Humanistic Register (II): Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov: A Memoir and Appreciation
Murray Bodo, OFM
Zakia
Alfred Noyes Portrait, by Alexader Bassano, 1922
Alfred Noyes was a poet of English descent, a traditionalist remembered chiefly for his lyrical verse. He was born on September 16th 1880 in Wolverhampton England. His father, a grocer and teacher, taught him Latin and Greek.The Welsh coast and mountains were an inspiration to Noyes. He was known for his well loved poem The Highwayman. which Zakia recalled from school:
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
Noyes’ first volume of poems, The Loom of Years, was published while he was still at Oxford University. Amongst his later works the most notable is a 3-volume epic trilogy called The Torch Bearers, comprising Watchers of the Sky (1922), The Book of Earth (1925) and The Last Voyage (1930). It attempted to reconcile science and religion and was inspired by a visit in 1917 to a new 100-inch telescope being installed at Mount Wilson in California.
Alfred Noyes Portrait, by Alexader Bassano, 1922
In late 1940 he was overcome by the onset of blindness and that’s when he began dictating children’s poetry at his home in the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England near Southampton.
Alfred Noyes – Sweet pea flowers in their bucolic beauty and seductive fragrance seem the very antithesis of our busy lives.
The poem A Child’s Vision is a delightful view of the sweet pea plant from a child’s perspective. Most flowers capture our attention with their colour or form but some hold a unique place in our hearts because of their intoxicating perfume.
Alfred Noyes Poem – Daddy fell into the pond
Daddy Fell Into the Pond is a humorous poem with which Zakia chose to end the session on a lighter note.
Alfred Noyes died at the age of 77 and is buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Totland, in the Isle of Wight.
Arundhaty
The Garden by Moonlight by Amy Lowell
A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.
Devika
The Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
Geetha
A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Joe
3 Poems from the collection A Scattering by Christopher Reid
1. The Unfinished (excerpt from Section 1
Sparse breaths, then none — and it was done.
Listening and hugging hard, between mouthings of sweet next-to-nothings into her ear — pillow-talk-cum-prayer — I never heard the precise cadence into silence that argued the end. Yet I knew it had happened.
Ultimate calm.
Gingerly, as if loth to disturb it, I released my arm from its stiff vigil athwart that embattled heart and raised and righted myself, the better to observe it.
Kisses followed, to mouth, cheeks, eyelids, forehead, and a rigmarole of unheard farewell kept up as far as the click of the door.
After six months, or more, I observe it still.
2. Afterlife
As if she couldn’t bear not to be busy and useful
after her death, she willed her body to medical science.
Today, as a number of times before, I walked
past the institution that took her gift, and thought,
‘That's where my dead wife lives. I hope they're treating
her kindly.’
The dark brick, the depthless windows. gave nothing away,
but the place seemed preferable to either Heaven or Hell,
whose multitudes meekly receive whatever the design teams
and PR whizzes of religion have conjured up for them.
My wife is in there, somewhere, doing practical work:
her organs and tissues are educating young doctors
or helping researchers outwit the disease that outwitted her.
So it's a hallowed patch of London for me now.
But it's not a graveyard, to dawdle and remember and mope in,
and I had work to do, too, in a different part of town.
3. Conundrum
I’m the riddle to an answer:
I'm an unmarried spouse,
a flesh-and-blood revenant,
my own ghost, inhabitant
of an empty house.
Kavita
First Love by John Clare
I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.
And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.
I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start—
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.
Are flowers the winter’s choice?
Is love’s bed always snow?
She seemed to hear my silent voice,
Not love's appeals to know.
I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more.
KumKum
The shout by Simon Armitage
We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face
I don’t remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth
I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.
He called from over the park – I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,
from the foot of the hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell’s Farm –
I lifted an arm.
He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.
Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.
(2004)
Pamela – 2 poems by Simon Armitage
A Vision
The future was a beautiful place, once.
Remember the full-blown balsa-wood town
on public display in the Civic Hall.
The ring-bound sketches, artists’ impressions,
blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel,
board-game suburbs, modes of transportation
like fairground rides or executive toys.
Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.
And people like us at the bottle-bank
next to the cycle-path, or dog-walking
over tended strips of fuzzy-felt grass,
or model drivers, motoring home in
electric cars, or after the late show -
strolling the boulevard. They were the plans,
all underwritten in the neat left-hand
of architects – a true, legible script.
I pulled that future out of the north wind
at the landfill site, stamped with today’s date,
riding the air with other such futures,
all unlived in and now fully extinct.
A sky stretched thin….
The sky stretched thin
over the frame
of day.
Downdraft and throttle -
the air ambulance carving
its high yellow arc,
the millpond ronkled, jittery,
wood pigeons rousted
out of the wood,
an embarrassed fox
in its winter coat,
flushed from the copse.
Night hunched
in the east, ready
to fill in the gaps.
I’m watching all this
through
bullet-proof glass.
Priya – 2 poems by Vikram Seth
Suzhou Park
Magnolia trees float out their flowers,
Vast, soft, upon the rubbish heap.
The grandfather sits still for hours:
His lap-held grandson is asleep.
Above him plane trees fan the sky.
Nearby, a man in muted dance
Does t’ai-qu-quan. A butterfly
Flies whitely past his easy trance.
A magpie flaps back to its pine.
A sparrow dust-rolls, fluffs, and cheeps.
The humans rest in a design:
One writes, one thinks, one moves, one sleeps.
The leaves trace out the stenciled stone,
And each is in his dream alone.
Qingdao: December
Here by the sea this quiet night
I see the moon through misted light.
The water laps the rocks below.
I hear it lap and swash and go.
The pine-trees, dense and earthward-bent,
Suffuse the air with resin-scent.
A landward breeze combs through my hair
And cools the earth with salted air.
Here all attempt in life appears
Irrelevant. The erosive years
That build the moon and the rock and tree
Speak of a sweet futility
And say that we who are from birth
Caressed by unimpulsive earth
Should yield our fever to the trees,
The seaward light and the resined breeze.
Here by the sea this quiet night
Where my still spirit could take flight
And nullify the heart's distress
Into the peace of wordlessness,
I see the light, I breathe the scent,
I touch the insight, but a bent
Of heart exacts its old designs
And draws my hands to write these lines.
Saras – 2 poems by Fleur Adcock
Leaving the Tate
Coming out with your clutch of postcards
in a Tate gallery bag and another clutch
of images packed into your head you pause
on the steps to look across the river
and there's a new one: light bright buildings,
a streak of brown water, and such a sky
you wonder who painted it - Constable? No:
too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic -
a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky,
perhaps, sheer blue apart from the white plumes
rushing up it (today, that is,
April. Another day would be different
but it wouldn't matter. All skies work.)
Cut to the lower right for a detail:
seagulls pecking on mud, below
two office blocks and a Georgian terrace.
Now swing to the left, and take in plane-trees
bobbled with seeds, and that brick building,
and a red bus...Cut it off just there,
by the lamp-post. Leave the scaffolding in.
That's your next one. Curious how
these outdoor pictures didn't exist
before you'd looked at the indoor pictures,
the ones on the walls. But here they are now,
marching out of their panorama
and queuing up for the viewfinder
your eye's become. You can isolate them
by holding your optic muscles still.
You can zoom in on figure studies
(that boy with the rucksack), or still lives,
abstracts, townscapes. No one made them.
The light painted them. You're in charge
of the hanging committee. Put what space
you like around the ones you fix on,
and gloat. Art multiplies itself.
Art's whatever you choose to frame.
Happy Ending
After they had not made love
she pulled the sheet up over her eyes
until he was buttoning his shirt:
not shyness for their bodies- those
they had willingly displayed- but a frail
endeavour to apologise.
Later, though, drawn together by
a distaste for such 'untidy ends'
they agreed to meet again; whereupon
they giggled, reminisced, held hands
as though what they had made was love-
and not that happier outcome- friends.
Shoba
She comes not when Noon is on the roses by Herbert Trench
She comes not when Noon is on the roses--
Too bright is Day.
She comes not to the Soul till it reposes
From work and play.
But when Night is on the hills, and the great Voices
Roll in from Sea,
By starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight
She comes to me.
Thomo
Making Peace by Denise Levertov
A voice from the dark called out,
‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
Zakia – 2 poems by Alfred Noyes
Sweet Peas
Under the sweet-peas I stood
And drew deep breaths, they smelt so good.
Then, with strange enchanted eyes,
I saw them change to butterflies.
Higher than the skylark sings
I saw their fluttering crimson wings
Leave their garden-trellis bare
And fly into the upper air.
Standing in an elfin trance
Through the clouds I saw them glance….
Then I stretched my hands up high
And touched them in the distant sky.
At once the coloured wing came back
From wandering in the zodiac.
Under the sweet-peas I stood
And drew deep breaths. They smelt so good.
Daddy fell into the pond
Everyone grumbled. The sky was grey.
We had nothing to do and nothing to say.
We were nearing the end of a dismal day,
And there seemed to be nothing beyond,
THEN Daddy fell into the pond!
And everyone’s face grew merry and bright,
And Timothy danced for sheer delight.
"Give me the camera, quick, oh quick!
He’s crawling out of the duckweed!"
Click! Then the gardener suddenlyslapped his knee,
And doubled up, shaking silently,
And the ducks all quacked as if they were daft,
And it sounded as if the old drake laughed.
Oh, there wasn’t a thing that didn’t respond
WHEN Daddy fell into the pond!
A very comprehensive retelling of the session. Congratulations to writers Joe, Getha and Saraswathy
ReplyDeleteThis is a super blogg. It was such a beautiful reading experience. I met with quite a few poets here today about whom I have never heard before. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteSaras, Geetha and Joe, KRG's bloggers, deserve credits for their diligent work. Actually some credits are due to us (the participants) as well. As each of us write up about our poem, poet.
A Scattering - The Elephant Graveyard reminded me of a group of elephants in Moremi Game Reserve, Botswana. One elephant had passed on and the rest of them were paying their last respects. They were standing around the dead elephant and then one by one walked away. A really heart rendering sight.
ReplyDelete