One Page Poetry Circle Archive

Welcome to the Virtual One Page Poetry Circle!

Date: November 21, 2023
Theme: Poetry and Promises
Time: 5:30 – 6:30 pm
Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave, 3rd fl. Or by email (see addresses below)

Find a poem! Show up! Or, send a poem by email!

We're back for the sixteenth fall season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people examine the works of established poets. While there is no instructor and this is not a workshop for personal writing, once a month OPPC gives everyone a place to become teachers and learners to explore the form, content, language and meaning of poetry. Since the circle began, participants have selected and discussed 1508 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

GOOD NEWS: The One Page Poetry Circle has returned to the St. Agnes Library.
In addition, for those who are unable to attend, you will still be able to participate by email.

The theme for November is Poetry and Promises. Christina Rossetti describes the impossibility of living up to promises in "Promises like Pie-Crust," suggesting that like pie-crust, promises are easily broken:

• Promise me no promises
• So will I not promise you:
• Keep we both our liberties,
• Never false and never true.

In "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats describes an apocalyptic world in which the promises of modern society have proven empty, its perception of progress and order an illusion. Yeats had much to be bleak about when he wrote the poem at the end of World War I. Chaos was all around. Millions of people had died:

• And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
• Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

If you can make the November 21st meeting, we ask that you bring a poem with you on the theme of Poetry and Promises, with copies for others if you can.

If you're unable to attend, send us the poems you've selected with a comment on why you chose them. We'll share the poems with you in person, by email, and through our blog.

We met on October 17th to discuss Poetry and Change.

AnnaLee brought "Change" by the prolific award-winning British poet, Kathleen Raine, who was interested in various forms of spirituality, Platonism and Neoplatonism. Her work was influenced by William Blake and W. B. Yeats. Raine's poem depicts the cycles of change in the natural world—from the elements around us, to the force of plants and insects, to the human emotions and the birth of children, then back around to the elements. The poem is deceptively simple in its complexity of repeating sounds, and words that can be a noun in one place and a verb in another:

• Change
• Said the sun to the moon,
• You cannot stay.

• Change
• Says the moon to the waters,
• All is flowing.

• Change
• Says the fields to the grass,
• Seed-time and harvest,
• Chaff and grain

Ellen brought "Beauty" by Tony Hoagland, a favorite poet of hers. The narrator of the poem is the sister of a once beautiful woman who has spent a lifetime keeping herself up. Now she is ill and must face change—the loss of her physical beauty. It begins on a candid note of her sister's face marred by the medication she must take. By throwing off the tyranny of physical beauty, she regains another kind of beauty. The poem has many slant rhymes and wonderful imagery. It ends:

• Something she had carried a long ways,
• But had no use for anymore,
• Now that it had no use for her.
• That, too, was beautiful.

Barbara selected "A Farewell" (complete below) by Harriet Monroe, a literary critic, poet and editor of Poetry Magazine. Monroe's words, which reminded us of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," celebrate transience:

• Good-bye!—no, do not grieve that it is over,
•    The perfect hour,
• That the winged joy, sweet honey-loving rover,
•    Flits from the flower.

• Grieve not—it is the law. Love will be flying—
•    Yes, love and all.
• Glad was the living—blessed be the dying.
•    Let the leaves fall.

Mindy loved the sonnet "Lion, Gnat" by Lee Slonimsky, a Pythagorean scholar and poet for "its cinematic portrayal of the sweep of time over millions of years, juxtaposing awe-inspiring and particular images of creatures enormous and tiny, in settings distant and familiar."

• Complexity determines everything,
• And is the universe's one true love.
• The first four-legged whale is primitive:
• come back in thirty million years and find
• two dozen species, wide variety
• Complexity determines everything,
• And is the universe's one true love.
• The first four-legged whale is primitive:
• come back in thirty million years and find
• two dozen species, wide variety
• of fin and jaw, of size, for sure of mind;
• while glossy fin is supple arm is wing,
• blue-feathered now, aloft. (The sky its sea.)
• Complexity's the language of pure change;
• The lust of molecules to rearrange
• Themselves quite differently: as lion, gnat.
• As white dwarf star, as rushing stream; as Alps.
• As backyard in East Acton: swallow's loops.
• Flux is the core of steel no matter what.

Ed read Tanya Markul's poem "eleven" (complete below), in which a speaker addresses someone, perhaps herself, or all of us, in the form of an aphorism reminding us to use our pain not as an isolating tool, but as part of the story we all share, and participate in the healing world: "The pain /that made you/the odd one out /is the story/that connects you/to a healing world"

Eileen brought one of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas's most famous poems, "Do not go gentle into that good night." The work is dedicated to his dying father, yet it reminds us to celebrate the joy of life, even as it is fleeting: "And you, my father, there on the sad height,/Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray./Do not go gentle into that good night./Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Cate read "Earthworm," by Louise Gluck, who died this month at 80. Gluck was born in 1943 in New York, and reared on Long Island. Poet and scholar James Longenbach wrote "change is Louise Gluck's highest value...if change is what she most craves, it is also what she most resists, what is most difficult for her, most hard-won.": "death will come to seem a web of channels or tunnels like/a sponge's or honeycomb's, which, as part of us,/you will be free to explore. Perhaps/you will find in these travels/a wholeness that eluded you—as men and women."

Gail brought W. F. Bolton's "Sea Change (July 1999)" with its lines that echo Macbeth's speech "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" in Shakespeare's play of the same name:

• And now, and now,
• I find myself looking
• Into favored magazines

• Not for fiction or,
• God knows, an article;
• But for cartoons,

Daria gave us "Change should breed Change" by William Henry Drummond a public lecturer who practiced medicine in frontier communities. His first book of poetry, The Habitant and Other French Canadian Poems was published in 1897: "New doth the sun appear,/The mountains' snows decay,/Crown'd with frail flowers forth comes the baby year."

Abigail loved the melancholy pace of "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" by Henry Wardsworth Longfellow, "The day returns, but nevermore/Returns the traveller to the shore,/And the tide rises, the tide falls."

Ann was moved by James Richardson's "Metamorphosis" (complete below). "This poem set off a chain of thoughts and images: changing desire (simply yearning to see a dead mother), bodies that change "painfully cell by cell" even without the help of the gods, and Bernini's truly amazing sculpture of Apollo and Daphne in the Borghese Gallery in Rome.

• The week after you died, Mom,
• you were in my checkout line,
• little old lady who met my stare
• with the fear, the yearning
• of a mortal chosen by a god,
• feeling herself change
• painfully cell by cell
• into a shadow, a laurel, you, a constellation.

Steve sent a favorite poem: Robert Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man." He writes "This is so much about change. Warren changing his feelings for Silas, (and you know he has changed them many times before) the change in Silas, and change in the sky or in their world." His favorite lines: "I'll sit and see if that small sailing cloud/Will hit or miss the moon./It hit the moon./Then there were three there, making a dim row,/The moon, the little silver cloud, and she."

Philip chose the "Seven Ages of Man" speech in William Shakespeare's As You Like It, "Having gone through six ages and entering the seventh age, this poem resonates with me":

• Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
• And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
• That ends this strange eventful history,
• Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
• Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Roger enjoyed Shakespeare's Sonnet 123: "No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:/Thy pyramids build up with newer might/To me are nothing novel, nothing strange," wherein the speaker asserts that he will not change.

Kai chose "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "At length did cross an Albatross,/Through the fog it came;/As if it had been a Christian soul,/We hailed it in God's name." Kai writes, "To me this is the ultimate poem about change. With one impulsive act, by killing the Albatross, the subject of the poem alters the course of not only his life and fate, but also causes the crew of his ship to die a horrible death (then to suffer a fate worse than death)."

June thought to send Adam Zagajewski's "Try to Praise the Mutilated World," "published after 9/11, but written more than a year earlier, about the Soviet invasion of the Poet's native Poland," but then "chose three lines by Matsuo Basho (translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Yakamoto) which have something of the same meaning":

• summer grasses—
• all that remains
• of warriors' dreams

Scott found "from constant change figures" by Lyn Hejinian, which begins: "constant change figures/the time we sense/passing on its effect/surpassing things we've known before." "I had never encountered anything like it before, reminding me somewhat of a villanelle, where the same line comes back in a different context. Here the entire poem is only a few lines constantly shifting, showing us how the rearrangement changes meaning. Difficult, indeed, but rewarding."

Larry thought of "The Beautiful Changes" by Richard Wilbur, "a 'top ten' favorite poet of mine":

• Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
• They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
• In such kind ways,
• Wishing ever to sunder
• Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
• For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Whether a poem talks about a promise or suggests one, choose a poem that has meaning to you. If you can attend the Poetry Circle, bring a poem, with copies for others. If you're unable to attend, email your selection to one of us by November 21 with a brief comment on why you chose it. Try Poetry Foundation or poets.org. Blog with us onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Fall 2023 Schedule
November 21: Poetry and Promises
December 19: Poetry and Mysticism

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom(at)gmail(dot)com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee(at)kaeserwilson(dot)com

The One Page Poetry Circle sponsored by the New York Public Library is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.