The Book Club for Poets will still be meeting on the New England College campus tomorrow (May 19), but we’ll meet in the Simon Center, in front of the Great Hall.
Here are some “favorites” suggested to me for discussion:
The Revisionist Dream
The Last Good War
Ah, Poetry
The Day My Student Teaches Me That Life Is Not Art
Hope to see you there!
On February 17, 2015, the Book Club for Poets will be trying something new: a whole session devoted to writing exercises based on the books we’ve read. If you can, bring one or two of your favorite books among the ones we’ve discussed. We’ll meet from 7 to 9 p.m. in the New England Room of the Danforth Library at New England College in Henniker, NH. Hope to see you there!
Coming up! This Saturday, November 29, 2014, I’ll be “Bookseller (for a Day)” at Gibson’s Bookstore, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m., in honor of Small Business Saturday. I’ll be featuring many of the books we’ve discussed in the Book Club for Poets. If you’re close to Concord, NH, swing by and see me!
Thank you to everyone who came to our discussion of Sharon Olds’s Stag’s Leap!
Our next Book Club for Poets meeting will be on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, when we’ll be trying something new. This time, instead of reading and discussing a book, we’ll spend our time doing writing exercises based on some of the poets and poetic techniques we’ve been discussing. No prep work is needed: just bring one or two of the books you’ve especially enjoyed reading in the club — and plenty of paper and a pen. It should be fun!
In case in inclement weather, keep an eye on this blog. If New England College closes because of winter storms, we’ll also have to cancel our discussion in February. If the college is open but the weather is iffy, I’ll post any notices of cancellation on this blog.
The Book Club for Poets is a program of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project, and the group meets on the campus of New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. The group is designed for practicing poets who want to look closely at the techniques of accomplished writers — and the group is also free and open to the public.
On November 18, the Book Club for Poets will discuss Sharon Olds’s Putlizer Prize-winning Stag’s Leap. Here are some poems that members of the club would like to discuss:
While He told Me (3)
Unspeakable (4)
Telling My Mother (10)
The Last Hour (13)
Last Look (14)
Stag’s Leap (16)
Known to be left (18)
Poems for the breasts (21)
Left-Wife Goose (34)
The Easel (38)
Once In a While I Gave Up (43)
To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now (44)
French Bra (45)
The Haircut (63)
Crazy (65)
On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult (71)
Left-Wife Bop (83)
What Left? (89)
**If you have any other favorites, please let me know!**
Directions to campus: http://www.nec.edu/about/visit/ (Danforth Library is located at 28 Bridge Street in Henniker)
Easiest parking: Park in the lot in front of the Simon Center, on Bridge Street. Enter the Simon Center, go up a few steps, and then walk to the back of the building. When you exit the back door (past the cafe), take the path to the left, which leads to Danforth Library.
If you need a map of campus, here’s link: http://www.nec.edu/campus-map/.
After we discuss Sharon Olds, our meeting after that will be on February 17. We’ll be trying something new for our February meeting. Instead of reading a book, we’ll spend our time doing writing exercises, some of them based on poems we’ve read in the Book Club. Should be fun!
I’ve been thinking for a while now that it would be nice for Your Own Small Craft to have a responsive design: that is, to have a design that will look good whether you’re visiting the blog on your desktop, your tablet, or your phone. So today, I’m unveiling our new look. Hope you like it!
Otherwise, Your Own Small Craft will remain the same, featuring poets discussed by the Book Club for Poets. Our next meeting will be August 19, 2014, and our book will be Cathedral of Nervous Horses. Please stay tuned for more information, as we may be meeting in a different room than usual.
The Book Club for Poets will be rescheduling its discussion of the poetry of Walter E. Butts for our summer meeting. I’ll post the date as soon as I can. In the meantime, here are some lines to whet your appetite:
Father baited the hooks
and cast his line in a long, curved arc,
slow and deliberate as any hawk
I’d seen riding thermals above the hills
on the far bank.
from “First Catch,” Walter E Butts, Cathedral of Nervous Horses (Hobblebush, 2013), p. 21.
The Book Club for Poets will discuss W.E. Butts’s Cathedral of Nervous Horses on April 15, 2014, in the Reflection Room, top floor of the Simon Center, New England College, Henniker, New Hampshire, 7–9 p.m. Here are the poems club members have requested we discuss:
“What We Did Wrong, 1956” (p. 8)
“The Last Hold” (p. 9)
“Martin’s Nursing Home” (p. 13)
“First Catch” (p. 21)
“Day Labor” (p. 26)
“The Lover” (p. 49)
“Movies in a Small Town, 1957” (p. 50)
“Innocence” (p. 53)
“Sunday Evening at the Stardust Café” (p. 58)
“Sunday Factory” (p. 72)
“The Calling” (p. 86)
“The Annual Richard Milhous Nixon Pig Roast & 4th of July Celebration” (p. 94)
“What To Say If the Birds Ask” (p. 98)
The Book Club for Poets is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!
In addition to its humanity — its giving voice to people that history and art have often overlooked — one of the great pleasures of Eavan Boland’s poetry is the way it layers time and moves through time. At our last meeting, the Book Club for Poets focused on poems from Against Love Poetry, several of which show Boland’s ability to merge past and present, historical and personal, the captured moment and the fleetingness of time.
In “Making Money,” for example, the poet devotes the opening five stanzas to a narrative describing how women living near the River Slang were employed to make money for the British government. Boland describes the process closely, from the “first ugly hour” of the women’s waking, to “the toil / of sifting and beating and settling and fraying / the weighed out fibres” of “rag” and “hemp.” The poem then shifts into what the women themselves cannot see — the consequences of British wealth in Ireland, compressed into a single stanza:
And they do not and they never will
see the small boundaries all this will buy
or the poisoned kingdom with its waterways
and splintered locks and the peacocks who will walk
this paper up and down in the windless gardens
of a history no one can stop happening now.
Nor the crimson and indigo features
of the prince who will stare out from
the surfaces they have made on
the ruin of a Europe
he cannot see from a surface
of a wealth he cannot keep
The poem then challenges its readers. If we can’t acknowledge that the past is “a crime we cannot admit and will not atone,” the women are still there “in the rainy autumn” as the “wagons of rags . . . arrive.” The women will always be “facing the paradox” of making money in their poverty, “learning to die of it.”
In “Thankëd be Fortune,” the poet moves from “constellations, / orderly uninterested and cold” to “the bookshelves just above” the sleeping narrator and her husband:
all through the hours of darkness,
men and women
wept, cursed, kept and broke faith
and killed themselves for love.
The poem then shifts from literary time into the present of the couple as they wake and hear their child waking — “listening to our child crying, as if to birdsong” — and the poem ends with an evocative, mysterious image: “the grass eking out / the last crooked hour of starlight.” Is the grass photosynthesizing starlight? What, to human eyes, seems like the timelessness of the constellations is translated into the more mortal time span of the grass.
Boland creates a similar moment in “The Pinhole Camera,” noting first our knowledge of the natural world and how time works here (“the reason for the red berries / darkening”). The speaker then describes the narratives that humans have created to explain phenomena like solar eclipses (“if this were legend / the king of light would turn his face away”) — before the poet captures the workings of the universe in an everyday object, a piece of paper below the pinhole camera:
But this is real —
how your page records
the alignment of planets,
their governance.
In other words,
the not-to-be-seen again
mystery of
a mutual influence.
Besides the pleasure we get in reading Boland’s poetry, we can also use these poems to remind ourselves to consider how time moves in our own poetry. Can we include more than one scale of time in our own poems? Can we explore when to be leisurely and when to move swiftly, compressing events?
Sources
Boland, Eavan. “How We Made a New Art on Old Ground.” New Collected Poems. 1st American ed. New York: Norton, 2008. 296–297.
— — —. “Making Money.” New Collected Poems. 1st American ed. New York: Norton, 2008. 292–293.
— — —. “The Pinhole Camera.” New Collected Poems. 1st American ed. New York: Norton, 2008. 280–281.
— — —. “Thankëd be Fortune.” New Collected Poems. 1st American ed. New York: Norton, 2008. 286.
Here are the poems we’ll be discussion from New and Collected Poems by Eavan Boland at the January 21, 2013, Book Club for Poets discussion:
“The War Horse,” 39
“On the Gift of The Birds of America by John James Audubon,” 168
“The Achill Woman,” 176
“Pomegranate,” 215
“Colony,” 245-57
Selections from Against Love Poetry, 279-307
You can bring copies of poems not in this book, and we’ll discuss them as we have time. If you want to suggest further poems, just let me know!
The discussion will take place from 7-9 p.m. in the New England Room of Danforth Library, New England College, Henniker, New Hampshire. All poets who would like to discuss craft are welcome!
your own small craft 