April Meeting

We began this afternoon with Shakespeare’s sonnet 94: ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none’, which led to a long and lively discussion about the condemnation of those who fall from grace as opposed to those who were permanently flawed. We spent less time on another sonnet: Neil Powell’s ‘1989’. This delighted us without getting us into ethics. Jane Cooper’s ‘Rent’ took a while to open up but was much enjoyed. Wallace Stevens’s ‘On the Manner of Addressing Clouds’ provoked more in-depth discussion of the compact form, while Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’ provided majestic images to end our lively meeting.

March 2012

We met on the first day of Spring, officially, though it has snowed since! But our poems were not especially tied to the season. Colette Bryce’s ‘The Poetry Bug’, though only 20 lines long, gave us a good deal of material to discuss. The line ‘of love’s shucked husk’ was particularly remarked upon for its taxing assonsance and alliteration. John Burnside’s ‘Notes Towards and Ending’ challenged us differently, with its reference to ‘the Hundertwasser sky’; and we debated how to understand the grammatical use of ‘Magnificat’. We all knew what it referred to, but not how it referred in the poem. Hundertwasser was an Austrian artist who died in 2000. His style is fantastic (in the literal sense), showing some influence of Chagal, and of Van Gogh, at least to the uninitiated eye. His skies are vividly, rather than realistically coloured and full of wild movement. We also looked at one of Andrew Motion’s poems about 17thC East Anglia ‘An Ultimatum’ from the collection The Pleasure Steamers.

Being only 5 of us, it looked like being a short meeting, but was not, since one of our number contributed a poem of her own for discussion ‘Making Walls’, by Veronica Anne (unpublished) also gave us plenty to think about.

February meeting

For our February meeting we began with Gavin Ewart’s ‘Ending’ which was approved for its cleverly banal imaging of relationship breakdown. Emily Dickinson’s untitled poem beginning ‘After great pain a formal feeling comes’ was thought to accurately represent the stages and feelings of grief. Pat Barker’s quoting of Siegfried Sassoon’s bitterly ironic ‘The General’ continued the funereal feeling but this was offset by Christina Rossetti’s ‘Winter: My Secret’, which we finally thought had more to it than it pretends to have. We ended with one of the sonnets from Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella that begins ‘Good brother Philip’ and purports to relate a lover’s jealousy at the favours shown by his lady to her pet sparrow.

January Meeting

The first meeting of 2012 presented us with a more-than-usual diversity of topics. W.B Yeats’s short poem ‘The Scholars’ challenged what we do anyway, reminding us that the poems we read were once creations over which their creators worked and struggled to express vividly the emotions they wanted to convey. W,H. Auden’s famous ‘Funeral Blues’ prompted considerable discussion and was much appreciated for its implicit expression of love and grief. 2 very short poems by Fleur Adcock ‘Half-way Street Sidcup’ and ‘Loving Hitler’ changed to tone. The latter – a child’s inadvertently inappropriate way of seeking attention. Carol Rumen’s ‘Rules for Beginners’ is certainly not the work of a beginner in poetry as the rondeau redoublé evokes the banality of an uneducated woman’s life.

We shall see what February brings!

December already!

We lightened the December gloom at this meeting with some beautiful imagery and touching sentiments (but not sentimentality), but began with a local poem inspired by a couple of the monuments in the city. The poem was called ‘Statues in the Park’ and referred to the statues of Isaac Watts and Robert Andrews (one of our historic mayors) that stand in 2 of our most beautiful parks. If you live in Southampton then you will know that the city is famous for its impressive Victorian parks, but sometimes we don’t quite notice the statues.

Ted Hughes’ ‘Fingers’ taken from the Birthday Letters changed the tone, and the ‘Evening’ sequence from Milton’s Paradise Lost elevated it to new heights. ‘Island Man’, by Grace Nichols returned us to melancholy personal detail. Cecil Day Lewis’s ‘Walking Away’ was, we thought, beautifully expressed and controlled, while the first 20 lines of the 14^th century poem ‘Pearl’, by the Gawain-poet demonstrated both the beauty and the complexity of medieval poetry.
We will meet again on 5^th January 2012, so Merry Christmas!

November meeting

On an unseasonably mild day for November, it was hardly surprising that we had a selection of poems that included some more evocative of spring and summer than the deep autumn. Not a golden leaf, not a foggy morning, not so much as a witch or mushroom! The range of emotions was, however, considerable.

Thomas Hood’s ‘The Song of the Shirt’ was both poignant and angry at the sweat-shop conditions of the 19^th century. Wilfred Owen’s ‘From My Diary, July 1914, was poignant in its complacency, full of prettily expressed conventional images, unaware, of course, of the horrors shortly to be visited on the young swimmers and lovers. Similarly complacent and apparently self-satisfied was ‘Leisure’ by W.H. Davies. This famously popular poem divided opinion, but those who did not know the poet’s life-story were astonished at it, and it had to be admitted that the poem is incredibly well-known and loved.

In contrast to Davies couplets, ‘Daed-traa’ by the contemporary poet Jen Hadfield conformed to modern free verse, expressing the effect of a rock-pool on the poet. The images were strange, diverse, and sometimes arcane. The title seems to be Gaelic. We discussed the problem, as we saw it, of poets who intentionally distance their readers by including little-known things, and we compared Hadfield to T.S. Eliot. Ezra Pound might have been added.

As well as this meditation on poetic inspiration, we had the alternative view from Alice Walker, trying unsuccessfully to reject the poetic impulse in ‘I Said to Poetry’.

It was a richly varied selection of poems prompting so much discussion that we ran out of time.

December’s meeting will be on 1^st, free choice as usual.

6th October Meeting

Our selection of poems for the October meeting included Laurie Lee’s provocative re-reading of spring in ‘April Rise’; Donald Hall’s ‘Ox Cart Man’, which polarised opinion. Less controversial were ‘A New Song on the Birth of the Prince of Wales’ – a poem with an initially limited publication and originally printed in Preston; W.B. Yeast’s wonderful ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’; and an extract from Alexander Pope’s entertaining ‘An Epistle from Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot’. We also heard an amateur piece showing wit and inventiveness: ‘An Evening at the Mansion’ by the young poet Laura Mckenzie.

As usual we will have free choice for our poems for November.