Poetry
Poetry Breakfast ~ at home
As we are unable to meet together for our Poetry Breakfasts, I invite you to join us for a virtual session instead. So, with the help of Tim, Ali and Hilary, I will share ideas for poems, on a given theme and we invite you to put the coffee on, heat up a croissant, and settle down for a good read.
To quote Elizabeth Alexander: ‘Poetry is what you find/ in the dirt in the corner,//overhear on the bus, God/ in the details, the only way// to get from here to there.’
I suppose this resonates so strongly with me just now, because poetry is proving, for so many of us, to be such an important part of getting from here to there ….
Sending you all much love!
Anna x
Words by Edward Thomas (there is also an interesting Guardian article here that you might like to read)
To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence by James Elroy Flecker
What the Chairman Told Tom by Basil Bunting
At the Lake House by Jon Loomis
How to Capture a Poem by Angela Topping
Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander
The Right Words Geraldine Connolly
Sea’s Answer by Sheenagh Pugh
The Poem of the Future by J R Solonche
The Round by Stanley Koonitz
In My Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas
Rereading Frost by Linda Pastan
iPoem by George Bilgere
Please add your ideas for poems into the comments box below. If you can’t find online versions to share, just tell us where you found your poem so we can look them up. Feel free to comment on any of the poems, or just simply add your own suggestions.
Call out to poets! We’d love to hear your thoughts on writing and reading poetry – and please feel free to share poems you may have written about writing.
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Hi Everyone,
Anna’s list shows just how much poets have written about poetry and being a poet.
I’d like to point you to Anna Akhmatova who published a collection called The Secrets of the Craft. Some of them are in her Selected Poems translated by Richard McKane published by Bloodaxe (a Christmas present bought for me from the Poetry Pharmacy!)
They are all wonderful but my particular favourites are ‘The Poet’ and ‘Last Poem’. And here’s ‘On Poetry’.
It is the husks of sleepless nights,
it is the congealed wax of crooked candles,
it is the first morning chime
of a hundred white bells…
It is the warm windowsill
under the Ukranian moon,
it is bees, it is clover,
it is dust and gloom and intense heat.
Thank you Ali, and thank you too for the shout out to the Poetry Pharmacy – anyone wanting poetry books can contact Deborah Alma, aka the Emergency Poet, via her gorgeous new poetry bookshop and event space https://www.poetrypharmacy.co.uk
I am not very good at sending links but I enjoyed Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60 recently ‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore’.
For a bit of fun there is also Roger McGough’s On Having a First Book of Poetry Published (The day the world ended.) from Collected Poems which I can’t find online.
I have only just seen the list above. I shall tuck in later!
Hi Hilary – thank you for these two very different suggestions!
Thank you Anna for setting up this blog. It is very uplifting in these unsettling times. Two poems that I like very much are The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes and Digging by Seamus Heaney.
Hi Pam, It is really my pleasure to do this – and I love that people are joining in. Yes, I like those two poems, too – especially Digging: I heard Seamus Heaney recite it at The Ways with Words festival several years ago! Never to be forgotten. Anna x
Hi Anna ,
I think I’ve just sent this comment to an old address but to belt up my braces here it is again.
Here’s a link to a poem I filmed in anti-social distancing in Wellington about writing about poetry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxntCVh4t3A
Hope it comes across OK with a balance of size to quality ; may take a few seconds to load.
Best Wishes from around the Wrekin
Steve Harrison
Thank you Steve, that’s marvellous! I’ll email you a list of themes going up over the next few weeks just in case you feel so moved! Our Poet-in Residence! Hurrah! Lots of love, Anna x
Oooh look! So many poems about poetry, and so many more still! No-one’s even mentioned the Billy Collins one – “Poetry” -that Hilary reminded me of the other day (thanks again, Hilary).
Here’s one by Robin Vaughan-Williams from a pamphlet called The Manager. I can’t find it in full online – I have it in 13 Poems of Revenge (Candlestick Press) – so at the risk of using up a bit of space, I’ve typed it out. Thus:
MANAGER #10.
FIRED!
The manager looks at me.
He says it’s time I went.
They won’t be needing me any more.
I don’t understand.
I want to know why.
But he says some things are better left unsaid.
I tell him I don’t want to go.
I’ve put so much into this job already.
I’ve been ill, my nose has been running constantly.
I never asked for any sympathy.
Didn’t pull a sickie.
Doesn’t he realise how vulnerable I am?
I’m a sensitive person.
“I’m a poet,” I say.
“You can’t fire me,
I’ll put you in a poem.”
“Not a very well known poet,” he says
and fires me anyway.
Some day I will have my revenge.
Hah! Fabulous Tim, thank you – one for all (& aspiring) poets there! And re Billy Collins – did you mean this one?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46712/introduction-to-poetry
If so, how did I miss it?! By the way, in answer to a question from you, when I’m coming up with lists of poems for Poetry Breakfast, yes! I turn to my iPhone Notes. Whenever I read a pome that seems to fit a particular theme (however tenuously, and regardless of whether the theme has been used yet or not, I do the equivalent of scribbling in a notebook – like this: “URBAN BEAUTY August Morning, Upper Broadway; The City Crocuses; by Alicia Ostriker, Waiting for the Light. Brave & Startling Truth, Brain Pickings, YF Another Westminster Bridge, Alice Oswald, Woods, Etc. Travelling with Ashes, Short Days, Long Shadows, Sheena Pugh, p19” It’s very helpful when the time comes!
I wonder what other people do? Lots of love, Anna x
http://stryder22204.blogspot.com/2005/09/velocity-by-billy-collins.html
I think this was the one I really liked which we talked about some time ago Tim
Another great poem from Billy Collins – thank you Hilary (and Tim!)
I found this poem recently – the final poem of ‘Treelines’ (A collection of poems published by Lautus Press) and thought it was worth sharing. I like the idea that, in planting a tree, you’re not just off-setting your carbon footprint in its lifetime, but, eventually, giving someone, somewhere in the future, pages of poetry…
The Poet Tree – Michael Shepherd
Tenderly
with its soft leaves
the tree shaded the poet
as he wrote
and as its leaves fell
and the year turned
the tree wished
that it might be reborn
as a book of poems
and so it was
Oh Jude, gorgeous! I love all the Lautus Press anthologies and you can buy them here: http://www.lautuspress.co.uk Thank you for adding this poem, love Anna x
That is soooo good, Anna, that “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins. Why wouldn’t it be? But no, not the one I meant, it’s called “Poetry”, it’s in the collection Nine Horses and it starts:
Call it a field where the animals
who were forgotten by the Ark
come to graze under the evening clouds.
To find it online stick the first phrase in as well as “Poetry by Billy Collins” which after all may not narrow the search down quite enough…
Not a poem but a comment from Mary Jean Chan that resonated with me;
“More than ever, I turn to poetry for its propensity towards truth, its tensile strength, and its insistence that language can, and must be, the bridge that connects us all during these difficult times.”
Thank you Helen – so true!
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse
One time it was a woman’s face, or worse –
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing comes but readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs;
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish
W B Yeats
Can someone explain the last two lines?