Tag Archives: Georgia Poetry Society

The Marvellous Marshes of Glynn (Well Ok, the Nice Enough Streets of Historic Downtown Macon)

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Last Saturday was the Quarterly Meeting of GPS, held down in Macon at the Sidney Lanier Cottage.  I had never been to Macon before, though I had driven through once, and though I didn’t get a chance to explore the town much, the homes surrounding the Cottage were old-timey and pretty.

What was surprising to me about the Cottage, though, was how austerely appointed it was–I think was expecting a house with tons of antiques and personal possessions he’d owned in his life, but the only thing of real interest was a wedding dress that his wife Mary had worn (and I think she had an 18 inch waist!), and a copy of a letter he had written to his mother that you could read which was sitting out on a secretary.

I didn’t know much about Sidney Lanier prior to visiting–other than a lake that was named for him.  But apparently he was quite the Renaissance man–besides being a poet, he had served in the Confederacy, was something of a mathematician, worked as a lawyer, was a self-taught flautist, taught at Johns Hopkins, and spent seven years playing the flute in a symphony.

The day started with a Sidney Lanier impersonator talking about his language.  And I’m sorry, but the only kind of “impersonator” I can bear watching is someone like Will Ferrell playing George Bush.  I just find impersonators unwatchable, so it was torture sitting there and listening to the Sidney Lanier character.  I was very interested in finding out about Lanier’s life, and it was quite extraordinary (and the Cottage is on the National Historic Register both for his music and his poetry).  If it had just been a lecture about his life, I would have enjoyed it so much more.

Maybe I just didn’t think the guy was very good–not that I have any experience of Sidney Lanier in which to compare the performance, obviously.  But what really annoyed me was that except for a little quotation from some famous Cantata that Lanier wrote, there was no recitation of his poetry.  Really?  Really???  We’re there for a day of poetry, and we get next to none of it in a performance “by” Sidney Lanier?  That seems a bit counter-intuitive to me.

And later in the afternoon, after Alice Friman’s excellent (but way too soft-spoken) reading (and I was sitting in the front–so I feel really bad for those sitting towards the back), we hear more poetry, but instead of Sidney Lanier’s poems (I would have liked to hear his famous  “The Marshes of Glynn,” for instance, which several of the Members’ Sidney Lanier-inspired poems referred to in the morning), we hear work from Andrew Hudgins’ 1988 book, After the Lost War, a book long series of persona poems based on Lanier’s life.  I enjoyed hearing them, certainly, because Ron Self is a wonderful reader (as well as writer), but come on.  I think we should have heard Lanier’s actual words.  But maybe that’s just me being a curmudgeon and a purist.

It was, of course, good to see all my friends; I never get tired of that.

Other than that, not much going on with me in poetry, except I’m still working periodically on the Sibley Sisters.  I thought I might have a full book of them by now (and maybe if I had written about them with more regularity last year, I’d be further along, but then everyone who knows me knows 2010 was The Year from Hell, and writing poems was hardly a priority), but I’ll get there eventually.

Sometimes, things just take longer than you’d like.

Poetry Overload

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Yesterday was the quarterly meeting of the Georgia Poetry Society, and I think it was one of the better ones.  For one thing, the programming ran really smoothly, and we we didn’t get crazy behind as we have in the past.  For another, there was just a really good selection of people who presented.

Since it was hosted by Kennesaw’s Foreign Language department, Robert Simon (the VP, and a faculty member in that dept.) had gotten two of his colleagues to present on poetry–one was an Italian scholar, and the other was Chinese.  So it cool to hear poems in a different language, and then to hear them translated.  What was especially interesting to me was hearing the musicality (which you know from my last post is something I’m particularly passionate about) of both the Chinese and Italian poems–the attention that the poets paid to sound was deliberate.  I enjoyed it.

Then Dan Veach from Poetry Atlanta and The Atlanta Review gave a really great presentation of his own poetry, Chinese poetry, and Iraqi poetry.  He was really engaging and funny–I mean, one of his poems was a paean to his ratty old underwear (which reminded me of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Underwear” poem… maybe just because it’s about undies).  And he had a funny Power Point to go with his poems that had illustrations and Chinese brush and ink paintings that he’d made.

And what was best of all was that he knows his poems to speak them–every last one from his someday-to-be-released book Elephant Water he spoke from memory.  Now he made a gag about this book being 30 years in the making, so I suppose, if you’ve had these poems lying around for 30 years more or less, you might actually have memorized them just by virtue of their longevity.

But I just think he’s one of those people who just memorizes poetry, which to me is amazing and impossible.  (I mean, I’ve memorized Pound’s “In a Station of a Metro,” but who hasn’t?)  I asked him about that when he was selling the book of Iraqi poetry he edited, Flowers of Flame, and he said that memorizing his poems is very good for his writing.  He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t stick around because I felt bad not buying the book (although, had Elephant Water been available, I would have bought that).

Lunch, of course, was a disaster (as always), although I did get my $$$ for winning a few of the 2009 GPS contests.  (Which I won’t complain about, except that the money I won will have to go to paying the boarding/ vaccinating fees for the little dog I found on Thursday, instead of something more useful.  But that’s another story.)

The afternoon program had GPS poets Robert Lynn reading from his new book, Midnight Verse, and Clela Reed reading from her new book, Bloodline.  So, I’m going to be a little petty here and say that Bob confused Petrarchan sonnets with Shakespearian (not only did he misidentify the form when he and I were talking about sonnets before his presentation, he actually misidentified it in his book!) and that irritated me.  Not like I’m the Sonnet Police, but I don’t know.  It seems to me, if you’re going to use a form, be sure which one it is–Petrarchan sonnets are quite different from Shakespearian sonnets in rhyme scheme and purpose/ organization.  Or, if you don’t know which one it is, just be safe and say generic ol’ “sonnet.”  (Ok, ok, maybe I am being a little police-y.)  But other than my bout of poetry form OCD, his poems were ok.

Clela’s poems, as usual, were very good.  I actually would have liked to have bought her new book, and might have felt more free to with winning that money, but because it’s all going to the boarding  fees, I didn’t.  Maybe at the April meeting I’ll see if she has any copies with her…

And then the meeting was over, and the Board went over some things, and I went home.

I really enjoyed yesterday.  Sometimes GPS meetings can seem excruciatingly long, but yesterday the pacing was just right.

And certainly, all of the kudos for my poems were, of course, well-deserved, but nice just the same to hear them. 😉

She on Honey-dew Hath Fed

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Because of the hard freeze after the snow last night, there is a good bit of ice on the roads, and Georgia Tech, in its infinite wisdom (and, as a great morale booster after the obnoxious furloughs last month), decided to delay opening campus until noon.

That was very nice, but I was planning on staying home to work today anyway because my office, with its one 100% busted heater and its other 87% busted heater, has been like Superman’s frozen Fortress of Solitude this past week.  (I suppose, to be more poetic, I might have compared it to Coleridge’s “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” but my office is neither a pleasure-dome, nor sunny, though the caves of ice bit is real enough.  Anyway, the week before school, my office is pretty solitudinous.)  Then, I just happened to go back to the GT website, and lo and behold, they’ve closed the campus for the day.  So, ta-da!  We have a genuine snow day.

Despite a rejection I just received, I’m feeling especially inspired to write today.  Chris just said of the snow on the ivy, “It looks like tiny little white flowers, doesn’t it?”  And it does.  When I lived in Nebraska, an inch of snow would be de rigueur, and people would practically walk around in shorts.   Here, an inch of snow closes down the city, and I find myself looking out the window in my sunroom at the “tiny little white flowers” and the sun through the kudzu-covered pines and feeling a lightness in my heart that I haven’t felt in a while–and a desire to write about the wind, and the black birds thronging the trees in the distance…

Speaking of “Kubla Khan,” I just read the last few lines (which I love, love, love) out to Chris and commented that they (meaning the Romantics) really knew how to use sound.  And he said something that was really insightful (don’t be so shocked, Bob!)–“That’s because they didn’t have the white noise that we do.”  And I think that’s absolutely right.  I don’t think poets use sound to its best effect any more–the musicality of poems just doesn’t seem to be there.  And I am as guilty as my other poet peers.

I’m not saying we need to go back to rhyme, although I’ve been noticing a trend lately where rhyme is becoming retro-cool, but where is the music in poems these days?  Why aren’t poems as sonorous as they used to be?  Why have alliteration and consonance and repetition fallen from favor?  (Assonance is perhaps the last hold-out of sound–I know, for instance, with the DYPS, Blake is always looking for ways to repeat vowel sounds in his poems and ours, and I appreciate it.)

I think, in some ways, white noise really has dulled our ears.  We are inundated with the sounds of “progress” and technology, and so maybe we don’t want to have to hear anything else.  As a culture, maybe we’re all a bit ADD.

Anyway, the approach to poetry has shifted.  Because it’s become a reading activity, as opposed to a hearing activity, writers place less emphasis on how a poem sounds, and more on how it looks on the page.  The only time we ever hear poetry out loud is at a “reading”–a formal space where the Poet (TM) delivers a set of her poems to a passive audience, and who then offers her books for sale, so the poems might be read silently, in the privacy of the audience member’s own home.  It’s not really a communal activity any more…  Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic for the pre-industrial days (you know, like 200+years ago, when none of us were around) when families and friends sat in their drawing rooms or libraries and read poetry to each other.  (Although, perhaps that is an idealized image, brought on by watching too many Jane Austen movies.)

Anyway, I blame academic poets for this shift.  Since poetry on the page is more important than poetry out loud, poetic musicality is passe.  I think my fellow academic poets (and me, to an extent) are afraid to use some of those literary/ sound devices for fear of being thought quaint or, Goddess forbid, Longfellow- or Poe-esque.  (Eep!  Can’t have that.  Our collective response to that thought–it must be said–is “Nevermore.”)

About the only place where I consistently hear poetry that pays attention to the way the words sound is at the quarterly Georgia Poetry Society meetings–and these aren’t academic poets by a long shot.  Now, many, many of those poems sound bad–they use rhyme, meter, and repetition criminally.   I won’t lie.  But for the ones that are well done, the attention to sound really elevates the work in a way that I always find surprising–which tells you how infrequently I hear poems that are written to please the ears.  Those are the poems you want to hear out loud, could listen to more of.

We academic poets could learn from that, but we fear, we fear, we fear.