One Page Poetry Circle Archive

Welcome to the Virtual One Page Poetry Circle!

Date: March 19, 2024
Theme: Poetry and Rabbits
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 spring 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 1582 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.

If you can make the March 19th meeting, we ask that you bring a poem with you on the theme of Poetry and Rabbits, 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.

Poetry and rabbits? We can't help but think of the March Hare this month, but there is also a white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland and another (or perhaps the same one) in the Jefferson Airplane Song, "White Rabbit." Once you look for them, rabbits are everywhere, even leading to an article in the July 1932 issue The Atlantic, "The Plague of Rabbits in Poetry."

Abigail admired the way that William Cowper made a friend of one of his hares, another, not so much, as described in his "Epitaph on a Hare": "Though duly from my hand he took/His pittance every night,/He did it with a jealous look,/And, when he could, would bite."

AnnaLee read Wallace Stevens's "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" in which the poet uses a rabbit's life to reflect our feelings that when night falls we can relax from the perils of the day:

• To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
• Without that monument of cat,
• The cat forgotten on the moon;

• And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
• In which everything is meant for you
• And nothing need be explained;

Our topic for February was Poetry and Paint. We had an unusual number of duplicate poems and authors this month. Several participants thought of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" perhaps the most famous of ekphrastic poems; two found Sexton's "The Starry Night"; we had three poems by Kooser; and one poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and one by his sister, Christina Rossetti.

AnnaLee opened the circle with X. J. Kennedy's "Nude Descending a Staircase" inspired by Marcel Duchamp's infamous painting of the same name. Poetry and painting merge as the author describes a nude woman making her way down a flight of stairs. The mechanical and energetic aspects that Duchamp captured in paint, Kennedy conveys with insight and humor: "Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,/a gold of lemon, root and rind,/she sifts in sunlight down the stairs/with nothing on. Nor on her mind."

Ed brought "The Starry Night" by Anne Sexton, inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's beloved painting of the same name. The poem begins with an epigraph from a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: "That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars" after which the poem's speaker gazes up to describe a roiling night sky with moon, stars, and a cypress tree resembling a drowned woman. Using slant rhymes, full rhymes, enjambment, anaphora, and many other poetic devices, the poem ends in a wish for annihilation: "into that rushing beast of the night,/sucked up by that great dragon, to split/from my life with no flag,/no belly,/no cry."

Daria selected "Painting vs. Poetry" by poet Bill Knott. In plain language and a single sentence, the poem delivers a masterful twist to define what is painting and what is poetry. Poet Thomas Lux writes, "As dense as [Knott's] poems can be, they rarely defeat comprehensibility. Some are so lucid and straightforward, they are like a punch in the gut, or one's first great kiss."

• Painting is a person placed
• between the light and a
• canvas so that their shadow
• is cast on the canvas and
• then the person signs their
• name on it whereas poetry
• is the shadow writing its
• name upon the person.

Janina attended the poetry circle for the first time and contributed with insight to our discussion.

At the last minute Cate was unable to attend the February program, but sent us two selections, "Spring Landscape" and "In April." "These two poems by Ted Kooser seemed appropriate for the theme.... I like these as examples of his own painterly writing style." Gail read us "Spring Landscape": "Spring on the prairie, a sky reaching forever/in every direction, and here at my feet,/distilled from all that blue, a single drop/caught in the spoon of a leaf, a robin's egg."

Gail completed the circle with "Painted Turtle" by Gretchen Marquette from May Day, her first published book of poetry. To quote the author, "The book is a report from a dark time," a reference to her breakup of a lengthy affair. Laying psychic pain alongside the natural world, the poem addresses her once lover: "Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence./Why aren't I your wife?/You swerved around a turtle sunning itself./I wanted to go back. To hold the hot disc of it and place it in the grass."

Abigail enjoyed that Dante Gabriel Rossetti had inscribed the first four verses of his poem "The Blessed Damozel" on the frame of the painting of the same name. In the painting the damozel looks longingly (over a row of angels) at her lover on earth, while he, lying on the ground, gazes back at her. "The blessed damozel leaned out/From the gold bar of Heaven;/Her eyes were deeper than the depth/Of waters stilled at even."

Roger found "The Painter" by John Ashbery. Written in sestina, a complicated form, the poem asks the question if a work of art is art if it is not painted or written down: "He chose his wife for a new subject,/Making her vast, like ruined buildings,/As if, forgetting itself, the portrait/Had expressed itself without a brush."

June chose Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess." "This dramatic monologue is a brilliant—and wonderfully creepy—psychological analysis" (of the narrator rather than the Duchess, the subject of the painting described):

• Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
• Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
• Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
• Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
• As if alive...

Philip sent W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts," "a complex poem by a complex poet" with a link to the New York Times interactive discussion of both the poem and the painting—part of a fabulous series linked above.

Scott reported that while reading about Auden's poem, "I stumbled on William Carlos Williams's inferior poem on the same theme, 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.' Why did he bother? I was also directed to some other Breughel paintings that fit the first stanza, so my horizons were broadened."

Kai prophetically wrote, "I'm sure I won't be the only person to choose this poem. Written in 1938 while Auden was living in Brussels, the author was witnessing first-hand the violent events leading up to WWII, juxtaposed against the background of daily life in Belgium carrying on unaffected by the turmoil and death occurring in its neighboring countries. It is no wonder that this painting inspired Auden to write a poem about how human suffering can coexist casually and simultaneously alongside human indifference."

Jo found Christina Rossetti's "In an Artist's Studio": "One face looks out from all his canvases,/One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:/We found her hidden just behind those screens,/That mirror gave back all her loveliness." "Rossetti painted in a way that was soft and beautiful while showing how a muse was used at times as she filled the artist's view of what she was and not necessarily as everyone else saw her."

Susan was struck by the red in Jane Kenyon's "Small Early Valentine": "I have your note/with flights and phone numbers/for different days.../Dear one, I have made the bed/with red sheets." "Telling the absent lover that she has made the bed, reminds us of the bed that Odysseus built, her faithfulness, all the times he has left her with 'flights and phone numbers' ... on the same wind that carried Odysseus away from Penelope. But, most important, it is the red of the sheets that puts the flaming passion and burning desire in Kenyon's love letter."

Carol sent Don McLean's song "Vincent" and also Anne Sexton's "The Starry Night," both responses to Vincent Van Gogh's famous painting. "Sexton wrote this piece as a way of celebrating Van Gogh's painting and exploring the deeper emotions, good/evil that he was struggling with while painting it and which she may have felt while looking at it. Both Sexton and Van Gogh committed suicide": "The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars./Oh starry starry night! This is how/I want to die."

Larry wrote, "I have five books of poems relating to paintings. Browsing through them, I came upon this poem by one of my favorite poets": "A Box of Pastels" by Ted Kooser:

• I once held on my knees a simple wooden box
• in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.
• It was a set of pastels that had years before
• belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt,
• and all of the colors she'd used in her work
• lay open before me.

Whether a poem concerns rabbits or not, choose a poem that has meaning to you. If you can attend the Poetry Circle, bring a poem, with copies for others if possible. If you're unable to attend, email your selection to one of us by March 19, with a brief comment of why you chose it. Can't locate a poem you want to send? Check out Poetry Foundation or poets.org.

In the meantime, please blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Spring 2024 Schedule
March 19, Poetry and Rabbits
April 16, Poetry and Insects
May 21, Poetry and Growth

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.