One Page Poetry Circle Archive

Welcome to the Virtual One Page Poetry Circle!

Date: September 13, 2022
Theme: The End of Summer

Find a poem! Send a poem by email!

We're back for the fifteenth fall 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 1386 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

This fall we will continue to gather virtually, by email. We ask you to send us the poems you have selected on the subject of Poetry and The End of Summer, with a comment on why you chose them. We'll share the poems with you through our blog blog and by email.

Summer began with its long days and promises of bounty, but what seemed endless comes to a rapid close. We associate fall, no matter how old we are, with the return to school, the turning of the leaves, and a new seriousness of intent. Edna St. Vincent Millay captures the mood in her poem, "The End of Summer":

• When poppies in the garden bleed,
• And coreopsis goes to seed,
• And pansies, blossoming past their prime,
• Grow small and smaller all the time,
• When on the mown field, shrunk and dry,
• Brown dock and purple thistle lie,
• And smoke from forest fires at noon
• Can make the sun appear the moon,
• When apple seeds, all white before,
• Begin to darken in the core,
• I know that summer, scarcely here,
• Is gone until another year.

In this excerpt from Becca Klaver's "Fall Parties," a Poem-a-Day selection from November 2013, the author bids farewell to summer parties, which she had hoped would save her from boredom:

• I used to think I loved summer parties
• until they got this year so sweaty and sad,

• the whole world away at the shore,
• sunk in sweet and salt.

• Goodbye, summer:
• you were supposed to save us

• from spring but everyone just slumped
• into you, sad sacks

• pulling the shade down on an afternoon
• of a few too many rounds.

• Well, I won’t have another.
• I’ll have fall. The fall of parties

Whether a poem speaks of the end of summer, or the start of fall, or of anything you associate with this time of year, email it to one of us by September 13th, with a brief comment on 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.

Fall 2022 Schedule
September 13: The End of Summer
October 11: Drought and Flooding
November 8: Blank Verse
December 13: Winter Solstice

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom(at)gmail(dot)com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee(at)kaeserwilson(dot)com