ABIGAIL BURNHAM BLOOM : Poetry Circle

One Page Poetry Circle Archive

abigail burnham bloom's one page poetry circle

Welcome to the Virtual One Page Poetry Circle!

Date: Tuesday, September 14, 2021 Theme: Wild Flowers

Find a poem! Send a poem by email!

We're back for the fourteenth 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 1304 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 Wild Flowers, with a comment on why you chose them. We'll share the poems with you through our blog and by email.

We have been reading about the recent movement to conserve and appreciate native plants. Poets have long honored wild flowers in their writing. With such a rich subject, it is difficult to make a selection. Abigail discovered "Wildflowers" by Reginald Gibbons which doesn't name the flowers but rather the narrator's associations with them:

Coleridge carefully wrote down a whole page
of them, all beginning with the letter b.
Guidebooks preserve our knowledge
of their hues and shapes, their breeding.
Many poems have made delicate word-chimes—
like wind-chimes not for wind but for the breath of man—
out of their lovely names.
At the edge of the prairie in a cabin
when thunder comes closer to thump the roof hard
a few of them—in a corner, brittle in a dry jar
where a woman's thoughtful hand left them to fade—
seem to blow the announcing winds outside
as the rain begins to fall on all their supple kin
of all colors, under a sky of one color, or none.

AnnaLee chose Vachel Lindsay's "The Dandelion," which refers to this invader from Europe as royalty:

O dandelion, rich and haughty,
King of village flowers!
Each day is coronation time,
You have no humble hours.
I like to see you bring a troop
To beat the blue-grass spears,
To scorn the lawn-mower that would be
Like fate's triumphant shears.
Your yellow heads are cut away,
It seems your reign is o'er.
By noon you raise a sea of stars
More golden than before.

Whether a poem speaks of wild flowers, flowers, or the wild in any way, email it to one of us by September 14th, 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.

We enjoyed this article in the New York Times on reading the same poem every day for a month: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/magazine/poetry-repetition.html

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

Fall 2021 Schedule
September 14: Wild Flowers
October 12: Shadows
November 9: Hypocrisy
December 14: Mementos

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com

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