One Page Poetry Circle Archive

Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle!

Date: May 20, 2025
Theme: Poetry and Light
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 seventeenth 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 1712 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.

Poets, like painters, celebrate light. Mark Strand, in his poem "The Coming of Light," equates love with light:

• Even this late it happens:
• the coming of love, the coming of light.
• You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
• stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
• sending up warm bouquets of air.
• Even this late the bones of the body shine
• and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.

The first lines of Donald Justice's "There Is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings" remind us that light has the power to tie everything together:

• There is a gold light in certain old paintings
• That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
• It is like happiness, when we are happy.
• It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light,

We met on April 15 to discuss Poetry and Birds.

Gail opened the circle with "The Eagle" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The succinct six-line poem captures the majesty and power of the eagle, describing the bird as though a god in his proximity to the sun that reigns both high and low (or as Icarus, who dares to fly so close to the sun). The group noted the power of simple words to illuminate, the use of alliteration in the first line, and the many meanings of the word "falls" in the last line:

• He clasps the crag with crooked hands:
• Close to the sun in lonely lands,
• Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

• The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
• He watches from his mountain walls,
• And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Erin, brought Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers," in which a bird provides hope to so many yet asks nothing in return: "'Hope" is the thing with feathers -/That perches in the soul -/And sings the tune without the words -/And never stops - at all -" We wondered why the word "Gale" in the second stanza was capitalized.

Marilyn discovered "The Kingdom of Birds" by Joan Colby: "The feathered god observes how clouds/Pass over in a grand parade/Of custom. A goldfinch flourishes/Its humoresque and now the day breaks/Staccato with the songs of birds in spring." The group appreciated the lushness of the language throughout.

Cate selected "On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep," a sonnet by Robert Frost, the only poet to received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. Among other things, the poem captures the balance in nature that the bird has developed to enable its survival as in the first eight lines:

• A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
• Sang half way through its little inborn tune.
• Partly because it sang but once all night
• And that from no especial bush's height;
• Partly because it sang ventriloquist
• And had the inspiration to desist
• Almost before the prick of hostile ears,
• It ventured less in peril than appears.

Daria selected "Round Shaped Birds" a free verse poem by Sarah Shahzad who called her verse a cute poem: "As their light weighted body,/Carry them, as feathers in the air,/No predator will harm such cutie,/While they sing their beauty"

Howard amused us with "The Common Cormorant," attributed to Christopher Isherwood, and considered a nonsense poem. The lines create playful images using poetic conventions and preposterous language. Though the poem had been around for a while it appeared under Isherwood's name in 1982 in his nonsense-animals collection People One Ought to Know: "The common cormorant (or shag)/Lays eggs inside a paper bag,/The reason you will see no doubt,/Is to keep the lightning out."

Judy admired the spirit in "A Marriage" by R .S. Thomas in which a husband and wife loved birds: "We met/under a shower/of bird-notes./Fifty years passed,/love's moment/in a world in/servitude to time./She was young;/I kissed with my eyes/closed and opened/them on her wrinkles." The poem ends on its message that death cannot kill love.

Diane selected the second Robert Frost sonnet of the evening, "The Oven Bird," in which the poet explores coming to terms with the passage of time: "There is a singer everyone has heard,/Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,/Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again./He says that leaves are old and that for flowers/Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten." We learned that the poem gets its name from a bird that builds nests resembling old-fashioned ovens.

Pam read "Poems About Birds" by Denise Rodgers she found in an online collection of children's poems. The easy and predictable rhyme scheme amused us: "Now the nest is empty/And I see it day by day,/As one by one the birds grew large/And simply flew away."

AnnaLee brought the circle around with lines from Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," a sequence poem in eight parts, in which birds evoke freedom, beauty, happiness, mortality, and the opposite: "Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail/Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;/Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;/And, in the isolation of the sky,/At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make/Ambiguous undulations as they sink,/Downward to darkness, on extended wings."

Abigail enjoyed thinking about how birds return in the warm weather and seem both harbingers of better weather and to bring it with them. Christina Rossetti describes this phenomenon in "A Bird Song": "It's a year almost that I have not seen her:/Oh, last summer green things were greener,/Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer."

Roger enjoyed Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" which describes the funeral of these two birds, the phoenix and the turtledove, to which some birds are invited and others are not: "Here the anthem doth commence:/Love and constancy is dead;/Phoenix and the Turtle fled/In a mutual flame from hence."

June chose Diane Seuss's "Romantic Poet" which "begins with a scholar's insistence, 'You would not have loved him,' and lists the reasons why, including 'He lied,/and rarely washed his hair. Wiped his ass/with leaves or with his hand,' and after a two-line space, the response: 'But the nightingale, I said.'"

Kai had difficulty choosing a poem: "'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' I have already used for a previous OPPC, ditto that damned albatross, pretty sure someone inevitably will choose Poe's 'Raven' which leaves me with the 4th poem that popped into my mind when I read the theme for April by Emily Dickinson:"'Hope' is the thing with feathers."

Carol also chose Emily Dickinson's poem (as had Kai and Erin in the circle), writing, "I'm not sure this poem is about birds at all! Seems to me, her hope is given the attribute of a bird, but it is NOT a bird! I found the same with Keats ('Ode to a Nightingale') and Shelley ('To a Skylark')—birds are used as symbols of human emotions, thoughts, spiritual 'flight.'"

Mindy sent "Happiness" by Molly Drake: "Happiness is like a bird with twenty wings/Try to catch him as he flies." Drake sets her poems to music and Mindy finds, "her poem-songs delicate, melancholy, poignant and haunting."

Larry sent Waxwings, his favorite bird poem noting, "It's by the other New England 'RF' poet, Robert Francis": "Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings/chat on a February berry bush/in sun, and I am one."

If you can make the May 20th meeting, we ask that you bring a poem with you on the theme of Poetry and Light, with copies for others if you can.

If you're unable to attend, send us the poem you've selected with a comment on why you chose it. We'll share the poems with you in person, by email, and through our blog.

Whether a poem mentions light or the absence of light, choose a poem that has meaning to you. Can't locate a poem to share? Try Poetry Foundation or poets.org.

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

Spring 2025 Schedule
May 20: Poetry and Light

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

The One Page Poetry Circle is sponsored by the New York Public Library and is open to all. St. Agnes Branch Library is handicap accessible.