One Page Poetry Circle Archive

Welcome to the One Page Poetry Circle!

Date: November 18, 2025
Theme: Occasional Poetry
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 18th 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 1762 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.

Our topic for November 18 is Occasional Poetry which is written for a specific occasion. Generally delivered orally, occasional poetry marks or celebrates a wedding, funeral, birthday, or significant historical event. Every poem can be considered an occasional poem if it reflects the mood of the poet when written, what Anne Brontë called "pillars of witness."

Lord Byron wrote "January 22nd, Missolonghi" on his 36th birthday, but it turned out to be his last poem as well:

• Seek out—less often sought than found—
• A Soldier's Grave, for thee the best;
• Then look around, and choose thy Ground,
•                And take thy rest.

Frank O'Hara wrote "The Day Lady Died" to mark Billie Holiday's death, mourning along with all who loved her. He recalls hearing her sing:

• and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
• leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
• while she whispered a song along the keyboard
• to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

We met on October 21 to discuss Poetry Rising and Falling.

Gail opened the circle with "Three Waves" by Merrill Christopherson published in the January 1940 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. The poem's three stanzas are written in rhyming couplets that don't repeat, but build, as does the ebb and flow of a series of waves, ultimately swallowing things up: "The Third, in a smoother way,/Came up where a sea form lay/And drew it out to the deep,/Where sea things and caravels sleep."

Karen followed with "Dover Beach," a lyric poem written in 1851 most likely on the poet's honeymoon. In a melancholy tone, Matthew Arnold addresses his new wife and speaks of humankind's loss of religious certainty brought forth by the dawn of modern science. He speaks of the ageless ebb and flow of the ocean and history and offers his love as something to count on. The poem seems to speak to the uncertainty of our own times:

• Ah love, let us be true
• To one another! For the world, which seems
• To lie before us like a land of dreams,
• So various, so beautiful, so new,
• Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
• Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
• And we are here as on a darkling plain
• Swept with confus'd alarms of struggle and flight,
• Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Abby found "The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings." by Donika Kelly from The Renunciations, in which the narrator begins with the razing of her internal house and ends with a rebuilding: "...Everything rushed past my small ears:/whir in the leaves, whir in the wing and the wood. About time/to get a hammer, I thought. About time to get a nail and saw." The Renunciations, the author's second book of verse, was a finalist for 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award Poetry.

Cate read us "A hand's lines" a prose poem by Julio Cortázar, an enigmatic tale: "From a letter thrown on the table, a line extracts itself and runs along the pinewood"... falling and rising through different scenarios it "takes refuge in the man's right hand palm, which in that instant starts to close on the butt of a handgun." The group discussed various possibilities of the poem's meaning. Its author was one of the founders of the Latin American Boom.

Gregory read us "A Late Walk" from Robert Frost's A Boy's Will (1915). The narrator enters a mowed field in autumn and feels the sadness we often feel as a fertile season, like a relationship, comes to a close. As the poem ends, there is hope for renewal:

• I end not far from my going forth
• By picking the faded blue
• Of the last remaining aster flower
• To carry again to you.

Daria could not attend but left her poem selection for us to read. In "Falling And Getting Back Up" poet Angel Wade writes of everyday struggles. The narrator refers to themself as "i" and uses a refrain: "Falling and getting back up": "I told my friend God take us through/tests to see if we pass/and to be real i feel i didnt even pass/one of his tests and if i did i didnt know i did."

Donald selected Tichborne's Elegy a tale of rising and falling written in 1586 by Chidiock Tichborne in the Tower before his execution at the age of 24. His crime was conspiring to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots: "My prime of youth is but a frost of cares;/My feast of joy is but a dish of pain;/My crop of corn is but a field of tares;/And all my good is but vain hope of gain." Strains of Tichborne's work found their way into Leonard Cohen's "Nevermind."

Diane picked "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" an ekphrastic poem by William Carlos Williams about a painting by Peter Bruegel the Elder in which the landscape and village people are going about their business while in a tiny corner of the painting Icarus is head down, feet up drowning. After the reading a discussion ensued on the points of view of Williams and Bruegel:

• unsignificantly
• off the coast
• there was

• a splash quite unnoticed
• this was
• Icarus drowning

AnnaLee closed the circle with a poem by the 2002 T. S. Eliot Prize-winning author Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald. In "A Short Story of Falling," the author looks to nature for the theme of Rising and Falling. The poem opens:

• It is the story of the falling rain
• to turn into a leaf and fall again

• it is the secret of a summer shower
• to steal the light and hide it in a flower

• and every flower a tiny tributary
• that from the ground flows green and momentary

June chose Elizabeth Bishop's "The Armadillo," which depicts fire balloons falling in celebration of a saint: "Last night another big one fell./It splattered like an egg of fire/against the cliff behind the house./The flame ran down. We saw the pair/of owls who nest there flying up/and up, their whirling black-and-white/strained bright pink underneath, until/they shrieked up out of sight." "What I love is all the surprises: the very idea of a fire balloon; the image of the egg; the blood as 'bright pink'; that shriek; and the armadillo showing up late—only to run off and be replaced by a rabbit (short-eared!)."

Carol read "Mother to Son" by Langston Hughes, writing, "I have a son I wish I could encourage more. This poem struck right to my target":

• I'se been a-climbin' on,
• And reachin' landin's,
• And turnin' corners,
• And sometimes goin' in the dark
• Where there ain't been no light.
• So boy, don't you turn back.

Roger found "Hark to the Shouting Wind" by Henry Timrod and enjoy the drama of the rising wind that accompanies the narrator's mood, "Shout on, thou pitiless Wind,/To the frightened and flying Rain!/I care not though I never see/A calm blue sky again."

Abigail loves Emily Brontë's "High Waving Heather" because of its energetic falling meter, "Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending,/Man's spirit away from its drear dongeon sending,/Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars."

Kai selected Gary Snyder's "For the Children": "The rising hills, the slopes,/of statistics/lie before us./the steep climb of everything, going up,/up, as we all/go down." "A simple poem with a message of hope for the future in spite of current challenges, obstacles, and inevitable decline."

If you can make the November 18th meeting, we ask that you bring an Occasional Poem, 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 was written for a specific occasion or mentions one, choose a poem that is meaningful to you. Then attend in person, or email it to one of us by November 18th, 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, blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Fall Schedule
November 18: Occasional Poetry
December 16: Poetry and The End

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.