Four of us enjoyed an evening of armchair travel “Around the world”, while other regular members of the group had taken the theme too literally and had gone off around the world on holidays.
In Ken Gambles’ ‘Sunflowers’, inspired by a holiday in the Vendée, their drooping heads make him think of dispirited slaves.
In his romantic sonnet ‘Greece’, Oscar Wilde relates the excitement of setting foot in that country. He knew classical Greek language and literature well, and travelled to Greece as an undergraduate.
Pam Currie read two poems inspired by her holidays, ‘Egypt’ and ‘The Everglades’. She also read her ‘Robot wars’, expressing the hope that wars around the world could be fought between robot armies.
War was indeed a recurrent secondary theme. Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Big steamers’ was used in the Great War. The steamers ply the world to supply Britain at the heart of empire. Written for children, the poem has been set to music by Elgar among others, and in a folk style by Pete Bellamy.
John Updike’s ‘Munich’ refers to events leading to and during WW2 in that city.
‘Midnight in India’ by Alun Lewis evokes the soldier far from his home and wife. The Welsh poet died in action in Burma in WW2.
Aharon Shabtai is an Israeli Jewish poet whose poem ‘War’ expresses his anger at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Vin Garbutt’s ‘Darwen to Dili’ is powerful song lyric about the sufferings of East Timor under invasion and then civil war, with brilliant wordplay.
The 13-year-old Syrian schoolgirl refugee Amineh Abou Kerech’s ‘Lament for Syria’ expresses her loss in beautiful and amazingly sophisticated images. This was also read in our House and Home session.
After visiting Paris, an 11-year-old British schoolgirl (‘Sophie’) sent a poem about the Eiffel Tower to President Emmanuel Macron and he responded in creditable verse. A translation from the French, retaining the original’s scheme of rhyme and metre, can be read here.
Another poetically-inclined head of state; Mao Zedong’s ‘Mountain Liupan’ is carved on a column near a section of the Great Wall of China. It refers to the communists’ war against the nationalists. I made fun of the English translation I read at the meeting, but I’ve since found a less silly one on the internet.
More translations; Kobayashi Issa (a pen-name meaning ‘cup of tea’) wrote over 20,000 haiku and lots can be found on the Poetry Atlas website. The three read at the meeting ( Hey cuckoo/Get a move on bat/O snail) were funny. Would they be, in the original Japanese? Yes, according to a Japanese friend who says “We learned about him at school. I found his poems are quite funny compared to other haiku poets. I like the perspective of little creatures.”
In an extract from August Kleinzhaler’s ‘Murph and me’, the rough-and-tough fast-car-loving Murph surprises his friend by quoting from Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’, a long modernist poem inspired by Brooklyn Bridge.
Pascale Petit’s charming ‘Extinction rebellion’ imagines a time when nature has taken the place of our electronic devices and “everyone will hold leaves… to hear them retweet birdsong”.
Elizabeth Bishop ‘Roosters’ contains classical and biblical allusions as well as suggestions of feminist protest and criticisms of militarism. It consists of three-line stanzas, the lines in each stanza ending in perfect or slant rhymes. The stresses generally increase through each stanza from 2 to 4.
Further reading: In Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Sestina of the Tramp-Royal’, the narrator is a common man who has enjoyed roaming around the world. This reminds me that Elizabeth Bishop also used this unusual poetic form. The atmosphere of her ‘Sestina’ however is very domestic and contained rather than roaming.
Colm Toibin in the essay ‘On Elizabeth Bishop’ says that she borrowed the formal scheme for ‘Roosters’ from the Metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw’s ‘Wishes to his (supposed) mistress’. The rhythmic format can apparently be described as a rhopalic tercet.
Ah, a rhopalic tercet. Of course. ( never heard of one ! ) Despite the lack of numbers, the range of poems was excellent, once again finely summed up by Chris.