Monday, April 30, 2012

The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Nine (Whitman)


When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer


Every year, The Montgomery Literary Arts Council hosts a Walt Whitman Birthday Reading in Conroe, Texas. This year, on 5/10/12 at 3 PM at LSC-Montgomery, Bruce Noll will present, Pure Grass, a dramatic program composed of excerpts from Whitman's Leaves of Grass. At 7:00 PM, a group of twenty poets, including yours truly, will gather at The Corner Pub to each read one poem of our own and one of Whitman's. The ever affable and always festive Dave Parsons will emcee.

This week I will memorize the "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer," the poem I intend to read on the tenth. I was recently reminded how much I love this poem when I heard Lois P. Jones interview Neil DeGrasse Tyson for Poets Cafe. It's a great interview. I highly recommend taking the time to listen to it.

Please feel free to leave comments about the poems even if you are not memorizing them. It's a huge inspiration to me to hear what you think! Here's last week's posting, if you want to leave comments on  William Shakespeare's "Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds ": The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Eight. Also, if you're new to the blog, please check out the first Mnemosyne Post. And feel free to suggest poems! I always learn the most from the poems I would have never thought to select myself.


Have a great week, everyone. May our time among the stanzas be filled with joy!


When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.



Monday, April 23, 2012

The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Eight (Shakespeare)





AKA The Bard
The Chandos Portrait


As was so cleverly stated this morning by my friend Dave Hoing, "Unfortunately, the only present Shakespeare got for his 52nd birthday was a death certificate." He'd be 448 years old today. With what he accomplished in those 52 years, you'd think he did live to be 448. Now, in celebration of his birth and in mourning for his death, I'd like to memorize one of my favorite Shakespeare poems, "Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds."


As always, please feel free to leave comments about the poems or your experience of memorizing them. It's a huge inspiration to me to hear what you think! Here is last week's posting, if you want to leave comments on Kay Ryan's "Green Behind the Ears": The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Seven. Also, if you're new to the blog, please check out the first Mnemosyne Post to find out what this project is all about. And feel free to suggest poems! I always learn the most from the poems I would have never thought to select myself.


Have a great week, everyone. May our time between the stanzas be filled with joy!


Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds


Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.




Friday, April 20, 2012

Richard Jeffrey Newman and the Power of Voice in Poetry






I would love for you to join me at Tiferet Talk this Sunday, 4/22/12, at 7 pm EST, for a dynamic conversation about poetry, translation, and teaching with Richard Jeffrey Newman. Newman is the author of the poetry collection The Silence Of Men; the translator of two masterpieces of 13th century Iranian poetry, Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan and Selec­tions from Saadi’s Bus­tan, and translator of The Teller of Tales, a portion of the Shahnameh, the Persian national epic. He is also co-translator, with Professor John Moyne, of A Bird in the Gar­den of Angels, a selec­tion of work by Rumi.

As well, Newman serves as Per­sian Arts Festival’s Lit­er­ary Arts Direc­tor, co-curates the monthly Shab-e She’r (Night of Persian Poetry) at the Bowery Poetry Club, sits on the advi­sory boards of The Trans­la­tion Project and Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val, is a speaker with the New York Council for the Humanities, and is an Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College.

Please enjoy the following interview and reading from the Jackson Heights Poetry Festival. Many thanks to Nancy Wait for finding it.






Monday, April 16, 2012

The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Seven (Ryan)



Photo by Alan Dep

This week, we have the witty, whimsical, and profound poet, Sarah Sarai, and her witty, whimsical, and profound blog, My 3,000 Loving Arms, to thank for our selection, "Green Behind the Ears," by former US Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan. Here is a wonderful interview with Ryan, in case you'd like to know more about her: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/video/173

As ever, please keep making comments in the sections under the postings. I love hearing what you think about the poems. Here is last week's posting, if you want to leave comments on the gorgeous snippet by Rumi: The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Six. Also, if you're new to the blog, please check out the first Mnemosyne Post to find out what this project is all about. 

Here ya go. Enjoy!

Green Behind the Ears

I was still slightly
fuzzy in shady spots
and the tenderest lime.
It was lovely, as I
look back, but not
at the time. For it is
hard to be green and
take your turn as flesh.
So much freshness
to unlearn.

_________
Kay Ryan. From The Niagara River (Grove Press), collected in The Best of It (Grove Press).



Monday, April 9, 2012

The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Six (Rumi)

Photo by Josep Renalias

It's the 9th of April, which means that anyone participating in NoPoWriMo is on their 9th poem of the month. In honor of your simultaneous exhaustion and exhilaration, and my own, I've chosen an incredibly beautiful and delightfully short poem for this week, an untitled snippet from the Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. This ecstatic  celebration of creativity will wake us back up to all that is alive in poetry, and it will give us the second wind we need to continue to write through the month.

Please keep making comments in the sections under the postings. I enjoy hearing your experiences of the poems as much as I enjoy memorizing them. I'm keeping my own comments about the poems restricted to these sections, as well, so that we can approach the new poems with clean, fresh, beginner's minds each week. 

Here is last week's posting, if you want to leave comments about Rich's "What Kind of Times Are These ": The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Five. Also, if you're new to the blog, you might want to look at the first Mnemosyne Post to find out what this project is all about. 

Here ya go. Enjoy!

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

*Translated by Coleman Barks.


Monday, April 2, 2012

The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Five (Rich)







I'm sure it will come as no surprise that I've chosen to honor Adrienne Rich with my selection of the fifth poem of The Mnemosyne Weekly. In the wake of Rich's death last week, an outpouring of poems, blog posts, articles, and newscasts have graced the cyber-waves with memories of Rich and her powerful words. If you would like to contribute, Jewish Voice for Peace has started a site for reminiscences.

Please keep making comments in the sections under the postings. I enjoy hearing your experiences of the poems as much as I enjoy memorizing them. I'm keeping my own comments about the poems restricted to these sections, as well, so that we can approach the new poems with clean, fresh, beginner's minds each week. One thing I would love to hear from you this week is if or how any of the poems we've memorized have found their way into the poems you've been writing lately. 

Here is last week's posting, if you want to leave comments about Oliver's "How Would You Live Then?": The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Four. As well, if you're new to the blog, you might want to look at the first Mnemosyne Post to find out what this project is all about. 

Our poem for the week comes from Rich's collection Dark Fields of the Republic and alludes to several lines from the Bertolt Brecht poem "For Those Born Later": "What kind of times are these/ When it's almost a crime to talk about trees/ Because it means keeping still about so many evil deeds?"  As well, we are fortunate enough to have access to a video recording of Rich reading this poem: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/video/27


What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.