Hi everyone!   We have a guest host for today’s Poetics, Andrew Wilson.  ~Grace

Hello dVerse Poets!

Andrew here, pleased to be guesting on Poetics.

Why do we write poetry? People may look to poetry for the balm of nature celebrated, for reassurance at the turn of the seasons described, for inspiration by the shared experience of love or for solace at times of loss – light or dark side – poets weigh in.

Whilst researching poems for this Poetics post, I came across the following statement – ‘Plato wanted to banish poets from his Republic because they can make lies seem like truth. Shelley thought poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and Auden insisted that “poetry makes nothing happen.’ Whichever of these very different assertions you agree or disagree with most, we live not in ‘interesting times’ but in positively dangerous times – Stormy Weather could describe the results of Climate Change, the rise of Authoritarianism and the imperilling of Democracy or the threat of War in a way we once thought dead, at least in the “First” world – and so today I would like you to channel your inner (or outer) activist into poetry. These are serious matters but don’t forget that satire and humour are also tools available to the poet to use in a poet’s way and that personal poems can be metaphors for the wider world as in the Etta James song – Stormy Weather.

Don’t know why
There’s no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather
Since my man and I ain’t together
Keeps raining all of the time

Oh, yeah
Life is bad
Gloom and misery everywhere
Stormy weather, stormy weather
And I just can get my poor self together
Oh, I’m weary all of the time
The time, so weary all of the time

When he went away
The blues walked in and met me
Oh, yeah if he stays away
Old rocking chair’s gonna get me
All I do is pray
The Lord will let me
Walk in the sun once more

Oh, I can’t go on, can’t go on, can’t go on
Everything I have is gone
Stormy weather, stormy weather
Since my man and I, me and my daddy ain’t together
Keeps raining all of the time
Oh, oh, keeps raining all of the time
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah raining all of the time
Stormy stormy
Stormy weather
Yeah

Source:LyricFind   Video

Songwriters: Harold Arlen / Ted Koehler

Stormy Weather lyrics © S.A. Music, Warner Chappell Music, Inc

Poetics Night at dVerse Poets Pub is about subject and content rather than poetic form, howevever, during my recent A-Z Challenge, in which I exemplified 26 poetic forms, I came across a Spanish form called the Glosa or glose, in which the poem begins with a four line quote from the work of another poet’s poem and one or more lines from this glosser or gloasador, may be used as a refrain. Optionally,I would like your poem to begin in this way although you are free to follow the glosser with any poetic form of your choosing so I am choosing poems to inspire you but feel free to reach for any poem of your choosing. If you want to follow the full Glosa form – you can find it here.

I have loved this poem since schooldays – long before Climate Change was recognised and yet it describes the taut, terror that many people are increasingly experiencing and the guarded relief if they come safely out the other side of an extreme weather event.

Wind

By Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up –
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Mary McCray has collected poems about dictatorship and this one, written, in the run-up to the Second World War, is particularly apposite now when Authoritarian leaders are once more on the march around the world… There are several other poems of Benét’s well worth a read on Mary’s site.

Litany for Dictatorships (1936)

by Stephen Vincent Benét

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon’s teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.

This poem is From 9 Original Poems on Climate Change – commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts – 2015 https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/events/climate-change-poetry-anthology.pdf

It speaks of the global inequity of the effects of global warming – largely generated by the “First” World and largely felt by the “Third” World or Global South. It is only now that severe weather events are being felt in the rich countries that people are starting to listen more seriously to the truth.

Polar Heart
Simon Barraclough

Opposites attract.
Perhaps.
In fact: in fact.

But the whole wide world
bulges between us:
overfed, underfed,
and will not be denied.

We know, we’ve tried.

My love expands for six dark months
while yours retracts
to rally again
as mine melts away for half a year.

I know we have to stay so far apart,
I know the climate needs our hopeless pas de deux
but sometimes at the solstice
I yell “Screw this!”
into the polar gale
and another ice shelf fails

The Industrial Complex/War Machine tells us that the wars being fought around the world are part of some geo-political rationale but perhaps that is just marketing for arms sales. Claudia Rankine in her very contemporary Lyric Essay form alludes to this thought through the form of a very mundane, personal encounter…

From Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: “I don’t usually talk to strangers…”

By CLAUDIA RANKINE

I don’t usually talk to strangers, but it is four o’clock and I can’t get a cab. I need a cab because I have packages, but it’s four o’clock and all the cabs are off duty. They are making a shift change. At the bus stop I say, It’s hard to get a cab now. The woman standing next to me glances over without turning her head. She faces the street where cab after cab drives by with its light off. She says, as if to anyone, It’s hard to live now. I don’t respond. Hers is an Operation Iraqi Freedom answer. The war is on and the Department of Homeland Security has decided we have an elevated national-threat level, a code-orange alert. I could say something, but my packages are getting heavier by the minute and besides, what is there to say since rhetorically it’s not about our oil under their sand but about freeing Iraqis from Iraqis and Osama is Saddam and Saddam is “that man who tried to kill my father” and the weapons of mass destruction are, well, invisible and Afghanistan is Iraq and Iraq is Syria and we see ourselves only through our own eyes and the British, but not the French, and Germany won’t and Turkey won’t join us but the coalition is inside Baghdad where the future is the threat the Americans feel they can escape though there is no escaping the Americans because war, this war, is about peace: “The war in Iraq is really about peace. Trying to make the world more peaceful. This victory in Iraq, when it happens, will make the world more peaceful.”

Claudia Rankine, “I don’t normally talk to strangers… (p. 113)” from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Copyright © 2004 by Claudia Rankine.

Source:  The Guardian Newspaper

Here are some other poems you might like to reference – two more Ted Hughes poems – a wordy contemplation of conflict – Crow Goes Hunting and a meditation on the futility of M.A.D. as a concept – A Woman Unconscious.

W.B.Yeats creates a nightmare prophecy of coming times in The Second Coming,  and perhaps the enigmatic approach of Pablo Neruda in his The Book of Questions (try the group of questions XXX)

To summarise, today I would like you to find an issue in this troubled world that you are passionate or even angry about and, like activists painting their banners in advance of a march, produce a poem that emblazons your views in a poem to advance the cause. Optionally, you can begin your poem with a glose, or quotation from another poem. To go back to my opening question, why do we write poetry – amongst all the other reasons, such as celebrating nature, love and inspiration, when we take up poetic arms in any cause, we are trusting that “the pen is mightier than the sword!”

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:

• • Write a poem in response to the challenge.
  • Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr. Linky below
    and remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy.
  • You will find links to other poets and more will join so please do check
    back later in order to read their poems.
  • Read and comment on other poets’ work– we all come here to have our poems read.
  • Drop in here to say hello. We are friendly.
  • Enjoy the poetry trail.

Bio of Guest Host:

Andrew Wilson still works part-time as a factory manager in Bradford, West Yorkshire and when not working, writes for pleasure. He has been a signwriter, painter, architectural draughtsman as well as a restauranteur and other food management roles. Working in many roles is a source of inspiration and as an early adopter of reinvention every few years, his philosophy is use it or lose it. Andrew is indebted to his AWA Writing Group and it’s facilitator – Deborah Bayer for their nurture and encouragement.