Yes, there will be a Zoom poetry reading and discussion this Saturday. Click on the link below at the appointed time to join.
Poetry Reading and Discussion, Sat. June 22, 2:00 PM PDT
To Join By Phone: (669) 444-9171
Meeting ID: 829 2744 1440
Passcode: 019532
Do you know Percy Shelley’s great essay A Defence of Poetry? Shelley wrote the broadest, most impactful vision of poetry and the poet in our language. Here is an excerpt for you:
“Poetry…may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination’: and poetry is connate [born at the same time] with the origin of man… [and] poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true… Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.”
By Shelley’s definition, I believe the prose by Edward Abbey at the link below is great modern poetry. I didn’t know the work of Edward Abbey before moving to Nevada. His books include The Monkeywrench Gang, The Brave Cowboy (made into an outsider’s movie starring Kirk Douglas), and the incomparable memoir Desert Solitaire, from which the excerpt below is taken. The book is available free via Kindle on Amazon. It starts as he takes a job in the 1960s as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah. What he publishes in 1968 about the land, the parks, and our industrial society puts a wheel of change in motion that animates us today. Try to read the unique prose at the link below. It takes him a page or two to get started, but the writing is strong and perceptive.
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks.
This was about the same time Allen Ginsberg started talking publicly about ‘100 years for the Planet.’ Visionaries such as Abbey, Robinson Jeffers, and others have been writing for almost a hundred years now on the direction society might take as the natural world diminishes, crowded out by the out-of-control hubris of humanity. The progress which Abbey feared has only moved forward, even as movements for ecology and climate stability arise. For our own writing this week, how do you think our exile from the natural world affects us? What does it mean to the ways we feel and experience life? I’m not asking for judgements of what’s good or bad. I’m hoping for poets to express what it feels like along this dimension of modern experience. What kind of adjectives can portray modern experience of life crowded in among mankind today? Frustrated? Angry? Grievance-prone? Tension-pitched? What do you see? How do you feel? Please try to find specific images that illustrate our modern experience, remember, not in ideas but in things. Don’t forget to include vibrant sense experiences, so we feel what you feel, see, hear, touch, and smell the modern life. What vision for our future do you believe in? Write it up and call it a poem. Bring the poem to the reading. Or just bring whatever you’re reading or writing!
Hope to see you at Poetry!
Our weekly workshop events are sponsored by Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thank you!
Bruce Isaacson
Poetry Promise, Inc.
a 501 (c)(3) Corporation
Phone: (702) 205-7100
Bruce@PoetryPromise.org