Moving On
It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog. I have moved to Northampton and am slowly joining a new and wonderful community of writers. This week I will participate in a six week Tuesday evening poetry workshop held by Janet MacFadyen, poet and Managing Editor of Slate Roof Press. I am very much looking forward to this event which heavy snow and ice has postponed twice.
As the months lengthened since my husband’s death, I gradually began to touch my grief and write from it. You will find three new poems on my website that emerged from that deep well:
“Predators,” “Fall Out at Sabine Woods,” and “Meditation on a Boat of Arrows.” I have also been writing in response to the great tragedy of the endless thousands of refugees driven from their lands. Here is the poem:
Like a Murmuration of Starlings
for Helen MacDonald
Listen to the desperate tread
of thousands of feet fleeing
chaos to live in other lands
locked out, arrested, or sent back.
Listen as their numbers multiply
and their murmur builds and rises
just as a flock of starlings
flying together for safety
from their predators
in one great swirling cloud
a darkly murmuring planet
seems a living, pulsing
alien presence
till landing one by one
each is transformed again
to single birds, refugees,
whose needs are ours –
freedom from fear, food,
a place to safely sleep,
where murmurs slow and soften
like lightly falling rain.
©Phyllis Beck Katz
I remember at one workshop in Vermont a participant stated bluntly about a poem I had shared that he did not like political poems. No doubt he would have said it again about this poem. I was quite surprised at his reaction as my mind rapidly scanned poetry over the ages that has explored and continues to examine the political – I’m thinking of Sophocles, Aeschylus, of Vergil, of Dante, of Whitman, of Ginsburg, of Maxine Kumin, of Adrienne Rich, and of so many more poets who explored the political in their poetry. One of the most memorable books I have read is Carolyn Forche’s anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century of Witness, Norton, 1995, a collection of poems that range from the Armenian Genocide (1909-1918) to the struggle for democracy in China (1911-1991).
Yesterday, February, 12, 2017, the New York Times Book Review featured an article by Tim Parks, Roving Eye with the following subtitle: “Is the literary world becoming more political? He argues that “it is the enthusiasm, the militancy that is disturbing, not the goal” and concludes with these words: “Let us by all means defend our freedom of speech when and if it is threatened; but let us never confuse this engagement with our inspiration as writers or our inclination as readers. Above all, let us not get off on it.” I would argue that there will always be excessively melodramatic political poems but at the same time where will always be remarkably well-crafted and moving works, literature written for and with the passion that comes from the heart, no “getting off on it” involved.
It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog. I have moved to Northampton and am slowly joining a new and wonderful community of writers. This week I will participate in a six week Tuesday evening poetry workshop held by Janet MacFadyen, poet and Managing Editor of Slate Roof Press. I am very much looking forward to this event which heavy snow and ice has postponed twice.
As the months lengthened since my husband’s death, I gradually began to touch my grief and write from it. You will find three new poems on my website that emerged from that deep well:
“Predators,” “Fall Out at Sabine Woods,” and “Meditation on a Boat of Arrows.” I have also been writing in response to the great tragedy of the endless thousands of refugees driven from their lands. Here is the poem:
Like a Murmuration of Starlings
for Helen MacDonald
Listen to the desperate tread
of thousands of feet fleeing
chaos to live in other lands
locked out, arrested, or sent back.
Listen as their numbers multiply
and their murmur builds and rises
just as a flock of starlings
flying together for safety
from their predators
in one great swirling cloud
a darkly murmuring planet
seems a living, pulsing
alien presence
till landing one by one
each is transformed again
to single birds, refugees,
whose needs are ours –
freedom from fear, food,
a place to safely sleep,
where murmurs slow and soften
like lightly falling rain.
©Phyllis Beck Katz
I remember at one workshop in Vermont a participant stated bluntly about a poem I had shared that he did not like political poems. No doubt he would have said it again about this poem. I was quite surprised at his reaction as my mind rapidly scanned poetry over the ages that has explored and continues to examine the political – I’m thinking of Sophocles, Aeschylus, of Vergil, of Dante, of Whitman, of Ginsburg, of Maxine Kumin, of Adrienne Rich, and of so many more poets who explored the political in their poetry. One of the most memorable books I have read is Carolyn Forche’s anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century of Witness, Norton, 1995, a collection of poems that range from the Armenian Genocide (1909-1918) to the struggle for democracy in China (1911-1991).
Yesterday, February, 12, 2017, the New York Times Book Review featured an article by Tim Parks, Roving Eye with the following subtitle: “Is the literary world becoming more political? He argues that “it is the enthusiasm, the militancy that is disturbing, not the goal” and concludes with these words: “Let us by all means defend our freedom of speech when and if it is threatened; but let us never confuse this engagement with our inspiration as writers or our inclination as readers. Above all, let us not get off on it.” I would argue that there will always be excessively melodramatic political poems but at the same time where will always be remarkably well-crafted and moving works, literature written for and with the passion that comes from the heart, no “getting off on it” involved.