PHYLLIS BECK KATZ, POET
  • HOME
  • About
  • Books
  • Poems
    • She Introduces Herself
    • In Between
    • Burning Bush
    • Ghost of Global Warming
    • Her Tulip Tree
    • Masks
  • News & Events
  • Reviews
  • Contact
  • New Blogs

Moving On

2/13/2017

Comments

 
​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.
 
 
 
Comments

    Phyllis Katz: My Blog.

    This Blog begins with a description of my development as a poet, and goes on to discuss my teaching with Donald Sheehan, long-time director of The Frost Place. In subsequent entries I describe the summer programs at The Frost Place and The Fine Arts Work Center and discuss the reading and writing of poems.

    Archives

    October 2020
    December 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    January 2018
    February 2017
    February 2016
    November 2015
    June 2015
    March 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014

Copyright 2018, Phyllis Beck Katz. All rights reserved.