Poetry puts off many people. They associate it with required classes in school. It’s like your mother telling you to eat your broccoli. Well, in truth, a lot of poetry is a slog. But there is much poetry that is clever, engaging, witty and brief. The purpose of this SDG is to pursue that kind of poetry, both early and modern. No slogging here. The poems are selected for meaning, but are not dreary in language or content. I have found that this kind of poetry stays with the reader because of its cleverness, deft and unexpected uses of language and brevity.
I coordinated an SDG with the same title and much of the same poetry seven years ago. I was asked if I wish to repeat it. I do. In my mind, the poems merit repeated reading and discussion. Most of the poems are short enough to allow several poets and a number of poems to be included in a single session. I also added a session on limericks with the idea that each SDG member will bring a limerick or two which are clever and have a moral. Our discussions in the previous SDG were excellent and I would expect the same here.
Each SDG session will consist of brief briographical information about the poet(s) of the day, readings aloud of some of the poems of the day and discussion.
1. John Donne: Woman’s Constancy, The Sun Rising,
The Canonization, Song, A Valedictory Forbidding
Mourning
2. John Donne: Satire III, Sonnet XIV, Good Friday 1613
Riding Westward, A Hymn to God the Father,
Devotion XVII
3. John Dryden: MacFlecknoe, To the Memory of Mr.
Oldham
Thomas Wyatt: They Flee From Me
4. Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock, Sound
and Sense
Shakespeare: Sonnet 116
5. Edward Arlington Robinson: Miniver Cheever,
Richard Cory, Mr. Flood’s Party, The House on
the Hill
6. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Felix Randal, God’s
Grandeur, Pied Beauty, The Windhover
7. Emily Dickinson: Because I Could Not Stop for
Death, Bring Me the Sunset in a Cup, Too Happy
Time
Edgar Lee Masters: Judge Somers, Julie Miller
Elizabeth Bishop, One Art
8. Rudyard Kipling: Gunga Din, Recessional, The
White Man’s Burden, Mandalay, The Return,
The Conundrum of the Workshop, Shillin’ a Day
9. Dorothy Parker: A Dream Lies Dead, A Certain Lady
The Little Old Lady in Lavender Silk
Ogden Nash: The Rhinoceros, The Seven Spiritual Ages
of Mrs Marmaduke, A Word to Husbands.
The Purist, How Truth Will Out
Shel Silverstein: Cloony the Clown, The Giving Tree,
A Boy Named Sue
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Sometime During Eternity,
People Getting Divorced, Retired Ballerina
10. Dylan Thomas: Do Not Go Gently Into That Good
Night, And Death Shall Have No Dominion,
The Hand That Signed the Paper, Refusal
To Mourn the Death By Fire of a Child in London
Delmore Schwartz: In the Naked Bed in Plato’s
Cave, Dogs are Shakesepearan &
Children Are Strangers
11. Limerick and Song Day:
Everyone Brings His/Her Favorite Limerick
Song Lyrics: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell
12. T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Mr.
Apollinax
Charles Bukowski, Bluebird
13. Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken, Stopping by
the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Fire and Ice,
Mending Wall
Stephen Vincent Benet: The Ballad of William Sycamore
William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow, This Is Just to Say
14. W.B. Yeats: The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Dolls,
The Magi, When You Are Old, No Second Troy, Crazy Jane Talks
With the Bishop, Sailing to Byzantium
Gwendolyn Brooks: We Real Cool