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Check out our discussion starter below to see what our poetry group will be reflecting on this month!
Sharing Poets for March 2021
Jim Dine’s “Bessemer” is a heart, but it’s not a Valentine. His ruminations about this classic form (about life itself?) take the place of what he had added and subtracted to this image. The same is true of poetry. The reason poems are not narratives is because something has been done to the words that make them not about a factual report.
You might say a poem is not fiction either. It is a playing with the ideas that words bring to mind. Sometimes a narrative is formed, but that’s just the beginning. There is more beneath the surface of the poem.
I came across the work of Eavan Boland in The New Yorker. Her poem “The Lost Art of Letter Writing” speaks about its subject…and so much more…so much more that is lost in our life, but which sometimes, through remembering, is still there. You can read the poem and hear her recitation of it at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/the-lost-art-of-letter-writing
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See the document attached below for the rest of our monthly discussion starter. And make sure to send your name and email to Fr. Tom Holahan, CSP at tholahan@paulist.org to be included in the discussion group if you haven't already done so!