Saturday lecture review

Saturday morning’s beauty provided a wonderful backdrop to listen to Eleanor Wilner’s lecture about the conception of poems: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,
a poem must ride on its own melting….” (Frost)

Poems referenced included Robert Frost’s “The Woodpile” and Louise Glück’s “The Wild Iris.” I recall Denise Levertov mentioned, but I don’t recall the title of the work. I didn’t have access to the handouts that everyone seemed to be reading from.

I sat next to an open door of the Fellowship Hall and wrote a page full of notes, but as I reread them I realize my mind must have drifted a bit off topic. Maybe I was a bit distracted by the two young hipster students who brought their ceramic bowls full of crunchy cereal to the lecture and sat on the floor behind me and proceeded to consume it during the first portion of the lecture. Come on already! If you are to attend a morning lecture on poetry don’t bring crunchy granola feed and eat like cows, suck down some espresso and drag on cigarettes like true bohemians. What is wrong with the young people nowadays?

One point I noted with clarity is how the modernist poets, according to Wilner, fought the institution of formal meter of their predecessors and how the following generations of poets take for granted free verse and blank verse; poets of the 70s and 80s are blurry photocopied reproductions of the original modernist movement.