My early-ish swim in the community pool continues, as I find an alternative to my local pool that is closed for annual maintenance. Apart from two Dutch visitors who looked shocked to be at the pool so early in the morning and equally shocked to find someone else there, I have swum alone. Which is good. Not because I am misanthropic, but because the pool is too small to do reasonable lengths and the only way to get value for money for your effort is to swim in circles. When you are swimming in rapid circles in a smallish pool, there really isn’t room for anyone else, not that that would stop me, as avoiding people gives an added interest to the almost terminal boredom of straight-line swimming.
And, I’m saving money! My original plan was to go and swim in the municipal pool in Gavà, where you have to buy a pre-paid card for a certain number of swims. This plan may yet come into operation as I am watching the temperature and the weather: I don’t swim in the cold or the rain. I may be a dedicated swimmer but I am not fanatical!
Yesterday evening was another meeting of the Barcelona Poetry Group. This time we had two Americans, two Indians, a Catalan and a Welshman and a dog.
I had a relatively clear run through from Castelldefels to get to the meeting and, arriving early I was told about the medical issues that have recently been affecting the dog. Today a further visit to the vet and hopefully some good news about how to proceed with her treatment. She is now 11 years old, but looks younger and is still spritely. We live in hope!
The next meeting will be in October (we have a meeting a month, though a few years ago they were weekly) and I am responsible for choosing the topic and selecting a couple of poems for reading and discussion.
“Dreams and Nightmares” was the theme for last night’s meeting and the discussion was wide ranging, thoughtful and thought making! I realise that this group is the only opportunity I have for an in-depth consideration of literary topics, and I truly value it.
The poems we read were “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes – a fairly famous poem and one surely known by generations of American school children – and “Scarecrow on Fire” by another American poet called Dean Young.
The title of Young’s poem was immediately arresting and put me in mind of Dalí’s painting “The Burning Giraffe” which haunted my as a kid after seeing it in (I think) The Story of Art for the first time, and Hughes’ poem has Surrealistic touches throughout. It may also be significant that the image of the scarecrow is often used as a metaphor for Man, “an empty coat upon a stick” in Yeats phrase, a worthless thing unless “soul clap its hands and sing” to give meaning to existence.
There is a great deal of negative language in this poem: disappearing, alleyways, small, graveyard, black angel, goodbye, last, winter, nothingness, stitching, vomiting, nightmare, illusion, dirt, wound, but there is also the assertion of “Hell, even now I love life” and the last words of the poem “This is my soul, freed.” But there are no exclamation marks after either statement and that omission lessens the force of the positive. And his freed soul is linked to water boiling, to evaporation, to vapour, just like his line where he says that “Maybe poems are made of breath” an exhalation into emptiness, just as earlier in the poem he asserted that, “We all feel / suspended over a drop into nothingness.”
This is a dense poem, rich in images and associations from a poet about whom I want to know more!
A key part of the evening is a short meditation on the theme, accompanied by a randomly chosen essential oil. This is a nod to Californian Hippydom and was instituted by the founder of the group as a defiant reminder of her home state, and is continued because, well, it’s a nice idea.
After the meditation there is a period allocated for writing. This can be one the theme or not as the individual desires, and the end results of the writing can be shared or not again as the individual decides.
I wrote on the theme and came up with the following.
The Dream
It is unnoticed ease,
a facile roll of incidents,
a wave of disparates,
that link and coalesce to make
a comfort carapace
that frames fragile reality.
A passageway located
Nowhere and yet Everywhere.
A known unknown.
A shell, a wall, a hill –
and all, yes all,
within a moment’s touch;
though sense is different.
Dimensions wax and wane
to morning’s death.
Something to work on!
And now to start thinking about the theme for the next poetry meeting. Among my first thoughts were “Courage” “Fear” and “Food” – gives great scope for the poems that we can talk about. I will think on!
Barcelona Poetry Group can be reached via this website:
https://www.meetup.com/es-ES/barcelona-english-speaking-poetry-group/?_cookie-check=XfrmrxLlMnboHNW7
