|
 The very enjoyable program
featured HAGSA member and poet, Anatole Lubovich, in readings of his own
poetry. Fellow members of the Sacramento Poetry Center workshop--Do
Gentry, and Bonnie and Walter Rolen--accompanied him for two of his
pieces.
He began with a reading of
his sonnets, including "The Sense of Substance," villanelles, including
"Camera Obscura," and several of his short poems in other formats. He
recited "The Periodical Room," for which he won a first prize in a
Berkeley poetry competition. These readings continued for most of the
program.
After an intermission, he
continued his readings, beginning with his "Ballad of Forked Tongue," in
which he skewered religion, sexism, courts, war and selective
indignation. This one involved his own drumming and responsive readings
from his assistants. He also read "The Right Side of the Dash,"
"Pandemonium," "True Colors" and "Hush, My Little Angel." His poems show
a consistent concern with humanism, reason (or the lack thereof),
victims of injustice, especially Native Americans, and the crimes of
governments.
Report prepared by
Wayne Luney, Recorder
couplet: Two
consecutive lines of poetry that usually rhyme and have the same meter.
A heroic couplet is a couplet written in rhymed iambic pentameter.
quatrain: A
four-line stanza. Quatrains are the most common stanzaic form in the
English language; they can have various meters and rhyme schemes.
sestet: A stanza
consisting of exactly six lines.
sonnet: A fixed
form of lyric poetry that consists of fourteen lines, usually written in
iambic pentameter. There are two basic types of sonnets, the Italian and
the English. The Italian sonnet, also known as the Petrarchan sonnet, is
divided into an octave, which typically rhymes abbaabba, and a sestet,
which may have varying rhyme schemes. Common rhyme patterns in the
sestet are cdecde, cdcdcd, and cdccdc. Very often the octave presents a
situation, attitude, or problem that the sestet comments upon or
resolves, as in John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."
The English sonnet, also known as the Shakespearean sonnet, is organized
into three quatrains and a couplet, which typically rhyme abab cdcd efef
gg. This rhyme scheme is more suited to English poetry because English
has fewer rhyming words than Italian. English sonnets, because of their
four-part organization, also have more flexibility with respect to where
thematic breaks can occur. Frequently, however, the most pronounced
break or turn comes with the concluding couplet, as in Shakespeare's
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
tercet: A
three-line stanza.
villanelle: A type
of fixed form poetry consisting of nineteen lines of any length divided
into six stanzas: five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The first and
third lines of the initial tercet rhyme; these rhymes are repeated in
each subsequent tercet (aba) and in the final two lines of the quatrain
(abaa). Line 1 appears in its entirety as lines 6, 12 and 18, while line
3 reappears as lines 9, 15 and 19. Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into
that good night" is a villanelle.
 Click
below to return to the list of 2005 Meetings or to go to the previous or
next meeting report.
|
