Baker’s previous book “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization” placed the Nazis and the Allies on the same moral level.

Baker seems to think that there was no difference between antisemitism in the US and in Nazi Germany.

His idea that because both the Nazis and the Allies bombed cities they were both equally guilty of crimes against humanity.

From this point of view there was no difference who the final victor was.

I’d love to hear what Mr. Baker has to say about the passing of John Updike. Mr. Baker’s “U and I,” (the “U” stands for Updike) is one of my favorite ruminations on the nature of artistic influence. One of the idiosyncrasies of the book is that Mr. Baker admits to having read only a small percentage of Updike’s work. I suppose there is a little consolation in the knowledge that Updike’s library is no longer growing.

My comment on your comments on “free verse” — I’d like to share my poem: “Freed Verse” — (LOVING this show!!!)

Freed Verse

This is not a poem, and it is not for you:
you don’t like poetry
haven’t read much of mine
and when you do — you don’t get it.

If there is meter and I make it rhyme
preferably funny, witty, benign
or something to do with Mars and Venus
or subjects erotic to tickle your whatever,

you might take a look but you would not buy the book.

So I sit here drenched in June
rain disposing of the moon,
on the porch with my tea
alone again, and happily

writing poetry in which you
do not matter. Not at all.

Kate O’Kula, North Kingstown, RI

Because writing poetry, like singing or child-rearing, is something we all mistakenly think we can do, I’ve always viewed poetry as something of a bell curve. Rhyme-and-meter forms seem primarily responsible for both the worst doggerel and my all-time favorites, with shapeless free verse populating the lukewarm middle.

To be sure, free verse is safe from the hackneyed “love/dove/above” syndrome, but a poem that employs no rules will almost always lack the magic of, say, a well-crafted terza rima.

A cockroach
can live 10 days
without its head–
but the good times
will be over.

(Thought I’d share one of mine with this delightful writer and you and your listeners)

So, what defines poetry if there is no rhyme? Or rhythm? Form, short lines, beautiful word patterns that yield some thought that cannot be expressed in prose? While I love those who can rhyme and rhythm, my own poetic expression has become a kind of self-psychiatric analysis wherein I work through my angst in verse (that usually doesn’t rhyme). Can’t do it in prose, but still struggle with the things that make a poem a poem.

Love this discussion…..

Hope your guess you get a chuckle out of this

Tea Baggers

When tea baggers spew there crazy stuff
They take a breath and huff and puff

They cry in despair about health care
Yet when asked what they use they reply “Medi-care”

They scream about taxes and what is spent
But forget about the surplus Bush was leant

There memories seem of that a knat
Seeming never to just look back

Of the reasons why and what got use here
Instead they wish to play on fear

Of the dumb, the fools and to trust the ones who got use here.
Ha, the life of a tea bagger as if they cared.

Come to Boston City Hall on Thursday, Sept 10 at 6:30 pm to meet the Poet Laureate Sam Cornish.

I intend to read this. Is it poetry?

Brookline–>Allston

interval of clouds–
stretching to the gray wall
the filigree trees

This granite mansion, we own it!
162 Ivy Street.
On its massive façade the year of
construction is grooved in granite in the forgotten font.
1852.
The lawn balanced with a noble beech tree rolls down to the west. Poets slowly pass the ornate gates and take seats in the front of verandah.
A limo from Logan brings a VIP guest from London. The president of the World Haiku League. He steps onto the wide driveway and the whole thing gets a jet lagging feel. A kimono-clad young woman from Showa School takes him into the guest and meditation hall. A collection of Byzantine glass adorns its mahogany shelves.
I hear one guest saying to her escort, “I may hide from you in this palace and you’ll never find me”. “Ha-ha-ha” she/he replies. “How can I clean such a house and its grounds?”
Rounded edges of roof slates gloriously glisten in the afternoon air thickened with moisture.
My elusive daughter calls again, “Pop, I want to talk to you in person. I have so much to tell you and perhaps you can sit down with me. Oh, do you have time right now? I have a question…”
I don’t have time. Brookline Haiku Society session has just started.

glossy magazine:
after a fleeting rain
its pages stuck shut

When this haiku is read I realized that we are guilty of trespassing. We must retreat to the sidewalk with a sign

Caldwell Bankers
Estates International
Shown by appointment only.

These huge expanses, this floral furniture, this Italian fountain, this country setting inside the expensive city are not for us. They are for people who are more equal than others.

glossy magazine:
rainwater converts it
to the papier-màché brick

We are to return to Allston. We must return to our apartment filled with a faint secondary smoke seeping in and its waves of the burn oil scent coming through mesh windows. The chimney of the opposite building spews the noxious fumes since they cannot fix the old boiler for the whole year. We must return to the piles of paper in our flimsy homestead. We must return to to the injustices and insults. We must return to our inner city with garbage containers emptied in the wee hours and their warning signals of backing up. I have not seen my daughter for more than a year.

night drizzle
can collectors push shopping carts
with ravishing din

It’s our lot. It’s our abused condominium. There we survive by the mercy of our neighbors and burglars, not by the unenforceable laws and by-laws. I am still at the cheap table writing all this stuff. I have not seen my daughter for more than a year. And trustees’ lawyer’s summons to court stares at me with its deadline.

Who was the free verse poet Baker mentioned in the last 15 minutes of show? and What was that last piece of poetry Tom quoted? Was it Kipling–something about naked nature trumping human’s effort to create beauty? Please post title and author…

Two Old Birds

I sat in my truck
Overlooking the sea
While an old beat-up gull
Overlooked me.

Two old birds meditating
With the whole ocean so blue
So’s all we could say
Was ‘How do you do?’

He understood me,
I had no food for the bird,
But I couldn’t understand him,
He said nary a word.

[This old bird never wrote, read
or even liked poetry until he retired.
I think it has something to do with
having to say things in timely fashion]

“Let us close the shop of speculation and open the shop of experience.” There are very many moving and excellent poets who sometimes rhyme and sometimes do not. William Blake is an excellent example, Yeats another. Dylan Thomas only occasionally rhymed,yet loaded his poems with multitudinous internal assonances.Often one of my favorites, Robert Duncan will have a rhythmless reverie, then suddenly interpose rhyme or lines that vehemently march. One must not only focus on what is to be said, but posit a state in which they are to be appreciated. The flow and symmetry of The Mental Traveler is instrumental to its horror; the unmetered flow of the Prophetic Books is integral to their timeless ecstasy. There is a place for all these forms or formlessness. A moment caught in stillness may match the rhythm of the thing seen rather than ones own physiological beat.

in poetry, form is the exoskeleton, as it is with sonnets, terza rima, anything that requires form first and the words to fill in the spaces. Nothing wrong with that, but when a writer has to start reaching for a word, or a line, to make the form ‘go’ then you have poor poetry. Too many people don’t realize that forms have strict conventions, and fourteen lines (or thirteen good ones) do not a sonnet make, necessarily.

in ‘free verse’ the form is dictated by the poem itself, and it’s on the inside. Each poem requires its own shape, style, rules. words with line breaks are not necessarily a free verse poem, and what becomes all important are the ordering of the words, the lines, and the type of poem you’ve written–list poems, layered, rants, something that starts slowly and builds momentum–often you can say things in free verse that you can’t in forms, but the words become the focus, not the shape of it.

I have no objection to forms, i’ve done more than a few, and when a poem insists on a rhyme, by golly, I go with that. The only objection I have to free verse is that is damnably hard to remember, even my own. And that is the beauty of rhyme. It’s got it’s own mnemonic cues built right in, and once you have those, you have the poem forever.

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I’m amazed at how few comments were posted here; I expected a flood. Guess I over-estimated how much other listeners might share the intense feeling of “finally, someone’s talking about (metrical) verse” that I felt. Anyway, for anyone who ventures here belatedly like me, I found a wonderful remark in the Wikipedia article about the philosopher Richard Rorty:

“Shortly before his death, he wrote a piece called ‘The Fire of Life’, (published in the November 2007 issue of Poetry Magazine), in which he meditates on his diagnosis and the comfort of poetry. He concludes, ‘I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.’”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty#Achieving_Our_Country

That well expresses for me the importance of keeping cadence and meter and some sort of “formalism” alive in poetry — without it poetry just isn’t “portable” enough.