Rhyme and reason

Today I hosted another ROLT Meetup.  This time the topic was poetry, so I called it "Rhyme and reason." Eight people came, our biggest event ever.  Three of them were poets who read their own work! (In one case, I made the faux pas of applauding someone who hadn't finished his poem.)

Jane read TS Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I like the part that goes "I grow old/I grow old/I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled." She also read the soliloquy from Shakespeare's OTHELLO that Verdi's "Dio, me potevi" aria is based on.

I started things by reading Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle." I hoped to get it from the library but in the copy I got the poem was supposed to be on page 224, and this edition repeated pages 187 to 210 instead of printing 211 to 234! (I found a printing mistake like that in a book reprinting recent articles from THE NATION.) So I had to print it off the web.

The other poems I read were Robert Frost's "After Apple Picking," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Day Is Done," and William Butler Yeats' "The Stare in My Window," on the Irish Troubles which includes the classic lines "We've fed the heart on fantasies/The heart's grown brutal with the fare/More substance in our enmity than in our love..." You have the twentieth century right there! (I also printed out WH Auden's "September 1 1939," but didn't have time to read that one.  Its theme is similar to the Yeats poem anyway.)

Next month our topic will be children's literature.

I also went to another Karaoke Meetup at Barplus.  I sang Paul McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights," but it's a song which could use figuring out the best key shift for my voice.