Assembly required.

PIECES:

Carmel Point, by Robinson Jeffers [see below.]

DIRECTIONS:

Robinson Jeffers believed that “poetry’s function is to be an intensification of life, not a refuge from it. … It must be rhythmic, and must deal with permanent things, and must avoid affectation” (Rock and Hawk: Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers).

What is permanent?

What is impermanent?

Write a poem that explores these questions and focuses on the juxtaposition of impermanence with permanence.

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The extraordinary patience of things!

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Poem copied from Poets.org

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15739