Member Night at W&B -- August 11

Leah Ruekberg,(terrific story teller) and I decided we'd have fun performing poetry -- which I envisioned as a way of connecting audience participation and poetry performance.
Leah's selection:
Methodist Church, from New and Selected Works by Stephen Dunn
Two Trains , from What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland
Square Dancing With Sister Robert Claire from Halfway Decent Sinners by Michael Cleary
Healing the Mare, and Hotel Nights with My Mother, from Eva Mary by Linda McCarriston
We Are Transmitters, from Collected Works by D.H. Lawrence
You do Not Have to Be Good, and Trilliums, from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
I Thank You God, My sweet old etcetera, and Somewhere i have never traveled, by e.e. cummings
The Lanyard, from The Trouble With Poetry, by Billy Collins
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes, from Picnic, Lightning by Billy Collins
Some Kiss We Want by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

My selection:
Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donne, Auden, WCW, (ekphrastic), Housman, Ferlinghetti, Dylan Thomas,

I liked this quote :
"I think one of my early motivations for writing was that other people's versions of experience didn't gel with my own. It was a gesture toward sanity to try to get the world right for myself. I've since learned that if you get it right for yourself, it often has resonance for others."

Stephen Dunn

I think that is one of my early motivations for performing.

So, we giggled through Romeo and Juliette "kissing scene" (I'll never forget how Dorianne Laux performed it)

cavorted through Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins
-- skies of couple colour... whatever is fickle, stippled, freckled, plotted, pieced,
all those things alliteratively fresh as firecoal and finches wings

On Fools: more Shakespeare, and Donne's Triple Fool (remembering how Heather McHugh performed it) at which point I felt more fool than three, and not wise enough...


For both Auden and William Carlos Williams -- Bruughel paintings: WCW's fun of "La Kermesse" with "The Round... and Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts (Brussels) ah... those old masters, never wrong about suffering... and that ship, hurrying on to get to where it had to get, while a boy is falling up there in the corner, out of the sky...


Housman: 8 O'clock -- how to tell a story in 8 lines, like a riddle. I love how those quarters the steeple sprinkles down seem as fresh as first snow flakes. How quick the luck of the draw -- how the clock does the work. Makes you re-tell the story differently if you isolate
the second stanza:
Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.

Ferlinghetti : Constantly Risking Absurdity : I did as an acrobat on a tightrope.

Ended with Dylan Thomas, remembering my Welsh grandfather who would cite Fern Hill.
The music always wins.