Register for ZOOM link (NOTE: this is not the link itself!!!) HERE.
Who does a (serious! no joke!) poetry reading on April Fool’s Day? Well, I do, along with a few others at the 19th annual Poets/Speak! event (of course, on Zoom) April 1, 4 to 5:15 p.m. ET.
Kathleen Ellis has been organizing this annual reading through the Bangor Public Library for all these years. In that life so long, long ago when people came together in real time, in real space, we would gather in the Lecture Hall (except the year of the major renovations when we read at the Zillman Art Museum downtown) and afterwards everyone would be invited to hang out at some local spot like Pepino’s or Blaze, where they’re willing to cobble together tables and don’t care whether you eat a big dinner or just sit there and sip a glass, don’t care whether you’re boisterous, whether someone decides to stand up and randomly recite a poem into a space that is rarely privileged to hear such things.
Over the years my memory has become acute about some things and relatively fuzzy about others, and so I probably should have asked Kathleen for details about the origins—her motivations, how the first gatherings came together. My guess is that as a poet and someone who cares deeply about creating opportunities for other poets and for her students at the University of Maine in Orono as well as expanding words to the everyday world, it seemed like a win-win. The library’s then-director Barbara McDade was on-board, and we had a full-fledged little three-hour-plus poetry festival, with live music, book sales, and refreshments. Always a theme, always some significant national or international poet whose work was honored. And always an eye to diversity—just because it’s the right way to live. Kathleen has always known that and lived that.
There were some years it went on too long, readers overshot their allotted times, the library announcement that they were now closing resounding over the last poems. There were years I was ready to stand up and say to the students who read early and left early, often en masse (rude and obvious—I know they were young, but still, not that young): “Sit down, you fools; you’ll likely hear a fabulous poem and you’ll definitely hear how to ‘read’ so that your work makes it from page to ear to heart/head.” But I didn’t. And they didn’t. Eventually, the ones who graduated from student to continuing poet in adult time got it all on their own. And we were all the better for them showing up at all. And I know I was all the more for having heard all the works whether I was in the audience or a reader.
And so, life goes on. Even in these times. Even though we have lost many and much. We continue to show up. Through our odd, individual and universal poetic lenses, we figure out ways to process loss and losing, how to continue together, how to move through what is hard and broken, sleepwalking into our poems, accepting the ordinary beauty of all this, learning to know what we really love…
Why Poetry Matters, with a tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” features POETS Kathleen Ellis, Leonore Hildebrandt, Rich Hoch, Annaliese Jakimides, Gary Lawless, and Lisa Panepinto reading poetry that matters in a time of pandemic, racial injustice, climate change, and civil unrest. Register for ZOOM link HERE. Click here for more info.
TIME: 4 p.m.–5:15 p.m. ET
CO-SPONSORED BY: Bangor Public Library and University of Maine Honors College
