Next Sunday Is 3rd Sunday in "Second Sunday Reading Series"

If it takes you a minute to figure out the headline, you're not alone. This coming Sunday is the third in a three-event series that began on the second Sunday of September. Organized by Duluth poet laureate Gary Boelhower, this Zoom gathering will take place November 8 from 3 to 4 p.m.

Featured readers this week will be former poet laureate Sheila Packa and Blair Powless, followed by an open reading. You can register for the event by sending an email to gboelhower@msn.com. If you are a poet who wishes to participate as a reader, submit your intentions to the same email.

Quick question to area poets. Have you been writing more poems this year of fewer? Are they darker than usual (due to the overcast mood of the country)? Or are they brighter, in an effort to lighten your spirit and relieve it from the congested heaviness of this year we wish we could have bypassed? What impact has 2020 had on your writing?

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Here's one of the many poems I wrote this year that were stimulated and stained by the unusual events of 2020.  

Writing A Self Portrait

Distancing myself from the madness.

I’m writing till I’m all wrote out.
Whatever emerges I’ll follow its flow
till sidetracked by another route
that leads me elsewhere. I won’t know
till I get there.

I’m writing till I find myself.
Whatever emerges will help me learn
something new. I’m weary of pelf
that has no purpose. What I yearn
for is fresh air.

I’m writing, half believing I’ll see
a flow of words that serves as a trail
to where mind, heart and soul agree:
a trail, one hopes, that will not be a veil
but a portrait real.

To reach mountaintops you must climb all the way
You ascend step by step, that’s the price you must pay.
If you dawdle, that battle will be your last bout;
Get going, don’t look for the easy way out.

June 2020

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The Duluth Poet Laureate Project began in 2005 and is funded by donations from The Friends of the Duluth Public Library, Lake Superior College, Lake Superior Writers, and the English departments at the College of Saint Scholastica, UMD, and by generous individuals. The Zeitgeist Community Arts Center is the fiscal sponsor. More information can be found at www.duluthpoetlaureate.org.

Special nod to Jim Perlman for his support of writers in the Northland.