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. 

Second Sunday Reading Series Goes Zooming

Photo courtesy Gary Firstenberg

Covid-19 has thrown a monkey wrench into everything that involves gathering live and in person, from marathons to Major League Baseball. Our Duluth Toastmasters group has been meeting via Zoom and starting next weekend a Second Sunday Reading Series for poetry fans will begin.

Here's the straight dope.

The Duluth Poet Laureate Project announces the “Second Sunday Reading Series,” three online open poetry readings organized by Gary Boelhower, 2018-2020 Duluth Poet Laureate. The monthly readings will take place from 3-4 pm. on Sunday afternoon, September 13th, October 11th, and November 8th. Each month's reading will feature two local poets whose presentations will be followed by an open reading. The reading on September 13th will feature Phil Fitzpatrick and Daniel Oyinloye; October 11th will feature Deborah Cooper and John Herold; and the reading on November 8th will feature Sheila Packa and Blair Powless.

All three poetry readings will be offered through the ZOOM online video communications technology. The public is invited to view the readings through a ZOOM online portal; please register for one, two or all the programs with Gary Boelhower through email, gboelhower@msn.com. Poets who wish to participate in the open reading segment should contact Gary Boelhower with the date they wish to be placed on the program.

The Duluth Poet Laureate Project began in 2005 and is funded by donations from The Friends of the Duluth Public Library, Lake Superior College, 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.

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As friends and followers know, I enjoy reading and writing poetry myself, this year more than ever. This past week I have been reading Kazuo Ishiguro's heartbreakingly beautiful novel Never Let Me Go. One of the themes in the book has to do with things said and unsaid. There's a line in Charlene Groves' poem Emptiness that speak to this feature of life as regards matters of the heart and the manner in which we veil ourselves, conceal ourselves within ourselves. Charlene wrote this poem several decades past, but it could just as easily have been written during this period of Covid-19 lockdown.

Here's a poem of my own, most definitely inspired by this 2020 cultural anomaly. It's called The Mask Police.

First Song, a Poem by Gary Boelhower

The vitality of our Duluth poetry scene is becoming evident more than ever. The poetry event at Sacred Heart during Homegrown had an impressive crowd with 25 participating poets. Near the end of May we were enriched by a Poets of the North Country event during Dylan Fest that showed us again the strength of our maturing poetry community.

One of the poets who read in both events was Gary Boelhower, a professor of theology and religious studies at St. Scholastica who is also the author of several books including Mountain 10: Climbing the Labyrinth Within. At Dylan Fest he read "Listen to the Canary," echoing a number of Dylanesque themes, and I intended to share that here. But this weekend, after watching the film All Quiet On The Western Front, I decided to share the powerful poem he read during Homegrown, preceding it with the alphabet song.

FIRST SONG

The first song he learned in school held the pieces
to all the words in the world. As she tapped their lithe
bodies posted above the blackboard with her long pointer

he sang each one and catalogued the world by their names.
A is for apple, antler, aardvark. B is for boy, bat, baseball.
C is for cat, comb, cougar. D is for dog, door, daughter.

The whole world went like this. You could hitch them
together like cars on a train and they took in the big
universe one word at a time, nothing was left out.

At night in his room, he made lists from the dictionary.
He started with three words for each letter, then five,
ten, thirty, a hundred. Whenever he heard a new word
he put it in its proper column, it belonged to A or D or K.
Later there were states and their capitals,
all the bones, muscles and systems of the body;

but they all fit in one of the columns absolutely
and for sure. The lists were very long now,
some words hyphenated or with five sibilant syllables.

In history class, he learned the names of wars. Starting
with his own country and the revolution: A is for Augusta,
B is for Bunker Hill and Brandywine, C is for Concord,

Charleston, Camden; then marching through the years
of the Civil War: A is for Antietam, B is for Bull Run,
C is for Chattanooga, D is for Donelson,

F is for Fredericksburg, G is for Gettysburg,
H is for Harper’s Ferry; column by never ending column,
on to the World Wars: One: Antwerp, Belleau Wood,

Caporetto, Delville Wood, Es Sinn, Falluja, Gorizia
Hill 60, Isonzo, Jutland, Krithia, Lone Pine, Mughar Ridge,
Namur, Passchendaele, Ramadi, Scarborough, Tannenberg

Verdun, Wadi, Ypres, and WWII: Attu, Aleutian Islands,
Battle of the Bulge, Bismarck Sea, Christmas Island,
Crucifix Hill, Denmark Strait, Dragoon, El Alamein,

Operation Elephant, Fontenay, Guadalcanal, Halbe,
Iwo Jima, Imphal, Java, Java Sea, Kwajalein, Kiev,
Luzon, Litani River, Midway, Madagascar, Mindinao,

North Borneo, Netherlands, Odessa, Peleliu, Pearl Harbor,
Operation Queen, Rennell Island, Somaliland, Smolensk,
Saipan, Tinian, Taranto Harbor, Operation Torch,

Visayas, Operation Varsity, Wake Island, Warsaw Uprising.
Then, on to ancient lands and smaller countries, on every
continent, in every year, lines drawn and redrawn and redrawn,

small hills taken and lost on the same day, cities renamed, maps
reconfigured, blood from the beaches painting the lips of the waves,
the children’s song all grown up, fed by history

and the weeping stars and the weeping mothers.
As he filled notebooks with columns of wars and the names of each
fallen soldier in every uniform, and an X for each civilian

casualty: children, mothers, fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers,
he began to ask a question: where is the small gland that screams
for victory and land, the aberrant cyst in the anterior cingulated gyrus,

the trigger glyph in the right-handed double helix that keeps repeating
itself like the simplest song: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Now I know my ABCs, next time won’t you sing with me.

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