2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose, May 10

2nd time for us, usually at the Arts Center, on Zoom & a nice showing of readers & listeners. Nancy Klepsch & I, Dan Wilcox, bounced back & forth as hosts, with Jil Hanifan thankfully handling the logistics. Even some Vermonters on the list.

Kenn Ash got us off to a start with humor, “Ode to the TV Horses” with funny rhymes, & a poem imagining the end of the shutdown. Laura also entertained us with rhyme & word-play with “Cat Food Soup,” then a topical piece “Annihilated.” Dan Curley added to the day’s informal theme of life with covid-19 with 2 poems from his “pandemic series” “I Went to the Big Box Store” & “Yard Work.”

Cheryl Rice avoided the hour drive from Kingston (& the necessity to wear pants) by joining the Zoom meeting & began with a piece on mortality “Peacock” (dead on the sidewalk) & “Mask.” Bob Sharkey began with a reading of the poem “Fever” by recently-gone Eavan Boland, then another in his series of re-writes of fortune cookies this on the topic-de-jour “Pandemic Fortune.” Kate Gillespie began appropriately enough with an introduction poem with the recurring line “ask me a question,” then one on theme titled “A Cold in the Time of Corona.”

Both of Jil Hanifan’s poems were, as she said, “plague poems,” the first about the virus in Korea “Contact Tracing,” then what sounded personal “The Old Professor & the Pandemic.” Sally Rhoades was also on topic with a poem about the peacefulness of her street now “No School Busses,” then an autobiographical poem for her daughters “Letting Go a Little Bit of My Youth” about deciding not to return to nursing now. I skirted the topic-de-jour entirely with a poem from my week in January in Gloucester “The 6 of Cups” & my Poem-in-Your-Pocket entry, a poem/joke “April 30.”

Nancy Klepsch ended the list with a poem she proudly discovered had been published in Fence Magazine that began with a quote from Virginia Woolf & was about losses & being a writer titled “All the Nine Herbs are Listening.”

So the 2nd Sunday @ 2: Poetry + Prose will continue even though we have been sent to our rooms, but not at the Arts Center which remains closed, but on Zoom. Check out the 2nd Sunday @ 2 Facebook page for a link when the next 2nd Sunday gets close.