Another big-table lunch with an eclectic, a random mix of authors & listeners, this time at the Brickhouse Restaurant, where the food & conversation got away from us so that we (most of us anyways) got back to the campus a little late — but then who was taking attendance?
XIX. Estep Auditorium
I got in late but heard enough of Sharon Martin’s piece to gather it was first person fiction about a preacher’s daughter running away. The title listed on the Scissortail Festival program was The Courage to Speak. The episode was told with such rebellious passion that it could have been a memoir.
Marc DiPaolo followed with his autobiographical novel Fake Italian (Bordighera Press) about growing up on Staten Island, NY. The excerpt he read was about an encounter on a school bus with bullies. It was filled with funny, cultural references that I recognized from my years in New York City, with even a brief stint on Staten Island. The clichés are not just in the movies, they are in real life too.
Professor Steven Phillips was this session’s moderator & he took the opportunity, as he did in a session yesterday, to read a poem, again in rhyme, this he wrote for his son after a break-up.
Ricard Dixon has read here in the past. Today his poems were relatively short, thus able to get a lot in in his allotted time. He read a number of COVID pieces, a couple of celebrity-related poems (one about a canyon where Patrick Swayze bought a ranch, another a praise poem, “Paul Simon Blows Away the Room”), & some poems about declining towns, such as a torn down skating rink, one titled “The Ghost Cafe,” another about a farmer in debt (“Oh Deere”). There was short humorous piece titled “Nun’s on Their Cellphones,” & he ended with “Tennis in the Twilight Zone” (he’s a retired high school teacher & tennis coach.
XXI. Estep Auditorium
Later in the evening, after dinner, we were back for the 2nd of the Festival’s featured authors. But first there was a brief ceremony recognizing undergraduate writers, then two of whom, both from Northeastern State University read as opening acts for the featured author.
Ashland Jenkins read an excerpt from a longer piece of prose fiction, “The Outer Woods,” about the confusion of a couple of teen agers finding a baby in the woods.
Aubrey Green’s work, “Elizabeth,” was a summary of a life that might have been, imagined after a spontaneous abortion.
The featured author was poet Arthur Sze who I saw at Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC in March 2010 where he gave a reading & conducted a discussion on contemporary Chinese poetry, where he memorably said “poetry is not a noun, but a verb.” His reading tonight could be described as I described his reading in 2010, “He reads quietly…” essentially letting the power of the craft of his lines carry the audience. His reading was from The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), began with “After a New Moon,” “The Shapes of the Leaves,” “First Snow,” “Adamant,” & a voice experiment with a run-on sentence “Lichen Song.” He talked about an invented form (aren’t they all?) called a “cascade” where words in a line are picked up from a previous line, repetition being an integral part of most forms, about which he read a sequence titled “Compass Rose” composed of nine poems.
Later there was a reception at the nearby Ross-Osborn Family Foundation Event Center, with jazz, delightful snacks (with a fountain of chocolate) & punch. While I was talking writing & poetry & the writers we had heard with Daniel Marroquin I commented on the students I saw walking around with Sze’s fat tome The Glass Constellation & I quipped that “there’s a lot of good shit in there,” & poor Daniel almost choked on a cannoli — I meant it as a compliment, but I guess he was expecting something more erudite. He doesn't know me that well.
A good time was had by all.
[Biographies of each of the readers can be found at https://ecuscissortail.blogspot.com/2022/01/2022-scissortail-biographies.html]
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