Thank you Bill Glose for recording the poetry readings from April 25, 2019

Thank you, Bill Glose, for recording the poetry readings from the April 25, 2019 event cosponsored by the Poetry Society of Virginia and Germanna Community College.

Click here to watch and listen.

April 25 poetry reading a success

The Poetry Reading at Germanna Community College the evening of April 25 was a success. Thirty-two attended the event, cosponsored by the College and the Poetry Society of Virginia. Jim Gaines, Beth Spragins and Bill Glose were joined by 8 students from my creative writing class and 6 others in reading their work.

My students, none of whom had read their poetry in public before, all did a fine job.

Looking forward to doing it again in October.

Neruda's final collection rewards the reader

The Sea and the Bells by Pablo Neruda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Neruda's last and unfinished collection still contains a number of poems that are as wonderful as any her has written. These poems are both very person, such as the last poem he wrote to his beloved, Matilde ("Finale"), but also touch the universal if not the mythic ("Returning").

Many of these poems feel unfinished, not just because they have no titles, but they lack that final quality of workmanship Neruda gives to his collections as they are published. Read this collection regardless. Neruda unfinished is superior to so many poets writing today and the collection as a whole rewards us as we experience the haunting sea and silent bell.

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Two of the 10-minute plays written by students in my Spring 2019 Creative Writing class at Germanna Community College can be viewed on YouTube

Two of the 10-minute plays written by students in my Spring 2019 Creative Writing class at Germanna Community College were performed by the class. They can be viewed on YouTube:

Miscommunication

https://youtu.be/4AGnaidW7Vs

It’s Nothing Personal

https://youtu.be/UKqqidk-pH0

Yet one more fine translation by William O'Daly of the late work of Pablo Neruda

The Yellow Heart by Pablo Neruda
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yet one more fine translation by William O'Daly of the late work of Pablo Neruda.

This collection of a sort of magical surrealism displays Neruda's social and political commentary partly hidden by personal mythologies and ironic treatments of the "poet" himself and other actors. Despite the humor, or perhaps because f it, there is a poignancy to the poems and indeed the collection as a whole.

Neruda knew his cancer was going to kill him soon. And he had watched a his hopes for Chile were destroyed by the cancer of CIA-supported Fascism.

His biting satire mocks those middle class suburbanites who buy and buy and still die, and all those who fall again and again for

an endless track of champions
and in a corner we, forgotten
maybe because of everybody else,
since they seemed so much like us
until they were robbed of their laurels,
their medals, their titles, their names.

This passage has echoes of the Martin Niemöller poem:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Nonetheless, there is a forgiveness--for himself and for all the other flawed and fearful antiheroes of his poems. And he himself, at last "turn(s) toward my truth/because I am lacking a life."

A collection to be read and reread.



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