poetry

Did you know?  April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate we are turning the library meeting room into a coffeehouse for an evening.  Come read and/or listen to favorite poems, old and new, next Monday, April 15, 6:00 pm, and enjoy pastries and a cup of coffee or a cool glass of lemonade.  If you write poetry, please bring something of your own to share!  This program is for all ages.

Rise and shine your debut has come for Northwest Branch library. April is called poetry Month.
We want to celebrate by asking Young Adults and Homeschoolers who like poetry to participate in this event.  All you need to do is bring your own poetry, or read a poem by someone else. Come see Gwendolyn and sign up. The date of your debut will be April twentieth at 1:30 PM in the meeting room. Now don’t be shy, this is a time to have fun.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s a bit sad that Beowulf—one of the oldest surviving poems in English (albeit of the Ye Olde kind)—has made the jump to the silver screen with more youthful vigor and a far larger budget than…say…I dunno…something…anything...written in the intervening 1300 years? Granted Beowulf has somewhat more of the kind of stuff that both mead-drinking, horns-on-the-helmet-types, and popcorn-munching 21st century cineastes alike tend to prize in their entertainments, namely: monsters “gorged and bloodied” and “gloating over the raw corpses” of several buff but faceless actor/waiters in gore harvests of cameronian  proportions, and the requisite buxomly bewitching servant girl whose only real function in the story is to be buxomly bewitching so as to test our noble hero’s proto-democratic leanings and to make sure that no one takes all the male-bonding the *ahem* wrong way. Granted, too, that unless you’re French and/or a Comp Lit major, the vague existential dread engendered by finding a dead curlew while on a walk in the sun-dappled silence of a suburban forest that is the essential plotline of every poem written since 1950, does not make for edge-of-the-seat cinema.