Applause

Last night, in the Summit Hall cinema room, over powdered donuts and Hershey Kisses, we discussed poetry and the "you"--specifically, how the "you" appears in three poems, "Scary, No Scary" by Zachary Schomburg, "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams, and "Fierce Girl Playing Hopscotch" by Alice Fulton. Conversation turned to things that terrify us, sadden us, and, surprisingly, the toys of our childhood--legos, gloworms, furbies, barbies, baby-be-mine . . .

We then got to the good stuff; we wrote in the style of our favorite poem above to create specific scenes of Morgantown, our dorms/apartments, the playground, and our childhood homes. The challenge was to have a "you" appear.

With poetry, every listener seems to be dazzled by different things, and, indeed, we all liked various things about each other's resulting poems--the comforting imagery of a rural home, the confessions of simple wishes on the playground, energetic sounds sparking down the page, snapshots of High Street, like an abandoned Sprite can, an immediate setting giving way to discovery of the self. The theme was, we liked what we heard.

We discovered that it is amazing what you can write in just half an hour (counting our conversation, inspiration, and pre-thought as writing time). We all created nearly finished poems that both Hannah and I walked away still admiring. Thanks for the rarity of such listening and thought and meditation on why we write :)

Next meeting, Hannah will share more work to admire and write from. Come meet us in the cinema room (you really have to see it, to know what it is!) of Summit Hall, Monday, October 21 at 6:30PM!