Carboneras' “Book People”

Lately I've talked more about "society" than "literature" here, but in fact in Carboneras we do more literature than social agitation. Spurred on by actor-playwright Antonio Rodríguez Menéndez, 30 or more people in town have joined his "Fahrenheit 451/Personas Libro" project, learning texts (all in Spanish) and delivering them before audiences with voice and gesture. It's great fun, and I think we're all getting better. So far, my texts have been by Neruda, Juan Gelman, and Heberto Padilla, and from the other participants I've become acquainted with a dozen other poets and prose writers. This Saturday our group will be part of a festival celebrating cultural diversity in Almería (capital of the province), where I'll be doing another piece by Gelman: Medidas.

And now, as an offshoot of that Spanish-language project, some of the English-speakers in town have formed our own "Book Person" club. Our aim is to meet once a month (the last Friday), each of us with a new text prepared (memorized and rehearsed) to present. Tomorrow will be our 3rd gathering. Here are some of the pieces performed last month (presenter in parentheses):

The Owl and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear (sung, beautifully, by Jeanne Durban Taylor)
The book has been man's greatest triumph, by Louis L'Amour (Pamela Ravander)
Daffodils, by William Wordsworth (Hazel Jones)
Death in Leamington, by John Betjeman (John Taylor)
Loveliest of trees, by A. E. Housman (David Jones)
Frustration, by Dorothy Parker (Susana Torre)
The Makers, by Howard Nemerov (Geoffrey Fox)

Photo, Inma Caparrós: Larry, Jeanne and Hazel listen as David Jones interprets A. E. Housman's “Loveliest of Trees”.

The Ode Less Traveled

Unhappy with that great syllabic mess
of stutterings and halts that I call prose,
I've found this book just off the press
that I most need: self-help for me and those
like me who want to sing but only caw
in raucous tones disordered and sans law.

A 12-step plan to bardhood. First, step one:
sound out the samples, tap your feet
to Shakespeare, Heaney, Dickinson and Donne,
until you're sure you've caught the beat:
pentametrically ordered five-by-five,
those iambs and those trochees come alive!

Then pen in hand, begin to write some word
that's stressed on second stroke; you can forget
if it makes sense, an iamb even if absurd
sounds good in the right place. And yet,

the lesson that you learn is truly sad:
All poetry, or most I've ever read,
consists of this: the banal thought well said.
It sounds good sometimes even when it's bad.

(To try it on your own, see Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, Gotham Books, 2005.)

Poetecstasy: Communally hated!

Here's a poet who can help us feel the anger of those our leaders Bush and Blair are trying to "democratize". Poetecstasy: Communally hated! See also this same writer's comments on The Amitava Kumar - Salman Rushdie Controversy. This John Matthew is a thoughtful man, with a refreshingly open (possibly naive?) faith in the power of the word.