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Dave Read

JT and Yo-Yo on the porch

Article updated July 15, 2019 by

This video of James Taylor being accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma on Sweet Baby James, recorded Sept. 15, 2008 on the porch of the Red Lion Inn at Stockbridge, is blowing up the Internet – at least my little piece of it!

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2019 Tanglewood schedule

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has released the schedule for the 2019 season at Tanglewood, which will be remembered for the opening of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, the four buildings overlooking Seiji Ozawa Hall on the Leonard Bernstein camopus.

Music director Andris Nelsons will be present for the month of July, conducting 13 programs, including the world premiere of a new work by Kevin Puts, The Brightness of Light, based on letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz on July 20, and a concert performance of Wagner’s complete Die Walküre on july 27 and 28.

Richard Thompson at Tanglewood, June 21, 2019

By – Richard Thompson strode to center stage in Seiji Ozawa hall June 21, carrying a guitar, which was all it took to fill the august band box with beautiful sound. Besides being a first-ballot shoo-in for the guitar hall of fame, artist division, Thompson also is a master at the art of stagecraft. His 110 minute concert revealed him to be a generous, tenacious, and pretty funny guy. Hip to him since the days of Fairport Convention, this was my first concert, and it was awesome.

And somehow, I heard Buddy Holly throughout the show. Something about that big bold acoustic sound* – the quality of the strings, the resonance of the soundboard, the spirit of the one animating the tools of his trade.

It was a sound vein mined to such great effect by Dylan until he got bored with it and veered away in 1965 at Newport to create rock ‘n roll’s first tributary – Dylan music. Meanwhile, back across the pond, Thompson and his mates formed bands with cool names such as Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle.

… to be continued.

*That may be my entry in the redundancy tournament.

Live From Here at Tanglewood, June 15, 2019

By – Chris Thile has the hardest job in show biz, following Garrison Keillor as host of a live radio broadcast from the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood. The show he ran June 15, 2019, was on par with the 16 editions of Keillor’s that we covered.

Just as we remember the bit from the initial show in 2000, when the pretend Bill Clinton responds to Keillor’s inquiry as to what it’s like to be leaving the house he has called home for eight years by mimicing Bob Dylan singing Like a Rolling Stone, Thile’s troupe had us rolling in the aisles with something as funny and as original – and therefore, memorable.

They created a universe in which whenever a put-upon father (Father’s Day on the horizon) responded to his teenager in an unsatisfactory way, a clip from the awesome Harry Chapin’s Cats in the Cradle would fill the air and guilt-trip dad into action!

Thile also has pre-existing Tanglewood conditions – his maternal grandfather, a composer, had a piece performed here sixty some years ago, AND he himself is a wrangler in Yo Yo Ma’s Goat Rodeo. Keillor had one too – a second date with his eventual wife when she was a student here at BUTI. The both are right up front about how much they like Tanglewood, especially that this show concludes their live radio season. And the audience seems pretty happy too.

Listen to the show.
Cellphone snaps of the lawn audience and a couple views of the stunning new Tanglewood Learning Institute up by Ozawa Hall.

Dave Read reads five poems

Once you start the video, you can fast-forward to my poems at around 1:10. Poem titles are:
1.Vice Versa
2.Big Apple Byte
3.Hold Still
4.In Loco Parentis, or Mark & Sheryl to the Rescue
5.It’s Not Up to Chuck & Nancy
6.Jared has Four Diamonds,* Every Kick begins with K

I made a mistake in It’s Not Up to Chuck & Nancy – Martin Luther called Henry VIII “pig, dolt and liar (not idiot).”

IWOW (In Words Out Words), June 4, 2019. Deb Koffman's Art Space, Housatonic, Massachusetts. from CTSB on Vimeo.

IWOW (In Words Out Words), June 4, 2019. Deb Koffman's Art Space, Housatonic, Massachusetts.

I’m happy to provide the text for these, just give me your name and email address:[smlsubform] Posting them here would make it more difficult to publish them elsewhere.

American Life in Poetry

Cat Moving Kittens

We must have known,
Even as we reached
Down to touch them
Where we’d found them

Shut-eyed and trembling
Under a straw bale
In the haymow, that
She would move them

That night under cover
Of darkness, and that
By finding them
We were making certain

We wouldn’t see them again
Until we saw them
Crouching under the pickup
Like sullen teens, having gone

As wild by then as they’d gone
Still in her mouth that night
She made a decision
Any mother might make

Upon guessing the intentions
Of the state: to go and to
Go now, taking everything
You love between your teeth.

By Austin Smith, who lives in rural Illinois and is an acute observer of the world at hand.This poem is from his book Flyover Country, published by Princeton University Press.

About poetry on BerkshireLinks

Adding a poetry category to BerkshireLinks.com comports with what we had in mind when we started our first web magazine, Berkshire Spectrum, way back in 1996. Today, one could expect to generate some interest by publishing poetry on a website that has an audience of thousands of persons interested in the Berkshires arts and entertainment scene.

The key feature, initially at least, will be the inclusion of the American Life in Poetry project, which makes available to us and practically anybody else, as indicated here:

American Life in Poetry is a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem by Ted Kooser. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry, and we believe we can add value for newspaper and online readers by doing so. There are no costs or obligations for reprinting the columns, though we do require that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration, along with the complete copyright, permissions and credit information, exactly as supplied with each column.

Memorial Day parade Lenox, MA

Article updated May 28, 2019 by

Memorial Day parade in the Berkshires

The passage of time and the replenishment of a small town’s population are evident in snapshots of the Memorial Day parade. Recollections from earlier parades, from the late 1980s or early 1990s, show a flatbed truck carrying several WWII and Korean War veterans; today, no vets on flatbeds. Last year, my poem Memorial Day was published by was Indolent Books in their What Rough Beast project.