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Except for Love reading in Cambridge

Porter Square Books in Cambridge hosted a reading for Except for Love, New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall on Aug. 16 – there’s one scheduled for the Bookstore in Lenox on November 7th. It was great fun to meet several co-contributors, and to hear their various Don Hall stories. I knew that I wasn’t alone as a benefifiary of his correspondence, but it was fun to hear how important it was for so many fellow poets, too.

After introducing me, Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, the editor and publisher of the anthology, said that she considered the event a sort of afterparty for Hall, which is the title of my poem in the book. My pal Eddie O’Toole took time away from his Honduras project, for an old-school open-ended road trip; here is his cellphone videography of my four minute segment:

Read Dave’s poem chosen for a Beat Poetry anthology

Article updated July 29, 2019 by Dave Read

My poem, Dozen Ways of Looking at Stuff, has been selected for publication in the upcoming We Are Beat, National Beat Poetry Festival Anthology, which I think is scheduled for publication in late August.

Dozen Ways of Looking at Stuff

v.1

on the edge of nature
the haughty docent
said to me

here the pretty
flowers are and there
the poetry

v.erotic

on the edge of nature
the naughty docent
beckoned me

there the pretty
flowers are and here
the poetry

occidental version

the poet who dissembles
all day long to earn his pay
will have his say
if he assembles
honest verse along the way

oriental edition

the poet’s lot is
to limn what it has amused
the gods to encrypt

Metro Edition

Some poems reflect everybody
seen in the Metro by Ezra Pound,
while others recall faces I know
whose voices make a beautiful sound.

version vice versa

If it is the poet’s bane to like all the interesting stuff
then her boon is to love only what is perfect.

The poet’s bane is to love only what is perfect,
but her boon is to like all the interesting stuff.

v.epigram

consider any bag of thoughts,
some passel of inklings,
or worry of oughts:

string them together,
the least on top, laced so tight
that the other ones pop!

in re:form

The function of form in a poem
is to devise a scheme so that
you can conceal

the clue to your notion of hiding
an antonym to the rhyme
you mean to reveal.

v.homeric

Turned inward like a bad toenail is the mind’s eyeball,
an unblinking cyclops ready to light me up
like a bored cop at the intersection of reflect and write.

scholastic ed.

Poetry is Miss Zeitgeist
rapping on your knucklehead.

v.paean

Passing by the MacLeish homestead,
a poet espied the globed fruits and sighed
I’m just off the sweets, alas.

double paean

With a smile of recognition he lopes to work
looping George Harrison through earbuds.

Dave Conlin Read

Hotels in the Berkshires

Find hotels near Tanglewood with user reviews, check amenities, nearby attractions, availability and then book your room reservations at these lodging establishments through our partner, International Hotel Solutions (IHS), the leading provider of secure online hotel reservations.

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.

Lenox the Berkshires summer photos

Article updated July 16, 2019 by Dave Read

Following a busy weekend at Tanglewood in the Berkshires, where Maestro Andris Nelsons conducted three programs comprised of a dizzying array of music composed by Copland, Grieg, Verdi, Beethoven, and HK Gruber, who was present to enjoy the audience’s enthusiastic response to his Aerial, Concerto for trumpet and orchestra, sharing the limelight with trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger, whose vertuosity and flair was thrilling, we captured a few snapshots of Lenox, as dusk approached.

Hotels in the Berkshires

2019 Tanglewood schedule

JT and Yo-Yo on the porch

Article updated July 15, 2019 by Dave Read

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!

Hotels in the Berkshires

2019 Tanglewood schedule

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.