Loose Leaf Notes

~ It was the 5th anniversary of the monthly Spoken Word night in Floyd but none of the founders of the event were in attendance. The following entry is from guest reporter Patricia Woodruff, artist and author of Strange Tales of Floyd County.

It was a pretty small affair this Spoken Word, but you know that the institution has taken on a life of its own, when Colleen, Mara, Jayn and our young performers, Marsden, Kyla, Cameron and Coriander all can’t attend, yet the night still was full of poetry and song. The unintentional theme seemed to be of circles, cycles and spirals.

After the drum roll of the Black Water Loft blender, Gloria Gerritz acted as MC and was our first reader. She started with an entrance test for her creation “The Society of Simpletons.” She explained “there’s no right answers” and read off the questions and answers: A,B,C or D. (But if I have to guess you would qualify if you answered “B – What does “is” mean?”) Gloria progressed to free-form poetry on the ocean, the musings in bed, lies, and love like milkweed silk. We also got a brief history lesson on how milkweed silk was collected during the war and trainloads of it were used to make life jackets. (You never know what you’re going to learn at Spoken Word!!)

I imparted what I had learned about tankas from Mara (that they are similar to haikus but with two extra lines.) Since her invention of “Tanka Tuesday”, shared through our “Virtual Floyd” community on Facebook, I have generated a few of these short poems and shared four of them ranging from the cycle of the seasons, to a poem about having mono.

Dr. Sue Osborn read from a literary cookbook which had the distinction of being written by Lillian Hellman and Peter Feibleman “Eating Together; Recipes and Recollections.” It talked about his way and her way and many times they gave different recipes for the same thing, since they disagreed on the correct way to cook it. It has delightful categories such as “Foods for Seduction” to “Foods for the Self Absorbed,” as well as essays. Dr. Sue’s literary selection talks about Peter’s story of Lillian’s dying, and Lillian’s lament about her imminent demise where she viewed it as “the worst case of writer’s block” she ever had.

Jack Callan read from his book “Knucklehead Poems” and then a new collection of poems that he has grouped as “Writing from the Meadows of Daniel”. Much of Jack’s inspiration on his poems (and his paintings) comes from camping here in the nature of Floyd. His first poem stated “I will take a stone from this river. I will leave a poem.” It becomes almost a foreshadowing of his latest poems written by the banks of the same river; including such wonderful imagery as, “The shadow of the Buffalo is dark, lush and green; Silent, as is fitting a holy mountain.”

Chelsea Adams read about saying “Yes!” to Autumn, with a “shameless red maple”. Then two poems inspired by the line “The man in the moon disappeared.” She concluded with a very visual poem of a woman laughing as she melted her frozen heart by embracing the sun.

This was Caroline Romano’s last performance (for now), as her family is moving to Georgia. Caroline’s first Spoken Word was exactly a year ago. It was the first time she ever sang one of her own compositions in front of an audience. She spoke of the confidence it has brought her, sharing her songs with a lovely, supportive audience. She played her guitar and sang, “Empty Cup”, then “You Called My Name” (see on YouTube) which was the song she first played last year. On musing on her two songs, she said the earlier one she wrote is almost an answer to the question posed in the later one. Caroline very profoundly observed, “There’s a circular aspect to our lives. We revisit things but with a different viewpoint, spiraling around.”  ~ Patricia Woodruff