Poetry for Life: “Wasted Beauty” at the Tavern of Fine Arts

There are five practical ideas for creating more powerful access to poetry; bringing it home is one of them.

Poetry seems to attach itself to certain cities or regional areas. San Francisco had the beats. Chicago had Carl Sandburg. Kentucky has Wendell Berry. Hartford had Wallace Stevens. New Jersey had William Carlos Willams. And New York, well, New York had everyone else.

When one thinks of poetry, St. Louis doesn’t come immediately to mind. (Currently, it might immediately come to mind for other things, but not poetry.) And yet.

Billy Collins gives a poetry reading at the St. Louis County Library, and 800 people show up – a sell-out crowd, causing a traffic jam on a Saturday night.

St. Louis has the Eugene Field House, a three-story brick row house that was Field’s childhood home. While it is all that is left of its original row, and original neighborhood, it is still there, still attracting locals and tourists alike.

While he became a British subject, T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, and his family was involved in the founding of several educational institutions that are still flourishing today.

The St. Louis Poetry Center, founded in 1946, is the oldest poetry organization of its kind west of the Mississippi River. It sponsors readings, poetry slams, open mic nights, and general celebrations of poetry (and it’s amazing what it accomplishes on a shoestring budget; it depends largely upon area poets for support).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

An Evening with Billy Collins

Wearing a black suit and an orange shirt (Halloween was the night before), he looks around the room. “A poetry traffic jam is something I haven’t seen too often,” he sa7s. “This is wonderful.”

“He” is Billy Collins, two-time poet laureate of the United States. I tell my wife he’s one of the three poets in the United States who makes a living from poetry.

“Who are the other two?” she asks.

“I can’t remember their names offhand,” I reply.

We are sitting in the main room of the St. Louis Country Library in Frontenac, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Billy Collins is giving a poetry reading from his new work, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems.

More than 800 people are in the room. My wife and I have what is a “package ticket” – two admission tickets and a copy of the book for $20. The volume retails for $16 for the paperback (just over $12 on Amazon), so the package ticket is a good deal.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

A Fun Day with Nancy

Nancy Rosback, my online friendship with whom goes back to when, well, we were a lot younger, has been in St. Louis for the past couple of days. Last night, Janet I met her and her childhood friend Faye Fullerton for dinner at the Tavern of Fine Arts. And virtual friendship became face-to-face friendship.

Nancy in person is exactly alike Nancy online.

She and Faye visited the St. Louis Art Museum today, and then Janet I picked her up at her hotel. And we did what we call in St. Louis "the Central West End thing."

First, we went to the World Chess Hall of Fame. It's been in St. Louis for three or so years, and it occupies a former house / former business on Maryland Avenue in the Central West End. (The photo above is the exterior of the museum, with what is believed to be the largest chess playing piece int he world.)

The museum has three floors, and three changing exhibits. On the first floor is an exhibit combining composer John Cage and artist Glenn Kaino. The focus of the exhibit is a performance of Cage's Reunion in Toronto on March 5, 1968, in which 16 chess players (masters and novices alike) literally performed music each time they moved a piece on the chess board.

On the second floor was "Strategy by Design," an exhibit of the games and household items designed by Michael Graves. Graves designed a number of chess sets (among other games) for Target for several years running in the 2000s. Especially cool was a chess set whose pieces were designed to look like how the pieces can be moved on the chess board.

On the third floor was an an exhibit devoted to chess master Bobby Fisher, who wrested enough world titles from Russian players to break the monopoly Russia had long held on the game.

A small part of the Fisher exhibit

We checked out the hall of fame's gift shop. It's considered one of the best small museum gift shops in St. Louis, and with good reason.

After the chess museum we walked three short blocks to Left Banks Books, one of few traditional bookshops left in St. Louis. It's a local institution, and likely a labor of love on the part of its owners. It's managed to survive big box bookstores and Amazon, but it can't be easy. (Yes, I bought a few books. Janet wandered around the store. Nancy sat on the floor and read poetry.)

Left Bank Books has one of those St. Louis 250th birthday cakes sitting outside the store. Someone deemed it one of the 250 most important sites in St. Louis (others being Grant's Trail, Busch Stadium, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the art museum, and so on).

Then it was time to eat, which we combined with the plan for the evening. It was back to the Tavern of Fine Arts, for dinner and a poetry reading by Richard Newman, editor of River Styx Magazine. He read from his just-published collection All the Wasted Beauty of the World.

It was a great afternoon and evening, and it was great to spend it with Nancy.