Julia Rietmulder-Stone's blog | ramblings about poetry, politics, & Harrisburg
I assume that everyone has, by now, heard of the Pope’s death.
On my way into town tonight, I noticed that the flag at Bob Evans was at half mast, and wondered who’d died. Now I know.
I hope that…the heaven Catholics believe the Pope deserves is a reality for him. For all of us.
One of the perks of being a student (as opposed to having one of those “job†things) is that if I feel like skipping class, I can. It doesn’t happen often, but when I heard that Jack Veasey and Barbara DeCesare were going to be reading on campus as part of the Wildwood Writers’ Festival, well, it was clear that I wouldn’t be attending my Macroeconomics class. And when I subsequently heard that Gene Hosey was going to be reading immediately after that, Comparative Politics went out the window. And so it happened that my morning yesterday was spent listening to some very fine poets.
The combination of poets was wonderful. Jack with an incredible gift for seeing the world from the inside out, treating his subjects with such an honesty, gentleness, and disarming wit that they themselves become the poems, riding on his tender eloquence. Barbara with her frank cynicism and ebullient reading style, shattering expectations and illusions. Gene with his jaded hopefulness, recognizing absurdity and challenging us to keep going anyway (maybe this is Camus’s definition of hope?).
And then there was Joe Weil, the surprise of the day. I don’t know how many people there were already familiar with him (someone must have been, right?), but I’d never heard of him. This guy, it turns out, is real and raw, funny and moving, and one hell of a poet. I hope some of the local hosts are able to get him to come back.
The biggest drawback to the event was that so much of the audience was required by their professors to be there. While it meant that the room was pretty full for most of the day, it also meant that the energy level was lower than it could have been. I also didn’t attend the open reading the followed the last session of the day, so I don’t know what that was like. If you were there, post a comment and tell us how it went!
Today is the second and final day of the festival. I’m half considering going in at noon to hear Philip Billings, who I’ve heard is good, but, ultimately, will probably not end up doing so. So if you do, let me know how he was.