I’ll be reading with one of my favorite poets and favorite people, Ron Wallace at the Chippewa Valley Book Festival in Eau Claire, WI in October.
Nadine St. Louis Memorial Poetry Conversation: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Poem: The “Humorous” Poems of Ronald Wallace and Rita Mae Reese
Ronald Wallace and Rita Mae Reese will read from their recently published books, For Dear Life and The Book of Hulga, books that wittily draw on writers from the past (Basho and Issa, Flannery O’Connor and Simone Weil) to generate a “humorous” poetry. Wallace’s For Dear Life uses classical Japanese haiku to produce poetry that plays on the book’s title as both desperate measure and designated gift, cri de coeur and credo, entreaty and dedication. Reese’s The Book of Hulga uses lines from the French philosopher Simone Weil’s notebooks to form crowns of sonnets and to imagine further life for O’Connor’s embittered heroine from “Good Country People.” For both poets, the “way” to poetry is often “funny,” involving what nineteenth-century poet George Meredith called “the laughter of the mind,” but also reflecting the four traditional humors—blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy.
Ron has written a lot of genuinely funny poems and is a great reader. My poems are “humorous” in the way Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are humorous (in fact, I’ll likely be reading a poem about Poe).
For more information about the Chippewa Valley Book Festival, go to http://www.cvbookfest.org.
Where: Eau Claire Room, LE Phillips Memorial Public Library, 400 Eau Claire St, Eau Claire, WI 54701
When: October 14, 2015 at 4 PM
This event is free and open to the public, so come and bring a friend.