Sunday Night Wrap Up

It's a Wrap: BEA

Virtual BEA: It’s almost like being there. In case you missed the excitement of BEA, you can get the full blogging coverage of this year's event at Chekhov’s Mistress, or from Ed (We love the monkey photo!), Ron , or Mark. Next year in D.C., baby!

Conversational Dan

Dan Wickett takes the helm at Conversational Reading this week, filling in for Scott while he’s away on vacation. Do make sure to stop by and share some commenty-love. Also, if you haven’t seen Dan’s latest e-panel with a new crop of litbloggers, check it out here.

FotHB Report

Friends of the Happy Booker (FotHB) are everywhere. And they love to send emails about all the cool literary goings on in their neighborhoods. We enjoy their notes so much that we have decided to run them as a regular feature. Welcome to the first installment of the FotHB Report. Today's note comes from Christy Zink, our pal in the city, who writes to remind us about what we’re missing by living in our soulless suburban hinterlands at the beltway’s edge—but does she have a super-sized Home Depot? That’s all we’re saying….

Brooklyn? No, Brookland,by Christy Zink

That’s where the poetry’s happening. The BAWA ( Brookland Area Writers and Artists) Poetry Series here in Washington launched its 17th event in the dog days of DC summer about, what else? Dogs. While the regular series spotlights local poets reading their work alongside that of the poets who most inspired them, the summer series goes full-on thematic at the Brookland Visitors’ Center, in the Washington Works on Paper Gallery. In addition to the host gallery, the Wohlfarth Gallery and recent neighbor Roxanne’s Art and Antiques create a burgeoning “gallery row” of adjoining townhouses in this diverse northeast DC neighborhood that an increasing number of writers, visual artists, actors, and musicians call home.

Series coordinators Dan Vera and Michael Gushue were joined by neighborhood writer Sue Scheid as they entreated us to consider—in a poem by Dan—those “blessings on four legs.” Dan brought the house down early with his hilarious reading of a poem by cartoonist Lynda Barry, whose dog-speaker gets ahold of brownies laced with LCD and offers us that incredibly worldly-wise lesson: “Don’t play the Doors on acid. Not that man’s voice on acid. No.” This and a few other selections of the night came from the anthology Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs, edited by Amy Hempel.

It turns out there’s a long, worthy tradition of the dog poem, from May Swenson to William Matthews all the way back to Homer, where Argos lifts his head wearily to greet his master Odysseus after 19 years of separation. Where there’s love, there’s death, especially when there are poets running around, and so Michael opened the second half of the reading preparing the audience for the poems to grow more somber. The world of dog and human are clearly not so far apart, for as Mark Doty writes of his canine companion whose “form had begun to admit imperfection, / who’d begun to fail,” there is still the hard push toward life: “Believe me, / a dog’s gaze opens, like ours, / when the world’s an invitation.” And in a moment that was a poem unto itself, Dan shared with us an old daguerreotype postcard he bought for a dollar in a West Virginia antique store that simply shows two dogs in a field, from a time when such photographs were a decided investment, putting forward the mystery of the people who’d paid to capture those two dogs for posterity. But perhaps it’s not such a mystery, for, as Michael reminded us, these animals are “a separate nation that accompanies us throughout the world.” Something, in fact, that could be said just as well for the poetry we keep with us as companion animals in their own right.

Comments

[Dan]

Thanks for the great write-up for the BAWA reading. It was a delight to be a part of this second exploration of four-legged wonder. Oh, and I LOVE this site. Thanks for all the great work that goes into making lit-art happen her in the District of Columbines.