A Gathering of Poets / Rouse

Progress

Today I conjure your spirit
where before
it came on its own.
This is a good sign.

I take your letters
from the drawer
of my bedside table
and put them in the dark
cupboard of the basement.
They are no longer
among the first things
I will save from fire.

And if small memories
of you should arrive
they will be like the shadows
against these white
blinds: birds or leaves
or other birds.

Nancy Mitchell Ebert

The beauty of a poem for me, is that it is pure essense: A moment, a feeling, a glimpse of the human spirit that is distilled for fullest impact. Poetry has brought great joy to my life.

Poets Nancy Mitchell and Martha Rhodes will be in town this Friday night, April the 12th, at Browseabout Books for a special poetry reading.

Friday's reading is one of many similar events which will be taking place in local communities around the country during April, to celebrate the first annual National Poetry Month. The Academy of American Poets is hoping through this effort to spotlight poetry and its vital place in American culture.

Poet Nancy Mitchell, formerly of Salisbury, is a graduate from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared in The Louisville Review, North Atlantic Review, Salt Hill Journal, and are forthcoming in Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction & Deliverance, an anthology to be published by Sarabande Books in 1997. She lives in Washington, DC and works as Marketing Director for Four Way Books and as a publicist for writers.

Joining Mitchell will be poet Martha Rhodes who wrote At The Gate.

Prior to its 1995 publication, At The Gate received praise from the Pultizer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck who wrote: "...These short poems, by turns savage, wry, mordantly witty, tender, stern, deluded, sane, read like a series of fragments, bits of mosaic; they duplicate on the page the sense of a past's being, piece by piece, recovered; they convey, devastatingly, the moment of a pattern's emerging: the little scenes and vignettes, the suspect tools of memory, cohere heart-stoppingly and absolutely into a narrative which fuses the damaged body to the divided heart..."

Both Rhodes and Mitchell will be reading their own poems. The reading starts at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

Browseabout Books is located at 800 S. Salisbury Blvd. For more information, call 410-860-5400.

Kelley!