Shakespeare, Barnacles, and Blueberries

Happy Shakespeare's Birthday! Or death day. If Shakespeare was even a real person. Sigh...

It's still National Poetry Month. I have been very busy. Writing a poem a day. Except for yesterday. So I wrote two poems today. Very, very short poems.

Yesterday I was showing beautiful Uptown Normal and our "tree campus" at Illinois State University to Escape Into Life poet Scott Poole, who came here from Vancouver, WA, via Portland, OR (and Denver, CO on the plane) for the fabulous News That Stays News poetry reading, sponsored by The Parret Endowment for Religion, Culture & the Arts at the First United Methodist Church.

We had a great audience--enthusiastic, rapt, supportive--and many people stayed afterwards to chat with the poets, eat chocolate, buy books, and talk further about the importance of poetry in the world! So, yay!

But we had a worry: the health of our wonderful WGLT radio host and poetry lover, Bruce Bergethon. My wonderful dad, a radio man from way back before he was a theatre professor, filled in for Bruce and did a great job!

This morning I got up at 4:30 to make sure Scott got to the airport on time for his flight back to Portland, and I am pooped. But, no, that's not me on the roof. That's a fabulous photo by Scarlett Hooft Graafland. You can see more at EIL here, or with the wonderful new poetry feature by Kristin LaTour! Her poems have blueberries and barnacles, crustaceans and lilies. You'll also want to check out LaTour's "Items of Value to a Dying Man" with art by Peter Gric at Moving Poems, here!