It's good to have a collection of poets and poetry-lovers in your backyard on a sunny summer day. Joel Lipman (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/joel-lipman )was the featured reader at my recent Literary Salon.
He brought 24 framed text-and-image pieces and distributed them around my living and dining room. Here are a few:
He brought 24 framed text-and-image pieces and distributed them around my living and dining room. Here are a few:
He also gave a short talk and reading from poems recently published in "Inland Seas: Quarterly Journal of the Great Lakes Historical Society." Here is one of them.
SMELTING
SMELTING
Oil wicks burn
spring’s chill
drizzle.
Lanterns’
yellow mantles
light
littered beach
along
Highway 32
where Pike
Creek
meets lake.
Dip nets
rigged
with
pulleys, ropes,
hinged
frames.
Long seines
belly out
across the
stream mouth.
From each
end,
hip deep dark
water,
men pull net
and call quiet
across cold shallows.
On the bank,
hands
reach into a
mesh arc
where silver
smelt flip.
Men smoke
cigarettes,
sit on five
gallon buckets
pearly with
scales,
drink
schnapps,
talk soft, spit,
adjust
suspenders,
boots, waders,
instructing
kids
in the lure
of currents
and chant of
toss, sweep, lift.
Along a
wave-lapped
shore pocket
where Pike
Creek
and Lake
Michigan mix,
twenty
pounds of smelt
in a
five-gallon plastic pail,
cookfire skillet
sizzling.
Joel Lipman, 2017
Joel Lipman, 2017
