Monday, September 4, 2017

Salon with Joel Lipman


 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 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

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