liquid inspiration

On Sunday I attended the New Issues Press / Herb Scott Memorial fundraiser at Bell's Eccentric Cafe, and enjoyed readings by poets native to Kalamazoo and dear to Mr. Scott and to the CW program at Western.  I always forget how much I love these readings... sitting in a hall, listening to melodious or monotonous voices shape words, lines, images; feeling a calm and focus difficult to reach in other places, brought on by the intensity of a singular voice creating a singular vision. These poets evoked images of an herb called boneset painting a pattern of flowers and tendrils across a woman's throat; a memory of a father explaining the structure of a black walnut to his son while his dog waited, tail-wagging, for him to throw it; images of old women power-walking through malls built over ancient bogs; the tale of a funeral procession for a dead dryad.  

Suttung pursuing Odin

I stood in Bell's cavernous new performance space and sipped my mead, the drink known in Norse myth as the nectar and source of poetry, stolen by Odin from Gunnlod and gifted to bards, prophets, and scholars in the mortal world. As I drank, I felt sort of out-of-time, standing in a great wooden hall and drinking an ancient drink, listening to modern-day word-smiths spin lyrics from the raw fibers and threads of momentary visions, melodic syllables, and near-forgotten memories. Is this what Anglo-Saxons felt, sitting in fire-lit mead-halls, listening to scops intone the stories of heroes and monsters, God and Creation? (Minus the train whistle as the 3:45 from Chicago rattles through town, of course.)