Why There Are Words Reading (Video)
Video from reading in November, 2014, at Why There Are Words in Sausalito. Such a fun evening! (The whole thing only runs 9 minutes, so enjoy!)
Similar Posts
Crannóg, Trees, Vortexes, and Home
It made me very happy to know that Crannóg Magazine had selected my poem “Unleaving” for Issue 47, now available. It makes such a resonant conjunction of different places and times! Crannóg is published in Galway, Ireland, yet this is a praise poem to the trees of northern California, and starts out with an American…
Home Ground
I’ve just returned from a writers’ retreat at Sea Ranch on the northern California coast. Sea Ranch is one of my heart places, a place where my parents once built a house and where their ashes are scattered. Now I wonder how it will survive. How any of the places I have loved in California,…
Flotsam
Reading so many beautiful poems of gratitude and thanks-giving this week, I wanted to share this, from my last book, Crazing: Flotsam The storm drives all ashore—thrown stick with dogteeth, twig of twisted pine, thumbnail jellyfish with dark sails fallen, torn kelp, fouled ballast, soapy olivine foam. Everyone here has the same story. We are…
Grouse Song
In many traditions, the grouse is a symbol of the spiral dance to the heart of mystery. Here she is also an offering to my own limping, arthritic joints. Grouse spins inward, dancesthe one-wing limp-dance – the hunched, knee-favoring,stiff-hip-lurching two-step. Round and round she dancesdragging a wing, a thumb joint, and the dragged part, flightless,makes…
Bless You, Father Walt
Bless You, Father Walt for lying stripped and singingin the floes and fallows of your own body.For granting us land-rights to your shaggy unkempt tonguewhere through long syllables of scarlet leaveswe ride shanks-mare, drunk on the public road again. Oh, bless me, Father Walt!Lend me your large boots to caper and hoot at dusk,make me…
The White Queen
The White Queen Comes the White Queen worryingand hurrying to keep up and losingher hairpins. Mind pieces slipout of their sockets. Because it is all held togetherwith hairpins —the old kind, meant to be invisible? And they were invisible.I didn’t know they were there holding my mind togetheruntil I startedto lose it. Someone whose name…
3 Comments
Comments are closed.
Ruth, One of your best readings. I liked the pace which created space for the audience to savor a poem heard for the first time. And of course the poems which on rereading and rehearing only gain in emotional appeal and music.
and you couldn’t hear!
Judy
What a joy to see and hear you read, Ruth! I am one of your biggest fans! Thank you for posting this.
Lovely to hear a poet who reads so well her brilliant compositions!