Sunday Double-Header: Good Food, Good Listening

On a pleasant, though still possibly overly-warm summer afternoon, Bloomington Writers Guild members were offered a double treat. The first was the Guild’s annual summer picnic, getting back into its normal time-and-place rotation, a kaleidoscope of fried chicken, potato salad, cole slaw (that just on my first plate), cheeses, sweets, berries, three kinds of tea, lemonade, and more. Then, some of us leaving a little early to get there by 3 p.m., “Last Sunday Poetry Reading and Open Mic” at Morgenstern Books (cf. June 25, et al.).

Before what seemed a record crowd, the poetry featured two Asian Americans, the first local member and Appalachian born and raised, “AppalAsian” educator and poet Lisa Kwong, reading entries from her 2022 BECOMING APPALASIAN, as well as a second book in production, tentatively titled APPALASIAN BAPTISM, including her 2019 Sundress Publications Poetry Broadside Contest winner, “Searching for Wonton Soup,” and other nominees for various awards and prizes. Following her, IU English faculty member, non-fiction writer, poet, and translator of fiction from various Indian languages into English, Mahasweta Baxipatra, with work in multiple publications including LAST STANZA POETRY JOURNAL, MUSE INDIA, and CREATIVE FORUM: JOURNAL OF LITERARY AND CRITICAL WRITINGS, presented a cornucopia of short poems on such themes as frustrated expectations, thoughts, facets of history, art, memory, and poetry itself.

But then there were two “Open Mic” sessions as well, one at the picnic where I read a short piece from a recent “Third Sunday Write” based on the prompt “What would you have in your picnic basket? Maybe share a recipe or two. Who would you share it with? Where are you?” which, I not having such a basket myself, might best be titled THE VAMPIRESS’S PICNIC (and keeping, thus, with the occasion, for which to read for yourself see June 3). And the second the poetry Open Mic session with 23 listeners still attending(!), where I was second of about ten with two poems, both on subjects suggested/inspired by a non-local friend, speculative poet and Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Society (SFPA) activist Marge Simon, “Musical Summer” (a challenge-poem, to include the words “Vermin,” “Theremin,” “Decision,” and “Vitamin” in twenty or fewer lines) and, based on an illustration and title also by Marge, “Emile’s Ghosts.”