May 2-6, 2012
Free and Open to Everybody, Featuring more than 20 local poets
Asheville Wordfest
in celebration of our shared humanity
in memory of Carol Novack Founder/Publisher/Editor Mad Hatters' Review,
Asheville Wordfest 2012: HOME: Place and Planet will take place May 2-62012 at Grateful Steps Foundation Bookshop at 159 S. Lexington, Kava Bar on Eagle St., The Altamont Theater 18 Church Street in Asheville, NC 28801. This is the festival's fifth year of celebrating the voices of poets from many cultural and aesthetic contexts. North Carolina Humanities Council funds the festival in part, and we need your help to really bring it to life. Asheville Wordfest maintains that if something someone says doesn't speak to everybody, then it probably isn't the truth. Join us as we revel in how poetry has a way of speaking to everyone. Explore the schedule and read about our honored guest poets. Please refresh your browser if you have visited this site already. See you at Wordfest!
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Poplars
Géza Brunow
www.gezabrunow.com
. . .
Among rotten stumps in black bass ponds,
somewhere catfish reel in fins and crawl,
walking whiskers to higher waters.
Waters above, below
the choir calling it forth.
Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirds
fly as if hung in one place like pinwheels.
They dance toward the rain crest,
the approaching storm
beckoning, inviting, summoning.
A single sparrow sings the stroke of rain
past the strength of sunlight.
The frog chorus sings refrain,
melody drumming thunder,
evoked by beasts and water creatures wanting their homes.
Wanting to return to clearings and streams where ash, or
white birch woods rise, tower over,
quaking aspen stand against
storm shown veils—sheeting rains crossing
pasture, meadow, hills, mountain.
Sounds erupt.
Gathering clouds converge, push,
pull, push, pull forcing lightning
back and forth shaping
windy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants
from stratocumulus media.
As if they are a living cloud chamber,
As if they exist only in the heavens.
Air swells with dampness.
It has begun.
from “When the Animals Leave This Place”
by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Used with poet’s permission via The Poetry Foundation.
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Asheville Wordfest is generously supported by a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council.
“The North Carolina Humanities Council is a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”