Super-Sized Series

Zoom Poetry Readings

 

 

Marianne Szlyk reads a poem on a zoom from Maryland Photo by Alan Gann

The Zoom Readings by Marianne Szlyk

Not so long ago, three years now
poets’ living rooms and bedrooms
opened windows to their bright souls.

True, true we couldn’t crouch beside
their bookshelves or gaze at CD
towers to look for what we wished

we had, what we wished we had kept.
We couldn’t stand in their kitchens,
drink tap water or beer, and just

talk. We two could only wander
our picked-over suburbs, not theirs.
We couldn’t find the streams that ran

through their poems, or the corner store
where they stopped for coffee and eggs.
But that year we visited poets.

We watched a husband play trumpet,
then switch on loops of percussion,
while his wife chanted words we could

only imagine in the haze
of sound that smeared the bare white walls
like ones we once had, once before

we settled down in no man’s land.
We heard a man recite poems to
Frida in a room with blue walls

in a house with palm trees, one half
hour drive from Mexico’s border,
so many miles from her blue house.

We saw a woman in Thailand
reading from her vintage notebook
as birds chirped and white flowers bloomed,

so many miles from our takeout
of drunken noodles with tofu, fried
catfish, mangos with sticky rice.


Poet recites poems to Frida in a blue room from Texas on zoom. Photo by Anthony Rippa.

 

Live Readings from a Zoom Box by Joan Leotta

As a five-year old in the nineteen fifties, my Aunt tried to convince me that the gray people in the mahogany box that was my Grandmother’s television, were really inside. It was several years before I was sure she was not telling the truth.

For years I compartmentalized the worlds of video and film as different from real life. A lover of stage performing and an applause addict for my own appearances, it was not hard to place “Live” television performances in the category of film, since my reactions could not be seen or heard by those on stage. The fourth wall was impenetrable. No audience interaction was possible.

Video phone calls and science fiction films should have prepared me for the tsunami of change that washed over my communications, but actually nothing prepared me for the thrill of my first zoom poetry reading. I had performed on television but only a small part of my audience was live, the few who came to the studio for the filming. But zoom offered more.

Yes, I admit, I also love to zoom because I glad to not have to drive endless minutes, find a parking place, dress appropriately, I love to be able to interact with people from other times zones even as far away as England, Europe, Australia, India.

However, on zoom I most cherish the moments before and after the zoom record the reading when the host and participants interact informally, sharing weather news, tidbits about our children and life in general, as if we were in a green room offstage together. We can interact with one another, and the audience on the screen with applause and comments live or in the “chat.” The fourth wall is not impenetrable! We are live while in that box.

Sometimes I can almost taste the tea and cookies I see on screen—oh wait—those are mine, so of course I can taste them! Yes, I delight in being in one of the little boxes in the larger box, rigid plastic computer screen now instead of polished mahogany.

I wonder what my aunt would say if she could see me and others now. Perhaps there is a zoom that reaches into the next world and if so, perhaps she connects and is laughing now watching me live out what she foresaw so long ago that there really are live people, live performances, inside the boxes.

Two poems by Sharon Waller Knutson

I Schedule a Zoom Poetry Reading on Super Bowl Sunday

Realize my mistake
from the messages.
Sorry, nothing could
stop me but football.
Cooking chili
at the big bash
for hubby and boys.

Others say: I’ll be there
so we don’t re-schedule.
Then there’s the last
minute cancelations.
My back went out.
I have laryngitis.
Pacemaker operation.

It’s like the birthday
parties where you wonder
if anyone will show up
and then there they are
all those faces popping
up on the screen with smiles
as bright as balloons.



From left. Top, Joan Leotta, Jim Lewis, Sharon Knutson and Neil Creighton.
Middle: Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca. Marianne Szlyk, Abha Das Sarma and her granddaughter and Mary  McCarthy.
Bottom row,  Shawn R. Pankoski, Luanne Castle, Ethan  Goffman and Mary Ellen Talley.

There we are on YouTube

A dozen faces glowing
in the dark like fireflies
wiping tears smiling
laughing clapping
as we read our stories
about sassafras and sugar
a filly and stallion
a mob of kangaroos
homesickness
supermarkets and yogurt
saint without a history
pain, patience and peace
cocky little chin toss
sweet short sugary house
skittering spider
unbuckled shoes
blue balcony
and rocket blasts
and then return
to our lives in Australia,
South America, India,
Canada and the USA.

I Welcome Many Visitors and Travel to Faraway Places by Neil Creighton

Picture this.
There is the brick house
with the cedar windows and long verandah
that she and I built with our own hands.
Not too much use of machines.
We dug the foundations with mattock and shovel,
sometimes digging well into the night.
We have lived here for almost fifty years.
Our children were raised here
and much loved dogs have come and gone.

There is the land, over two acres,
the acre surrounding the house
filled with casual gardens, winding paths
and sandstone walls, stone we bought
in local quarries, ferried back in trailer or ute
and split with bolster or chiselled with scutch.
Every season something is flowering:
wattle and banksia in winter;
crepe myrtle and oleander in summer;
bromeliads, spider lilies and fountain grasses.  

There is an orchard of twenty or so trees and vines:
macadamia, mandarin, orange, lemon, lime,
tangelo, avocado, fig, passionfruit and blackberry.
Hens scratch happily in their poultry run.
Tomatoes, lettuce, chili, corn, onions and garlic
spring from the rich soil of the vegetable garden. 

Idyllic?
Sure, but isolated.  

There are no poetry groups
in the little village nearby,
nor in the surrounding towns,
no community of like minds
with whom to share or discuss.

Then came Covid 19 and Zoom meetings.  
Peers and poets gazed through my computer.
I listened in wonder and saw faces once unfamiliar:
Alan, reading with restrained passion;
Betsy, with quiet, gentle sensitivity;
Stephanie, always with words of encouragement;
generous Jim and Robbi; prolific Rose;
Karen, Joan, Margaret, Judy, Ed, Sterling, Steve,
Lee, James, Mary, Len, Kari, John, Joe, Maryann.
They have all visited and brought joy.

Places once separated by the tyranny of distance
have now come to me: Sacramento, Athens in Ohio,
New York, Utah, Colorado and New Jersey.
I have gone almost every month to Washington State,
listened, read and made friends.
I have heard great poets read
and thrilled to the power and beauty of their work.

Every cloud has its silver lining,
or so the cliché goes.
The horror of Covid 19 swept the earth,
claiming millions, destroying livelihoods,
causing immense suffering and grief.
No silver lining can compensate for that,
but in the little historic village of Wilberforce,
in faraway Australia, a poet who wrote in isolation
now meets with the world.
As he grieves for loss and suffering,
he rejoices in the wonder of technology.
It has brought him the community he craved.
It has gifted him shared companionship
in the power and pleasure of poetry.


Four Zoom Haiku by Cynthia Anderson

zooming in
the kind face
of an old friend
 
zoom free-for-all
nearly not hearing what
I wish I hadn’t
 
bated breath
entering a zoom
full of strangers
 
all morning
the zoom
of hummingbirds