Dave Read

Live From Here at Tanglewood, June 15, 2019

By Dave Read – Chris Thile has the hardest job in show biz, following Garrison Keillor as host of a live radio broadcast from the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood. The show he ran June 15, 2019, was on par with the 16 editions of Keillor’s that we covered.

Just as we remember the bit from the initial show in 2000, when the pretend Bill Clinton responds to Keillor’s inquiry as to what it’s like to be leaving the house he has called home for eight years by mimicing Bob Dylan singing Like a Rolling Stone, Thile’s troupe had us rolling in the aisles with something as funny and as original – and therefore, memorable.

They created a universe in which whenever a put-upon father (Father’s Day on the horizon) responded to his teenager in an unsatisfactory way, a clip from the awesome Harry Chapin’s Cats in the Cradle would fill the air and guilt-trip dad into action!

Thile also has pre-existing Tanglewood conditions – his maternal grandfather, a composer, had a piece performed here sixty some years ago, AND he himself is a wrangler in Yo Yo Ma’s Goat Rodeo. Keillor had one too – a second date with his eventual wife when she was a student here at BUTI. The both are right up front about how much they like Tanglewood, especially that this show concludes their live radio season. And the audience seems pretty happy too.

Listen to the show.
Cellphone snaps of the lawn audience and a couple views of the stunning new Tanglewood Learning Institute up by Ozawa Hall.

Dave Read reads five poems

Once you start the video, you can fast-forward to my poems at around 1:10. Poem titles are:
1.Vice Versa
2.Big Apple Byte
3.Hold Still
4.In Loco Parentis, or Mark & Sheryl to the Rescue
5.It’s Not Up to Chuck & Nancy
6.Jared has Four Diamonds,* Every Kick begins with K

I made a mistake in It’s Not Up to Chuck & Nancy – Martin Luther called Henry VIII “pig, dolt and liar (not idiot).”

IWOW (In Words Out Words), June 4, 2019. Deb Koffman's Art Space, Housatonic, Massachusetts. from CTSB on Vimeo.

IWOW (In Words Out Words), June 4, 2019. Deb Koffman's Art Space, Housatonic, Massachusetts.

I’m happy to provide the text for these, just give me your name and email address:[smlsubform] Posting them here would make it more difficult to publish them elsewhere.

American Life in Poetry

Cat Moving Kittens

We must have known,
Even as we reached
Down to touch them
Where we’d found them

Shut-eyed and trembling
Under a straw bale
In the haymow, that
She would move them

That night under cover
Of darkness, and that
By finding them
We were making certain

We wouldn’t see them again
Until we saw them
Crouching under the pickup
Like sullen teens, having gone

As wild by then as they’d gone
Still in her mouth that night
She made a decision
Any mother might make

Upon guessing the intentions
Of the state: to go and to
Go now, taking everything
You love between your teeth.

By Austin Smith, who lives in rural Illinois and is an acute observer of the world at hand.This poem is from his book Flyover Country, published by Princeton University Press.

About poetry on BerkshireLinks

Adding a poetry category to BerkshireLinks.com comports with what we had in mind when we started our first web magazine, Berkshire Spectrum, way back in 1996. Today, one could expect to generate some interest by publishing poetry on a website that has an audience of thousands of persons interested in the Berkshires arts and entertainment scene.

The key feature, initially at least, will be the inclusion of the American Life in Poetry project, which makes available to us and practically anybody else, as indicated here:

American Life in Poetry is a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem by Ted Kooser. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry, and we believe we can add value for newspaper and online readers by doing so. There are no costs or obligations for reprinting the columns, though we do require that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration, along with the complete copyright, permissions and credit information, exactly as supplied with each column.

Memorial Day parade Lenox, MA

Article updated May 28, 2019 by Dave Read

Memorial Day parade in the Berkshires

The passage of time and the replenishment of a small town’s population are evident in snapshots of the Memorial Day parade. Recollections from earlier parades, from the late 1980s or early 1990s, show a flatbed truck carrying several WWII and Korean War veterans; today, no vets on flatbeds. Last year, my poem Memorial Day was published by was Indolent Books in their What Rough Beast project.

Except for Love; New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall

Article updated June 24, 2019 by Dave Conlin Read

Except for Love; New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall, was published on June 23rd, the first anniversary of his death at 89. Included in the anthology is my poem Afterparty.

Donald Hall and Dave Read at UNH, Nov. 9, 2017; photo courtesy David J. Murray, ClearEyePhoto.com

Mr. Hall was a guest on the 2008 broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood, with Garrison Keillor, which I reviewed here. His January 2012 New Yorker essay Out the Window led to an acquaintance that included a series of visits with him at Eagle Pond Farm and his final reading and poetry talk at the University of New Hampshire in Nov. 2017.

The book is edited by Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, with an Introductory tribute by Wesley McNair, former Poet Laureate of Maine, and cover photo of Hall by Steven Ratiner. 10% of proceeds to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to honor Hall’s wife Jane Kenyon It can be ordered via this link.

Afterparty

We don’t bid our dead Godspeed to the afterlife
the way we did, in churches, where weeping echoes
off walls or gets absorbed by pipe organ blasts,
while incense spirals from an acolyte’s censer,
and the minister intones his woeful sound.

After we lowered our dearly departed into the ground,
back at the church hall there would be baked ham,
casseroles, and pies, supplied by neighbors and aunts.

Today, in function rooms, where event planners
have laid out aromatherapy diffusers and flowers,
we get right on with the afterparty and mingle,
nibbling fruit, veggies, and tiramisu, while a playlist,
synced to a slideshow, loops in the background.

The Outer Borough Colonel, Old Bone Spur

Having ordered a parade of his own,
Trump is transformed
from Putin’s Puppet,
to Kim’s Clone.

Now, we wonder …

Will he ask bids
for a new pyramid,
or coldly evict, then
re-brand Grant’s Tomb?

The Outer Borough Colonel, Old Bone Spur, poem by Dave Conlin Read

poem by Dave Conlin Read; first published by Indolent Books in their What Rough Beast series.