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Library focus: Poets look for America

COURTESY PHOTO Up next: On Friday April 21st, Cara Loriz, Executive Director of the Organic Seed Alliance, will discuss seeds and the future of food.
COURTESY PHOTO Up next after the poets have their say this Friday —  On Friday April 21st, Cara Loriz, Executive Director of the Organic Seed Alliance, will discuss seeds and the future of food.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, “Poetry Nation … Poets look for America” is the theme of a reading on April 7 at 7 p.m. at the Shelter Island Public Library.

Every April for almost a decade the Shelter Island Poetry Project has presented a different Poetry Month event, read by the people of Shelter Island, to honor the impact of poetry in our daily lives. This year’s reading, part of the Library’s Friday Night Dialogues series, will explore the multiple ways poets across the nation view their country.

Channeling Paul Simon’s immortal lyrics, written in times almost as perilous as our own, Bliss Morehead, Shelter Island Poetry Project curator, went looking for America, and in the process has collected a road trip’s worth of great poems about the United States in many of their finest (and sometimes far from finest) moments.

“Poets have always been our bellwethers,” said Ms. Morehead, “and it seems to me that poetry that cherishes our sheer artistic as well as geographical bigness and celebrates our multiplicity of views can be a restorative to all of us ­— a lasting gift that reminds us of the power of art, especially when times get dark.”

Barbecue and John Brown, The Indy 500 and the buck and wing, football, eagles, Ferguson, cutting off your braids, kissing in Vietnam, Albuquerque, Boston and a horse named American Pharaoh are a few of the stops along the way, from poets as various as Philip Levine, Grace Paley, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Blanco, Ida Limon, Sherman Alexie, Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell, James Dickey, Juan Felipe Herrera, Ocean Vuong … even the great Paul Simon himself, who for one night gets to hang out with the poets.

“They’ve all come to look for America,” Paul sang.

Come listen to their many voices at the Library. This program is free, but donations are always gratefully accepted.

Submitted by library staff