As part of the 2002-04 Jones Professorship, Carol Gilbertson planned a series of Friday afternoon readings at 4:00 p.m. in Luther's Farwell Lounge. In each case, a group of faculty, staff, and students read published poems on a certain theme or by particular poets. The readings, in reverse chronological order, were the following (with the program listings below):
May 7, 2004: Visible Vocations. A reading in conjunction with the exhibit "Visible Vocations," which includes works from the Luther College Fine Arts Collection which feature portrayals of varied vocations. Students, faculty, and staff each read a poem about their chosen vocation. Among the readers are a custodian, a historian, a waitress, a pastor, the facilities services director, an artist, and the college president.
April 23, 2004: The Living Word Poetry Event. A reading by participants in Laura and William Gentry's Living Word Project, along with some poetry play: create-your-own haikus with Living Words, audience participation in the Living Word poem, and decorate and eat your words.
March 26, 2004: If You Could See My Soul. A performance of poetry by spoken word artists Indigo Lee and her mother, Sheila Radford-Hill, Executive Director of Luther's Diversity Center, as part of Women's History Month.
February 27, 2004: Heavy Grace. A reading by Guest Poet and Sense of Vocation Visitor Robert Cording, author of Heavy Grace and Against Consolation and Barrett Professor of Creative Writing at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts.
February 13, 2004: Scones, Tea, and Poems. A reading, accompanied by English tea and scones, by students from the British Romanticism Class, including poems by Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Robert Burns, Dorothy Wordsworth, Joanna Baillie, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, and John Clare.
January 16, 2004: Poetry Exposed. A reading by students in the January Term Poems for Life class, focusing on the way poetry exposes the truth of life's joys and difficulties, its large issues and its trivial things.
November 21, 2003: Beguiled Improvisations. Guest poet Cheryl Lachowski's original poetic voice-overs to the music of composer Tim Story's album Beguiled.
October 31, 2003: Poems for Funny Bones. A Halloween reading of witty, comic, parodic, and just plain goofy poems, read by students in the Fall 2003 Introduction to Poetry class.
September 26, 2003: The Lyric of Generations--Poems about Family, Parents, and Children. A poetry reading as part of Luther's Family Weekend, featuring students, faculty, and staff reading poems about the pleasures and tensions in family relationships.
September 12, 2003: Everything Under the Stars--Poems on the Disciplines Read by Your Teachers and Colleagues. A reading, by faculty from ten different departments, of poems exploring their discipline. The faculty were in the summer 2003 "Disciplined Poetry" Workshop led by Carol Gilbertson.
May 6, 2003: The Poet in Her Own Voice: Joyce Sutphen--Coming Back to the Body. A reading by guest poet Joyce Sutphen, professor of literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota.
April 11: The Poet in Her Own Voice: Rebecca Wee--Uncertain Grace. A poetry reading in celebration of the Dedication of the Center for the Arts, given by guest poet Rebecca Wee, professor of creative writing at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL.
March 20, 2003: The Shape and Color of Words: Visual Haiku. A presentation/reading by guest artist-poet Marguerite Perret as part of Women's History Month. This reading combined visual and poetic as Perret gave a gallery talk about her use of paint sample names and colors to create visual/verbal haiku.
March 13, 2003: Mapping Our Lives: Poems by Women Poets. An event for Women's History Month in which female faculty, staff, and students each read favorite poems by women poets.
February 28, 2003: Deep Like Rivers: Poems Celebrating African-American Life and History. A reading by students and faculty to commemorate Black History Month. Poems about Africa, slavery, terror, civil rights struggle, urban life, heroes, music, and the dignity of being black.
February 14, 2003: Hearts and Bodies: Valentine Poems. A reading by students in the spring 2003 Poems for Life class of poems by a range of poets about love, touch, parting, loss, and duration.
January 24, 2003: Drama in the Garden: Readings from Milton's Paradise Lost. Students from the January Term class Milton and the Seventeenth Century did a dramatic reading of selections from Milton's dramatic and powerful Christian epic.
January 9, 2003: The Poet in his Own Voice. A reading by Guest Poet and Vocation Visitor (Sense of Vocation Program) Michael Carey, a poet, editor, and farmer who is originally from New York but who now actively farms in Southwest Iowa. Carey is editor of the Loess Hills Books press.
October 4, 2002: Disparate Voices: Poems in Celebration of Cultural Richness. Faculty and staff from diverse global backgrounds introduced and read powerful poems evoking their traditions and cultures. Participants selected poems that evoked their culture or cultural issues and read them in English as well as in their original language.
November 22, 2002: What We Do . . . As a Faculty. A reading designed for the faculty on the issues involved in teaching. Faculty from a range of disciplines read poems by Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Tom Wayman, Dana Gioia, Stephen Dunn, Howard Nemerov, David Young, and Lucille Clifton on the intellectual life, our disciplinary models, the limits of language, and the vocation--as well as the trials and errors--of teaching.
November 1, 2002: Halloween Poems: The Gothic, the Tricks, and the Treats. Faculty, staff, and students read nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gothic poems, as well as poems that respond to, or even toy with, the Gothic themes of vulnerable young females, strong male sexual aggressors, and dark, shadowy Gothic architecture as a metaphor for human unconscious desires.
November 15, 2002: American Voices: Whitman and Dickinson. Poems by these two quintessential American poets, who have distinctively different voices, both of them authentic and passionate, read by students from this semester's American Literature class and Whitman seminar.
October 25, 2002: The Spin of Song: Poems of Rumi. Caroline Banks (Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work) and Raymundo Rosales (Student Academic Support Service) read the poems of Rumi, a thirteenth-century Muslim Sufi mystic.
UPCOMING READINGS IN POEMS 4 FRIDAY SERIES
