Archive for August 6th, 2015
Everyman’s Poet: Martha Heimberg on Ted Kooser
When: Thursday, April 14, 7 pm
Salon: Private Residence, RSVP wordspace@wordspace.us
What: Everyman’s Poet: Ted Kooser’s Down-to-Earth Poems, Essays and Surprising Musical Verse
Bonus: Lisa Huffaker performs
Refreshments made possible by Ben E. Keith
Critic and everyday painter Martha Heimberg and poet, mezzo soprano, guitarist and joyful artist Lisa Huffaker lead an evening of reading and exploring the work of poet and essayist Ted Kooser, Nebraska-born Pulitzer Prize Winner (Shadows and Delights) and 2004 US Poet Laureate.
Kooser’s diction, drawn from everyday speech, never makes an allusion that a smart, unbookish reader won’t grasp. Many of his short poems are about perception itself, the signs of human habitation, and the uncertainty of human knowledge.
An insurance executive at Lincoln Benefit Life Company for 30 years, Kooser lives on acreage outside Lincoln, and now teaches classes in “Poetry Repair” at the University of Nebraska. He wakes at 4:30 a.m. and begins to write. When he’s not writing and teaching, he paints. At 76, he has won every American prize in poetry and non-fiction. The poems are short, sweet and wow!
Kooser received a Grammy as a librettist in 2015. Nine poems from his book Winter Morning Walks were set to music by Maria Schneider and sung by Dawn Upshaw. The CD swept the awards in contemporary classical music.
7:00 p.m. Wine and bread
7:30-7:50 p.m. Martha talks about Ted’s Winter Morning Walks
7:50-8:15 p.m. Lisa plays guitar and sings some melodies she made up to match Ted’s poems from Shadows and Delights
8:15 p.m. More singing in the wilderness of old East Dallas until 9:00 p.m.
New Transcendentalism: Martha Heimberg on H is for Hawk
When: Thursday, December 3
Salon: Private Residence, RSVP: wordspace@wordspace
Refreshments made possible by Ben E. Keith and Spiral Diner!
Blood Sport: Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk
Critic Martha Heimberg places Helen Walker’s H is For Hawk in the feral and vivid tradition of literary nature writing, from Thoreau and Emerson in America’s great Romantic tradition to the Scottish naturalist John Muir’s passionate environmentalism and Barbara Kingsolver’s nature-rich fiction.
H is For Hawk is a brilliant and fierce memoir by Cambridge lecturer, poet and naturalist. It won every major science and essay-writing award in Britain and America in 2014. As the New Yorker critic wrote: “Had there been an award for the best new book that defies every genre, I imagine it would have won that, too.”
When McDonald’s beloved father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, she’d never before been tempted to train a goshawk, the most belligerent and vicious flying predator of them all. Then she did. She purchased and raised a goshawk, because, in her wild grief, she equated the creature’s feral and fierce temperament to her own.
Part myth, part memoir, part lit-crit and falconry history, the work is innovative, invigorating and “so good it draws blood,” says Dwight Garner in the New York Times.
Is there a falconer in the house?
