Loose Leaf Notes

We mostly read to ourselves, those from the Artemis Journal table at the Taubman Museum for Roanoke Arts Pop! But we met other poets, and for Katherine and I, it was another notch in our Grief and Relief Soulful Aging Reading Tour, which lately I’ve been calling the “Still Acting Our Age Tour.”

The Arts Pop! is a Roanoke Arts Commission showcase of regional arts and culture that included chorus and dancing performances and much more. Our poetry pop-up was hosted by the Taubman, the Virginia Poetry Society and Artemis Journal, an award-winning literary art journal that I’ve had work published in. Artemis art editor Page Turner was on hand to staff the table, which was set up next to a parrot from the Mill Mountain Zoo.

Katherine read a few from her poetry collection Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent: Poems from My Sixties.

I read some from Objects Are Closer Than They Appear and THIS one about the back-to-back deaths of two of my brothers in 2001, which I dedicated to our attendee artist friend Lora who just lost her father, a well-loved Floyd icon.

We shared the podium with Mel Kasting, a poet who lived in Floyd County at one time.

It was loud because of the expansive lobby and high ceiling, part of which was being used as a hanging gallery of iconic costumes.

But we had a mic and an attentive small audience that included Poetry Society of Virginia’s Angela Dribben, who organized the readings, and my husband Joe, who took some videos that (because of the background noise) didn’t come out well enough to share.

One of the perks was checking out the Taubman’s art upstairs from the lobby and enjoying a downtown feast of Indian food with our Floyd contingency.

In the Downtown Market Square, we bumped into a Ukraine Peace Rally, which was heartening to see.