Poems for The 8th Annual Little River Poetry Festival June 2 – 4
I’ll be doing a workshop at the Little River Poetry Festival Friday June 2 at 6:30. I’ll be using my poem “Eulogy in Self-Portrait,” which my husband calls my Opus, as a loose template for this 3rd person exercise. My poem is the conclusion of a body of work that has taken me eight years to complete. The workshop is an opportunity for others to delve into creative self-reflection and to tell the world who you really are at the core.
On Saturday at 2:00 Katherine Chantal and I will be presenting a back-and-forth reading called “Reveries of an Aging Mind: Aka Losing our Mind,” which we first shared as a threesome with Mary Wiley at an invitational house reading. Reveries is the fourth installment of the Soulful Aging Tour, a poetry reading tour that Katherine and I have been doing since the winter of 2022 at various regional venues, including at Radford University, Little River Poetry Festival, Yoga Jam, Jessie Peterman Library and the Soup Shop.
I also hope to read at LRP open mics and Sunday (free Floyd day) from the third in a trilogy of poetry books that embody the theme of my work, a poetry memoir and travelogue of aging where depth psychology and death mythology meet. The recently published Poems from the Darkroom is titled for what I imagine as retrospective proof-of-concept show, pulling out the dusty negatives that have collected over a lifetime, developing them and holding them up to the light because “It takes time in the dark room to bring lived-experience into focus and to develop the meaning we’ve made of our lives.” Poems from the Darkroom follows my first poetry collection in the series, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, which was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017, and Objects are Closer Than They Appear, published independently (like Poems From the Darkroom) in 2021. All are available locally an on Amazon.
More about the Little River Poetry Festival at 2053 Thunderstruck Rd. Floyd, Virginia, including a schedule for the three-day event, can be found on Facebook. -Colleen Redman
