Loose Leaf Notes

1. This is a teaser of a story soon to appear in The Floyd Press on The HOMETOWN BALLAD SWAP FUNDRAISER FOR MARSHALL NC at The Floyd Country Store on Saturday: Before turning the stage over to the eight generational ballad singers of Madison County, Josh Copus spoke of the devastation that the flood caused to his “two-stoplight, one-street, mile-long adopted town,” and of the vision that led to the Ballad Swap Tour, a fundraiser for the Helene impacted musical community and a way to share the Marshall story, which is as uplifting as it is tragic…

2. Singing to a full house at the Floyd Country Store, the eight ballad singers swapped song stories that touched emotions and brought reflection and laughter from the audience. William Ritter performed a classic murder ballad and a song about the Great Marshall Flood of 1916. Judy Rhodes sang “Now our Meeting is Over,” with the fitting chorus line of “We will land on shore / And be safe forever more.

3. Tease Songs, also known on the renaissance faire circuit as “clean songs,” use the meter and rhyme-scheme convince you you’re about to hear something dirty… but then you don’t.

4. Josh spoke of how his friend, the award-winning 7th generation ballad singer Sheila Kay Adams, came to the OMJ after the flood had receded and sang on the sidewalk, “next to a pile of garbage that used to be my restaurant.” The song communicated what words could not, Copus said. With Marshall businesses closed down, he and Adams promised each other that they would pull off an October Ballad Swap on the Jail’s outside patio, which they did.

5. Is it all Gravy or all Groovy?

6. Grey or gray?

7. I used to tease my hair in high school.

8. I follow the landmarks of memories / and dream the dreams I have loved / Some reappear by my longing for them / as shadows teased from darkroom negatives –  Read my poem Resonance in its entirety HERE. 

9. Did you know that there’s a book no one will ever be able to finish reading in their lifetime, and it only has 10 pages? In 1960, the French writer Raymond Queneau introduced what is probably the world’s longest book. It’s called *Cent mille milliards de poèmes* (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), and it consists of just ten pages, each containing a sonnet. The verses all share the same rhyme pattern and are printed on strips, allowing readers to combine lines from different sonnets… Photo HERE from Goodwill Librarian

10. Every person’s inner gold / accrues interest when shared / Every labor of love / is the whole world’s enrichment / We spend our treasure / before it returns to darkness / We bury our old / like seed – Read my poem A Labor of Love in its entirety HERE. 

11. I’m always panning the gold of information.

12. “Do you not have an increasing sense that underlying one’s own preparedness to accept whatever fate may bring there is a warm, sincere, frightened yet daring unchangeability? And what does living come down to but bringing about those changes in ourselves which we have daringly attempted and which can free us to enjoy a richness and closeness with everyone? After so much honest progress you have now come thus far: that you can live humbly and with the clear expectation that nothing untrue will, nor indeed can, ever find its way in to your heart, for you have that voice within you which merits your safe trust, your utmost faithfulness, and your joy.” Rainer Maria Rilke

13. Joyeux Noël

_______Thirteen Thursday