I feel like we haven’t talked in a while.
When is the last time? Was it just Friday? Really? Curious.
It’s odd the way Time works in conjunction with our lives – speeding up, slowing down, stopping, working backwards – all of those things we sensed as little kids waiting for Christmas. Sensed as younglings – folks, I am now convinced completely that these are actual things outside of wee-child-world. I know I’ve seen Time turn-tail and scamper right-out the door when the numbers magically skipped from 10:16pm to 4:22am without so much as an innocent tape on the shoulder to let me know.
And that’s why I know that it’s been longer than Friday since I sat down and looked you here in the eye for a second.
Do you like talking? I do. I talk to myself a lot. I drag out long, languid and grand monologues when I think nobody will be any the wiser. Some of my most-best moments have taken place before a most-best and most invisible audience alone in my apartment. I worry people look in the windows.
Someday my voice will fill chambers.
But while I may be practicing for an immaterial stage, there are others out there on the planet with not only the right voice but the right words to transform the dry cardboard of “lecture” into “performance”. Join poet, lecturer and literary guru, Mary Ruefle, as part of the Axton Reading Series this coming Thursday, November 8th, at the University of Louisville.
Described as an “erasure artist” (no, I actually don’t understand what that means, but I did try to find out), poet and lecturer Mary Ruefle has been expounding on the world of words for over fifteen years. Having delivered a lecture every six months in this time period to poetry graduate students, Ruefle’s voice on the subject of poetry has had quite enough time to mold itself into something instructive, intelligent – and, yeah, quite beautiful. With many of these oratory epistles collected in the book, Madness, Rack, and Honey, titles in Ruefle’s spoken word history include “Poetry and the Moon,” “Someone Reading A Book Is A Sign Of Order In The World,” and “Lectures I Will Never Give.”
Starting at 7:30pm, fans of words, talking and other things like that can find Ruefle on UofL’s Belknap Campus lighting up the Bingham Poetry Room in the Ekstrom Library. Bring your good ears, bring your good mind and sit a spell for a good listen. Maybe on the drive home you can swing by my house and catch me in my own bombastic fanfare – it’s pretty great stuff you know, if I do say so myself, and I swear I can make Time stand still.
The University of Louisville is located at 2301 South Third Street. For more information, contact Paul Griner at (502) 852-3053.
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