True South

On April 11, I'll be reading poetry aloud at O'Bheal in Cork, southernmost end of Ireland. You can read about O'Bheal here: http://www.obheal.ie/blog/

and visit O'Bheal at Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/obheal.poetry

It seems I'm coming home to the south again, in another country. "Will these people find me terribly strange, with this Alabama accent and this funny voice?", I asked my friend from northern Ireland --- it's a 300 mile country, and the dialect differences are significant. He laughed. "Um, no. I don't think so." I wonder.

In any case, the arts have brought us together --- me and these wonderful people in a distant country across the Atlantic, poets all, and dreamers. I'm excited about Ireland, and I'm eager for the poems that will follow the experience. Look for me to be writing about my adventure April 8-15, 2016.

Last night, I was asked to recite a poem at a local bar, and I found that I could do it with only a few brief hesitations, but it was one that I wrote recently and know well. It's not nearly as long as "Sky, an Open Window," which I'll read at O'Bheal.

All of this has got me thinking about the power of recitation and spoken word in general. If you have never tried it and want to give it a shot, Billy Collins has some great basic tips for carrying it off: http://loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-howtoread.html

There are other tips here: http://www.write-out-loud.com/how-to-read-poetry-aloud.html

I read poetry aloud all the time in class, but the experience of reading aloud or of recitation outside the classroom has a distinctly different feel. My first objective is to learn the images --- parse them out, study them, and visualize them. At the heart of the poem is the idea of God as a kind of window shopper, admiring his glass menagerie through the open window of the sky. Thinking about this today took me back to a wonderful song by Jackson Browne: "Sky Blue and Black."

I had the idea, as I listened to it again, that for me true south is wherever we are deeply loved. it is less about a geographic space than a feeling that the sky we are under is a friendly one. Even when a sky is a bit blue and a bit black, it is a sky full of feeling and memory. The sky through which God sees all of us is like that. Tomorrow is Easter, the day of resurrection and overcoming sorrow. I will celebrate it as the day the sky opened up again and God looked on us with hope and even gratitude that He was not alone in this world. When he looks at us, he is looking at his true south.

Our compass is love. I pray you can see your true south, too.