a poetry reading at the jewish cultural center in wyomissing.

last thursday, the senior club at the jewish cultural center in wyomissing enjoyed lunch, good conversation, and a poetry reading featuring volume one of the labors of our fingertips: poems from manufacturing history in berks county.

and as a nice perk for chatting-minutes in the afternoon, several of the seniors are also poets of their own varieties. a few won honorable mention for poems they recently submitted to the annual berks encore poetry contest for seniors. and some of them had great questions about literature itself between sharing individual poems about what fellow seniors in berks county remember about the jobs that were such a large part of their identities and daily living in the past.

one woman wanted to know how words could be poetry if they did not rhyme, so we discussed the presence of line breaks which is absent in prose and also the differences between classical versus contemporary poetry, as well as the benefit of not limiting anyone's expression of self, since poetry is a form of art. there are more kinds of poetry as well as styles and approaches to it than are talked about in the larger culture, and getting to share examples of these and how berks county's poets as well as those from neighboring counties have skills in all different directions is truly a gift within this project. slam poetry served as just one newer genre mentioned.

we also discussed internal rhyme, which is used in john heck's poem in the very middle of the fourth line in the second stanza. the way internal rhyme is often accidental and also subtle gives it a unique and beautiful persuasion in language throwings.

thank you to carole robinson for assisting with eye-scooping scenes for the day, too.

in recent months at poetry readings which tend to be more cozy size-wise, copies of the first book for this project are passed around so that everyone in audiences can read the words they're hearing, since in some cases, it can be an easier way to take in the details of each line.

plus, since hearing difficulties are sometimes understandably in the picture, a chance to be able to read a poem on a page is a nice opportunity to still be able to absorb what's been expressed in the local story, cut into line breaks.

and since this project is an outlet to help teach that poetry can in fact be funny, the poems of edna machemer and ray doskus were a part of the selections read, too. these are two of several very honestly told laughter-ready stories in the first book of poems. the world will only benefit if we nudge a little more laughter out from within who we are.