a poetry reading at studio b on sunday, october 8 at 1 p.m. to introduce volume three officially.

studio b in boyertown is hosting a poetry reading for this project and its final book's release.

the poetry reading is set for sunday, october 8 at 1 p.m., and studio b's address is 39a east philadelphia avenue, boyertown, pa 19512. it is near the long-lived grill shop (which is in a poem this year, by the way) and neighbors with spirit holistic center, the local united way office, modellbahn ott hobbies, inc., and the peppermint stick candy store.

please send your RSVPs to thelaborsofourfingertips at yahoo dot com. invite friends and the famfam, if you like. we'll have some refreshments, too.
 
the bulk of copies of volume three will be available for purchase by the time this poetry reading rolls on around.

betty seifrit (she wasn't able to attend during a july poetry reading) and tom mauger will be special featured guests from the third and final volume in this project, as will gary and doris williams. the opportunity to ask the poem-sources questions about their lives after their poems are read is the always-there perk of these events so that you can learn more about them through genuine connections in conversation.

here are eye-scenes of them and a teaser poem about one of them, in the order in which they were mentioned above.

 *

gary williams, rockland township | born: 1948

sam hartline told me, you’re a natural at welding, once he

trained me but acted like i hardly needed the lessons. walter

delong had shown me the heat-firing ropes any time a free

minute or two cropped into our shifts at boyertown auto

body works. before sam’s nodding of final approval, i only

assembled the trucks, starting maybe in the late 1960s or

early 1970s. when contracts were slow to absorb inked

signatures in agreement, they laid me off, so reading

truck body hired me to work on dual-wheeled utility

vehicles. they paid more, but my heart functioned its

best back in boyertown. i welded shelves on the trucks,

crafted the sides of those dual-wheels from scratch.

when boyertown auto body works had some openings

again, i returned. in winter, sometimes walter and i

stole a few moments to throw snow into a cardboard

box outside of building 11. we were up on the balcony,

a perfect location for aiming snowballs down at guys

below, a way to add a laugh or two into a morning.

welding—with it, i felt like i accomplished more than

just putting in rivets and screws as an assembler. few

men there could fashion aluminum just right, its soft

and difficult tendencies always swimming easily close

to failure, botched jobs, but the flame, the sparks and

i got along well enough. stainless or galvanized steel,

too. i’m pretty sure i once glimpsed one of our emblems

on a box truck in a dirty harry movie, maybe magnum

force from 1973. to think our work made it to california,

that what we touched traveled so far and made it onto

the big screen—i like that memory, that little reminder,

to know what we did started in a small town, reached

so far beyond pennsylvania, beyond the blasting flashes

of what the steadied control of my arms made happen.

two bettys walk into a historical society poetry reading.

i've been loving the "two bettys walk into a bar" phrasing for the past week or two, although i had to more accurately twist it into a different venue and kind of hangout, a historical society poetry reading.

betty kunkel and betty yeager are these specific betty-types. in my second and third volumes of this poetry project, respectively, with betty kunkel also in betty yeager's poem, i delighted in the minutes of time spent with them during a program where i read their knitting milll job memories out loud for the hamburg area historical society at the hamburg area high school last thursday evening.

and a third betty joined these two in walking into the building, which i loved. "yodeling betty" naftzinger is not in my books and project on manufacturing history of berks county. but i don't know how often you can say you have three bettys walking into a doorway at once. here are the three bettys: naftzinger, kunkel, and yeager.

and the two bettys in my project drove to the wrong entrance of the school, as did i. since they have some struggles walking but do pretty well for their age, i walked back to get my car and acted as their chauffeur before and after the reading. and i loved that. 

in the early minutes of the reading, we heard a loud, awkward tech-y sound in the hallway outside of where we were. i said into the microphone that it sounded like an electrical fart. the crowd whirled into a good roar of laughter for a while. i told everyone that poetry builds you to be more in tune with how to describe things you notice in the world.

 

betty yeager commented during the reading that she gave brian riegel (he kindly took the photos here) of the historical society his lunch in his school days when she worked in the high school cafeteria, but she said he didn't have whiskers below his chin then. she's pretty good at incidental comedy. this was one of her jobs after her knitting mill days shared with betty kunkel.

and one woman in the audience raised her hand to let me know her mother had been in my first book, irene schappell. at the time, she'd been 98 going on 99. she said irene died a few months ago, at 100. i was so grateful that she spoke out and shared this news. irene struggled with hearing and memory yet had a wonderful and witty personality. here is irene's obituary which i just discovered.

by the end, outside, the moon perched low in the sky, bigger-seeming (it's technically the moon illusion), and it looked like a rounded chunk of muenster cheese. they gazed at it above hamburg's hills a bit before getting into betty yeager's car to head home. i told them that these moments were a poem.