Last night we had our first speaker event, a gentleman and poet named Michael Alpiner. He generously shared a few poems from his opus while a good minyan of us listened, some with wine in hand as per any proper reading. His poetry was beautiful, open and vulnerable, and connecting. He spoke of the pain of watching our parents and grandparents age, the threat of their fragility, and of the alienation sometimes felt by divorced fathers fighting to maintain their relationships with their beloved children, he spoke of fighting cancer and the strange intimacy that forms between nurses and patients born from the mix of vulnerability, kindness, physicality and care. He read some funny poems about language and history. It was lovely. One Groover was inspired to read “City of Ships” by Walt Whitman which had struck him as especially relevant to him during this time. I took a stab at reading the iambic effort I made posted below. No way on par with Alpiner’s or Whitman’s of course, but a gesture toward how poetry is one way to deal with the Corona Crisis. Art does that, it makes one feel less alone by sharing in a more abstract accessible way what we are all feeling but cannot express. I’ll try to have more arty events. The Zoom format does continue to present some challenges which we needed to collectively figure out, all still in our beginnings here. We figured out pretty quickly that when the one person, our poet, was speaking, we needed to mute ourselves. One Groover was enjoying an especially crunchy bowl of cereal at the start. We had one Groover who’s picture stayed adamantly sideways. We had another who neglected to turn on the mute or her video off so we had very personal views of her entire self moving around her kitchen. After turning off the video as asked her sound stayed on and we enjoyed the dulcimer sounds her slicing vegetables and beeping on the microwave, all during an especially poignant poem. My free account also dropped mid poem, so as I am seeing an interest in this Groove thing, I bit the bullet and licensed up, opening up for more events that can go onwards, as people come and go without leaving their chair.
March 23 – Poetry Groove
