A sampling of readings at Minneapolis Public Library in celebration of 1999 National Poetry Month. More than a dozen local luminaries read their favorite poems for a lunchtime audience.
A sampling of readings at Minneapolis Public Library in celebration of 1999 National Poetry Month. More than a dozen local luminaries read their favorite poems for a lunchtime audience.
SPEAKER 1: I heard the singing of the Mississippi, when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans. And I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers, ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
SPEAKER 2: Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. And everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
SPEAKER 3: Let the struggle of our time be short. Let it be settled with justice. Let the fortress of egos, that huge barricade crumble. And let every treasure go to every man.
SPEAKER 1: Sitting here, I know I've felt the throb of Jerusalem, or Rome, or any city yet to come, where there's a cafe and we, citizens all, break bread.
SPEAKER 4: Here then, is the clam of the orchards, which directly gives us, instead of the humors of the sea, those of the solid earth and the realm of birds, in a region, moreover, favored by the sun.
SPEAKER 3: So you find a bigger box, and you bury her in the yard, and weep. But you do not wake up a month from then, two months, a year from then, two years, in the middle of the night, and weep with your knuckles in your mouth. Oh, God, oh, God. Childhood is a Kingdom where nobody dies that matters.
SPEAKER 5: Supposedly, each human being has a built-in mechanism for one minute of knowing he or she will someday die. One minute of night sky, life going on across the street, where someone greets darkness with tins of food and drink, where someone listens, pauses by the door, and throws the bolt, and lets the animal in.
SPEAKER 6: It matters not how straight the gait, how charged with punishment the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.
SPEAKER 1: Life is just like a dream in Richfield, far from the city's violent crowds. You'll never hear a scream in Richfield. Those DC towns are much too loud.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER 7: Who would have thought, when it came to the fight, that they'd witness the launching of a human satellite? Yes, the crowd did not dream, when they put down their money, that they would see a total eclipse of the sun-ey.
[LAUGHTER]
I am the greatest. I'm the double greatest. Floating like a butterfly, sting like a bee, your eyes can't hit what your eyes can't see.
[APPLAUSE]
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