Poetry

February is the season of small sorrows, when everyone feels middle-aged even if you are 16, but there are cures for this. One is skating, and another is the convivial lunch. You meet three friends at the Chat 'N' Chew and order soup and a sandwich, and you yak and yak and nobody tries to sell you the aluminum siding, and nobody unloads his sorrows or displays his trophies, and nobody harangues you about politics. You tell stories. If things drift toward the ponderous or the maudlin, somebody tosses in a joke.

I've talked often in this column about how poetry can hold a mirror up to life, and I'm especially fond of poems that hold those mirrors up to our most ordinary activities, showing them at their best and brightest. Here Ruth Moose hangs out some laundry and, in an instant, an everyday chore that might have seemed to us to be quite plain is fresh and lovely. - Ted Kooser "Laundry" All our life so much laundry; each day's doing or not comes clean, flows off and away to blend with other sins of this world.

Harry Houdini never gets far from the news. There's always a movie coming out, or a book, and every other magician has to face comparison to the legendary master. Here, the California poet Kay Ryan encapsulates the man and says something wise about celebrity. - Ted Kooser "Houdini" Each escape involved some art, some hokum, and at least a brief incomprehensible exchange between the man and metal during which the chains were not so much broken as he and they blended. At the end of each such mix he had to extract himself.

For the 29th year, the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society will take audiences away from the cold and gray of winter with lively Irish tunes, fast-moving step-dancers and colorful poetic imagery. The society's annual Evening of Irish Music and Poetry on Friday night at Jim Rouse Theatre in Columbia will feature a reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, who has built an international reputation with his inventive use of language and imaginative themes. Muldoon said by e-mail that public readings are an extension of his work as a poet, critic and teacher.

"Young People's Poetry Week," sponsored by the Children's Book Council, will be observed this week (tomorrow through April 18) to encourage children and young adults to read, write and enjoy poetry. Poetry creates pictures in children's minds and develops their imagination. And, poems are often short with lots of white space on the page, which makes them more accessible to new readers.Here are some tips for sharing poetry with your child:n Read a poem slowly and be dramatic (in other words, ham it up)

I am ignoring, as always, National Poetry Month, which begins this Thursday, while I go on celebrating poetry, day in and day out. Poetry is very private. Yet it's possible to find it -- responsiveness to poetry -- in almost any life, whether ignited by Dante or rap lyrics, scriptures or soap jingles.There's peril in definitions. We all have standards -- and should. Lots of legitimate poetry bores me, offends me. Some enrages me. I find lots of published poetry too sentimental, simplistic, pretentious, vulgar, vicious, dumb.

Looking over a mountain of poetry books published in 1999, I'm struck by the relevance of one that came out in 1798: "The Lyrical Ballads," by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordworth's introduction -- in its time truly revolutionary -- boils down to this: poems should surprise readers out of their complacency, speak "ordinary language" and stay away from cliches. Wordsworth provides a handy three-prong tool for digging through the mountain.* Surprising the reader: Let's start with non-complacency.

Frances HughesGlendening, Maryland's first lady, for the past two years has toured the state with her arts advocacy campaign, "A Celebration of the Arts in Maryland," recognizing and honoring Maryland artists and arts organizations. She appears at and hosts numerous events ranging from visual and performing art exhibitions to literary and art education conferences. In 1998, the first lady received the Prince George's County Arts Council's prestigious Arts and Business Award.I make time regularly to read or listen to poetry as a means to renew my spirit and savor the joy of being human.

Noted AuthorsEmily Elizabeth Dickinson(1830-1886)Born in Amherst, Mass., Dickinson wrote poems that generations of readers have studied.None of her work was published while she lived. After her death, Dickinson's sister, Lavinia, found almost 2,000 poems of hers, most without a title.Paradoxically, almost all of her poems are romantic, yet she never married.Dickinson's poetry has had perhaps the greatest impact of any poet of any time.-- Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature

Twelve students from Friendship Valley Elementary School squelched their enthusiasm about graduating from the fifth grade long enough to share their poetry in front of a full house at the Carroll County Arts Council Gallery last night.The pupils opened up "First Thursday," an evening of poetry, music and art sponsored each month at the gallery in Westminster by One Tree Productions and Common Ground on the Hill.Joining the youngsters were Sykesville poet Kathleen Adcock, musician Amy Ferebee and her partner, Steve Snyder.

At first, it seemed unlikely to provide much inspiration - a drunken prank in a city where there's usually much better fodder for the man I've come to think of as the Bard of Baltimore Badness. But I was wrong. Even so amateur a crime as the heist of the Cal Ripken Jr. No. 8 statue at Camden Yards - conducted right under a security camera by hapless perps who would be caught almost immediately - managed to serve as muse for the master. Soon, we had an addition to his ever-growing canon, the always expanding compendium of his art. Call it the ineffable poetry of Frederick H. Bealefeld III. We may know him today as Baltimore's police commissioner, the white-haired, dark eye-browed, Bawlmer-accented cop's cop. But surely future scholars will come to appreciate his unrecognized literary genius, the found art of his pronouncements, the lyricism of his inadvertent verses.

Single Carrot Theatre has taken root and sprouted. Hard to believe that it's been just two years since this troupe of former Colorado theater graduates moved en masse to Baltimore after searching nationwide for a city where a fledgling arts collective could flourish. Since the summer of 2007, the 10-member ensemble has found permanent headquarters in the Station North arts district with a performing space, rehearsal hall and scene shop/storage area. The group has hired a full-time staff member, after scraping together a bare-bones salary for Elliott Rauh, the troupe's managing director.

HAYDEN CARRUTH, 87 Editor, critic and poet Hayden Carruth, an editor, critic and poet who earned recognition late in his 50-year writing career for powerful work that explored the struggles, loves and desires of people who made their living with their hands, as he did for two decades, died Monday at his home in the small central New York town of Munnsville after a series of strokes. Called a poet's poet for his technical mastery of forms from the sonnet to free verse, he wrote more than 20 books of poetry and prose, much of which emanated from the hardscrabble Vermont farm where he lived for 20 years.

The poet Josephine Jacobsen, in an essay she wrote for The Sun almost 30 years ago, decried how hard it was to get inside things that should be easy to open (milk cartons, aspirin bottles), yet how quickly Americans seemed to expect personal intimacy. Friendship, the Baltimore native wrote in her elegant way, should be a matter of "gradation - the stages by which acquaintance becomes congeniality, congeniality becomes intimacy. ... It is the flowering of long preparation." Jacobsen, the celebrated author of nine books of verse who once served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a position later renamed U.S. Poet Laureate)

PERFORMANCE PURE POETRY Kick off 2008 with an eclectic marathon of performances from many of Baltimore's creative minds. The New Year's Day Poetry Bash includes appearances by Rahne Alexander and Lucky Baltimore of queer cabaret group Charm City Kitty Club, JaHipster, Clarinda Harriss and others. In addition to poetry, check out Baltimore Improv Group and beatboxer Shodekeh. .................... The event runs 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson, 3134 Eastern Ave. Admission is $5, benefiting the Creative Alliance's kids' arts education programs.

Adrianna Amari is a pianist, photographer, psychologist, peacenik and poet. Now, the faculty member with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has assembled a book of poetry by Daniel Berrigan, the longtime antiwar activist who was convicted of burning draft records in the celebrated "Catonsville Nine" case. She placed the highly evocative poems side-by-side with dozens of haunting photographs of cemeteries that she had taken during the decade before she lost her vision as a result of an aneurysm.

Baby boomers loved Lary Lewman as Pete the Pirate, who captured the Baltimore TV market from 4:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. on WBAL-TV from 1960 to 1964. His archenemy was Captain Awfulmean. On Sunday, he put on a clay putty nose and became Captain Fog. Lewman, now 70 and retired, lives in a Clarksville home with his wife, Nancy, with whom he appeared on a 1959 show, What's New with the Lewmans. After his days as Pete, he made an artful transition to become The Voice. By 1980 he became what voters heard on radio and television - but never saw - in Jimmy Carter's re-election campaign.

Generally events that involve little kids seem harder to me because I always try to avoid the "cute kid" photo. It seems like gloss to me, all surface and no substance. At first I thought this assignment, titled "Poetry Slam," would be no different. The assignment description called for photos of children practicing their poetry at St. John the Apostle Church in West Baltimore. I was a little skeptical about the photographs that I might make at this event, considering that poetry is a written medium.

Though the dog chose domestication, cheerfully enjoying human food and protection, most of the world's species look upon us with justifiable wariness, for we're among the most dangerous critters on the planet. Here, Minnesota poet Freya Manfred, while out for a leisurely swim, comes face to face with a species that will not be trained to sit or roll over. - Ted Kooser "Swimming with a Hundred Year old Snapping Turtle" I spy his head above the waves, big as a man's fist, black eyes peering at me, until he dives into darker, deeper water.

I've talked a lot in this column about poetry as celebration, about the way in which a poem can make an ordinary experience seem quite special. Here's the celebration of a moment on a campus somewhere, anywhere. The poet is Juliana Gray, who lives in New York. I especially like the little comic surprise with which it closes. - Ted Kooser "Summer Downpour on Campus" When clouds turn heavy, rich and mottled as an oyster bed, when the temperature drops so fast that fog conjures itself inside the cars, as if the parking lots were filled with row upon row of lovers, when my umbrella veils my face and threatens to reverse itself at every gust of wind, and rain lashes my legs and the hem of my skirt, but I am walking to meet a man who'll buy me coffee and kiss my fingers - what can be more beautiful, then, than these boys sprinting through the storm, laughing, shouldering the rain aside, running to their dorms, perhaps to class, carrying, like torches, their useless shoes?