When I peeled myself out of the car after a long post-WoW! drive home Saturday night, I got an email from Jose Perez, a poet-performer who I’d met earlier that day when he came to St. John’s as part of the Compagnia de’ Colombari team. Jose wrote about it being “a true pleasure to be part of such a vibrant and inspiring event.” I thought about how sometimes someone who sees things from the outside can better express what it means than someone caught in the center.
Pleasure! Vibrant! Inspiring! – Jose got it exactly right. I’ll admit that too me it felt a little hectic, since I was worrying that everyone would get there on time, managing the tech, keeping an eye on the food and drinks, and making sure that director Karin Coonrod and her team could find their ways out to the far reaches of Queens.
Tess Patalano reads “Crossing NYC Ferry with Whitman”
As seven short films and twenty original poems rolled over us in one great Whitmanic wave, I was trying to stay in the moment and notice individual elements. But it was hard not to feel that WoW! was a single flowing experience, a collective effort, at this fraught time in American history, to speak ourselves as individuals and as a community. The “Come all ye Whitmanics” invocation that Lee Ann Brown wrote for us asks for motion and freedom:
To the wind with your pollen!
I won’t quote individually from each of the poems that followed – at least not yet! – but I loved the building, cresting, towering accumulation of line after line. From the opening poems written by Stephen Paul Miller’s 1100c classes to poems by English majors and non-majors, grad students and faculty, we all spoke back to and with Whitman’s ecstatic vision. Such a glorious thing to have been part of!
Dana Livingston reads “cavity”
I’m going through a bunch of pictures today – thanks to Emmanuel Quinones! – and maybe will say more later.
But for now – thanks to all who wrote poems, made films, took pictures, brought food – what a great event!
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