Poetry in the Park

PBS NewsHour filmed today's Memory Arts Cafe. Jeffery Brown interviews Bernie in Prospect Park. We had a picnic, jammed with a sax player, recited poems by Whitman and Dickinson and created a poem about the park, a perfect day.

Natasha Trethewey, U.S. Poet Laureate recited Lucille Clifton's poem:
why some people be mad at me sometimes
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.

The group loved the poem and Natasha performed it with them using the "call and response," technique.
One woman called out the last line before Natasha recited it, saying, "That's just how I feel."
It was a lovely moment.

I will post a link when the piece airs. Probably in mid-September.
The Memory Arts Cafe is co-produced with New York Memory Center.
Christopher Nadeau, Executive Director of the New York Memory Center surprised us all
with a beautiful poem he had written on love.
Special thanks to Josephine Brown and her hard work on the event.

Memory Arts Cafe Visits Prospect Park

Picnic in the Park

Special Guest: United States Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey

Please join for a Memory Arts Café field trip to Prospect Park. We will visit the Boathouse, watch swans glide on a lake and see a waterfall. We will take in the park’s most famous tree the “Camperdown Elm,” which was planted in Brooklyn in 1872. It’s one of only a few surviving trees in the world grafted from an elm on the estate of the Earl of Camperdown in Scotland.

Poet Gary Glazner will lead the group in the creation of a new poem inspired by the nature of Prospect Park. Yes! It will be an easy walk in the park.

In 2012, Trethewey was named as 19th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. Trethewey plans to travel to cities and towns across the country meeting with the general public to seek out the many ways poetry lives in American communities and report on her discoveries in a regular feature on the PBS NewsHour Poetry Series.