Monday, 9 November 2015
Sign-up at 8, show starts at 8:30, Munro will be featured around 9:20
PETER MUNRO normally serves as curator and host at Easy Speak Wedgwood. On this evening, however, he steps away from that job and takes up the microphone as the featured artist.
How Munro was selected as featured artist:
An edict was pronounced upon all the land, that every citizen should gather at the Wedgwood Ale House the better to subject themselves to a census of who has good taste in open mikes. The Poetry Police declared that auditions be conducted across the breadth of the dominion so as to entrain the fairest of all makers of verse to the affording of beauty and goodness and joy and Truth to the censused for the duration of their censusing. After many rounds of strict and blind adjudication, Munro was selected by a panel of elite judges that consisted entirely of Munro. Also, our previously scheduled performer was forced to drop out.
Please visit Munro’s website.
A note on the poem that Munro will perform:
A Fisheries Scientist Sights A Large School Of Myth Swimming In Shallow Water In Southeast Alaska
This poem was published in 1998 in the Beloit Poetry Journal. A few years later, the BPJ was kind enough to include the piece in their anthology to celebrate their 50th anniversary.
Using images from the solitary wilds of Alaska, the poem deals with the problem of false myth. There are myths that a broken-hearted person might use to keep on keeping on. Those myths are necessary to surviving emotional or spiritual trauma. But those same aids may eventually become dangerous, even soul-killing. Drawing on time-tested metaphors of water and dipping blindly into the dark, the speaker in the poem wrestles with what lies under his myths, with what he cannot see, much less see well enough to put into words. In short, it is a fishing poem.
The Carey Special, Munro’s favorite fly for catching dolly varden trout (the most important fish in the poem he’ll be performing).
There is an interview in the most recent issue of the poetry journal, Rattle, in which Munro goes into detail on how these issues manifested in his life. You can find an excerpt of that interview here, dealing with the problem of false myth.
This salmon shark was successfully lengthed, weighed, and then released to the wild, alive and kicking.
Note on the third person: This page has been written entirely in the third person but I think you and I both know, Munro did that.