Café Muse: What a Turnout!

Café Muse

Once a month on Monday nights, two featured poets read at the Friendship Heights Village Center, with an open mic to follow

Last night, 68 people packed into every available corner of the Village Center room to hear the poetic stylings of E. Ethelbert Miller and Myra Sklarew.

Ethelbert began the reading with some baseball poems from The Fifth Inning, and continued with poems from an anthology, including both a short poem of his own, and a Langston Hughes poem about nature.

Myra began her reading by pointing out her heroes in the room, following this up with a series of incredibly moving and deep poems, some from her recent book, Harmless.

A lively open mic session with quite the variety of poems concluded the poetry portion of the night, but plenty of people gathered in clusters around the room talking for quite some time afterwards. Check out the Word Works Facebook Page for more pictures from the event!

An AU Evening at Miller Cabin!

Our series moved outdoors again on June 17th with perfect weather-- clear skies, mid 80's, low humidity, and poetry that lived up to whatever expectations such weather might bring.

The reading, with Kyle Dargan (author of The Listening and Bouquet of Hungers) and David Keplinger (author of, most recently, The Prayers of Others), was an introduction to new poetic leaders in the Washington DC literary community. Both Kyle and David teach poetry at American University and are filling the void left by world class poet-professors Myra Sklarew and Henry Taylor. Kyle's poetry presented at the Cabin left an overall impression of political connectedness tempered by an emotional tenderness and musical sensibility. David's reading is best characterized by this line from his poem "Life on Earth," "You are breathing in what something beautiful and ancient has breathed out." A wonderful storyteller as well as reader, David expands the universe of possibilities and that's what he called on the attentive audience at Miller's Cabin to do!