Red Hen Press Hosts Poetry Livestream
The Broad Stage Artistic and Executive Director Rob Ballis, Red Hen Press Managing Editor and Co-Founder Kate Gale, and Hosted by writer, actor, and radio personality Sandra Tsing Loh Present the 6th live stream episode of the “Red Hen Press Poetry Hour”on May 2nd 2020. This weekly hour of poetry, features readings and interviews from award winning poets. (via The Broad Stage Facebook page).
In response to the COVID-19 Social Distancing Order, The Broad Stage in Santa Monica, SMC’s shared performance Hall, began their Broad Stage at Home initiative, which includes weekly live music performances and Poetry readings streamed on the The Broad Stage Facebook page.
The Red Hen Press Poetry Hour is their Saturday night 8pm PST Facebook livestream, presented by The Broad Stage Artistic and Executive Director Rob Ballis, Red Hen Press Managing Editor and Co-Founder Kate Gale, and Hosted by writer, actor, and radio personality Sandra Tsing Loh. The hour features a variety of poets reading their own works and discussing insights, inspirations and the meaning of their poetry.
May 2nd was the livestream of the sixth and final episode of "Season 1." Performances featured 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient, poet, author and scholar Camille T. Dungy and included original writings read by poets Tess Taylor, Elizabeth Bradfield and Kim Stafford, with videos by Stafford, Adrianne Kalfopoulou and Joe Jiménez.
About her award-winning book, “Guidebook To Relative Strangers,” Dungy said its works revolved around “the beauty of where we meet between where what we have in common as strangers, and where we can learn from what we thought we had in common from those with whom we aren’t strangers. Reader and writer come together somewhere where worlds meet.”
Dungy read works from two of her other books, “Suck on the Marrow” and “Tropical Cascade”, to tie in themes of confinement through these more serious and brutal written examples in contrast and comparison to our current circumstance of Safer at Home confinement.
She says this poetry has offered, “the beauty of thinking about what my own experience of the sense of confinement within my house, and how that might compare with other significantly intense confinements, helps me think of where I am now and place it in a context of relativity that seems important and valuable.”
Her composition, “Dinah In A Box”, describes a more extreme type of confinement and” Tropical Cascade” which contemplates survival on a multitude of physical and psychological planes, are two pieces that she shared in connection to our lesser COVID-19 lifestyle confinements.
She was precise in using her words to explain these story parallels, knowing that readers and listeners already grasped these on an intuitive level.
About her own family’s adjustment to feeling confined by being at home, Dungy said, “I keep trying to reframe my experience of this time in a state of gratitude to think of the ways that we can spend time together, the ways that we can learn new modes of survival as a family”.
“In this moment and in the larger view of history I am quite lucky to have this time at home with my family in a place of comfort and security that many people don’t have.”
Dungy encourages listeners to venture into the artist by saying, “With all the crazy COVID-19 dreams you’re having maybe you could write a poem and create something wonderful and creative.”
The Red Hen Press Poetry Hour plans to resume with a "Season 2" of live streaming on the Broad Stage Facebook Page, this summer 2020.
