At-A-Site Theater presents a Summer Project Celebrating Birthdays of Dead Writers: Edgar Lee Masters, August 23
AUGUST 23, 2014
EDGAR LEE MASTERS (1868-1950)
Location: Downtown Asheville NC
Time: 7:00pm - 11:00pm
On the corner of North Lexington Ave & Walnut St map link
or Haywood St near Malaprops map link
or the "Iron" sculpture at Wall St & Battery Park Ave map link
or near Wicked Weed & Mamacita's on Biltmore Ave map link
(Please note: The Reader may occasionally need to move to an alternative site because of weather or other onsite circumstances)
Passersby are invited to chose a poem randomly from this American poet, biographer and dramatist's, who though primarily known for Spoon River Anthology, his suite of poems about the richly imagined lives of the dead intered in the imagined small-town cemetery or imagined Spoon River, IL, in his lifetime also published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies.
The passersby will be invited to choose a name randomly from the alphabetical contents of Spoon River Anthology, and then the corresponding poem will be read to them.
Masters in himself buried in Oakland cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois. His epitaph includes his poem, "To-morrow is My Birthday" from Toward the Gulf (1918):
Good friends, let’s to the fields…
After a little walk and by your pardon,
I think I’ll sleep, there is no sweeter thing.
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep.
I am a dream out of a blessed sleep-
Let’s walk, and hear the lark.
More information about Edgar Lee Masters can be found at Wikipedia and at the Academy of American Poets and at The Poetry Foundation. You can read all the Spoon River Anthology poems online here.
MINERVA JONES
I am Minerva, the village poetess,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
And all the more when "Butch" Weldy
Captured me after a brutal hunt.
He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.
Will some one go to the village newspaper,
And gather into a book the verses I wrote?--
I thirsted so for love
I hungered so for life!
Reader Comments