Maryann Corbett and Anna George Meek at Common Good Books

Over the weekend, I went to a poetry reading by Anna George Meek and Maryann Corbett, two local Minnesota poets who are good friends and wanted to present some of the work from their new books.

The first to read was Maryann Corbett. A big focus in her poetry was about Minnesota and especially winter and the change in seasons. She said that a big part of winter for Minnesotans is that we want it to end, but we have to embrace it since it's around for so long. Her voice was very soft which reflected the nature of her poems. She sounded like a combination of my rabbi, Garrison Keillor and a newscaster on MPR, so it was very relaxing to listen to her. The people in the audience audibly reacted so some of her lines, especially the older audience members who a lot of her poems seemed to be directed at. She gave background on a lot of her poems, one of them being a poem connecting the death of her sister to the death of Tinkerbell in a Peter Pan play that was broadcast on TV in her childhood. Another poem which I particularly loved was "Dutch Elm", about seeing the trees that had been victims of Dutch Elm disease and had red rings around them marking that they were doomed to be cut down and how there was a "quiet sadness" about it.

The second poet was Anna George Meeks who read from her book "Engraved". All of the poems in the book were based off the engravings in Webster's dictionary and were dedicated to the engravings artists who had long been forgotten but had done such incredible work. She said it was inspiring looking at the drawings that they had done for adjectives, such as the word "fibrous" which was depicted as a dead-looking shrub for some reason. Meeks had a lot of really interesting lines in her poems:
"The objects are grotesque, or perhaps we are."
"Will you know me by my teeth?"
"The universe blushes black"
There were a lot of kerchunks in her poems and almost every poem resonated with me. She also discussed the death of her father in her poems which had been a very traumatic event for her. After he died from Alzheimer's, she said she thought she would never write poetry again. One of my favorite poems by her was "Cephalata", about the engraving of the octopus under "cephalopod". She connected it to the word "cephalitis" and tied it in to her father's death.

I really liked this poetry reading. It was a small group of people, but both poets were enlightening. It was nice to see that they were just regular everyday people who had a passion for writing poetry. Meeks brought her elementary age daughter along and it was very sweet to see her switch between poet mode and mother mode. I would definitely recommend both of these poets, especially Meeks and her new book which plays on a really interesting idea for poetry.