Jerry Wemple Featured Poet May 2nd First Thursday Poetry Reading

 

Featured Poet for May 
Jerry Wemple

A Pennsylvania native, Jerry Wemple is a poet, nonfiction writer, and editor. He has published four poetry collections, mostly recently We Always Wondered What Became of You from Broadstone Books. He also co-edited, with Marjorie Maddox, Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, an anthology from Penn State Press. Maddox and Wemple have another anthology of Pennsylvania poetry forthcoming from Penn State Press. Wemple’s poetry and essays have been published in numerous journal and anthologies, and internationally in Ireland, Sweden, and Chile. Among his honors are the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Literature, the Word Journal Chapbook Prize, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the Jack and Helen Evans Endowed Faculty Fellowship. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Commonwealth University - Bloomsburg.

American Bison in Pennsylvania 

  

We see them only in memory, myth.  

Some say there weren’t here at all. But if we are heedful 

and listen closely we can sense the remnants:  

the velvet steam of hot breath, the throat’s deep rattle 

drifting like a specter we can almost touch 

through the fog of an early autumn morning.  

We forget fellow humans too, their names  

changed or forgotten: Munsee, Lenape,  

or Susquehannock, which is the name strangers 

called them. The near last of their people killed 

in 1763, struck down because they could be.  

In tribute now, we name our schools after them.  

Join us
Thursday, May 2nd
from 6:00 - 7:45 p.m. for
First Thursday Poetry  
at Goggleworks Center for the Arts
201 Washington St., Reading 
   
berksbards@gmail.com         https://berksbards.blogspot.com/