To honor Women’s History Month, aka March, Pasadena Village took its usually members-only poetry reading group public. A nonprofit support organization for the over fifty-five set, Pasadena Village hosts scores of events and activities for members and the public each month in the Pasadena area.
Titled “A Poetry Gathering–Women Poets,” the March 13th meeting was the latest in the organization’s Village Connections series of free, open-to-all events held at the Washington Park Community House.
Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
At Pasadena Village’s bimonthly “Poetry Gathering,” members read aloud and discuss poems, and the public “Women Poets” edition followed the same format. The poems read and discussed were by American poets, including Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), and Ada Limón (b. 1976).
The discussion following the reading of Rich’s poem “What Kind of Times Are These” focused on how the poem resonates with the current US political situation.
The Amanda Gorman (b. 1998) poem “We Rise,” about women collectively taking leadership, led to comments about the women leading Pasadena 100, a coalition of organizations pushing for Pasadena Water and Power to generate all of Pasadena’s electricity in a 100 percent carbon-free manner by 2030.
“The Bean Eaters,” by Brooks, was appreciated for the impact of its direct language, and the metaphorical overlap between sea and sky became a focus of the discussion of Dickinson’s “A Bird, came down the Walk.”
Photo: Robert Savino Oventile
Once participant brought the Ellen Bass (b. 1947) poem “The Thing Is” to read, and this poem opened the topic of grief in relation to the Eaton Fire.
About one in ten Pasadena Village members lost their homes to the Eaton Fire and about half were displaced from their homes by the fire in one manner or another.
Besides offering support to members impacted by the Eaton Fire, Pasadena Village is gathering poems members have written about their experiences of the fire, and the organization is working with Cal State Los Angeles graduate students to deposit copies of the poems in an archive the university is establishing to document the disaster’s impacts.
The meeting closed with hugs, warm goodbyes, and a participant offering lemons from her lemon tree, which survived Pasadena’s recent calamities.
Deets
- Upcoming Pasadena Village Community Events
- Pasadena 100
- Local News Pasadena (LNP) publishes poems grounded in current news events from the greater Pasadena, California area. Submit your own poetry here.
