Save the date! On Tuesday, September 12th at 6:00pm, St. Louis-based artist and author Sophie Binder will be speaking at The Green Center about her 2001 odyssey around with world with, you guessed it, two wheels and a sketchbook.

​In April 2001, she quit her job and put all her belongings in storage to fulfill a longtime dream to bicycle and sketch her way around the world. What followed was a solo adventure that would take her through 16 countries across Europe, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, New Zealand and the U.S., pedaling 14,000 miles in 14 months. She came back in June 2002 with seven sketchbooks full of watercolors and stories.

​She will share some of her art, several of her stories, and many of the insights she gained about the unity in variety of the human experience, and the beauty and empathy to be seen and shared on this third planet from the sun.

An example of the power of the short poem to rattle around one's head is Randall Jarrell's wonderful 1954 poem "The Meteorite":

Star, that looked so long among the stones
And picked from them, half iron and half dirt,
One: and bent and put it to her lips
​And breathed upon it till at last it burned
Uncertainly, among the stars its sisters--
​Breathe on me still, star, sister.

​While syntactically a simple address and request of a star to do one thing (Star...Breathe on me...), what that star is and does is very complicated. The star "looked", "picked", "bent", "put", "breathed upon" a stone. That stone is itself special (or is it?). It is has been "picked from" others, is "half iron and half dirt", "burn[s] / Uncertainly, among the stars" who have now become "its sisters". In the end, the speaker's request that the star "Breathe on me" is capped with the wonderfully complex "still, star, sister". To ​keep breathing upon the speaker, and to address that to a "star" who is a "sister" in a poem titled "The Meteorite" is to send us back again and again through the short lyric to sort out who begins a star, who becomes a star, and who remains a star.

​That is the point, and that is the beauty of poetry. 

Thank you to the photographers, guests, and community who came out to The Green Center last night to celebrate WGNSS's biannual competition winners. The stunning photos--real natural historical documents--will be on display throughout the downstairs until September 1st, 2017. Please come in and have a look. In fact...

​...today at 4:00pm would be a wonderful opportunity, as The Green Center Tea Society welcomes all to cool off, have a snack and chat about Meena Alexander's poem "Lady Dufferin's Terrace". As always, no poetry experience necessary!

James Merrill (1926-95) is about as decorated as an American poet can be, having won the Pulitzer and National Book Award, among countless others. Known by many and praised by almost as many as the consummate stylist, whose intelligent and beautiful poems come from an experienced and virtuosic sense of art, "The Victor Dog" is an example of his deep whimsy and wide-ranging aesthetic. Ange Mlinko has written a wonderful guide to the poem at The Poetry Foundation, and if nothing else, a reading of this lovely poem should send you to your vinyl collection or Spotify for a bit...

​For those interested in a deeper dive into James Merrill's life and art, Langdon Hammer's recent biography of the poet is wonderful, and Merrill's papers are housed at Washington University in St. Louis.

The poem under discussion at today's meeting of The Green Center Tea Society (all are welcome! no prior knowledge or experience required!) is Tracy K. Smith's The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Smith is currently the United States Poet Laureate, appointed in June 2017. The poem is from her Pulitzer-winning collection from 2011, Life on Mars​.