February 22 - Featured Poet B.D. Love for the Month of Love

Bolton Hall Museum, Photo by Teresa Mei Chuc

The Village Poets are pleased to invite poets and poetry lovers to the Monthly Reading at the Bolton Hall Museum on Sunday, February 22, 2015 at 4:30 p.m. Featured poet, B.D. Love, will be joined by those who wish to present their work at the Open Mike. Refreshments provided.

B.D. LOVE

B. D. Love grew up in rural Michigan, where he attended a typical rural Midwest high school.  That experience engendered a sublime love of poetry, through two wonderful teachers, and a severe distaste for authority, courtesy of a mindless Administration.  Old story.

Over the years since he has earned his M.A. in English/Creative Writing from Syracuse University, he has quite serious writing altogether, formed several punk inspired bands from Syacuse to Dallas to LA and once more Syracuse.  He returned to writing seriously after a freak accident shattered the elbow of his right arm, and he was told he’d never play guitar again.

Since resuming writing, he has published in a great many journals and literally magazines across the nation, and has shepherded six books to print, four full length fiction books, one full length poetry book, and two chapbooks.  He is currently “shopping' two new poetry books.   His most precious new project is a song cycle for which he as written lyrics, with the gorgeous, soaring melodies provided by the great Maura Kennedy, another Syracuse expatriate.  It’s called “Villanelle:  The Songs of Maura Kennedy and B.D. Love.”  Should appear this Spring.  Our holiday song, not really limited, is out on Amazon.com and iTunes and CD Baby.  There is a mutual photograph of us there.

This poem comes from my new book, “Hounds of Wonder:  Life in Dogs.”  It’s about rescue dogs and their special love.  And it is not sentimental.  This poem was featured in Nimrod International Journal, Lasting Matters…

Little Landers Declaration. Photo by Maja Trochimczyk

Declan IV

I hold a photograph of you sitting in a box

Half-full of trim from the ancient pepper tree

Whose leaves would choke the eaves and drives and vex

The neighbor lady, who pleaded for the penalty

Of downing — this for a being much of her time.

She’d pass, pure white, beneath the “dirty” limbs.

“There’s a fungus among us,” my mom would chime

By way of warning.  Indeed, there was.  Death has her hymns.

But here you are, roots in the mulch, your face

Courting the camera’s heart.  The shutter clicks

And off you go to sniff all crones and grace

All trees with piss before a smaller box

Arrives to collect the last of the dust to fall.

Some old limbs creaked that night.  I heard their call.

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(C) by B.D. Love

First published in Nimrod

Photo by Teresa Mei Chuc

Photos from the January Reading by Teresa Mei Chuc and Ross Canton will soon be available on Picasa Web Album. Here's our group at the end of the reading:

Front: Toti O'Brien, Alice Pero, Teresa Mei Cuc, Ross Canton, Joe DeCenzo and Maja Trochimczyk