Poet and philosopher Mark Nepo will give a publication reading for his new book of poems, Reduced to Joy, on Tuesday, November 19, at 7PM in Stetson Chapel at Kalamazoo College. The event is free and open to the public. The new book, just out from Viva Editions, contains 73 poems retrieved and shaped over the last 13 years. Wrote Nepo: “These poems explore the nature of working with what we’re given until it wears us through to joy.”
“Mark Nepo’s poems reduce me first to grateful silence, and then to tears, and then to laughter, and then to praise,” says Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute and author of Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. “He joins a long tradition of truth-seeking, wild-hearted poets—Rumi, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver-—and deserves a place in the center of the circle with them.” Nepo has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for 40 years. The New York Times bestselling author has published 14 books and recorded eight audio projects. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages.
In a recent two-part interview with Oprah Winfrey, Nepo shares his thoughts on embracing the moment, the power of listening, and more.
Kalamazoo College Professor of English Bruce Mills’s fifth book, An Archaeology of Yearning, has been published by Etruscan Press. Using the metaphor of an archeological dig, Mills maps the artifacts of life as a father of a son with autism and as a boy himself growing up in Iowa. Of the book, Carolyn Kuebler, editor of the prestigious New England Review, writes: “This urgent and affecting memoir of parenthood is also a testimony to the way acts of imagination can lead us out of isolation and into communion with others, however tentative.” Ginger Strand ’87, author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies and Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, states that Mills “has written a rare and grace-filled book, one as true to reality-bound family life as it is to the soaring speculative beauty of archaeology, history, and thought. We come away with a deeper understanding of what it is to be a parent, a family, and finally, a human being.” Information about the book and upcoming events, including a reading on Tuesday, November 12, 7-8 pm, at Chelsea (Michigan) Public Library can be found on Mills’s blog.
Bruce Mills appeared on WWMT-TV Ch. 3 on Sunday Nov. 24 to discuss his book.
Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss ’78 will have her third volume of poems, Four-Legged Girl, published in 2015.
Her first collection was It Blows You Hollow, and her second, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, received the Juniper Prize for Poetry.
Last month Seuss was interviewed by Missouri Review intern Anne Barngrover for the Review’s Text Box anthology (October 15). It’s a fascinating read, much like a Di poem: “Four-Legged Girl is specifically concerned with embodiment, beauty, loss, addiction and desire,” says Seuss. “Maybe it is post-body, post-beauty, post-grief, post-addiction, post-desire. I think so. I believe it is located more outside the boundary of community than my other books; its imagination is more iconoclastic, arriving at ferocity, femaleness, freakishness, and solitude–which to me is poetry.”
The interview touches on the treatment of religion (“I tried to be Catholic about the same year as I got breast buds.”), female sexuality (“The four-legged girl’s lonely freakishness is a signal of her monstrous royalty.”), and the recurrence of the name “Mary” throughout her work (“…maybe the four-legged girl is named Mary. I think my notion of the goddess has gotten a lot racier. But in tandem with that raciness is an omnipresent grief.)” The reader also learns a great deal about the College’s resident writer’s writing process–“I have never been someone who writes daily….There is a window of opportunity in which I know all and see all from the poem’s point of view and language palette….Once the window closes, I’m lost. Out of that lostness, when it’s just me and the dog and the nameless stars, comes the next poem.”
The Kalamazoo College Symphonic Band presents its Fall 2013 concert: SPIN CYCLE: A Concert of Theme and Variations. The concert takes place on Friday, November 15, at 8 PM in the Light Fine Arts Dalton Theatre on the Kalamazoo College Campus. The event is free and open to the public. The Symphonic Band is directed by Professor of Music Thomas Evans and functions as a beloved creative outlet for woodwind, brass, and percussion students. The Symphonic Band holds one concert each quarter playing exciting arrays of band music both challenging and simple but–as Dr. Evans attests–never “simple-minded.” The band is a great favorite for both its members and its audiences, as the programs are usually coordinated around greatly diverse themes that allow for performances of much-loved pieces, both classic and new. SPIN CYCLE selections include Fantasy on Yankee Doodle (Mark Williams), Pachelbel’s Canon (Calvin Custer), Variations on a Korean Folk Song (John Barnes Chance), Themes from Green Bushes (Percy Grainger), Variations on Scarborough Fair (Calvin Custer), Variations on a Shaped Note Tune (Johnnie Vinson), First Suite in E-flat (Gustav Holst), and Joyful Variations-Ode to Joy (Brian Beck). The concert is sponsored by the Kalamazoo College music department.
The Kalamazoo College Singers and Women’s Ensemble presents the choral composition, Music Down in My Soul, on Sunday, November 17, at 3 p.m. at Stetson Chapel on the Kalamazoo College campus. The concert is free and open to the public. Music Down in My Soul was arranged by Moses Hogan, an African-American composer and arranger of choral music best known for his settings of spirituals. The concert also features selections by Benjamin Britten, Anders Edenroth, Joan Szymko, Randall Stroope, and Eric Whitacre. The songs evoke a spiritual theme within oneself–understanding the emotions within and celebrating them through music. The Kalamazoo College Singers and Women’s Ensemble consists of some 60 students and under the direction of Professor of Music James Turner. The event is sponsored by the K music department.
REGENERATION, the Kalamazoo Philharmonia’s Fall 2013 concert, features soprano Rhea Olivaccé, whose work as a concert and recital soloist has been widely recognized for her versatility of repertoire and medium. REGENERATION occurs Saturday, November 16, at 8 PM in the Light Fine Arts Dalton Theatre on the Kalamazoo College campus. Tickets are $5 general admission and $2 for students. The concert is free to Kalamazoo College students. Olivaccé and the Philharmonia will perform the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss. The content of Four Last Songs features a solo soprano voice given remarkable soaring melodies against a full orchestra, and all four songs have prominent horn parts. The combination of a beautiful vocal line with supportive brass accompaniment references Strauss’s own life. His wife, Pauline de Ahna, was a famous soprano and his father, Franz Strauss, a professional horn player. The Kalamazoo Philharmonia will also perform Mahler’s First Symphony, referred to as “The Titan.” The symphony lasts around just under an hour, making it one of Mahler’s shortest symphonies. The Kalamazoo Philharmonia is under the direction of Associate Professor of Music Andrew Koehler. The event is sponsored by the Kalamazoo College music department.
Alexander Ross ’17 plays the Officer and Emma Franzel ’17 the Daughter in the Festival Playhouse production of August Strindberg’s A DREAM PLAY
Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College performs August Strindberg’s A Dream Play in the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse in November. The show opens on Thursday, November 7, at 7.30 PM (“pay-what-you-like-night”). A brief talk-back will follow Thursday’s performance. Additional evening performances are on Friday and Saturday, November 8 and 9, at 8 PM; a matinee concludes the run on Sunday, November 10 at 2 PM. Tickets are $5 for students with an ID, $10 for seniors, $15 for other adults. A Dream Play is part of the Festival Playhouse’s Golden Anniversary season.
The play explores fundamental questions: Why do we exist, and why is life so difficult? The plot surrounds the daughter of the Hindu god, Indra, who leaves heaven to visit humans on earth. In living with humans as a human herself, her mission is to determine why humans suffer. Director Ed Menta says the production will attempt to create a theatre poem by interweaving Strindberg’s text with Festival Playhouse’s staging, performance, and design.
Senior David M. Landskroener, who serves as composer and music producer for the production, says that “creating live sound effects is such an interesting experience because I’m making sound to accompany a dream. Many times while tinkering around with effects I reject my initial thoughts about a certain sound in a scene and try out multiple options that may not at first sound completely congruent with the action onstage, but reflect the idea of associative links found in a dream.”
Before 1901, plays may have contained a dream sequence, but Strindberg created a new genre with a play that is entirely a dream. In the play’s foreword Strindberg wrote: “Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.”
Given such source materials, one can understand why “It has been a challenge to make all of the 30+ characters come to life,” according to K senior Michael Wecht, assistant director for A Dream Play. “It is my goal, through movement coaching and exercises emphasizing physicality, to help the cast discover each of their roles. This is especially pertinent because most of the actors are playing multiple roles.”
For reservations or more information about Festival Playhouse’s Golden Anniversary season (stay tuned for The Firebugs and Peer Gynt) call 269.337.7333.
Lyric soprano Rhea Olivaccé is the featured performer in the Kalamazoo Bach Festival Society’s opening concert,“The Many Facets of Love,” featuring romantic music of Strauss, the alluring charm of French opera, and the musings of new American composers. Olivaccé has performed on the stages of Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and multiple sites other throughout the United States. “The Many Facets of Love” occurs October 20, 2013, at 4 PM in Dalton Theatre (Light Fine Arts Building) on the Kalamazoo College campus. In the first half of the concert Olivaccé sings works by Donizetti, Strauss, and “The Jewel Song” from Charles Gounod’s opera Faust. Contemporary composers are featured in the second half of the concert, including Hundley, Bolcom, Mechem, Adams, and emerging Michigan composers Logan Skelton and Michael Lauckner. Olivaccé is accompanied by pianist Gunta Laukmane. Tickets are $15 if purchased by October 11. After October 11, tickets are $18 for general seating. Student tickets cost $5! For tickets, visit the Bach Festival Society website or call 269.337.7407. The event is a collaboration of the Bach Festival Society and the Kalamazoo College Department of Music.
The Kreisler Trio will present a concert of works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Hummel–performed on period instruments–on Sunday evening, October 20, at 8 PM in Dalton Theatre of the Light Fine Arts Building on the Kalamazoo College campus. The event is sponsored by the Kalamazoo College Department of Music; admission is free.
The Kreisler Trio was founded in the Royal Conservatory of the Hague and brings together three musicians from around the world: Keyboardist Shin Hwang, a prize-winner of the 1st International Westfield Fortepiano Competition; Violinist Yuki Horiuchi, a graduate of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and performer with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra; and cellist Fernando Santiago García, a graduate of the Koninkljk Conservatorium in The Hague and member of the European Union Youth Orchestra and the Gustav Mahler Academy in Bolzano.
For their concert at Kalamazoo College, the Trio has programmed sonatas by Mozart (for solo fortepiano and for violin and fortepiano), and trios by Beethoven and Hummel.
K on the Art Hop
October 4, 2013 / 5-8 p.m.
“What the Dickens: Victorian England in the A.M. Todd Rare Book Room” A.M. Todd Rare Book Room
Upjohn Library Commons — 3rd Floor
England was an incredibly rich and diverse society during the reign of Queen Victoria. Authors of the era included Charles Dickens, the Brownings, Oscar Wilde, and John Ruskin. Artists such as James McNeill Whistler, William Blake, William Morris, and Aubrey Beardsley all were creating works in very different styles. Charles Darwin completed his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle and began to develop controversial theories on evolution. Phrenology, physiognomy, and séances all were popular. It also was an era of collecting, following the age of exploration. Travelers were covering the globe to bring back to England rare and exotic plants and animals. Examples of these various aspects of the Victorian Era are included in the “What the Dickens: Victorian England in the A.M. Todd Rare Book Room.”
Can′t attend Art Hop? “What the Dickens” exhibit remains on display through Nov. 26 (closed Nov. 4-17), Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, 1-3 p.m. or by appointment. Call Paul Smithson, 269-337-7147.
Poet and philosopher Mark Nepo will give a publication reading for his new book of poems, Reduced to Joy, on Tuesday, November 19, at 7PM in Stetson Chapel at Kalamazoo College. The event is free and open to the public. The new book, just out from Viva Editions, contains 73 poems retrieved and shaped over the last 13 years. Wrote Nepo: “These poems explore the nature of working with what we’re given until it wears us through to joy.”
