The Elora Poetry Centre celebrates 100 Thousand Poets for Change on Sunday September 29, at 7324 Wellington Road 21, Elora. This year the event will be held as part of Culture Days.
100 Thousand Poets for Change is an international grassroots educational organization that focuses on the arts, particularly poetry, music, and literary arts. It was founded in 2011 by Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrion. The organization’s mission is to promote peace, justice, and environmental sustainability through community engagement and awareness, using the lens of poetry and artistic expression. In September, as part of the Read A Poem To A Child initiative, 100 Thousand Poets for Change encourages poetry lovers, teachers, parents, and friends to read poetry to children, introducing them to the beauty and joy of poetry.
From 2.00 PM until 3.30 PM, there will be a session for the children, who should bring a blanket or cushion, as the readings will be held outside after a short walk around the garden and a few sculptures. Following the reading summer cookies and juice will be offered. Printed copies of the poems will be available for children to take home with them.
From 4.30 PM onwards, there will be a performance of Love Accepted and Transfigured Between The Wars─sonnets by Walter Benjamin, written between WW I and WW II, translated by Carl Skoggard from German into English and set to music by Peter Skoggard.
Carl Skoggard was trained as a musicologist and for many years served as an editor for the music bibliography Repértoire International de la Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York, where he was responsible for German materials. More recently he was also the staff writer for Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, an award-winning magazine created by his partner Joseph Holtzman. Over the last decade Skoggard has prepared translations with extensive commentary for the three major autobiographically-oriented writings of the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. His bilingual edition of Benjamin’s Sonnets has made this little-known but important body of poetry available to readers of English for the first time.
A Q & A period will follow this section, after which some of Peter Skoggard’s musical settings of poems by e.e. cummings will be performed, with the addition of a jazz singer. Finally, continuing the theme of art between the two World Wars, some works of Kurt Weill will follow.
The usual finger food and drinks will be available after the performance.