From modest childhood rhymes to the erudite metaphysics of T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” or “Four Quartets,” the life-altering power of poetry has fascinated poets and poetry lovers across time and place.
Shelter Island’s Virginia Walker brings this compelling subject to the next Friday Night Dialogues at the Shelter Island Public Library. It takes place Friday, September 29, at 7 PM in the Community Room; all are welcome to attend.
“How has writing poetry altered your life?” is the third in a series of questions that Walker, curator of the program, has posed to poets. Three distinguished poets — Gladys Henderson, Isabel Stevenson, and Pauline Yeats — will join Walker to explore this subject and answer the question with their poetry and life experiences.
Henderson is the 2017 Suffolk County Poet Laureate and author of “Eclipse of Heaven.” Isabel Stevenson is a chronicler of the sixties. Pauline Yeats is a designer as well as a poet.
Walker is a facilitator for the library’s Art/Rich Poetry Roundtable. She has also curated popular webinars on poets and poetry for the library.
She is the co-author with Michael Walsh of “Neuron Mirror,” a book of poetry that raised nearly $11,000 for the Lustgarten Foundation for pancreatic cancer research.
Walker earned a Ph.D. at New York University and taught writing and literature courses at New England and Long Island colleges. Her poems have appeared in the Nassau Review, The Minetta Review, Suffolk County Poetry Review, and TheHumanist.com; and in anthologies, “The Light of City and Sea,” “Touched by Eros,” “In Autumn,” “Bards Annual,” “Poets 4 Paris,” and “PAUMANOK Transition.”
Phyllis Gates is a trustee of the Shelter Island Public Library.
