Tag: Ethan Jacobs

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Awakenings Elfchen – The Stafford Challenge Day 46, Slice of Life Challenge Day 2

February Poetry Night at the Coffee Shop

We had a local poet come to our town square coffee shop to talk about his collection of poetry in his book Dust. Ethan Jacobs, a graduate of our high schools and Auburn University, shared his inspirations and writing processes, and he held an audience spellbound for a half hour with his poetry. What a gift! Ethan majored in Education but chose to follow his passion of woodworking as his career path. We are so proud of Ethan.

I’m especially proud of him because one year prior to his reading, I sat in this very room with him to record several YouTube shorts of him reading his poems when his book was still a dream coming together. It was a glorious moment to see him holding his published book in his hands as he shared with his audience of 16 people ranging in age from teenagers to attendees in their 80s. I’m sharing a couple of those clips at the end of today’s post (we made QR codes of the videos and placed them in small frames around our county so that people in restaurants or places of business could scan them and discover a poem; and a few were even hidden in plastic Easter eggs!).

We’ve decided on our town theme for National Poetry Month this year.

Awakenings.

It goes with our coffee shop, the hub of our sharing, and the rural spring buds and blooms and greening of the world waking from winter.

And, perhaps, it calls to the inner poet.

Ethan reads from his book Dust

We gave attendees a time to write at the end of the evening. Here is my elfchen:

Awakening

awakening
sunshine streams
coffee brews ~ I
leap into life......caffeinated,
ready
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#VerseLove April 5 – Poetic Drive-Bys with Bryan Ripley Crandall

Bryan Ripley Crandall is our host at http://www.ethicalela.com for #VerseLove. You can read his prompt and the poems he inspires here. Today, he challenges us to write Poetic Drive-Bys.

He explains: “Every April, during a six-week unit on poetry in Kentucky, I’d assign students to think of a person, place, or thing worthy of a poem, and write it  as if you are gifting  random thoughts/ideas/verse or  insight for another. We began calling these ‘poetic drive-bys’. Students loved this, often chalking poems on a neighbor’s  driveway or creating one to hand  to strangers at  the mall (a few even ‘tagged’ abandoned buildings with their writing and one young man drove around handing what  he wrote to  fast food employees working in drive-thru windows). Write a poem for the  boy who bags your groceries, or the sidewalk where you walk, or for the stranger you see in the park.. The goal is to craft  a poem that you can leave for another to find (maybe  a specific someone or maybe not  — make it a poem  to be discovered or gifted.”

In my county in middle Georgia. I’m leaving QR Codes with poetry videos throughout the square. Below is an example of one. I’m reading here with Ethan Jacobs, whose book Dust will be available on Amazon this spring. This is for YOU, dear reader:

Poetry for others to find in a framed QR Code