In case you're not familiar with these two poets, here are their bios as published on the Observable Readings site:

Quincy Troupe

Quincy Troupe is the author of eight volumes of poetry and six non-fiction works. The Pursuit of Happyness, a biography, was a New York Times best-seller; The Architecture of Language, a book of poems, won the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement. He is editor of Black Renaissance Noire, a literary journal of the Institute of Africana Studies at New York University.

Patrick Rosal

Patrick Rosal is the author of two poetry collections; Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and most recently My American Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award. His poems and essays have been published widely. He taught creative writing for many years at Bloomfield College and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman's Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets.

Though I've often wanted to attend Observable Readings, this is the first time I've been able to make it all the way there. My time was well spent. The poets were excellent read in a welcoming ambiance of the Schlafly Bottleworks taproom and several of my friends among the assembled company.

Both Patrick and Quincy are empassioned poets encompassing the political and the personal in their work. Their reading matches their skill as poets. I need to say upfront that I'm normally not a big fan of Spoken Word performances of the type one tends to find at poetry slams and such. I find them overwhelming, often strident and insistent. These poets whose reading certainly leans in that direction (I'd guess) are not like that a'tall! Their embrace is so wide that the feeling the listener is left with is a sense of compassion for the tenderness and fragility of human life and the world we find ourselves in.

Both, to quote a Quincy Troupe line used in his introduction "come from the truth wid it." Their poetry is visceral, kinesthetic, and almost too hard to contain without making utterances and physical gestures. How I longed to be in an audience making this kind of expression of receiving the poetry, in concert. But, I didn't want to be the lone white woman at the back table, uulating or jumping up and down. I didn't want to misbehave. "Oh, misbehave!" Patrick Rosal urged when I brought this up in conversation after the reading.

So, instead, we had the polite applause in between poems and poets...the kind that I feel interrupts the flow of the reading. How I wished that an announcement had been made, saying, "Please hold your applause until the end, but feel free to hoot and holler, laugh, sigh, and cry, as much as you wish in response to these empassioned artists. You are riding in a Catillac, driven by a master."

Karen Mondale at Copperhead Cliff, family retreat (photo courtesy Karen Mondale)

I later met Karen at the St. Louis Poetry Center Gala in the fall where we viewed an amazing collection of antique cars and turn-of-the-century French posters out by the airport while sipping champagne and listening to winning poems.

Karen edits the St. Louis Poetry Center Newsletter (available on the web), and participates in Loosely Identified, a women’s poetry workshop, and the St. Louis Poetry Center. Five of her poems were included in Breathing Out, an anthology published by Cherry Pie Press, and others can be enjoyed in the Mid Rivers Review, a Literary Journal. She has given poetry readings in the River Styx series at Duff’s, at Genesis House, the Regional Arts Commission and for a charity event held in the Forest Park Golf House. Karen's dog's name is Solace, and she specializes in creating soups, and seves them in Francoma soup tureens.

Her lovely poem, "He Would Tell You He Never Was an Artist" printed below, won honorable mention in the James Nash Poetry Contest, in 2007.

Then, this year Karen took a second Honorable Mention in the James Nash Poetry Contest. She read her prize-winning poem "Joe, 1960" at the Atrium Gallery this past Sunday, May 18. This is a a poem that speaks about the difficulties of getting past the trust divide between blacks and whites who wanted to be friends in 1960.

---JGR
________________________

Lester Mondale (courtesy Karen Mondale)

HE WOULD TELL YOU HE NEVER WAS AN ARTIST
by Karen Mondale (copyright 2008, all rights reserved)

1.

It never was fired,
and so
the only proof
that once I could hold it within my hands
remains in the photograph
against the wall:
A preacher
behind the pulpit,
one hand on the good book
and the other raised to shake a fast fist at sinners,
its mouth contorted wide,
spitting eternal fires
at those who chose another way;
this piece of clay, he said,
was his reminder
of all he abhorred
in small minded men.

The Preacher, sculpture by Lester Mondale, photo courtesy of Karen Mondale

2.

Only a recollection remains of the
one morning when we woke up,
my sisters and I,
to run downstairs and
into a stunning world of
flirty mice in clothes, ducks in ruffles,
rabbits with giant teeth, scrawny cats with great grins,
witches, masked boogie-men and Snow-White
with her seven dwarfs;
all these merrily marched
around the walls
of our dining room.
The day before the drawings,
those walls had been covered
in cabbage roses, and the day after,
we gathered within a pattern of stately stripes.

Lester Mondale at Copperhead Cliff, where the Mondale family spent summers. Karen's father retired and lived at Copperhead Cliff until the night he died. (photo courtesy Karen Mondale)

3.

Visitors to our hilly summer home,
christened Copperhead Cliff,
slowly drive through the 90 wooded acres
to find the sign he carved from
a piece of felled tree.
Nailed to a live tree
remains the invitation to
“abandon all despair, ye who enter here.”

4.
The lean-to shed
stored cords of wood in
neatly stacked logs,
cut ends facing out,
patterns of wood grain decorated
with more patterns of sunshine and shadows,
these sawed from trees
he had carefully selected in the forest
to encourage the growth of young trees
by thinning out the old wood.
An ax and a thick stump
remain as testimony to his years
of splitting logs into firewood.

5.

He called it the lamb of god,
this piece of granite,
and he rolled it day by day,
a little every day,
until it reached
its perfect position
on the granite shelf
where it remains
a piece for contemplation and reflection,
a little to the left and
slightly downhill from
the picture window.

He would tell you
he never was an artist.

He would tell you that
art is in the contest
between man and the wily packrat,

He would tell you that
art is slaughtering a hog
at your neighbor’s farm
in the morning and then
attending evening theater in New York.

He would tell you that
art is in this old oak tree,
still producing acorns,
after decades of struggle
in stony ground and cramped space
between the house and the boulders behind it.

He would tell you that
art is in the habits of discipline
which enable a man to function
long after he no longer recalls
the reason for a particular chore.

and he would tell you that
art remains in the running waters,
the passing possum,
the mating copperheads,
the people from whom he came, and
the living daughters and grandchildren
he left behind.

He would tell you
He never was an artist.

copyright 2008 photos and poem...all rights reserved Karen Mondale