RIDGEFIELD, CT — The fourth season of a series of free summer-evening poetry readings in Ridgefield will launch on July 1.
Poetry in the Garden will be held every Monday evening in July at 7 p.m. inside the Keeler Tavern Museum and History Center’s walled gardens. Guests are invited to bring picnic dinners. On evenings that are rainy or too warm, the readings will move inside the Garden House.
Barb Jennes founded the series while Ridgefield’s poet emeritus, and continues to shepherd its growth. The summer readings began in 2021, after more than a year of COVID, when people were “anxious to get back out in the world and see live performances and community,” according to Jennes.
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She said the poetry series is finally hitting its stride.
“The first year, we started with very local Connecticut poets. And now we’re reaching out and really getting some top names.”
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Those include New York State’s poet laureate Patricia Spears Jones, the poet laureate emerita of Rhode Island, Tina Cane, and seven more muses crammed into the five-week series.
“Almost all of these poets have very recent publications that have been highly rated and very well reviewed,” according to Jennes, who said she pulls together each season’s roster around “assessable poets that an audience will enjoy without having to have a PhD in contemporary poetry.”
Almost all of them also work day jobs as teachers. No one is getting rich off of this, Jennes emphasized.
“Poetry is not a money making industry. It’s more to build your oeuvre, if you want to call it that, and to have more ammunition for selling yourself to other publishers or venues or universities that might hire you.”
The poets will be dropping their verses inside the historic gardens designed by Cass Gilbert, the same architect responsible for the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. and the Woolworth Tower in New York City. Jennes credits the now-shuttered Sunken Garden Poetry Festival at Hill-Stead Museum as her Poetry in the Garden’s spiritual predecessor.
The Keeler Tavern location may be slightly less grand than the garden in Farmington, but it enjoys an unrivaled acoustic intimacy, Jennes said.
“When poets read, swallows are swooping after bugs and butterflies are flitting, and it’s just an amazing place.”
2024 Poetry in the Garden Schedule of Readings:
July 1: Sophie Cabot Black and Patricia Spears Jones (New York State’s poet laureate)
July 8: Emily Hockaday and Jared Harél
July 15: Tina Cane (poet laureate emerita of Rhode Island) and Cynthia Manick
July 22: Marie Howe
July 29: Nathan McClain and Oliver de la Paz
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