/ CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST
Published: Feb. 19, 2016 11:10 a.m.
Artists of all kinds are displaying their creations as ballerinas twirl in the background. Hundreds of visitors pass through the busy event, most not paying attention to the poets showing the nerve to get up and read their own work.
It’s the oh-so-popular First Friday “Art Off The Walls” event in Temecula. And if you haven’t been, you just have to go.
If you had been there, you could have heard five Sun City Poetry Club members speak about the desert, moon, wolves, truth, lust, chaos, unfulfilled dreams and so many other things poets ask us to contemplate.
This being around Valentine’s Day, there’s Shirley Wible, the group’s leader, feeling the love.
“It has not cocooned me,” she reads. “Enfolded, impressed or enslaved me, It has not convinced me of breathing alive, being vital.”
Or Jenois Harris with her clever “Somebody Done Hacked My Nursery Rhymes” series.
“Hickory dickory dock, a mouse ran up the clock,” she says to laughs. “When it ran back down, found it had lost a pound, quickly got dressed, went to town, got a double cheeseburger and a cold pale beer with a triple crown, gulped it down, gained back that errant pound, hickory dickory dock.”
For an hour they try to inspire and often do. Every once in a while they bore, yet they march on, armed only with their thoughts in a genre that is by all accounts struggling. Yet at least they want to keep it alive.
“I want people to know it’s not a dead language,” Wible says.
She likens this to a bar atmosphere, which means there is a lot of noise to compete with as people wander around the spacious ground floor of the Truax Building in Old Town Temecula.
It’s the second time they’ve been here and she’s also had them go to an Anaheim coffee house and a Menifee arts showcase to expand their repertoire of events.
They call themselves Wordplay and they meet at 930 a.m. the first and third Tuesdays of the month at the Sun City Library. They work with prompts and other challenges to shatter the writer’s block.
“We encourage each other and have a great time,” she says.
At the art event, they applaud each other and laugh in all the right places, especially Harris’ silly nursery rhymes. People stop to listen here and there, a pair of teen age lovers, a middle aged couple and a few older guys drifting through.
Temecula city staffer Gail Zigler, who coordinates the monthly event, says the poets are art spoken while the ballerinas are art in motion.
“I want to see as many artistic forms represented as possible,” she says.
Pamela Hopper reads from one of two anthologies the group has put together and has several wonderful lines about trees. Karl Fretlon, 80, has done poetry a half century. His selections include “The Snowman” and how he sadly melts by noon.
Stan Jolls writes of “Flower in the Wind” and the line, “You pick me, I will only die,” speaks to how they, too, will perish.
Hopefully, the art these hearty poets fight to preserve won’t perish as well.
Contact the writer: carllove4@yahoo.com
