Bagel Bards
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 7:30 p.m.
Bagelbards are poets who before deigning to open their eyes on Saturday mornings, find themselves drifting into Davis Square's Au Bon Pain looking for a shot of literary camaraderie served up with coffee and croissants. Join the Bagel Bards for Fireside's first reading for the 2008-9 season. The Bards will read from their recently released anthology Bagels with the Bards No. 3, edited by Molly Lynn Watt, with an introduction by Regie O'Hare Gibson, designed by Steve Glines and published by Ibbetson Street Press. "The genius of this anthology is as simple and as wholesome as a bagel," wrote Tomas O'Leary. "O bard, a bagel has become a poem," wrote Afaa Michael Weaver.
The informal group has a vibrant, vacillating and ever-increasingly membership. Local poet-heroes, Doug Holder and Harris Gardner, who started the group four years ago, host each Saturday with welcome and wit. The group is as diverse as the city's population and members write poems running the gamut of ways to yowl, weep and yearn in today's world: some shout, others whisper, some rant, others sing.
This reading by a line-up of Bagel Bards celebrates the anthology. The two dozen poets reading are Beatriz Alba del Rio, Pamela Annas, Barbara Bialick, Martha Boss, Pat Brodie, Anne Brudevold, Philip E. Burnham, Ann Carhart, Jane Chakravarty, Tom Daley, Harris Gardner, Steve Glines, John J. Hildebidle, Irene Koronas, Mignon Ariel King, Linda Larson, Nathaniel Mayes, Shannon O'Conner, Tomas O'Leary, Lolita Paiwonsky, Zvi A. Sesling, Ellen Steinbaum, Barbara Thomas & Molly Lynn Watt.