“Up Jumped Spring” a spring poem by Al Young
April 21, 2008
Al Young, CA Poet Laureate visits Ventucky College
Monday April 21
12-12:45pm Poetry & discussion of poetics for change
1:30-2:30pm Poetry & Prose plus writing tips
both the above events take place in the Garden Patio
between the new library (LRC) and the old library (SSC)
7pm Guthrie Hall with live music, art and living history performance by Suzanne Lawrence
Ventura College 4667 Telegraph Road Ventura
Host: Art Predator
What’s most fantastical almost always goes
unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring.
Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee
your night, creameries your dream factories.
Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest
means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave
of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth
can still be the same earth our ancestors walked
From “Up Jumped Spring” by Al Young
California poet laureate, Al Young, was born in Mississippi and was reading by the age of three. He began publishing poems, stories, and articles in his early teens, and has lived most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been a poet, writer, teacher and lecturer throughout his literary career and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California , Berkeley in Spanish. He has taught poetry and fiction writing at a number of universities nationwide, including the Universities of California at Berkeley , Santa Cruz and Davis ; and Stanford University . Versatile and prolific, his works have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Rolling Stone, and the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. As a screenwriter, Young has worked with Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.
Thanks to Phil Taggart and Maggie Westland for helping to get the word out about these readings!
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I love how the poem begins as a very regular-sounding sentence, and then begins to wander at the point where ‘dreamlike’ enters the poem.
Thanks for sharing the photo of you with Al Young – you both look great!