For Giving Tuesday this year (May 5, 2020), we made an offer that would be meaningful to a very special type of audience, and donor — a Sandisfield Arts Center-type audience and donor:
Donate in any amount, and mention a poem you’d like to hear Ben Luxon read. We’ll draw names from a hat and select a few.
The result is here – 6 wonderful poems, a wide range across styles and centuries, introduced and read by Ben Luxon.
Thank you to these donors, not only for their monetary donations – which inspire us at a difficult time – but for their love of poetry in all its diversity, tenderness, and love. And of course, thank you to Ben, who always takes on these projects with grace and good humor.
Here’s the whole playlist followed by the individual poems – you can listen either way.
Click the red play button – don’t click the title links – to hear the recordings without leaving this post.
Introduction and the first of two sonnet requests by Irene Conley, “Since There’s No Help” by Michael Drayton
The second sonnet requested by Irene Conley, “Here Is a Wound That Will Never Heal, I Know” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Jayne Benjulian writes, “I’d love to hear Ben read Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
For Jean Atwater-Williams, the request is “A Psalm of Life”:by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
For a North Carolina friend of the Arts Center, poet Joan Barasovska, a request in honor of Frankie Rubinstein, her high school English teacher and lifelong friend, who died last July at the age of 101: “Crossing” by Jericho Brown.
Barbara Penb says:
Once again the remarkable Ben Luxon brings these poems to life and light with his insight and keen knowing of their tempo, rhythm and music..he is a Poetry Conductor.
Thank you once again for your voice,
Barbara Penn
Jayne Benjulian says:
A lovely reading. Thank you, Ben. I listened first thing this morning and heard Frost’s bold use of rhyme, like a sweet soft landing for a sharp message. Or as Kay Ryan said in an interview in The Paris Review, “He sets the standard for clarity and the management of darkness.”