Poets Corner Reading Series

Tag Archive: Sarah de Leeuw

Trucks and Bird Pillow Talk…..January 2023 at Poets Corner: Sarah de Leeuw and Rhona McAdam

Posted on behalf of Jillian Maguire.

Sarah de Leeuw sharing her beautiful book jacket with Zoom folks.

Our January reading, I dare say, was the biggest party yet at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  We knew it was going to be a night of intense learning when Sarah de Leeuw taught us that crocodiles eat only twice a year and make excellent pets, as long as the owner knows when their feedings are due. Our first round of open mic poets featured some moronic verses, a moderate-man revenge poem, two ridiculously funny poems featuring a large truck and birds discussing sex.  Yvonne, a Poets Corner first-timer, had us in stitches with her Rumba in the Raw.

Our first feature reader was Rhona McAdam and she was a delight, teaching us about the click beetle, micro armadillos, jello, cheese, though “a cheese may disappoint” and gluten.  She definitely filled some poetry gaps and left us with a question that I am sure our Poets Corner viewers thought about all night -who would want to live in a world without gravy?

Our second round of open mic readers, complete with our second Peter of the night, examined the “forcefuls and the connectors”, the food chain of fools and a man who ate his boots. The crowd giggled at the line “objects in the rumour appear realer than they are.”

Second feature reader Sarah de Leeuw continued the truck metaphor. She may have dated several. Her alliterative wordplay delighted the ears: spoon drift, clam beds, taking down tenacious targets, soft targets, targets likely to fold quickly. She explored the evolution of a monster and left us with a reminder that poetry works best under constraint.

At the end of the reading, during question period, we found out that Rhona is motivated by a fear of Tammy and she gave us a bonus poem about Meat.  She and Sarah riffed a bit together like an old-school comedy team and we all left feeling satiated.

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