BELLOWS FALLS — Poets Coleman Barks and Marie Howe and master musicians Eugene Friesen, cello, and Jamey Haddad, percussion, will join for a concert that will celebrate the art of language in performance of collaboration between poets and storytellers and master musicians, with a special focus on the mystic poet Rumi.
In Barks's translations, the timeless gifts of the great Sufi mystic Jelalludin Rumi (1207-1273) contain surprising insights into the working of the human heart and psyche. In performance, Coleman's entertaining style, anecdotes, and humor bring a new sense of familiarity to Rumi's ageless wisdom. Combined with original poetry by Coleman and Marie Howe, music of Bach, jazz, folk melodies, and improvisation, this concert kicks off Vermont Storyhouse, a four-day celebration of language, music, and collaboration.
Barks taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty years. He is the author of numerous Rumi translations and has been a student of Sufism since 1977. Barks' work has contributed to an extremely strong following of Rumi in the English-speaking world and due to his work, the ideas of Sufism have crossed numerous cultural boundaries over the past few decades. As a performer, Coleman epitomizes the values of spontaneity, rhythm, and timing – his performances all over the globe featuring his own poetry along with the works of Rumi, are consistently marked by emotion, humor and insight.
Howe, the New York State poet laureate from 2012 to 2014, is a widely published poet who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University. Her first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, who praised Howe's “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.” What the Living Do (1997), an elegy to her brother John, who died of an AIDS-related illness, was praised by Publishers Weekly as one of the five best poetry collections of that year. Stripping her poems of metaphor, Howe composed the collection as a transparent, accessible documentary of loss.
Drawing upon decades of international performances with poets, Friesen has developed an approach to accompanying language that deepens its impact and allows the listener to create intuitive imagery, associations, and meaning. A recipient of four Grammy awards for his work with the Paul Winter Consort, Friesen is active internationally as a concert and recording artist, speaker, and clinician. He is a professor of music at Berklee College of Music in Boston and is an artist in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
Haddad, who appears on more than 150 recordings, began playing Lebanese percussion instruments at age four. Later, he studied music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and is also the artistic director of the Fridays@7 series at Cleveland's Severance Hall. A Fulbright Fellowship allowed him to study Indian drums in South India, and he received four National Endowment for the Arts fellowships to pursue jazz and international studies and collaborations.
The concert takes place at Immanuel Episcopal Church, 20 Church St. at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, July 23, the first night of Vermont Storyhouse, a new workshop welcoming qualifying writer/poets and musicians to explore the transformational quality of story and poetry in oral settings. This intimate workshop matches musicians with readers to develop collaborative presentations for public performance in various venues in and around Bellows Falls through musician's workshops, class feedback, and audio/video analysis, group conversations, and coaching sessions with immersion in a historic New England village.