Auntie’s presents: An evening with a pair of poets

Poetry has been with us since the first time someone uttered something that carried with it a larger weight of meaning.

By that I mean something that went beyond the obvious, something that captured a thought or a feeling in a mix of words that, often at first, weren’t immediately obvious – and that often carried a blend of sounds that feel harmonious.

Take Sylvia Plath’s poem “Blackberrying. ” On the face of it, Plath is simply describing a trip to pick blackberries. But the very language she uses makes the trek into something that evokes the wonder of nature.

“Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—

Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.”

Look up the word “chough” – a word that I had never heard before – you find this definition: “a black Eurasian and North African bird of the crow family, with a down-curved bill and broad rounded wings, typically frequenting mountains and sea cliffs.”

Most of us, I suspect, would look up and just see a bunch of black birds milling about. Not Plath. And that’s what poets, the best poets, do.

You’ll have the chance to hear a pair of poets share their work at 7 p.m. Saturday at Auntie’s Bookstore when Christopher Howell and David Axelrod read from their latest collections.

Howell, of course, is a professor emeritus at Eastern Washington University and the author of 13 poetry collections. He will be reading from his latest, titled “Book of Beginnings and Ends.”

Axelrod teaches at Eastern Oregon University, is the author of nine collection, the latest of which is titled “Years Beyond the River.”

The reading is free and open to the public. Click here and scroll to the bottom to RSVP.