LifeWords students gathered last Thursday at Sherrill Hills Retirement Community for this semester’s Recitation Showcase, and their performances highlight how the program has grown over the year.
The Recitation Showcase serves as a celebration of student achievement and is a testament to the importance of literature. We want participants to share the “words that matter,” that have somehow impacted them or been personally meaningful. The term “literature” is used loosely here, and, this semester, students presented everything from poems, to journal entries, to passages of prose. Their selections represent ties to departed loved ones, homages to ancestral homelands, and efforts at self improvement.
Participants also premiered the Origins Poetry Project, a new LifeWords initiative from Own the Boards. Each semester, students will have the option to complete one creative writing assignment that will poetically represent aspects of their lives.
This semester, students wrote “Where I’m From” poems, which use the repeated phrase “I’m from…” To introduce a range of detail that shaped who we are today. We’ll be publishing a separate post introducing these poems, so be on the lookout for that in the coming days.
Thursday’s Showcase was the culmination of an amazing first year. LifeWords Reading Circles now meets at two sites (Sherrill Hills and the Strang Senior Center), with a third slated to start in August, at the Everett Senior Center in Blount County. We’ll also be hiring an additional instructor. These expansions will help us plan for the future, when we make LifeWords available at all senior centers in the Greater Knoxville area.
Below, you’ll find recordings of this semester’s performances. Enjoy!
Dr. Keigan Reads Poem for Mother’s Day
The premise for Billy Collins’s poem “The Lanyard” is simple: as children, we don’t comprehend the sacrifices our mothers make for us. Collins recounts his boyhood notion that gifts presented to his mother, specifically the lanyard he made at summer camp, could somehow equal the innumerable, often intangible offerings she bestowed upon him throughout his throughout life.
The poem seemed fitting for Mother’s Day and has taken on new meaning for Dr. Keigan since becoming the mother of two girls.
Connie Shares Inspirational Piece
Connie selected a passage from Richard Carlson’s book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and It’s All Small Stuff to illustrate her own efforts to reconcile herself with anxiety regarding mortality and life’s uncertainty. Her selection asks us to rethink how we deal with impatience and irritation and to view difficult situations and people as capable of teaching us important life lessons.
Julianna Pays Tribute to Homeland and Favorite Poet
Julianna, born in former Yugoslavia, read two poems by early twentieth-century Hungarian poet Endre Ady, whose work inspired her as a teen.
Shirley Honors Late Husband, Celebrates Spring Through Book of Poems
Last semester, Shirley introduced us to C. H. Blanchard ‘s Just Day By Day: Poems (1936), a book of belonging to her late husband. Her selection for this showcase pays homage to the month of May.