Event Details - Open Mic and Poetry Reading, featuring international poet Mervyn Taylor

Join us for an open mic and poetry reading from international poet, Mervyn Taylor, at The Golden Pony in downtown Harrisonburg on March 23 (Arrive around 6 p.m. to sign up if you want to share your poetry). Taylor is a Trinidad-born poet who divides his time between Brooklyn, NY, and his native island. In his poems, for which he received two New York State Council on the Arts Grants, Taylor returns consistently to themes that deal with ordinary folk, with family and friends, finding the heroic quality of their lives as they face the difficulties of survival. He speaks of a cousin, now blind, who looks after his mother, also blind, taping on the clothes she insists on tearing off. He plays music as she complains, "there's no one to dance with!" He writes about the terrible earthquake in Haiti, about the resilient people whom "freedom eludes, like a goat that has run into the sea." He recalls his father, a Trinidad Railway conductor, who "lost his thumb to the trains." The open mic will start at 6:30 p.m. downstairs at The Golden Pony and sign-ups will be first-come-first-served. Mervyn Taylor's poetry reading will start after the open mic portion at 7:30 p.m. This event will be livestreamed on the Center's Facebook page.