Award-winning local poets Jon Goode and Alice Teeter will share the lectern during Poetry at Callanwolde on Oct. 14 at 8 p.m.
Goode is part of Atlanta’s vibrant spoken word scene and he has been nominated for an Emmy Award and featured on CNN’s Black in America, HBO’s Def Poetry and BET’s Lyric Café. Goode can often be found playing chess in Woodruff Park when he’s not performing at colleges and universities around the country. “Conduit” is his first book and collects many of his performance pieces, poems and stories. We caught up with Goode to ask him a few questions about his work.
When did you start writing and why?
I started writing poetry in college. I was initially not writing the poems to share them – ever. I was attending James Madison University, a predominantly Caucasian school, and having come from a background of almost exclusively African American schools I was dealing with a bit of culture shock. Who knew so many games had been invented to aid in consuming beer? Who knew there were so many amazingly subtle ways of saying blindly racist things? Who knew the Volkswagen Cabriolet was so popular and given away so freely on sixteenth birthdays? So I began writing poems to process some of my feelings and vent some of my frustrations, in lieu of throwing a chair out of a window (which did happen once).
When do you write and what are some of your sources of inspiration?
I write anywhere and everywhere… except at home. I write on the train, in coffee shops, in the park, on planes. If an idea or line comes to me while I’m riding my bike, I hit the brakes and scribble the line down or record it in my phone, lest I forget. There is nothing worse than that amazing, life changing idea that you can’t remember. The inspiration for my work is housed in life itself. Life offers you so many different angles and options and trials and triumphs and wins and loses and conflicts and resolutions that you could write a poem, a play, a movie everyday if you cared to.
How is playing chess similar to writing stories and poems?
Chess teaches you a lot about order, process, strategy and patience. When writing a poem, short story, play or novel I think a lot about the order of the words and the process that it will take to properly convey the emotions and ideas that live at the core of the narrative. To get the ideas across effectively often takes patience, and to weave the narrative thread in a way that creates an inescapable and captivating web takes some strategizing. What you learn playing chess can really be applied to every facet of life but it is certainly useful for me when it comes to writing and creating.
Why was it important to you for your work to come out in book form?
My desire is to leave behind a canon of work; to in the end leave snapshots of where I was, what I was thinking and what the world looked like through my eyes at certain points in human history. I felt that if done correctly it could be a testament that could stand the rigors of time and be accessible and digestible for future generations. Plus… why not?
Dreams are a big part of the inspiration for Alice Teeter, whose third collection of poetry, “Elephant Girls,” has just come out from Aldrich Press.
Teeter, a long time resident of Pine Lake, is author of two other collections of poems, her award winning debut, “String Theory” and “When It Happens To You . . .”, which was published in 2009 by Star Cloud Press.
Teeter has been writing poems since she was in the 4th grade. She says she writes sporadically but every Saturday morning and twice a month with her writing group, the Websters. Her inspiration comes from everyday life, the lake she lives close to and her dreams. She sites as an influence the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Many of the poems in her new collection are written in the style of magical realism. Incredible things happen under the most ordinary of circumstances. Teeter also returns to the motifs of water and mud which make things disappear and reappear. Although wrought with whimsy her poems are accessible in clear, concise and often beautiful language.
Teeter, a graphic designer, has served as an Adjunct Professor/Lecturer in Poetry at Emory University and co-leads ‘Improvoetry’ workshops with creative coach Lesly Fredman. She is a member of THE IMPROVAH!BLES, a performance ensemble, Alternate ROOTS and co-hosts a monthly salon in Pine Lake with her wife Kathie deNobriga, who is also the mayor of Pine Lake).
The reading will be held in the library which is on the first floor of The Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, 980 Briarcliff Road, NE, Atlanta, GA 30306. Free refreshments and a book signing will follow the reading. Arrive early for the best parking, which is also free. Admission is $5, free for Callanwolde members. For more information, visit www.callanwolde.org.
Franklin Abbott is a psychotherapist and consultant, writer and community organizer. For more, visit www.franklinabbott.com.
