Another reading at Casa Romantica

It's been many months since I mustered the time and the ride to the regular Weds. night reading at Casa Romantica, an amazing venue for fine writing in Capistrano.
Last night, my student from the workshop, Bhasha, took me to a reading there by Bob Cowser and Marilyn Nelson. Again, as previously, the readers were very different, but harmonized to create a fascinating evening.
Though the attendance was sparse, perhaps because of this being the middle of the week and the middle of what is for some spring break, the people who were there were rapt, held by the quality of the work and the performance itself, and I had the weird experience (similar to one I have had before, in large groups of English teachers) of feeling that I knew every person in that room, though technically, I had met just two of them before that I could remember. It felt rather like a homecoming for this reason.
Cowser is a likeable writer who heads up a program in Non-fiction writing at St. Lawrence University, and, accordingly, read to us from an autobiographical essay from his book Scorekeeping, which he insists is not about baseball, though baseball did feature in this essay.
Cowser edits a magazine of non-fiction prose, River Teeth that I want to check out. It's an online journal, so you can check it out for yourself at: http://www.ashland.edu/riverteeth/

The essay he read was quite various, containing, among other things, a poem his father wrote in his early 50s and published shortly thereafter, a sort of musing about his own adolescence, as well as a remembrance of the golden years of his brother's life in baseball before a close friend killed himself, which seems to have robbed him of his strength, physical and mental. In all, the lovely particulars of the essay create a sense of place, time, and character one would hope to see in any fictional work.
However, for me, the highlight of the reading was Marilyn Nelson, a seasoned poet who has won many honors and awards, including poet laureate of Connecticut. Hearing her read made it clear why. I felt I had made a real connection and a discovery in being introduced to her work, though I think I have heard tell of it in passing on public radio.
All of her poems, written in careful and inventive forms that seem as natural as breath, were wonderful, but the ones that really made my hair stand up on end were from Fortune's Bones, which tells of the life of a slave in 18th century Connecticut, owned by a bone-setter (a doctor). After Fortune, the slave, was killed in an accident, his master dissected him, boiled off his flesh, and assembled the bones for study in a medical school he established. Nelson examines the situation from the slave's wife's point of view, the point of view of the master, and finally, that of the slave after death. It was a stunning piece of work, and summed up the writer's propensity for historical and narrative verse. As one might imagine, a controversy has grown up around these bones, which many would like to see buried properly, rather than hanging in a museum. Nelson says that she was handed this subject by the slave's descendants, in her capacity of poet laureate.
It is not often that one makes new discoveries, or even two new discoveries of writers in one evening, as well as finding a place to call home at the same time. I hope others who live close enough to join the audiences assembled for Casa Romantica's readings and its upcoming benefit on May 1 will find this description alluring and attend.