In Our Town

originally published April 7, 2004

Ecstatic Visions
Charlie Gard'ner, a follower of Indian holy man Meher Baba, adopted a daughter in India 10 years ago.
"The people who ran the orphanage saved her life," he says. "They didn't have to do it... I got to be the dad of a person I consider to be one of the most incredible human beings I've ever met."
Now Charlie, a local graphic artist and custom carpenter, wants to help other children as his daughter was helped. He and other Baba followers are determined to raise the money to build a residence for abandoned and orphaned children near Ahmednagar, India, approximately 150 miles east of Bombay. The location of the proposed orphanage, "Pumpkin House," is Meherabad, the spiritual center of the late Meher Baba.

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To assist in the fundraising for the orphanage, Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinsky will again read from the works of two of the best-selling poets in America: the Persian mystics Rumi and Hafiz.
The readings - accompanied with music by Art Rosenbaum, Trudy Gard'ner, Jenna Hencinski and Augi West - will be in the Seney-Stovall Chapel, 201 N. Milledge Ave., at 8 p.m. this Saturday, April 10. Admission is $25, and 100 percent of the money goes to the orphanage project.
Coleman Barks is the retired University of Georgia English professor who taught here for 30 years while writing and publishing his own poetry and hanging out in all the right places. Barks is a delightful, thoughtful, melodic poet who writes about the reverberations of the infinite in the ordinary, everyday things of life ("Mary Lil At The Waffle House").
Perhaps because of his fine-tuned poetic sensibility, he was open to the vision of a Sufi holy man who appeared to him one night in a dream. He later met that man in real life and went on learning from him for a decade. Barks also continued in earnest putting into American English the translations of Jalal Al-Din Rumi, who was born in 1207 and was the founder of the Sufism, an openhearted exploration of unity. Rumi fled from Mongol-ridden Afghanistan to Turkey, where he lived and taught until his death in 1273.
The poet Robert Bly had introduced Barks to Rumi, and Barks responded to the ecstatic vision contained in Rumi's work. He felt that by using his own poetic skills he could enable the poet to speak to modern Americans.
And modern Americans have responded overwhelmingly to Rumi as channeled by Coleman. Rumi's books are bestsellers, making Barks into an oxymoron: a rich poet who is in demand all over the country at readings and symposia. Barks, reading Rumi and probably some of his own poetry, is well worth the price of admission, especially considering where that money goes. (Barks has waived his usual multi-thousand dollar appearance fee for the cause.)
As if Barks weren't enough to make the evening worthwhile all by himself, he is joined by poet Daniel Ladinsky, who has devoted himself to producing fresh translations of the poetry of the great 14th Century Sufi poet Hafiz, who, according to Coleman Barks, is "one of the rare mysteries of world."
The aptly named evening at Seney-Stovall, "The Divine Romance: An Evening of Mystical Poetry & Song," is one of those rare occasions that brings to an intimate venue poetic performers who usually fill large halls. (People are flying in from California for the occasion.)

Elegiac Visitation
On Friday, April 16, at 3:30 p.m. in the University of Georgia Chapel, family, friends and admirers will hold a memorial service for Hugh Kenner, who died in November. Dr. Kenner was the beloved and much respected genius who taught in the English department here from 1990 until his retirement in 1999. Kenner was the intellectual spokesman for his generation and used his quick grasp of the complex and his eloquence to open up understanding for the works of the best minds, including (but by no means limited to) James Joyce and Ezra Pound.
Dr. Kenner's scholarship and teaching involved him in many friendships, for he was as humane as he was literary. Now some of those old friends gather here in tribute to William Hugh Kenner: journalist, writer and television presence William F. Buckley, Jr., scholar and writer Guy Davenport, critic Marjorie Perloff, scholar Thomas F. Staley, scholar and critic Coburn Freer, scholar, poet, critic Jed Rasula and legal scholar Marisa Pagnattaro. The group Banish Misfortune will add Irish music.

Symphonic Surprises
What a triumph for music in Athens last weekend! Thursday and Friday in the 2nd Thursday Series pianist Evgeny Rivkin played Mozart's "Concerto for Piano No. 23 in A Major," accompanied by the University of Georgia Symphony Orchestra in Hugh Hodgson Hall. Then the UGA Concert Choir & Men's Glee Club, the UGA Chorus and the symphony orchestra performed the delightfully incredible "Carmina Burana." The house was brought down.
Saturday evening, the Athens Symphony Spring Concert filled the Classic Center Theater with works by Copland, Piston and, yes, Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," with Joseph S. Causey at the Steinway in a smashing, jazzy, bluesy rendition that caused the audience to hold its breath in pleasure and at the end jump to its feet with applause.
What a town!

Pete McCommons editor@flagpole.com