JCU's George Bilgere discusses new poetry book on NPR: 9 a.m.

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Event Details

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

5:00 am - 5:00 am

George Bilgere, Ph.D., award-winning poet and John Carroll University English professor, will be featuredon "The Sound of Ideas," a program of Cleveland NPR affiliate, 90.3 FM-WCPN, on Wednesday, March 21, 9-10 a.m. Joining him on the show will be 2002 John Carroll graduate Dave Lucas, Ohio Poet Laureate. Bilgere will discuss his latest book of poetry, Blood Pages, and upcoming poetry readings. The title poem is below: Blood Pages Someone gave my little boy this illustrated book about whales and every day he carries it to me, demanding we read through its pages about the biggest whales, the blue ones, and the fiercest whales, the suave orcas in their tuxes, and the mild sperm whales with their baleen and blow holes and benevolent gaze. Which is fine. Everyone likes whales, but of course being a boy he wants to focus on the “blood pages,” as he calls them, just two of them inserted like an accidental dose of reality in the middle of the book, where the great whales are hauled up like minnows onto the decks of the Japanese trawlers, their strength broken against the diesel winches, blood pouring from the smoking wounds where the harpoons struck and exploded. I want to page forward to the dolphins somersaulting above Sea World, but he wants to see leviathan stripped of his lordliness, skinned alive on an ocean of blood by small men with their scarlet blades, their watch caps and cigarettes, making good money on the long cruise but nonetheless longing for home, for the touch of their wives, for their own children on their laps.