Being in Time

For those of you north of the border, for those of you planning to take a trip to Canada soon, Desi Di Nardo has a poetic treat in store. On Wednesday, May 13th, she will be holding a workshop/reading at 7:00pm.

The location is:

The McNally Robinson Bookstore

Don Mills Road at Lawrence Avenue East
12 Marie Labatte Road
Toronto, Ontario
M3C 3R6

(416) 384-0084

From the bookstore’s announcement:

Desi Di Nardo is an author and poet living in Toronto whose work has been published in numerous North American and international journals and anthologies. Her poetry has been performed at the National Arts Centre, featured in Poetry on the Way on the TTC, and displayed in the Official Residences of Canada. Desi’s poems have also been studied in schools across the country, translated into several languages, and printed on Starbucks cups. She has also worked as an English professor at George Brown College and Writer-in-Residence Loretto College.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about missing things. Missing key, essential, historical moments. Especially firsts. The first time Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane played together. The first time Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie played together. The first time a small group of people heard those notes of genius. The very first time . . .

 

“A Night in Tunisia”

It wasn’t mass produced. It wasn’t packaged or preordained, that first time. It happened, much like the improv on display. It happened without being rigged, hyped, marketed, tagged, billed, bottled, or seized by people with dollar signs in their heads.

“Ruby My Dear”

Art exploding without preconditions. Smooth. Sweet. Effortless. But oh they worked hard to be so effortless.

Recordings. We have those. Though some of the best moments were never recorded. Some of those firsts. Then take it on back through time and you had to be there. You had to be in that room, in time with their time, their rhythm, their cool. Not watching it on TV, or the Internet. But in the bar, that particular bar, where the right girl said the right thing and you smiled and you just knew the musicians smiled with you and for you. Being in time and saying, oh, man, what a time!