Carrboro hosting West End Poetry Festival

After last year’s resounding success, the Carrboro Recreation and Parks department is excited to be presenting the West End Poetry Festival this weekend at the Carrboro Century Center.

The festival will honor many of the area’s budding local poets, as well as Carrboro’s poet laureate Celisa Steele, who had a leading role in the festival’s development.

“I’ve ended up wearing a few hats,” Steele said. “I’ve been on the Carrboro Poets Council since it got founded … and we work with the town of Carrboro to help get the festival together. The other hat I’ve worn, is that I was recently selected to be the next Carrboro poet laureate, and I will be reading briefly at the final event.”

The goals of the festival are to give poetry lovers a chance to share their passion, while giving exposure to the wide and diverse range of poets in the area.

“I think it’s really exciting to get people together to celebrate something,” Steele said. “We have a commitment to represent and showcase poets from a lot of different backgrounds, poets that have been published a few times and poets with 10 books to their name, poets coming from all different perspectives.”

The festival will be a two-day undertaking, starting on Oct. 18. The participating poets are scheduled to speak in one of two themed sections: “Nature and Poetry” and “Music and Poetry.”

“For the poets, it’s a really great chance to network,” said Ralph Earle, one of the scheduled speakers for “Nature and Poetry.”

“A lot of us are really good friends, and this is an excellent chance to mingle with likeminded people.”

Earle, a lifelong poetry enthusiast, will be reading two poems he’s written about the mill dam in Bynum, N.C., which he frequented often in his years as a graduate student.

“I’ve been writing poetry since I was a child,” he said. “I love the sounds of words and I’ve always loved to write poetry, study it, read it, and play around with it. I guess you could say I’ve been writing poetry steady for the past 40 years.”

Skylar Gudasz, a local songwriter and musician, will also be participating in festival events by reading some of her poems in the “Music and Poetry” section.

“I was writing songs way before I was writing poems,” Gudasz said. “But when I was an undergrad at UNC, I took a poetry class and it really introduced me to it. The specificity of it was appealing … how much you could get across with so little.”

Gudasz said that she’ll likely focus on showing off work related to her album “Oleander” which she’s currently recording, and that she’s excited to connect with many of the writers in her panel.

“Whenever you get artists together, they’re always bouncing ideas off of each other and inspiring one another,” she said. “To me, that’s what’s invaluable about something like this.”

The festival will begin at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill on Friday and conclude Saturday night with a final selection of readings by Steele. The diverse opportunities for poets and non-poets alike are sure to make this year’s festival a powerhouse of information and entertainment.

“Poetry takes concepts and experiences that you may have never had, and connects them to you,” Steele said. “It gives you the sense of experiencing something even when you haven’t lived it yourself … People will benefit with that connection.”

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